Beginning with a critical examination of the humanist assumptions of critical ethnography, this article interrogates and surfaces problems with the ontological and epistemological orientations of this research methodology. In drawing on exemplar empirical data from an arts‐based project, the article demonstrates the limitations in the humanist‐based qualitative research approach and advances a postdualist, postrepresentationalist direction for critical ethnography called entangled ethnography. Using data from a larger study that examined the perspectives of racialized mad artists, what is demonstrated (...) in this inquiry is that the entanglement of bodies, objects, and meaning‐making practices is central to working with the ontologically excluded, such as those who find themselves in various states of disembodiment and/or corporeal and psychic distribution. We propose the redevelopment of critical ethnography, extended by entanglement theory (a critical posthuman theory), and suggest that for it to be an inclusive methodology, critical ethnography must be conceptualized as in the process of becoming and always in regeneration, open to critique, extension, and redevelopment. (shrink)

Ethnography in the field of postsecondary education has served as a magnifying glass bringing into focus university culture and student life. This paper highlights the ways in which ethnography is especially useful for understanding more recent dynamics and shifts in higher education. The authors utilize existing literature to uphold the relevancy of ethnography, while exploring its opportunities for research on adult students, online education, and for-profit colleges in particular. They conclude with methodological recommendations and directions for both (...) qualitative research and higher education scholarship. (shrink)

We lay groundwork for applying ethnographic methods in philosophy of science. We frame our analysis in terms of two tasks: to identify the benefits of an ethnographic approach in philosophy of science and to structure an ethnographic approach for philosophical investigation best adapted to provide information relevant to philosophical interests and epistemic values. To this end, we advocate for a purpose-guided form of cognitive ethnography that mediates between the explanatory and normative interests of philosophy of science, while maintaining openness (...) and independence when framing such an investigation to achieve robust unbiased results. (shrink)

This article is aimed at Foucauldian scholars and seeks to introduce them to ethnographic works that interrogate neoliberal governmentalities. As an analytic category ‘neoliberalism’ has over the last two decades helpfully illuminated connections between seemingly unrelated social changes occurring at multiple scales. Even earlier —in his College de France 1978-9 Birth of Biopolitics lectures, to be precise—Foucault began his engagement with neoliberalism as a dominant political force. Despite being more than three decades old, Foucault’s analysis of neoliberal rationalities remains fresh (...) and insightful, which perhaps explains why scholars inspired by his analytics of governmentality have been able to make major contributions to the current social science literature on neoliberalism. However, there are increasing concerns that governmentality scholars succumb to a more general tendency among social scientists to present neoliberal transformations in monolithic and linear terms. This article critically reviews contributions from a small but growing group of neo-Foucauldian researchers that avoid these tendencies. These researchers investigate the changes wrought by neoliberalism through methodologies that involve combining an analytics of governmentality with ethnographic and quasi-ethnographic methods, and in doing so they avoid deterministic, homogenous and static accounts of social transformation. By beginning with the “everyday,” these works reject the idea that neoliberal governmentality forms a coherent apparatus. Instead these ethnographies of neoliberal governmentalities focus on governmental ensembleges (or assemblages) that link neoliberal political rationalities with non-liberal rationalities, and they explore how neoliberal thought and practice is transformed across time and space. (shrink)

Representing a spectrum of intellectual concerns and methodological commitments in religious ethics, the contributors to this focus issue consider and assess the advantages and disadvantages of the shift in recent comparative religious ethics away from a rootedness in moral theory toward a model that privileges the ethnography of moral worlds. In their own way, all of the contributors think through and emphasize the meaning, importance, and place of normativity in recent comparative religious ethics.

The ethnographic turn in religious studies has responded to important developments, such as the rejection of value neutrality and the need to better address the lived experience of individuals and communities. In this essay, I affirm the value of ethnography as a method in comparative religious ethics, but distinguish between two ways of framing ethnography in relation to ethics. The first way insists on the hard limits of translating values across cultures, and tends to marginalize or dismiss normative (...) inquiry. The second way allows for the interpretation of practices of ethical justification in diverse cultural contexts. I argue that this second category of ethnography is more congenial to the work of comparative religious ethicists, since an integral part of ethical inquiry involves reflecting on, and making arguments about, social norms and practices. (shrink)

This essay offers a Jewish approach to ethnography in religious ethics. Following the work of other ethnographers working in religious ethics, I explore how an ethnographic account of reproductive ethics among Haredi Jewish women in Jerusalem enhances and improves Jewish ethical discourse. I argue that ethnography should become an integral part of Jewish ethics for three reasons. First, with a contextual approach to guidance and application of law and norms, an ethnographic approach to Jewish ethics parallels the way (...) ethical decisions are made on a daily basis in Jewish communities. Second, ethnography bolsters the voices of those involved in ethical discourse. Third, ethnography facilitates the bridge between local ethical questions and global ethical discourse. (shrink)

All matters related to ethnography flow from a decision that originates at the very beginning of the research process—the selection of the basic object of analysis—and yet fieldworkers pay scant attention to this crucial task. As a result, most take as their starting point bounded entities delimited by location or social classification and in so doing restrict the kinds of arguments available to them. This article presents the alternative of relational ethnography. Relational ethnography involves studying fields rather (...) than places, boundaries rather than bounded groups, processes rather than processed people, and cultural conflict rather than group culture. While this approach comes with its own set of challenges, it offers an ethnographic method that works with the relational and processual nature of social reality. (shrink)

