Pub Date : 2024-07-23DOI: 10.1177/14661381241266936
J. Tournadre
The idea of a possible collapse of thermo-industrial societies became more prominent during the 2010s, particularly in France. The present article investigates this phenomenon by focusing more specifically on the belief on which it is based: the conviction of the inevitable. How does this conviction, which mixes cognitive and emotional registers, come to grasp certain individuals? And what do these people do with it? Contrary to various studies in the social sciences, the ethnographic observation of two collectives that have been affected by this conviction and have settled in the French countryside makes it possible to draw the contours of authentic collective actions. The article also shows how this conviction arises or is reinforced, emphasizing the potential importance of certain personal experiences and certain structural tendencies characteristic of contemporary democratic societies. More generally, studying the conviction of the inevitable in the context of collective actions also helps to identify snippets of imaginaries and practices that are developing in the shadow of the Anthropocene.
{"title":"The conviction of the inevitable: Collapsism and collective action in contemporary rural France","authors":"J. Tournadre","doi":"10.1177/14661381241266936","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381241266936","url":null,"abstract":"The idea of a possible collapse of thermo-industrial societies became more prominent during the 2010s, particularly in France. The present article investigates this phenomenon by focusing more specifically on the belief on which it is based: the conviction of the inevitable. How does this conviction, which mixes cognitive and emotional registers, come to grasp certain individuals? And what do these people do with it? Contrary to various studies in the social sciences, the ethnographic observation of two collectives that have been affected by this conviction and have settled in the French countryside makes it possible to draw the contours of authentic collective actions. The article also shows how this conviction arises or is reinforced, emphasizing the potential importance of certain personal experiences and certain structural tendencies characteristic of contemporary democratic societies. More generally, studying the conviction of the inevitable in the context of collective actions also helps to identify snippets of imaginaries and practices that are developing in the shadow of the Anthropocene.","PeriodicalId":507430,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141811863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-21DOI: 10.1177/14661381241266924
Tuva Beyer Broch, Tom Bratrud, Marianne Lien, Cecilia G. Salinas
Digital Anthropology has in the past two decades emerged as a field that seeks to better grasp experiences of being human within digital technology and culture. However, digital technology is today so entangled in everyday practices that it gives as little meaning to single it out as a specific field of inquiry as it does to leave it out. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Norway, one of the most digitalized countries in the world, we argue that the ubiquity of the digital re-actualizes classic debates in the discipline on ‘home blindness’ emerging from the methodological challenges of doing fieldwork in familiar surroundings. We argue that building on methodological and analytical perspectives from the home blindness debate can help us better understand what it means to be human in digital environments.
{"title":"New forms of home blindness: Rethinking fieldwork methods in digitalized environments","authors":"Tuva Beyer Broch, Tom Bratrud, Marianne Lien, Cecilia G. Salinas","doi":"10.1177/14661381241266924","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381241266924","url":null,"abstract":"Digital Anthropology has in the past two decades emerged as a field that seeks to better grasp experiences of being human within digital technology and culture. However, digital technology is today so entangled in everyday practices that it gives as little meaning to single it out as a specific field of inquiry as it does to leave it out. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Norway, one of the most digitalized countries in the world, we argue that the ubiquity of the digital re-actualizes classic debates in the discipline on ‘home blindness’ emerging from the methodological challenges of doing fieldwork in familiar surroundings. We argue that building on methodological and analytical perspectives from the home blindness debate can help us better understand what it means to be human in digital environments.","PeriodicalId":507430,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141818756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-20DOI: 10.1177/14661381241260883
Aditya Srinivasan
How do things shift shape - both physically and metaphorically - as they transition across spaces and social contexts? Using ethnographic data gathered over ten weeks by volunteering at a donation warehouse for one of Syracuse, New York’s largest refugee resettlement agencies, I argue that the donations in question come to represent the peculiar moral economy of donation in America. In an economy that is fundamentally driven by capitalism, egregious consumption, wastefulness and inequality, donation represents an opportunity to reconcile American excess with the needs of the ‘vulnerable’. I leverage the concept of the ‘moral economy’ to articulate how donations take on new meanings as they transition across contexts, varyingly understood as personal artefacts, rubbish, material embodiments of generosity, and the building blocks of a refugee family’s future home. Although this logic is underwritten by the contradiction between excessive consumption and obvious need, I also reflect on my own assumptions concerning refugees, whom I had initially assumed would receive no succour from the purely material.
