Production Of Anthropological Knowledge Research Articles

Problém reflexivity

This article presents reflexivity in its various meanings and forms as it appears in anthropology and social sciences. During the second half of the twentieth century in these fields, it became both an inspiration for various theories of the functioning of social phenomena, but also a part of anthropological methodology: in the era of the reflexive turn, it served as a critique of the situatedness of the production of anthropological knowledge, which was supposed to unmask the personal influence of the researcher on the resulting form of the texts. Although the contribution of this stage to the understanding of the meaning of the textuality of anthropological works cannot be denied, I see its “normalization” as part of anthropological methodology as problematic. If we focus more closely on the functioning mechanisms of reflexivity and self-reflection, we will come across certain paradoxes. In this paper, I focus on various criticisms of reflexivity, through which I try to approach the essence of the problem of using reflexivity. Emphasis is placed on the debate on reflexivity as a pivotal mechanism in the organization of late modern societies as described by theorists such as Giddens, Beck, Lash or Archer. These theories are confronted with the concept of “speech” as understood by constructivist approaches such as discourse analysis, which view all meanings as variable and constantly constructed by linguistic means in ordinary speech. I further show how reflexivity is unmasked by the opponents of reflexive modernization theory as a rhetorical strategy used to legitimize the status quo. This example serves as an illustration of the illusory nature of reflexivity and the possibility of its misuse.

Can anthropologists get humor? A collaborative experiment on empathetic knowing at a time of predicaments

AbstractAs a pandemic‐era collaborative writing project undertaken amid rising geopolitical tensions, this article demonstrates understanding humor in contemporary China as an ethnographic project leading toward deep, empathetic knowledge at a time when in‐person fieldwork became difficult. Through deciphering and translating layered meanings “encrypted” in and intentions signaled by humor in a new comedy program launched in 2021, we dive deep into the lively social life in contemporary China. Humor, via “thick description,” offers valuable insights into life in “fieldsites” that were hard to access during the pandemic time, amid political tensions. It provides a unique lens to examine the unspoken but shared sentiments in societies where humor has become a fundamental mode of public expression. It alerts us to existential anxieties in social life, the subtle voices of social critique, and the yearning for empathy. Humor is not only a valuable object for anthropological inquiry but also a vantage point to reflect on ethnographic methodology and epistemology. We examine humor, with its sentimental and ethical potentialities, and through spontaneous collaboration of mutual support, envision new possibilities in anthropological knowledge production.

Illuminating the craft of policy: an anthropological approach to policy ethnography

The ‘task to come’ in anthropological fieldwork is rarely discussed explicitly as a set of underpinning methodological, analytical, conceptual, and theoretical precepts and practices. Drawing on learnings from a study of policymakers in the Australian Public Service – a non-conventional fieldwork location – this paper presents an account of how the anthropologist instituted direction and purpose or ‘fruitful ways of looking’ as an orientation to policy ethnography and the sense-making journey that follows. This paper progresses three interrelated aims: (1) to argue that, through ethnographic fieldwork, anthropology adds value to understanding the policy setting and its actors as engaged in purposeful and meaningful work underpinned by policy knowledge and expertise; (2) provocate that anthropology should contribute to research agendas outside of critical normative disciplinary interests in power and control; (3) illustrate that preparation is useful to tailor the production of anthropological knowledge to its context. An ‘interpretive framework’ is described as the culmination of this approach to collecting and interpreting ethnographic field data, demonstrating how this attends to the policy setting as socio-cultural domain with actors engaged in shared practices, routines and rituals, steeped in policy-practitioner skills, knowledge and expertise – or policy ‘craft’. Together, this conditioned the anthropological gaze to take in everyday activities involved in policy work and enabled the study of meetings and documents to discern what happens during these structured conversations to better understand how policy staff engage with academic research in meeting their policy responsibilities under the expectations of the evidence-based policy agenda.

Sampling as ethnographic method/remixing Gulu City

AbstractThis article describes the process of producing Gulu SoundTracks, a digital sonic ethnographic project accessible at gulusoundtracks.org, with four Ugandan music producers based in Gulu. The album comprises eight digital audio tracks that tell stories about Gulu musically through the compositional mixing of field soundscape recordings. Using field recordings as samples opened up sampling as a multimodal method for ethnographic storytelling which entails listening that is “vexed” (Weheliye 2005), archival, multiple, and generative. Pointing to insights from the project's creative process, the author explores sound praxis as a modality for amplifying fruitful connections between ethnographic and Afrodiasporic arts traditions. In conversation with others using sound methods in anthropology, ethnomusicology, and digital sound studies, this article stages a dialogue between sound‐based work, critical treatments of Black and Afrosonic cultural production, and experimental ethnography. Sampling as method centers ethnographic imagination and points to critical possibilities field recording holds for anthropological knowledge production.