This methodological essay describes and advocates using certain psychoanalytic techniques for ethnography. It focuses on the self analysis of the ethnographer using evenly hovering attention, dream analysis, and free association. It presents an argument that using those techniques enhances the goal of ethnography as a human science and of social research. Fear of crime serves as a point of departure for the methodological argument. Finally, it links psychoanalytic ethnography to a fractal model of society and the self (...) with reference to C. S. Peirce’s theory of semiotics as a link between the individual and society. (shrink)

The use of ethnography to understand archaeology is both prevalent and controversial. This paper develops an alternative approach, using ethnography to build and test a general theory of forager behaviors, and their variations in different conditions, one which can then be applied even to prehistoric sites differing from contemporary experience. Human behavioral ecology is chosen as the framework theory, and forager social learning as a case study. The argument is then applied to social learning in the late Pleistocene, (...) and hence to a famous archaeological puzzle: the late Pleistocene acceleration of technical innovation and regional differentiation. (shrink)

In this follow-up to the highly successful _Ethnography Unbound,_ Michael Burawoy and nine colleagues break the bounds of conventional sociology, to explore the mutual shaping of local struggles and global forces. In contrast to the lofty debates between radical theorists, these nine studies excavate the dynamics and histories of globalization by extending out from the concrete, everyday world. The authors were participant observers in diverse struggles over extending citizenship, medicalizing breast cancer, dumping toxic waste, privatizing nursing homes, the degradation of (...) work, the withdrawal of welfare rights, and the elaboration of body politics. From their insider vantage points, they show how groups negotiate, circumvent, challenge, and even re-create the complex global web that entangles them. Traversing continents and extending over three years, this collaborative research developed its own distinctive method of "grounded globalization" to grasp the evaporation of traditional workplaces, the dissolution of enclaved communities, and the fluidity of identities. Forged between the local and global, these compelling essays make a powerful case for ethnography's insight into global dynamics. (shrink)

This collection of work addresses the contribution that ethnography and linguistics make to education, and the contribution that research in education makes to anthropology and linguistics.; The first section of the book pinpoints characteristics of anthropology that most make a difference to research in education. The second section describes the perspective that is needed if the study of language is to contribute adequately to problems of education and inequality. Finally, the third section takes up discoveries about narrative, which show (...) that young people's narratives may have a depth of form and skill that has gone largely unrecognized. (shrink)

The article is based on research conducted at the actual radiology department. It presents a range of descriptions and analyses of concrete operations performed by radiologists during their daily professional routine. After careful ethnographic observations, phenomenological analysis is employed with a view to examining the enactive cognition in the radiologist’s “life-world”. The paper uses both ethnography and phenomenology in order to reveal the essential regularities and sedimentations of everyday radiological processes, and the “everyday background” of certain scientific-cognitive operations. The (...) method of research includes “enactive proofs”— observations and analysis of the externalization of a radiologist’s professional memory through the enaction of medical imaging and imageconsciousness. The findings of this research have much to offer to both philosophy and radiological praxis. While the observations strongly support the development of enactive phenomenology, critique of representationalism, primacy of inference in cognition, and shared intentions, they also provide insight into concrete operations in coping with radiology’s paraphernalia, habituality, the origin of mistakes, multilayered communication, and improving professional praxis. (shrink)

In this book, Fitzpatrick and May make the case for a reimagined approach to critical ethnography in education. Exploring how critical ethnography works within contemporary inquiries, the authors argue that many researchers already do the kind of critical ethnography that readers imagine, whether they call their studies critical or not. Such studies employ the tenets of ethnography and are grounded in work that attends to, reimagines, troubles, and questions notions of power, in/justice, in/equity, and marginalization. Understanding (...) the tensions and complexities that come with the posts-including poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and posthumanism-Fitzpatrick and May argue that social, theoretical, and political issues in education can be more profoundly viewed through a lens that is personal, embodied, and lived: critical ethnography. Offering a wide-ranging and insightful commentary on approaches and influences on critical ethnography over time, Fitzpatrick and May interrogate how it has moved and engaged with ongoing theoretical developments to now include a wide range of possible analytical approaches. With extensive examples, excerpts, and personal discussions, they demonstrate how critical ethnography is an expansive, eclectic, and inclusive methodology. Linking work across a range of topics, this book highlights the ongoing importance of this methodology in education. It is essential reading for students, scholars, and researchers in qualitative inquiry, ethnography, educational anthropology, educational research methods, sociology of education, and philosophy of education. (shrink)

Reshaping ethnography: contemporary postpositivist possibilitiesFollowing Leinginger's introduction of ethnography into the field of nursing research, numerous descriptive and interpretive studies of health care beliefs and practices have been conducted. The resultant data have been translated into recommendations relative to the areas of nursing education, administration and clinical practice in an effort to ensure that the identified cultural needs are recognized and met. In this paper die discourses that inform such work are explored. Its practices and emergent dilemmas are (...) reassessed in die light of an emerging body of work that challenges its foundational assumptions. Linked under die umbrella of ‘postpositivist ethnography’, such work recognizes the research area as a social and political field of which the researcher is an integral part. Hence, as an informed subject, die researcher, like the informants, is seen to be implicated in the generation of data. She, or he, is not charged with occupying die opposing roles of objective researcher and subjective participant, nor with reporting ‘the truth’ as told by informants. This emergent tradition is not without its dilemmas and of particular concern is the issue of authority; that is, whose voice constructs the text? As nursing academics grapple with questions regarding die nature of die knowledge that informs their discipline, it is imperative that they critique potentially fruitful research practices before they appropriate them. Failure to do so may lead diem to unwittingly generate knowledge that is inimical to their particular quest. The lsquo;new edinographyrsquo; discussed in this paper, offers academics and odiers interested in the generation of knowledge, not only a mediodology that invites the possibility of opening up previously hidden areas of practice, but one that actively involves die researcher in challenging her taken‐for‐granted assumptions. (shrink)