{"title":"America materialis: Things and meaning in a donation warehouse","authors":"Aditya Srinivasan","doi":"10.1177/14661381241260883","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381241260883","url":null,"abstract":"How do things shift shape - both physically and metaphorically - as they transition across spaces and social contexts? Using ethnographic data gathered over ten weeks by volunteering at a donation warehouse for one of Syracuse, New York’s largest refugee resettlement agencies, I argue that the donations in question come to represent the peculiar moral economy of donation in America. In an economy that is fundamentally driven by capitalism, egregious consumption, wastefulness and inequality, donation represents an opportunity to reconcile American excess with the needs of the ‘vulnerable’. I leverage the concept of the ‘moral economy’ to articulate how donations take on new meanings as they transition across contexts, varyingly understood as personal artefacts, rubbish, material embodiments of generosity, and the building blocks of a refugee family’s future home. Although this logic is underwritten by the contradiction between excessive consumption and obvious need, I also reflect on my own assumptions concerning refugees, whom I had initially assumed would receive no succour from the purely material.","PeriodicalId":507430,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141819917","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-19DOI: 10.1177/14661381241266918
Vera Lazzaretti
Heritage and security are distinct research topics in anthropology, but some of their connections have been unpacked, particularly in scholarship about heritage during conflicts and peace building. This article, however, brings them analytically together to understand how they entangle to shape cities and their futures. In scrutinising overlooked similarities between heritage and security, my longitudinal ethnography in Banaras (Varanasi) suggests that both intersect productively in anticipating and making urban futures. I argue that a Hindu majoritarian urban future—as materialised in the walls, signboards and checkpoints of the Prime Minister’s flagship Kashi Vishvanath Dham and Corridor—unfolded precisely through security and heritage. This future seems to be, at least partially, shared by those who are excluded from it. Bridging the largely disconnected anthropological scholarship on heritage and security, this article offers a first ethnographically-grounded theorisation of security and heritage as cross-fertilising urban processes that make futures.
{"title":"Security and heritage in the making of urban futures: A new research avenue","authors":"Vera Lazzaretti","doi":"10.1177/14661381241266918","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381241266918","url":null,"abstract":"Heritage and security are distinct research topics in anthropology, but some of their connections have been unpacked, particularly in scholarship about heritage during conflicts and peace building. This article, however, brings them analytically together to understand how they entangle to shape cities and their futures. In scrutinising overlooked similarities between heritage and security, my longitudinal ethnography in Banaras (Varanasi) suggests that both intersect productively in anticipating and making urban futures. I argue that a Hindu majoritarian urban future—as materialised in the walls, signboards and checkpoints of the Prime Minister’s flagship Kashi Vishvanath Dham and Corridor—unfolded precisely through security and heritage. This future seems to be, at least partially, shared by those who are excluded from it. Bridging the largely disconnected anthropological scholarship on heritage and security, this article offers a first ethnographically-grounded theorisation of security and heritage as cross-fertilising urban processes that make futures.","PeriodicalId":507430,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141822885","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-22DOI: 10.1177/14661381241246251
Sébastien Roux, Cédric Lévêque
In France today, an increasing number of people consider themselves to be “survivalists.” Presuming an inevitable crisis, they are organizing themselves to acquire and develop the skills, techniques, and knowledge they believe are necessary to survive the potential dissipation of mainstream ways of life. Based on ethnographic data collected in the Southwest of France, this article aims at understanding the motivations surrounding “preparedness”—as well as the discourses it generates and the practices it engenders—by repositioning them within the political and social context in which they emerge. For the most part, French survivalists develop traditional anti-liberal discourses, values, and practices, wherein notions of disaster or collapse are used as vehicles to promote a conservative political agenda. However, for some, prepping may also be a way to confront a feeling of the degradation of their lives, transforming survivalism into a paradoxical way of re/affirming one’s place in the world.