Producing Anthropological Knowledge in and of Southern Africa: A Case Study of the Anthropology Southern Africa Journal

This article conducts an archival examination of the Anthropology Southern Africa journal (formerly the South African Journal of Ethnology/Suid- Afrikaanse Tydskrif vir Etnologie), in keeping with Allen and Jobson’s (2016) call for anthropology to examine its own archives, as spaces of knowledge production which act as indexes of power. The article moves through three eras of the journal, between 1978 and 2020, showing how it evolved from being the home of volkekunde anthropology under apartheid, to a space for the production of anthropological knowledge by both established and nascent voices from the global South. Turning attention to the demographic minutiae of praxis within journals enables the start of a conversation about who was making anthropological know edge at different moments in history, and what sort of knowledge was made.

Falling into the Gaps, Together: On Peer Review as Intellectual Accompaniment

Falling into the Gaps, Together: On Peer Review as Intellectual Accompaniment

Emotive Banners and Billboards

Abstract This paper analyses the affective ramifications at the onset of the emerging Corona pandemic in Kupang, Indonesia. Steering towards now established social and political orders of public conduct outside one’s home and neighbourhood, public billboards and warning signs became early visible manifestations of worlding Covid-19 into the city’s infrastructure. Rapidly emerging governmental and entrepreneurial banners communicated new orders of personal and communal hygiene practices. They created messages of Covid-19 infectiology based on globalised public health rhetoric calling familiar socialities and ordinary feelings into question. This paper scrutinises the pandemic worlding of spaces and socialities and reflects on the relationship between newspaper reports, billboards and the feelings they evoked. The article proposes the concept of ‘orders of feelings’ as a valuable complement of ‘worlding’ theories via the analysis of banners, signs and newspaper articles as ‘emotives’. Ultimately, it contemplates anthropological knowledge production in a pandemic context that obstructed traditional ethnographic engagement.

ANTROPOLOGIA, DESEJO E TEXTURAS DA VIDA: UMA ENTREVISTA COM VEENA DAS

Abstract Presentation of the interview with Veena Das and the set of texts related to her work published in the current volume of Sociologia & Antropologia. In the interview, Das talks about the imbrication between writing and forms of life; her childhood and the presence of children in her research; the implications of asymmetries and long-term relationships in ethnographic research; the relationship between philosophy and anthropology in her trajectory; Sanskrit and the dialogues of some philosophers with Sanskrit. She also comments on the articulation between gender and knowledge production; the relationship between desire, ritual and religion; the notion of “textures”, which gives the title to her recently-released book; some aspects of the reception of the book; the activity of mentoring young researchers; collaborative forms of research; the dynamics of the North American university system; and the place of joy and desire in the production of anthropological knowledge.

I said, they said: The ethnographic backstage and the politics of producing engaged anthropology

Two commonly articulated goals of engaged anthropology include: 1) creating equal power relations with research participants; and 2) producing scholarship that critiques inequality. Though these seem commensurate, this article discusses how working toward both goals can lead to conflict when collaborators vehemently disagree with the critical aspects of your research findings. This article argues that writing about the ethnographic backstage — the background negotiations that rarely make it to the printed page — can help engaged anthropologists foster more egalitarian relations when it comes to ethnographic representation and can sharpen our sociocultural critiques. Because engaged anthropology, by definition, is shaped by negotiations with research participants, examining the ethnographic backstage helps us better understand an important axis in the production of anthropological knowledge.

Typologies, Typifications, and Types

This article positions types at the center of anthropological knowledge production, considering them both from the abstract, analytical perspective of expert typologies and from the tacit, phenomenological perspective of everyday practices of typification. Proposing what an “anthropology of types,” broadly construed and across these two scales, might look like, I examine the histories and uses of types and typological thinking in anthropology, highlighting the empirical, analytical, methodological, ethical, and political questions they have raised. I then describe the phenomenological foundations of typification, how sociocultural and linguistic anthropologists have approached it, and the accompanying challenges related to translation and representation. Finally, I review ethnographies of expert practices of type production, tracing the circuit of typification–typology–type and back again to show how forms of expertise institutionalize lay knowledge in ways that further solidify the misrecognition of types as natural, and examine visual and arts-based interventions that draw attention to these processes.