Melanesian ethnography has been a substantial and enduring presence in Strathern’s comparative project of anthropology. The cornerstone of this project was The Gender of the Gift, where a model was established for demonstrating the analogies between Melanesian societies based on a system of common differences. The comparisons created in this work were centred on a real and radical divide between Melanesia and the West. Strathern’s subsequent comparative work has examined the debates surrounding new social and technological forms in the (...) West (e.g. new genetic and reproductive technologies) through drawing analogies with Melanesian social forms; she has simultaneously highlighted the limits of these comparisons. Her intention in this comparative project has been to expand the range of concepts and language used to understand western social and technological innovations that potentially affect the world at large, so that debate is not simply circumscribed by western preoccupations and concerns. As mediated through the analysis of Strathern and the other Melanesian anthropologists she draws on, the voices and interests of non-westerners can potentially inform and even reform the grounds of such deliberations. (shrink)

Ethnography of Singapore Chinese Names: Race, Religion, and RepresentationSingapore Chinese is part of the Chinese Diaspora. This research shows how Singapore Chinese names reflect the Chinese naming tradition of surnames and generation names, as well as Straits Chinese influence. The names also reflect the beliefs and religion of Singapore Chinese. More significantly, a change of identity and representation is reflected in the names of earlier settlers and Singapore Chinese today. This paper aims to show the general naming traditions of (...) Chinese in Singapore as well as a change in ideology and trends due to globalization. (shrink)

Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- What is "feminist" in feminist ethnography? -- Historicizing feminist ethnography -- Debates in feminist ethnography -- How does one do feminist ethnography? -- Challenges for feminist ethnographers -- Producing feminist ethnography -- Feminist activist ethnography -- Thinking through the future of feminist ethnography : a conversation -- Glossary -- References -- About the authors -- Index.

This commentary elaborates on the ideas and projects outlined in this special issue, from a specifically sociological perspective. Much recent work in sociology proposes ‘methods mashups’ of ethnography and digital data/computational tools in different and diverse ways. However, typically, these have taken the form of applying the principles of ethnography to new domains and data types, as if ethnography itself is stable and immutable; that it has a universal set of methodological principles that unify ethnographic practice. Returning (...) to anthropology is, therefore, a useful way to extend our methodological thinking to consider what ethnography is and how it operates, and from there think more clearly about how it may be effectively combined with digital data/computational tools in an emerging ‘Computational Anthropology’. (shrink)

Recent ethnographic studies of lived ethics, such as those of Leela Prasad and Saba Mahmood, present valuable opportunities for comparative religious ethics. This essay argues that developments in philosophical and religious ethics over the last three decades have supported a strong interest in thick descriptions of what it means to be human. This anthropological turn has thereby laid important groundwork for the encounter between these scholars and new ethnographic studies. Nonetheless, an encounter it is. Each side brings novel questions to (...) the other. The second part of the essay focuses on one of these questions: How, exactly, are these ethnographic studies to inform normative reflection on ethical questions? (shrink)

This essay describes institutional ethnography as a method of inquiry pioneered by Dorothy E. Smith, and introduces a collection of papers which make distinctive contributions to the development of this novel form of investigation. Institutional ethnography is presented as a research strategy which emerges from Smith's wide-ranging explorations of the problematic of the everyday world. Smith's conception of the everyday world as problematic involves a critical departure from the concepts and procedures of more conventional sociologies. She argues for (...) an alternative sociology which begins with the standpoint of the actor in everyday life, rather than from within a professional sociological discourse aligned with the society's ruling institutions. The familiar sociologies of everyday life do not suffice for this purpose, since they deal with local settings and social worlds, but stop short of examining how these are knitted into broader forms of social organization. In contrast, institutional ethnography examines how the scenes of everyday life are shaped by forms of social organization which cannot be fully grasped from within those scenes. The principal tasks of institutional ethnography include describing the coordination of activities in the everyday world, discovering how ideological accounts define those activities in relation to institutional imperatives, and examining the broader social relations in which local sites of activity are embedded. The four papers which follow demonstrate that specific contributions to institutional ethnography can be made in relation to a wide array of topics, methods, and interests. (shrink)

This chapter introduces postcritical ethnography. Addressing its location in relationship to critical ethnography and postmodernism, the authors outline similarities and differences across critical ethnography, the reflexively critical postcritical ethnography, and the post-structural post-critical ethnography. These forms of ethnography are described as a set of understandings: power, particularity, partiality, provisionality, participation, (our own) person, positionality, perspectives, and possibilities. The chapter ends with the logic of the book and descriptions of the chapters that follow.