{"title":"Resisting the future: Preparedness, degradation, and “inquietude” among survivalists in contemporary France","authors":"Sébastien Roux, Cédric Lévêque","doi":"10.1177/14661381241246251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381241246251","url":null,"abstract":"In France today, an increasing number of people consider themselves to be “survivalists.” Presuming an inevitable crisis, they are organizing themselves to acquire and develop the skills, techniques, and knowledge they believe are necessary to survive the potential dissipation of mainstream ways of life. Based on ethnographic data collected in the Southwest of France, this article aims at understanding the motivations surrounding “preparedness”—as well as the discourses it generates and the practices it engenders—by repositioning them within the political and social context in which they emerge. For the most part, French survivalists develop traditional anti-liberal discourses, values, and practices, wherein notions of disaster or collapse are used as vehicles to promote a conservative political agenda. However, for some, prepping may also be a way to confront a feeling of the degradation of their lives, transforming survivalism into a paradoxical way of re/affirming one’s place in the world.","PeriodicalId":507430,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140676860","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-18DOI: 10.1177/14661381241246254
Arantza Begueria, R. Beneito-Montagut
This paper engages in a reflection about the use of social media to carry out fieldwork online for contemporary ethnography. The reflection is based on the ethnographer’s experiences of discomforts and affects in digital fieldwork, in which she used her own social media accounts to interact with the interlocutors recruited for the project as a means to create reciprocity with them. This article uses these discomforts as generators of ethical, epistemological and political reflections by discussing the positionality of the ethnographer in a digital fieldwork. Firstly, it delves into the potential of these discomforts as a reflective tool for knowledge generation. It also reflects on the power dynamics consequence of the position that the anthropologist occupies in the field. Finally, the article initiates a political reflection on academic life when extensive exposure to fieldwork breaks down the boundaries between work and personal life.
{"title":"The observer observed: Ethnographic discomforts and (a)symmetrical relationships in a digital ethnography","authors":"Arantza Begueria, R. Beneito-Montagut","doi":"10.1177/14661381241246254","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381241246254","url":null,"abstract":"This paper engages in a reflection about the use of social media to carry out fieldwork online for contemporary ethnography. The reflection is based on the ethnographer’s experiences of discomforts and affects in digital fieldwork, in which she used her own social media accounts to interact with the interlocutors recruited for the project as a means to create reciprocity with them. This article uses these discomforts as generators of ethical, epistemological and political reflections by discussing the positionality of the ethnographer in a digital fieldwork. Firstly, it delves into the potential of these discomforts as a reflective tool for knowledge generation. It also reflects on the power dynamics consequence of the position that the anthropologist occupies in the field. Finally, the article initiates a political reflection on academic life when extensive exposure to fieldwork breaks down the boundaries between work and personal life.","PeriodicalId":507430,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140689905","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-18DOI: 10.1177/14661381241237407
Samuel Brookfield
For clinicians conducting ethnographic research, conflict can arise between the clinical understanding of beneficence, meaning to apply skills and knowledge for people towards whom there is a duty of care, and enacting beneficence through research, which can sometimes allow researchers to withhold assistance in the interests of generating data which may have a broader beneficent effect when applied. As a nurse and ethnographic researcher, I present three reflections on my own fieldwork with people engaging in recovery from harmful methamphetamine use, to explore how beneficence can be enacted in constrained and complex circumstances. These reflections provide the basis for a discussion of how relational ethics can reveal the fabric of microethical actions and decisions which comprise clinical and research interactions, allowing practitioners to demonstrate a continuity between how they enact principles like beneficence both in the context of clinical work and in the field.
