Anthropological Notion Research Articles

Epistemics and Expertise in Peer Tutoring Interactions: Co‐Constructing Knowledge of Spanish

Peer tutoring is viewed as a valuable component of additional language learning due to the presence of a more knowledgeable interlocutor. Yet researchers and language program directors alike often ignore the linguistic and cultural differences that peer tutors possess, instead categorizing them homogeneously as ‘experts’ or ‘native speakers.’ In this article, I use a case study to closely examine how knowledge is negotiated in one peer tutoring cohort. Grounding my analysis in ethnomethodological and linguistic anthropological notions of epistemics and expertise, I show how one peer tutor drew from various embodied, artifactual, and historical resources in order to negotiate lexical gaps and position herself as an expert in the target language. At the same time, I demonstrate how essentialist ideologies help construct a language expert by highlighting the learners’ alignments to the tutor's epistemic stance as knower, even when faced with conflicting information. These findings question the ways knowledge and expertise are traditionally perceived in peer tutoring and other additional language learning contexts, emphasize the need for training peer tutors in cooperative learning methods and articulating their knowledge with that from the classroom setting, and highlight the complex ideologies that surround the ‘right to know’ a target language.

Counter-Conduct and the Everyday: Anthropological Engagements with Philosophy

This article critically examines counter-conduct as an analytical tool for understanding minority subjectivity. It revisits the concept within its Collège lecture context and alongside alternative descriptions of opposing governmental power. Its affinities with the anthropological notion of the “everyday” are explored in depth. The anthropological everyday, it is argued, points to nuances that enrich our understanding of the political. Heidegger's notions of “everyday” and “they” are discussed alongside ethnographic insights from Greece and Cyprus. This anthropological-philosophical encounter yields a more meaningful understanding of counter-conduct, as embedded in the everyday, that addresses both its broad scope and its analytic specificity.

Ритуал перехода и психотерапия

Anthropological notion of the rite of passage and its stages are viewed. Different psychotherapeutic approaches (psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, trauma, transpersonal and transcultural psychotherapy, dance movement therapy, narrative approach and community work), which address to the structure and symbolic meaning of the rites of passage, are compared. Systematization of client requests and corresponding psychotherapeutic objectives based on the rite of passage as a metaphor of life changes is proposed. Opportunities of using metaphor in modern society are analyzed.

On the Im/Propriety of Brand Names

This paper asks what kind of modifications we might have to make to our conventional understandings of proper names to accommodate the im/propriety of brand names. On the basis of ethnographic research on a naming crisis at a Mumbai advertising agency, I suggest that the classic anthropological notion of ‘participation’ (as opposed to reference) allows us to consider the play between baptism and the mimetic activation of virtual potentials that characterizes the public life of brand names. I argue for moving beyond the distinction between ‘artificial’ and ‘real’ proper names sustained by the theory of commodity fetishism, and propose instead that the supposed artificiality of brand identities has come to operate as an alibi for the unsteady authenticity of personal identities.

Noción de "espíritu" en Karl Rahner: una perspectiva de filosofía de la religión

Resumen: “Espiritu” es para Karl Rahner una nocion ante todo antropologica, pero en una concepcion del ser humano no cerrada, sino abierta a la trascendencia. Releyendo Horer des Wortes, se estudia aqui esta nocion en perspectiva de una fi losofia de la religion (1) y vinculada al concepto de “anticipacion” (Vorgriff), en el horizonte del ser absoluto que “se oculta” (2). Luego se analiza la condicion “espiritual” en el plano de la libertad del hombre como “oyente” de una posible revelacion (3) y fi nalmente se considera el “lugar” concreto en que para Rahner acontece este evento: el mundo material e historico (4). Palabras clave: Espiritu, Filosofia de la religion, Anticipacion. Abstract: For Karl Rahner, the concept “spirit” is, in the fi rst place, an anthropological notion; nevertheless, not one limited to a closed conception of man but open to transcendence. In this paper the concept “spirit” in Horer des Wortes is fi rst considered from the point of view of the Philosophy of religion(1) and linked to the concept “anticipation” (Vorgriff), in the realm of the “hidden” absolute being(2). Then follows an analysis of the human condition as “spiritual” in the context of man’s freedom as “listener” of God’s potential revelation(3). Finally, the article deals with the “place” where, according to Rahner, this event takes place: the material and historical world. Keywords: Spirit, Philosophy of Religious, Anticipation