Having only conducted one small ethnographic study back in 2016 and where I now find myself writing out ethnographic-based research grant applications as part of my new job, Inclusive Ethnography w...

(1987). An Ethnography of AESA: A Collective Insider's Perspective on the Organization (AESA Presidential Address--1986) Educational Studies: Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 359-373.

By its very nature ethnography is an emergent methodology. To be ethical the ethnographer needs to manage research ethics in-situ. This need to manage ethical dilemmas as they arise often comes into conflict with increased ethical regulation and procedures from ethics review boards that require the researcher to foresee ethical quandaries before data collection commences. These regulations can constrain the emerging purpose of the study, evolving means of data collection and multifaceted ways of interacting with participants that are seen (...) as being the strengths of undertaking an ethnographic approach. 0The chapters in this volume problematise this tension and highlight the importance of managing ethics in-situ by reflecting on recently completed and current projects drawing out ethical dilemmas relating to data ownership, dissemination, representation, social justice and managing ethnographic studies in the midst of a global pandemic and Covid-19 lockdowns. 0Reflecting on these experiences of doing educational ethnography with children and young people, drawing on a diverse range of studies conducted in England, Scotland, South America, India, and the Basque Country, this volume argues that administrative and conceptual change is needed to ensure that ethics does not become a tick box exercise but that ethnographers commit fully to conscientiously managing ethics in-situ. (shrink)

With recent major progress in AI, AI-driven robots are expected to operate outside of their original settings, such as factory floors, and be integrated into our daily lives. In this trajectory, integrating culture, with its broad and vague meaning, into human–robot interaction becomes a concern for the field of social robotics. In this article, we propose a culturally-responsive robot as a concept that encapsulates critical theoretical and experimental studies of culture in robotics without subscribing to the dominant view of the (...) field that translates culture only to nationality. The main contribution of this article is to propose a methodology for implementing culturally-responsive robots, termed “robot-ethnographers.” Drawing from the long history of conventional ethnography, we define a robot-ethnographer as a robot situated within interaction contexts, shaping interactions, and learning culture through observation to adapt its behaviours accordingly. The paper analyses the properties of the robot-ethnographer in line with those of conventional ethnography in social science. Whilst acknowledging important technological limitations, this article concludes that robot-ethnographers can create culturally-responsive human–robot interactions. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the possible collaboration between the cognitive and evolutionary human sciences and ethnography. My purpose is to show that certain kinds of behaviour and attitudes that can be observed by means of the ethnographic method can also be properly explained from an evolutionary perspective. I will explore plausibility of an evolutionary point of view on ethnographic material by means of a case study: the analysis the religious beliefs and practices of an Irish (...) family. The theoretical proposal of this paper is twofold: first, that in this case we do not have one but two modes of religiosity, doctrinal and experiential; second, that ethnography can reveal the existence of the forms of popular religiosity that originate in the experiential mode of religiosity while an evolutionary perspective can explain their persistence. (shrink)

In this article we move beyond the problematic distinction between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ cognition by accounting for so-called ‘higher’ cognitive capacities in terms of skillful activities in practices, and in terms of the affordances exploited in those practices. Through ethnographic research we aim to further develop the new notion of skilled intentionality by turning to the phenomenon of the tendency towards an optimal grip on a situation in real-life situations in the field of architecture. Tending towards an optimal grip is (...) an inherently affective and dynamic phenomenon. It has been under explored in philosophy, despite its central place in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. When the architects experience discontent, attention is typically solicited by the affordances through which possible ways of continuing the improvement of the design can be explored. In various ways this tension or disequilibrium - fueling a tendency towards an optimal grip - is encountered in the complex architectural design practices that we observed. Based on our field material we distinguish between: a) grip in visual perception, b) grip on the design, and c) grip on ‘how to design’. The move towards an optimal grip takes shape by joining forces with a landscape of affordances. This landscape includes, for instance, affordances for grasping a cup of coffee, affordances provided by a cardboard model to improve it, as well as for engaging with a person who is not physically present. Because they are skilled, the architects can be responsive to these different affordances in similar ways. Furthermore, in practice the architects are responsive to multiple affordances simultaneously. Through our analysis of the tendency towards an optimal grip we show that our surroundings contribute to skillful action and cognition in a far more complex way than is currently acknowledged in philosophy and cognitive science. (shrink)

This article examines how migrant ‘illegality’ is experienced in the Swedish context. How do ‘illegal‘ migrants manage work, housing, healthcare, safety and a family life in the absence of access to formal provisions? What are their survival strategies? I use direct quotations from undocumented migrants themselves to build a multifaceted picture of migrant ‘illegality’. Following Willen's (2007) call for a ‘critical phenomenology of illegality’, I move beyond the socio-political situation of undocumented migrants to their embodied experiences of being ‘illegal’. I (...) conclude that undocumented migrants are not excluded but are excepted; they have not been thrown out, but neither are they considered participants. Undocumented migrants are included in society without being recognised as members. (shrink)

Positivist ethnographic research situates the participant observer in an objectivist position towards the field. Using poststructural perspectives to analyse the field challenges and unsettles objectivist assumptions underpinning ethnography. Neither is merging of the two approaches completely unproblematic. A crucial element in a coherent amalgam centres around resolution of potential contradictions emanating from the place of field notes in ethnographic research, and the position of the researcher (author) vis‐a‐vis such notes. Contemporary approaches to field notes maintain that such notes are (...) not an objective description of the field, unaffected by the voice of the researcher. Rather, observational records are to be regarded as text, with characteristics in common with all texts. The ethnographic record is constituted as much by the positionality of the researcher as by the research participants. The nurse researcher can be viewed as participant in the constitution of the field. In unsettling and challenging taken‐for‐granted understandings about nursing practice, I am affirming the centrality of the position of the nurse in nursing research. (shrink)