{"title":"Choosing not to help: The ethical challenge of beneficence for clinicians conducting ethnographic research","authors":"Samuel Brookfield","doi":"10.1177/14661381241237407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381241237407","url":null,"abstract":"For clinicians conducting ethnographic research, conflict can arise between the clinical understanding of beneficence, meaning to apply skills and knowledge for people towards whom there is a duty of care, and enacting beneficence through research, which can sometimes allow researchers to withhold assistance in the interests of generating data which may have a broader beneficent effect when applied. As a nurse and ethnographic researcher, I present three reflections on my own fieldwork with people engaging in recovery from harmful methamphetamine use, to explore how beneficence can be enacted in constrained and complex circumstances. These reflections provide the basis for a discussion of how relational ethics can reveal the fabric of microethical actions and decisions which comprise clinical and research interactions, allowing practitioners to demonstrate a continuity between how they enact principles like beneficence both in the context of clinical work and in the field.","PeriodicalId":507430,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140688275","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-29DOI: 10.1177/14661381231216845
Hanna Al-Taher, Anna-Esther Younes
Palestine continues to be a contentious issue in and for Western higher education particularly in Germany and, by extension, in German-speaking academia. In this article we take figurations of Palestine as an analytical lens through which to trouble German-centric epistemologies, understandings of history and their applications inside academic structures. We specifically tackle the silence on and ideological erasure of Palestine in German-speaking academic environments and read this erasure as colonially constituted and stemming from a German Lebensraum ideology, ruling over space and race ‘through science’. We propose to understand contemporary erasures of Palestine through this transnational and transhistorical space-race-and-education-nexus. First, we delineate Lebensraum ideology and its policing barriers and apply it to today’s structures of higher education and the territorial exclusion of Palestinians from those structures by way of education. Within this epistemic nationalist framework—which evicts politicized Palestinians qua Palestinians as (too) political—we discuss how Palestine has become a central tool for the maintenance of white academia, and as such is a decolonial feminist issue relevant for the investigation of power structures in higher education and German political discourses. We finally discuss our theoretical approach vis-à-vis commentaries from and by Palestinians in German-speaking higher education. The authors situate their personal and professional experience on the inside, outside, and on the margins of German academia. In a political landscape that disavows BDS on campuses, brands solidarity with Palestinians as anti-Semitic, and a state doctrine that calls for an uncritical and ‘unconditional support of Israel’, this article is of crucial importance to understand modern knowledge production in Germany and Europe. Our methodology is based on literature reviews, new feminist theorization around issues of silence and solidarity, and preliminary (auto-) ethnographic explorations of Palestinians in and out of German-speaking academia.
{"title":"Lebensraum, geopolitics and race—Palestine as a feminist issue in German-speaking academia","authors":"Hanna Al-Taher, Anna-Esther Younes","doi":"10.1177/14661381231216845","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381231216845","url":null,"abstract":"Palestine continues to be a contentious issue in and for Western higher education particularly in Germany and, by extension, in German-speaking academia. In this article we take figurations of Palestine as an analytical lens through which to trouble German-centric epistemologies, understandings of history and their applications inside academic structures. We specifically tackle the silence on and ideological erasure of Palestine in German-speaking academic environments and read this erasure as colonially constituted and stemming from a German Lebensraum ideology, ruling over space and race ‘through science’. We propose to understand contemporary erasures of Palestine through this transnational and transhistorical space-race-and-education-nexus. First, we delineate Lebensraum ideology and its policing barriers and apply it to today’s structures of higher education and the territorial exclusion of Palestinians from those structures by way of education. Within this epistemic nationalist framework—which evicts politicized Palestinians qua Palestinians as (too) political—we discuss how Palestine has become a central tool for the maintenance of white academia, and as such is a decolonial feminist issue relevant for the investigation of power structures in higher education and German political discourses. We finally discuss our theoretical approach vis-à-vis commentaries from and by Palestinians in German-speaking higher education. The authors situate their personal and professional experience on the inside, outside, and on the margins of German academia. In a political landscape that disavows BDS on campuses, brands solidarity with Palestinians as anti-Semitic, and a state doctrine that calls for an uncritical and ‘unconditional support of Israel’, this article is of crucial importance to understand modern knowledge production in Germany and Europe. Our methodology is based on literature reviews, new feminist theorization around issues of silence and solidarity, and preliminary (auto-) ethnographic explorations of Palestinians in and out of German-speaking academia.","PeriodicalId":507430,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139214611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-21DOI: 10.1177/14661381231217386
Sarah Bracke, F. Guadeloupe
{"title":"Scholarly engagements in times of catastrophe","authors":"Sarah Bracke, F. Guadeloupe","doi":"10.1177/14661381231217386","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381231217386","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":507430,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139253592","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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