Psychotherapy with people who smell

This paper stems from psychotherapy work with patients who ‘neglect personal hygiene’ in homelessness and chronic mental health settings, and consultancy to staff groups tasked with patients’ ‘social inclusion’. Psychoanalytic theory has largely eschewed exploring internal psychic states communicated by odour and, equally, the meaning of marked societal hostility towards malodorous individuals. The paper looks at historical and anthropological notions of ‘dirt’ and the construction of the ‘unwashed’ as a social category in the formation of bourgeois society. Psychoanalytic ideas of unconscious bodily and psychic communication are described. Case examples explore how troubled relations between body and mind result from early abuse/neglect, where the internal world is suffocated by trauma and ‘dread’ which cannot be contained and processed. From a psychosocial perspective, taking up a role as ‘unacceptable’ is the paradoxical condition of belonging for many members of the social whole. The paper suggests that invasive smell confronts us with our repressed knowledge of that which is ‘rotten’ in the emotional and sociopolitical environment in which ‘the unwashed’ exist. An example from organisational consultancy traces profound disturbance in institutional dynamics that occurs when the malodorous individual seeks to claim shared social resources. The author questions the prevalent view that ‘being smelly’ is an attempt to withdraw from social and psychic contact, rather than a meaningful communication which is within the scope of psychoanalytic thought to understand.

Workers’ Lunch Away from Home in the Paris of the Belle Epoque: The French Model of Meals as Norm and Practice

This article expands the anthropological notion of the “proper meal” to account for the quantitative aspects of workers’ lunch away from home in Paris around 1900. It reconstructs the meals’ caloric content and shows that male workers had easier access than their female colleagues to what they considered a full repast. Yet not everybody behaved according to the French model of the structured meal, namely, appetizer, entrée, and dessert. A full-fledged takeout food sector offered alternatives to the French model and allowed consumers to distance themselves from norms. Many French scholars have accepted the canonical dietary model as self-evident, which has led to neglect of this more informal food space where cultural rules exerted a weaker hold on eating behavior. Attention to the cultural importance and the material content of the commercial midday meal around 1900 offers a starting point to examine the developments of food practices and body weights in the twentieth century. En élaborant la notion anthropologique du « vrai repas » pour estimer le contenu calorique des déjeuners des ouvriers à l’extérieur autour de 1900, cette recherche montre que les hommes ont un accès plus facile que les femmes à ce qu’ils considèrent comme un repas roboratif. Mais tout le monde ne mange pas selon le modèle français du repas structuré en trois: hors d’œuvre, plat de résistance, dessert. Un secteur d’aliments à emporter propose des alternatives au modèle français et permet aux consommateurs de tenir les normes à distance. L’histoire ou le retour du refoulé: l’ethnocentrisme contemporain qui accepte le modèle canonique comme une évidence a fait négliger aux chercheurs français cet espace informel où les règles de la bienséance n’exercent qu’une influence limitée sur les pratiques alimentaires. L’oubli dans lequel est tombée l’histoire de cette nourriture de rue a permis d’interpréter l’émergence de la restauration rapide comme une manœuvre étrangère et de qualifier de « malbouffe » les mets qu’elle propose.

The Enhancement of Place's Specific Heritage. Place Marketing and Corporate Museums.

In Italy in recent decades there has been a remarkable growth in corporate museums, which have significantly contributed to the anthropological notion of cultural heritage and the recognition of the company even as being cultural. These museums have become important tools for creating value for companies to which they belong and for the local area. In fact, the enhancement of place specific resources accumulated over the centuries in the area, made by those for the promotion of brand and corporate image, reverberates throughout the local economy and civil system, creating a considerable support for enhancement policies of the place. To achieve all possible benefits, however, significant innovations are needed, particularly with regard to product policies, processes and organisational structures. The work thus proposes to i) identify the potential of corporate museums to create value, especially as to the local socio-economic system, ii) focus on strategies and policies for optimum performance.