This article examines adaptive reuse as a form of public ethnography through a community-engaged design project in rural West Texas. Focusing on an abandoned cotton gin and other underused historic structures, it reflects on how sensory mapping, walking interviews, oral histories, and community review sessions reshaped a design studio’s understanding of place. The article argues that participatory design becomes public ethnography when knowledge co-production, accountability, and community interpretation matter more than aesthetic output. It highlights the ethical tensions of (...) making place-based knowledge public, including visibility, authorship, institutional extraction, and the politics of representation. (shrink)

This paper points to the need in ape language research to shift from experimentation to ethnography. We cannot determine what goes on inside the head of an ape when it communicates with a human being, but we can learn about the nature and content of the communication that occurs in such face-to-face interaction. This information is fundamental for establishing a baseline for the abilities of an ape-human common ancestor.

As we experience and manipulate time—be it as boredom or impatience—it becomes an object: something materialized and social, something that affects perception, or something that may motivate reconsideration and change. The editors and contributors to this important new book, _Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality, _have provided a diverse collection of ethnographic studies and theoretical explorations of youth experiencing time in a variety of contemporary socio-cultural settings. The essays in this volume focus on time as an external and often troubling factor (...) in young people’s lives, and shows how emotional unrest and violence but also creativity and hope are responses to troubling times. The chapters discuss notions of time and its and its “objectification” in diverse locales including the Georgian Republic, Brazil, Denmark and Uganda. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the essays in _Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality_ use youth as a prism to understand time and its subjective experience. In the series _Global Youth_, edited by Craig Jeffrey and Jane Dyson. (shrink)

I began this essay by advancing three claims with respect to conducting ethnographic research: the analyst should be disposed to engage Other in a genuinely dialogic fashion so as to produce shared understanding; provision should be made for the analyst to disengage from the dialogue for purposes of self-reflection; and there should be some justificatory grounds for ideology critique. At the same time, I noted the problematic status of these claims on conceptual and methodological grounds and pointed to a need (...) for taking account of the analyst as a subject whose being in the world impinges upon the analysis at each stage of research. This awareness, it seems to me, calls for an ethnography which is phenomenologically instigated. This is to say that the ethnographer needs to be no less sensitive to his or her own subjectivity than to the meanings of Other.In order to get clearer as to what might be involved in making the above claims, I discussed critically Gadamer's phenomenological hermeneutics. Although Gadamer is to be commended for his philosophical inquiry into the bases of self-understanding, we saw that his phenomenological hermeneutics suffered a number of limitations, all of which being linked to his inability to adequately free the subject from the limits of self-understanding. Thus, Gadamer's subject-as-analyst is restricted as a participant in dialogue with Other; engages in self-reflection without a firm footing; and is unable thus to mount a justifiable critique either of Other or the subject's own tradition/culture.This critique of Gadamer suggests that once the phenomenological turn is taken, it then requires an additional turn which joins the subject with Other in shared understanding. In this regard I suggested the possible directions that some conceptual emendations of Gadamer's thesis might take us, and gave special reference to the ways in which such emendations might be implemented in ethnographic work. Both my critique and emendation were meant to underscore the need for a joining of subject and Other not merely as this might represent an occasion for understanding Other, nor merely for the understanding of self, but for a shared understanding that opens up a newly formed terrain upon which self-reflection and ideology critique may find suitable and just intersubjective grounding. (shrink)