Slavery, Anthropological Knowledge, and the Racialization of Africans

This essay asks, If one of the legacies of slavery in the Americas was the racialization of enslaved Africans, and indeed the racialization of the modern world, did this legacy of race not also impact the communities on the African continent? The essay grapples with this question by insisting what should be a baseline understanding: that modern racial consciousness, and especially global racialization processes that emerge in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade, also impacted continental African communities. I focus specifically on the ways that the legacies of anthropological knowledge production in Africa depend on racializing tropes of Africans while simultaneously impeding this type of racial analysis. And I suggest a reconsideration of the ways we apprehend African community formation post-European contact. I argue for an understanding of the modern development of African societies that shifts from exclusive investments in local configurations to systematic approaches in which the histories and legacies of slavery and race are situated.

Speak, Friend, and Enter? Fieldwork Access and Anthropological Knowledge Production on the Copperbelt

The ‘gate’ has been a recurring metaphor for moments of access and denial in ethnographic fieldwork. However, access challenges during fieldwork represent not only ‘gates’ opening up or foreclosing scientific opportunity: rather, they tell us something about fieldwork as a collection of scientific practices, and, more precisely, how practices of power mark the process of anthropological knowledge production and anthropology as a social science. Based on fieldwork in Luanshya from 2015 to 2016, the study of metatexts from ethnographies on Zambia’s copper mines, archival research and personal communication with Copperbelt scholars, I argue that ethnographic fieldwork has been able to challenge persisting power structures and social hierarchies in colonial and post-colonial Zambia. Similarly, as I will explain, ethnographic fieldwork made the anthropologist a social scientist who was being ‘chased’ by the practices of power that structured his or her prime work place – that is, the field. I set out as a historian of social anthropology, retracing how anthropologists on the Copperbelt gained or were denied access to their field sites from the studies of the Rhodes–Livingstone Institute (RLI), founded in 1937, to my own ethnographic research project up to 2017. Moments of fieldwork access and denial have occurred in this region in an especially clear form. I seek to contribute to the historiography of the Copperbelt as an anthropological field site and the understanding of anthropology as a social science. It is a science that is capable of illustrating power hierarchies through passing moments of gaining fieldwork access, continuous negotiations to maintain it, and prolonged efforts, ending in denial. These instances are not mere embellishments to be relegated to the introductions, appendices and postscripts of ethnographies or retrospective assessments of academic careers. Fieldwork access should be central within every reflection on the production of anthropological knowledge and the nature of anthropology as a social science.

Narrating the Unspeakable

The use of psychedelic substances has been described as an ‘unspeakable primary experience,’ one that is personal and ultimately indescribable. The ineffable quality of such an experience, however, does not prohibit or invalidate attempts to explain it. The struggle to narrate one’s experience is instead an important endeavor. But, how does narration work if the psychedelic experience is truly unspeakable? What kind of narratives are possible? What kinds of narrative work do psychedelics foreclose? This article addresses these questions by analyzing narratives generated about the use of psychedelics for drug treatment. Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic research at drug treatment centers in Baja California, Mexico, this article examines what narration looks like in the context of a psychedelic-based drug treatment modality. It pays particular attention to how people in treatment retell – or struggle to retell – their experiences with psychedelics to make sense of them and then articulate them for the researcher. I argue that psychedelic experiences pose a unique challenge for the anthropological study of these substances, particularly their therapeutic use. I show how these experiences resist narrativization in multiple ways, presenting both ethnographic and epistemological obstacles to the production of anthropological knowledge.

Speaking for the Refugee Other: Missioneering, White Saviourism, and the Politics of Ethnographic Representation in Luis Alberto Urrea's Across the Wire

Luis Alberto Urrea's Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (1993) provides a harrowing perspective on the struggles of a group of mainly indigenous refugees and migrants who live in one of Tijuana's many colonias—informal settlements with no utilities or public services—where they barely survive by picking trash. Written from notes that Urrea compiled while he was a translator for Baptist missionaries from 1978 to 1982 and then again in the 1990s, Across the Wire is deeply indebted to colonial modes of representation that have characterised Western anthropological knowledge production, and specifically ethnographic writing, from its inception. The memoir cum ethnographic work cum journalistic account aims to call attention to the hardships that refugees in Tijuana face and elicit sympathy for their plight. Yet, despite Urrea's intention to humanise his subjects, Across the Wire depicts them as helpless, in need of outside deliverance, and ultimately inferior to Urrea and his missionary crew, reproducing a white saviour narrative that reifies the myth of white, Western superiority. In the process, Across the Wire unwittingly reveals the pernicious workings of white saviourism and illustrates how it is contingent on an exploitative relationship in which the purported “helper” is the actual beneficiary.