What the beer shows: Exploring ritual and ontology in Kilimanjaro

Anthropology's recent turn to ontology extends a trajectory of rethinking established analytical domains, such as kinship, politics, and ritual. I reassess ritual by exploring the concept of “showing” among Chagga-speaking people of Rombo District, in Tanzania's Kilimanjaro Region, where substances such as eleusine (finger millet), entrails, milk, and beer have the capacity to reveal the past and point to the future. Through this case, I consider the analytical limitations of notions such as “interpretation,” “symbol,” and “signification” as I investigate how “showing” and the substances it involves acquire a conceptual character and the capacity to enunciate Deleuzian “events.” “Showing” is thus revealed as a moment that posits and creates concepts, a revelation that transforms and reorients anthropological notions of ritual.

Una escucha al Contrapunteo latinoamericano de Fernando Ortiz

Rhythms, accents, forms, harmonies and counterpoints are some of the musical geographies used to interpret Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Because of these features, it is possible to open up the anthropological notion of transculturation, which has been used as an integral framework within the study of Latin American identity since its first use in 1940. Through a critical approach based on listening, this paper draws attention to a series of analytical tools that can inform the lettered interpretation of culture, and, as such, critically reconsiders Ortiz’s cultural analysis within the structural boundaries of his essay.

Legal Limitations of the Anthropological Notion of the Gift in Roman Law

The gift from an anthropological perspective differs from the rigid civil notion of donation, which presupposes an unilateral, gratuitous transfer from one person to another. The anthropological notion of the gift includes all gratuitous transfers, either material or non-material. Therefore, the relation between the anthropological notion of the gift and the legal notion of donation is one of inclusion. However, limitations imposed on donations in Roman law follow the same logic of the legal limitations on other gratuitous transfers such as the ones prohibited by leges sumptuaria. In this article I will analyze the reasons behind the legal interdictions in Roman law on some gratuitous spending, including donations between spouses, the ones prohibited by Lex cincia de donis et muneribus and by leges sumptuaria, interdictions that deal with the anthropological function of the gift in the greco-roman world.

Queer Muslim migrants in Belgium: A research note on same-sex sexualities and lived religion

Based on research on same-sex sexuality, religion and transnational migration in Belgium, this article looks at how the process of transnational migration intersects with the fashioning of the moral selves of queer Muslim migrants. Bringing together the concept of lived religion with an anthropological notion of moral selves, I argue for the importance of taking into account complexity and ambivalence in the understanding of moral subjectivities.

Temporalization and Ethical Action

This essay attempts to reconceptualize temporality as it relates to ethics, by interrupting dominant anthropological notions of time—most particularly the temporal coherence of narrative unity—which are homogeneous and empty. Eschewing the more commonly understood notion of anthropology as ethnographic thick description, this essay is a practice of anthropological hermeneutics by which I take a cue from my Muscovite interlocutors to disrupt dominant anthropological conceptions of temporal unity within which action is considered to take place, and in so doing, reveal temporalization as the process by which ethical action becomes possible.

Classroom mood and the dance of stance: The role of affective and epistemic stancetaking in the development of a classroom mood

Abstract Our paper offers a new theoretical and methodological approach to the study of moods in academic settings. We begin by introducing the concept of classroom mood as a phenomena distributed across time and across people. Then we propose a method for studying classroom mood using the linguistic anthropological notion of stance. We demonstrate this method through an analysis of a year-long video ethnography of literacy teaching and learning in a first-grade classroom. In this analysis, we document how a collaborative-problem-solving mood, one form of emotional experience, emerges through stancetaking over time as a communicative, collaborative, and relational process. Our analysis describes how a teacher and her students coordinated affective and epistemic stances dialogically and opportunistically to build a collaborative problem-solving mood over time. This mood called forth (solicited) particular actions from students to participate competently in the learning activity, which included joint attention, effortful listening, and correct tool use (strategies/sound cards). Our analysis demonstrates how contextual moods influence engagement in learning.