We all wait – in traffic jams, passport offices, school meal queues, for better weather, an end to fighting, peace. Time spent waiting produces hope, boredom, anxiety, doubt, or uncertainty. Ethnographies of Waiting explores the social phenomenon of waiting and its centrality in human society. Using waiting as a central analytical category, the book investigates how waiting is negotiated in myriad ways. Examining the politics and poetics of waiting, Ethnographies of Waiting offers fresh perspectives on waiting as the uncertain interplay (...) between doubting and hoping, and asks "When is time worth the wait?" Waiting thus conceived is intrinsic to the ethnographic method at the heart of the anthropological enterprise. Featuring detailed ethnographies from Japan, Georgia, England, Ghana, Norway, Russia and the United States, a Foreword by Craig Jeffrey and an Afterword by Ghassan Hage, this is a vital contribution to the field of anthropology of time and essential reading for students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ethnography as Christian Theology and Ethics ed. by Christian Scharen and Anna Marie VigenJohn KiessEthnography as Christian Theology and Ethics Edited by Christian Scharen and Anna Marie Vigen New York: Continuum, 2011. 304 pp. $29.95Over the past decade, an increasing number of Christian theologians and ethicists have turned to ethnographic methodologies in order to attend more closely to the complexities of lived faith and the bodily character (...) of theological knowledge. For those wishing to get a glimpse of what this looks like in practice, what its implications might be for theology and ethics, and how one might set off and do it oneself, this book is an excellent introduction.Editors Christian Scharen and Aana Marie Vigen organize the book into three parts. The first part orients readers to the use of ethnography in cultural anthropology and reviews the recent “ethnographic turn” in Christian theology and ethics. This is followed by a brief survey of theological critiques of social science and a defense of ethnography against these critiques. Scharen and Vigen argue that the use of ethnography, far from compromising the integrity of theology, has the potential to renew and enrich the discipline through the incorporation of long-overlooked forms of local wisdom. As a method attuned to practical, often noncognitive forms of knowledge, ethnography can help scholars move away from an exclusive focus on texts to a deeper consideration of the theological and ethical claims “embedded and embodied” in the lives and practices of everyday communities (xxii). [End Page 190]Naturally, the best argument for such an approach is exemplification. The second part of the book presents an impressive collection of ethnographic work from contexts as diverse as Chicago, Atlanta, Oregon, Chiapas, Nairobi, and Gulu. Contributors employ ethnography to compare pastoral leadership in two African American churches, track grassroots dissent on the issue of contraception among women living with HIV/AIDS, and reimagine the debate on physician-assisted suicide from the perspective of the poor and disabled. Particularly effective are Vicini’s exploration of the liturgical response of local churches to the legacy of violence in Chiapas and Whitmore’s critical examination of his own place as a white researcher in Northern Uganda, which makes hauntingly transparent the ethical complexities of the research process itself.The final part of the book offers a more practical how-to guide for those looking to do ethnography, covering such issues as institutional review board approval, interview methodology, and accountability to research subjects. This part, like the rest of the book, will be a gift for graduate students facing down a dissertation proposal or scholars contemplating the use of ethnography in their work. Admirably reflexive, vigilantly attentive to issues of power and privilege, and articulate about the ways that research can be a form of discipleship, one can only hope this book will succeed in its aim of encouraging other scholars to “go and do likewise.”Those who have already incorporated ethnographic techniques in their scholarship or who are looking for a fuller articulation of the relation between ethnography, ethics, and theology may find themselves less satisfied with the book. Its treatment of existing options (virtue ethics, Catholic social ethics) and thinkers (David Ford, Stanley Hauerwas, and John Milbank) is thin, and a number of key figures in the broader story of the ethnographic turn in theology (Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Hans Frei) are conspicuously missing. Their absence is felt particularly strongly in the unanswered questions the volume provokes, including how to account for God’s difference when appeals to experience become primary (Barth), and how to avoid positivism when appeals to the “reality” of the church become the point of departure for ecclesiology (Bonhoeffer).Such provocations, however, are reminders that we are still at the very early stages of the ethnographic turn in Christian theology and ethics. If this volume is any indication, the future of this exciting intersection of thought and practice looks very promising indeed. [End Page 191]John KiessLoyola University MarylandCopyright © 2013 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

This article reflects on my journey conducting online ethnography through Iraqi, Saudi, Kuwaiti and Yemeni feminist Twitters as an Iraqi researcher residing in the United Kingdom. It examines the intersection of online ethnography and feminist activism, emphasising the essential role of long-term immersion in social media spaces as an activist prior to undertaking this type of research. I gained crucial insights into the complexity, fluidity and emotional dynamics of online spaces and relationships through years of visible presence and (...) engagement with other activists before conducting my ethnography. While some level of intimacy and affiliation with feminist activists existed, the absence of offline encounters posed challenges to forging friendships; however, this difficulty served as a catalyst for developing an ethical method to navigate relationships with participants and address the limitations of a friendship-based approach. In this article, I propose an alternative approach centred around a fellowship affiliation, approaching other activists as ‘fellows’ in the two Arabic senses of zamāla and rifqa (peer- and comrade-driven) relationships. This shift in the researcher–participant relationship moves away from the intense and demanding nature of the ṣadāqah (friendship) relationship. In doing so, it offers a politically powerful stance and a much-needed critical space for constructive debate while maintaining mutual respect and a shared commitment to the cause. The fellowship-based method necessitates activist transparency and critical allyship dedicated to collaboration and unconventional methods of knowledge co-production, promising solidarity and transcending differences and disagreements. Nonetheless, achieving this can, at times, be challenging. While acknowledging the limitations of the approach, the article recognises that moments of silence or distance can also arise from a sense of activist responsibility and commitment to protecting others. (shrink)

The relationship between early Greek ethnography and early philosophical inquiry is typically regarded as tenuous at best. A paucity of references to the cultures and beliefs of other peoples among the fragmentary works thought to preserve the theorizing of the Presocratics and, latterly, the sophists, has created the impression that philosophical interests and concerns developed separately from ethnography with only minimal crossover between the two. Instead, “Early Greek Ethnography and Human Values” draws on a variety of literary (...) and non-literary evidence to argue that ethnographic knowledge played a significant role in the emergence of a sense of popular ethics—the very ideas and values that helped define what it meant to be “Greek” in the first place. (shrink)

Este artículo de revisión analiza tres libros que exploran las experiencias de pueblos afrodescendientes en el caribe continental centroamericano. El antropólogo Edmund T. Gordon ofrece un análisis de 35 años sobre la diáspora africana en Bluefields, Nicaragua, enfocándose en la interseccionalidad, el sentido común político y la economía racial en los creole. La antropóloga Serena Cosgrove et al. examinan la resistencia y resiliencia de la comunidad garífuna en Nicaragua, sus vínculos con Honduras y las diferentes migraciones, haciendo énfasis en los (...) pueblos garífunas del Bronx, EE. UU., desafiando conceptos de cultura y resistencia. La antropóloga cultural Carla Guerrón Montero estudia la transformación de la población afroantillana en Bocas del Toro, Panamá, debido al turismo. Los estudios, basados en investigaciones etnográficas e históricas, revelan cómo estos pueblos enfrentan y adaptan sus identidades ante factores externos como el turismo, la migración y las economías raciales, proporcionando una comprensión profunda de la resistencia cultural y las dinámicas de poder. (shrink)