Redefining ethnography «in the strict sense of the term»: Perspectives gained from non-standard, old-new fieldwork

This essay reflects on the consequences for ethnography of the reversal of the direction of the anthropological encounter – what exactly happens when anthropologists from the Global South undertake fieldwork among populations in the Global North? I will argue that this does not merely correct historical imbalances of anthropological knowledge production, thereby changing the substance of that knowledge itself, although of course that is a goal worth pursuing, as has cogently been pointed out by the “world anthropologies” critique of hegemonic disciplinary practices. Using insights drawn from my own research site in the US heartland, where I conducted fieldwork initially in 1989-91, and then again during a “focused revisit” in 2015, I suggest that lasting misunderstandings between the anthropologist and the research participants are themselves a rich source of data and human possibility. My contention is that non-standard and long-term fieldwork of this kind may help reveal dimensions of the practice of ethnography that would otherwise remain obscured.

American Normal: Situated Theory and American Anthropological Knowledge Production

AbstractKey social scientific concepts are based in local theories particular to the North Atlantic, and the United States especially, and have been exported by anthropologists to analyze diverse ethnographic contexts despite the lack of interrogation of their status as local, American theories. In this article, I address this situation by focusing on the elaboration of American normalcy in its present moment, dependent upon a lay reconfiguration of “ideology,” “hegemony,” and “history.” In advancing this analysis, I focus on popular media journalism and its analysis of the Trump presidency. My approach is bifocal, at once focusing on the history of these Marxian concepts while attending to their permutations in the present. Focusing on these concepts and their relation to ideas of the individual and institutions opens up possibilities for the symmetrical analysis of knowledge production practices and everyday actions of popular and expert communities, and lays the foundation for the cultural anthropology of the U.S. to critique contemporary U.S. politics as well as social science knowledge production and its circulation.

The Dragon and the River: Poetic Parallelism in Hazardous Research

SUMMARYI offer poetic parallelism as evidence for an ethnography of authoritarian power in Laos and as a conceptual frame for understanding hazards in ethnography and anthropological knowledge production. Parallel poems take the form of juxtaposed statements, often characterized by multiplicity and contradiction. In an authoritarian context marked by state violence, the very form of the parallels is data on Lao society. I examine poetic parallels as a provocation to write field poems rather than field notes.

Editorial Anthrovision Issue 5.2

This special issue dedicated to photography is a particularly challenging one as the relationship between photography in the academic context of anthropological knowledge production is extremely relevant and important to the study of interactions between anthropology’s visual history and contemporary issues related to identities in context of renewal traditions or to digital images, for example in Nepal, and the categorisation and stereotypical expectations linked, for example to “ecologies o...

Why do we read the classics?

Debates on the epistemological, ethical, and historical constitution of the anthropological corpus are one of the reasons why anthropology has always thrived. Whether in terms of the complex relation between the production of anthropological knowledge and the political systems in which it takes place, or the proliferation of the language of “mutual constitution” as a way to bypass questions of causality, the question of the “suffering” vs. the “good,” the attribution of “colonial” or “white male privilege” to ethnographic classics, or the hackneyed debates on the precariousness of academic life, contemporary anthropology is traversed by critical shortcuts, worn paths we often take, without reflecting on them. This first installment of a new journal section titled “Shortcuts” aims to investigate and question the analytical, historical, and interpretive arguments that have become common knowledge in anthropology, intuitively true and agreeable, yet rarely subject to rigorous scrutiny and discussion. The fir...

Epistemological eclecticism: Difference and the ‘Other’ in the Balkans and beyond

This article's concern is epistemological in that it seeks understanding of the nature of ethnographic knowledge production. Its background assumption is that decolonization of anthropology requires decolonization of anthropological epistemology. The article argues that anthropology is not so much a study of the ‘Other’, but an effort to acquire knowledge by translating across some sort of socio-historically established difference. Anthropologists do not acquire knowledge necessarily by translating between modern, Western European, and non-modern, ‘Other’ conceptual arrangements. Instead, the anthropological production of knowledge requires an effort to figure out the relevant differences and similarities between an anthropologist, their interlocutors, and their audiences, as well as a translation across these differences and similarities. In order to demonstrate this point, the article focuses on 19th- and 20th-century ethnographic discussions of rural joint families called zadruga in the Balkans. Through a critical reading of two works on zadruga, it demonstrates that anthropologists in the Balkans were epistemologically eclectic, in that they could make use of strategies of both ‘anthropology abroad’ and ‘auto-anthropology’, or combine and reverse them. While this instance of epistemological eclecticism is the result of widespread uncertainties concerning the status of the ‘modern’ and the ‘non-modern’ as organizational categories in the Balkans, it has direct implications for the production of anthropological knowledge generally.