In their writings on Africa and colonialism, John and Jean Comaroff have explored some of the fundamental questions of social science, delving into the nature of history and human agency, culture and consciousness, ritual and representation. How are human differences constructed and institutionalized, transformed and (sometimes) resisted? How do local cultures articulate with global forms? How is the power of some people over others built, sustained, eroded, and negated?These essays work toward an "imaginative sociology," demonstrating the techniques by which social (...) science may capture the contexts that human beings construct and inhabit. In the introduction the authors offer their most complete statement to date on historical anthropology. Standing apart from the traditional disciplines of social history and modernist social science, their work is dedicated to discovering how human worlds are made and signified, forgotten and remade. (shrink)

Background: Maintaining patient’s dignity in intensive care units is difficult because of the unique conditions of both critically-ill patients and intensive care units. Objectives: The aim of this study was to uncover the cultural factors that impeded maintaining patients’ dignity in the cardiac surgery intensive care unit. Research Design: The study was conducted using a critical ethnographic method proposed by Carspecken. Participants and research context: Participants included all physicians, nurses and staffs working in the study setting (two cardiac surgery intensive (...) care units). Data collection methods included participant observations, formal and informal interviews, and documents assessment. In total, 200 hours of observation and 30 interviews were performed. Data were analyzed to uncover tacit cultural knowledge and to help healthcare providers to reconstruct the culture of their workplace. Ethical Consideration: Ethical approval for the study from Ethics committee of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences was obtained. Findings: The findings of the study fell into the following main themes: “Presence: the guarantee for giving enough attention to patients’ self-esteem”, “Instrumental and objectified attitudes”, “Adherence to the human equality principle: value-action gap”, “Paternalistic conduct”, “Improper language”, and “Non-interactive communication”. The final assertion was “Reductionism as a major barrier to the maintaining of patient’s dignity”. Discussion: The prevailing atmosphere in subculture of the CSICU was reductionism and paternalism. This key finding is part of the biomedical discourse. As a matter of fact, it is in contrast with dignified care because the latter necessitate holistic attitudes and approaches. Conclusion: Changing an ICU culture is not easy; but through increasing awareness and critical self-reflections, the nurses, physicians and other healthcare providers, may be able to reaffirm dignified care and cure in their therapeutic relationships. (shrink)

The article explores meditation-based examination of experience as a means for developing a contemplative, nonnaturalized, and existentially meaningful empirical research of consciousness in which the experiencing person is regarded as the primary investigator. As the first phase of a broader project, a group of seven researchers carried out a series of five meditation retreats. We sampled the ongoing experience of the researchers at the same random moments during meditation practice. The acquired data, consisting of more than 500 journal entries, interview (...) transcripts, and participatory analysis records, set the ground for three lines of enquiry: (1) What, if any, kind of meditative practice is suitable for researching experience? How can it be cultivated? (2) Can a group of researchers skilled in meditation systematically investigate selected experiential phenomena? (3) What is the actual lived experience of a group of researchers engaged in a continuous meditation-based examination of experience? In this report, we primarily focus on the third question, offering a concrete ethnographic overview of our research enterprise. We conclude by relating our findings to the discussion of the phenomenological practice of the epoché as an empirical tool for the study of consciousness. (shrink)

Since its inception contemporary medical ethics has been regarded by many of its practitioners as ‘applied ethics’, that is, the application of philosophical theories to the moral problems that arise in health care. This ‘applied ethics’ model of medical ethics is, however, beset with internal and external difficulties. The internal difficulties point out that the model is intrinsically flawed. The external difficulties arise because the model does not fit work in the field. Indeed, the strengths of that work are its (...) highly nuanced, particularized analyses of cases and issues and its appreciation of the circumstances and contexts that generate and structure these cases and issues. A shift away from a theory-driven ‘applied ethics’ to a more situational, contextual approach to medical ethics opens the way for ethnographic studies of moral problems in health care as well as a conception of moral theory that is more responsive to the empirical dimensions of those problems. (shrink)

The convergence between ethology and ethnography has significantly transformed studies of animal subjectivity and culture. The future of both fields lies in a cultural zoology that treats animals as subjects partaking in culture. Nonetheless, significant resistance to such an approach exists on each side of the dis- ciplinary divide. Biologists and social scientists content themselves with definitions of culture that prevent them from taking heed of crucial dimensions of it. Beyond that, the very organiz- ation of scholarly knowledge in (...) university disci- plines is predicated upon an absolute split between humans and other animals, with ethol- ogy charged with understanding non-human animal behavior and the social sciences directed almost exclusively to human cultures. The most promising approaches of the present and future rely on a mixture of methods and definitions that challenges and expands the disciplines involved as well as the very understanding of animal life. (shrink)

This article examines the history of ethnological studies conducted by the missionaries of Africa ('White Fathers') in Northern Zambia, situating their work within the broader context of British colonial social anthropology. It explores the relationship between missionary ethnographic practices and the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, a government anthropological institute established in 1938. The White Fathers' studies of African customs formed part of a broader process of their agendas to 'modernise' and Christianise African populations. Christianisation was a modernising project, in relation to how (...) missionaries framed their work as bringing 'modernity' to colonised societies, often defined in terms of Western ideas of progress, development, and civilisation. This idea was central to the ideology of empire, especially from the 19th century onwards, and had both material and discursive dimensions. This work and the processes of enculturation, processes of adapting Christian beliefs to local customs, paralleled the indirect rule system. In this paper, I argue that the White Fathers' close engagement with Bemba cultural practices and material culture contributed to the ethnologisation of Bemba identity, reinforcing tribal distinctions and elevating Bemba prominence over other ethnic groups. These studies not only shaped colonial knowledge production but also played a role in transforming indigenous subjectivities, positioning local populations as governable Christian citizens. By interrogating the entanglements between missionary ethnography and colonial anthropology, this article sheds light on the intersections of Christianisation, knowledge, power, and colonialism in colonial Zambia, and seeks to contribute to wider scholarship on missionaries as ethnographic agents in colonial Africa. (shrink)

This analytic autoethnographic and autobiographical essay addresses several interrelated questions regarding the use of ethnographic and otherwise ‘qualitative’ research methods in the study of contemporary urban society. The testy relationship between qualitative and quantitative research has historical as well as logico-deductive roots that continue to haunt the social sciences. As to hermeneutics, the debate parallels my academic career journey from Indiana University to Brooklyn College by way of New York University during which I learned that the normative practices of the (...) social and not so social sciences come in a myriad of different competing, and occasionally conflicting, pre- and proscriptions. My intention in this essay is not to construct a fine, or even a crude, philosophical discourse but to argue for more attention to be paid to what social scientists do best as opposed to the labels they apply to each other and their trades. As the positivist founders of sociology would agree, social science is not exempt from the laws of social science. At the conclusion, an example will be given of the kind of knowledge accessible only through direct observation and best conveyed by thick description. (shrink)

How does the question of temporality get translated into the register of values in the process of constructing knowledge through ethnography? Is there a possibility of critical ethnography that tracks politics of time in the accounts of the other? By centring these questions to the domain of ethnographic endeavours in Indian anthropology, this article takes a look into the shifting locations of self and the other in the practice of ethnography with reference to the notion of temporality (...) as value. Ethnography, once a key device of anthropological research, has become one of the significant approaches in almost all social science disciplines today and even in certain domains of humanities, management and market research. Ethnography itself has been reimagined and reshaped under different terrains of interdisciplinary approaches. But one would rarely find accounts of political and ideological manoeuvring of temporal concepts and value orientations which inform the theories and rhetoric in it. It pronounces upon the knowledge gathered from such research a discourse which construes the other in terms of a distance from the self, both spatial and temporal. Drawing upon this register of ‘time’ from the writing of Johannes Fabian, the article transposes the framework to understand the currents in contemporary Indian anthropology. (shrink)

Scholars and Indigenous communities alike have long interrogated Native peoples’ interventions into ethnography. Earlier treatments investigated how ethnographers ally with colonial states and how Indigenous people resist their objectification. The works that this essay explores mark a new turn. They ask what ethnography is for, and what its future will be. These scholars evaluate how Indigenous interventions into ethnography plant seeds for revitalized ceremony, kinship ties, and gender complementarities. Charting a broad expanse of time and place—from Central (...) Australia to Dinétah to the Canadian Northwest Coast to Mesoamerica—these works assemble a toolkit for reimagining the function of ethnography. (shrink)

This article examines methodological and ethical issues of ethnographic research through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy. Levinas is relevant to a critical analysis of ethnographic methods because his philosophy turns on the problematic relationship between self and other, among other important problems that define and guide contemporary anthropological research, including questions of responsibility, justice, and solidarity. This article utilizes Levinas's philosophy to outline a phenomenology of the “doing” of fieldwork, emphasizing the contingency of face-to-face encounters over controlled research design. (...) This account provides a basis for going beyond the polarized opposition between objective and subjective ethnographic approaches. Levinas allows for an ethically informed ethnography premised upon an acknowledgement of risk and uncertainity over researcher control or reflexivity. Providing a handful of concrete examples, the article argues that critical self-reflection about the fundamental face-to-face dimension of fieldwork is central to ethnography's ethical possibilities. (shrink)

The sixteenth-century reckoning with extra-European peoples and cultures occurred at precisely the same moment that humanists were increasingly preoccupied with the daily life, material culture, and lived religion of classical antiquity. Leading figures in sixteenth-century antiquarianism took an abiding interest in ethnographic accounts of contemporary peoples and even produced such accounts. This article examines how sixteenth-century readers and scholars placed bodies of literature on ancient and modern customs in dialogue with one another. While scholars have long appreciated that ethnographic and (...) travel writing were deeply mediated by the study of antiquity, that mediation cut both ways. This article addresses the question of how ethnographic descriptions of modern peoples shaped sixteenth-century understandings of the customs and lived religion of antiquity. The writings of merchants and humanists testify to the ways in which the practices of ethnographic writing helped to shape travellers’ and readers’ appreciation of the cultural alterity of classical antiquity. (shrink)