Fenomen nawrócenia – próba filozoficznego ujęcia

This paper attempts to study and to describe the experience of conversion that is an existential change, whose aim is to initiate a relation with God. Although the category of conversion is biblical and theological, it is also an anthropological notion. Hence, research on this phenomenon by means of the phenomenological method may result in the extension of the knowledge of humanity.The article consists of two fundamental parts. In the first one three examples of conversion, as an empiric basis for further research, are presented: St Augustine of Hippo’s, Cardinal John Henry Newman’s and Edith Stein’s. An investigation of their ways enables us to enter into the horizon of the experience of conversion and to understand its basic intuition. In this approach the conversion is comprehended as a radical turn on the road of searching for the truth. A converting person gains the consciousness of being on the supreme way to the truth.In the further part of the article, the investigations bring a more universal description of this phenomenon. Conversion is certainly not only the single event, e.g. the turning point. It is rather a process which has its ‘before’ and ‘after’. On the way leading to conversion one may find such phenomena as: the integrated life of the person, an experience of emptiness and dissatisfaction, the courage to break present horizons and a readiness to accept the unexpected. In turn, ‘after’ the conversion one may notice the following phenomena: an experience of one’s own limits, the consciousness of the Absolute and an experience of freedom.The paper culminates in the discussion about the comprehension of conversion in terms of the process of philosophy or the ontology of becoming. Such concepts as Hegelian dialectic, Aristotle’s theory of act and potency or Kierkegaard’s leap of faith are rejected. The way of converting man has its explanation in the categories of the religious development according to J. H. Newman.

Darkness before Daybreak: African Migrants Living on the Margins in Southern Italy Today by Hans Lucht (review)

Reviewed by: Darkness before Daybreak: African Migrants Living on the Margins in Southern Italy Today by Hans Lucht Alice Elliot Hans Lucht, Darkness before Daybreak: African Migrants Living on the Margins in Southern Italy Today. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. 306 pp. Darkness before Daybreak is a compelling chronicle of the geographical and existential trajectories of young Ghanaian migrants who have left their native fishing village for a life worth living in Europe. It provides a unique testimony of the flesh and bone behind the faceless numbers and figures of transnational migration appearing cyclically in our news and political demagogy. Without overdramatizing, anthropologist Hans Lucht traces the workings of exceptionally dramatic lives, as they move from fishing villages in Ghana with dwindling fish and even more dwindling possibilities, across the infamous Sahara desert where the survival of the fittest metaphor becomes tragically literal, just to arrive to the rundown outskirts of Naples. Here, the deadly speed of cars and trucks on the Naples-Rome expressway drastically contrasts the existential immobility of Ghanaian immigrants, tenaciously waiting by the side of the road for a chance in life. By melding compelling narrative with a concerted effort to theorize the geopolitical-cum-existential positioning of Ghanaian migrants, this moving book is an important contribution to the anthropological understanding of contemporary human movement. Divided into three parts, the book traces the migration route of (mainly male) Ghanaian migrants in reverse. Thus, the book’s story begins in the Southern Italian city of Naples, then moves to the perilous migration route between Ghana and Italy, and ends in the Guan fishing village of Senya Beraku in Ghana’s Central region, where migration begins and, ideally for many involved, will one day end too. “Losses and Gains in Naples,” the first part of the book, traces the daily life of a group of Senya Beraku migrants living in the outskirts of Naples. Lucht describes the migrants’ survival [End Page 1165] strategies in a harsh environment, made of overcrowded high-rise buildings of flats, periodic racist attacks and attempted sexual abuse, targeted muggings, physically exhausting construction work, and, most importantly, the nagging sense of stasis and relentless postponement of hope. The scarce possibilities—financial and personal—Guan migrants encounter in Naples’s harsh underground economy become a reminder of the fact that “no matter how close one moves to the centres of mobility, inclusion in the circulation of material and symbolic goods always remains at a distance that cannot be bridged” (67). This emerges clearly in Lucht’s brilliant description of the social microcosm surrounding the section of the Rome expressway that passes through the rundown municipalities north of Naples, where most of Lucht’s informants live. For the Italian motorists driving at often ruthless speed between Rome and Naples, the expressway becomes the epitome of what Marc Augé terms a “non-place of supermodernity” (67). Lucht argues, however, that it has “retained characteristics of the old anthropological place to the immigrants living along it, walking along it, having things thrown at them along it” (67). The expressway comes to life in Lucht’s description, as he traces how the road becomes the place where West African immigrants position their hopes for daily employment and long-term achievements, where they come into contact with the locals—be they employers looking for cheap labor, fellow bus travelers, or hopeful curb crawlers—and where most of their daily life slowly unfolds. Roundabouts and pickup points along the expressway become crucial places of possibility, failure, and threat in Lucht’s description; places where, at the sight of a car slowing down, migrants find themselves fighting mercilessly against one another for the chance of (miserably paid) day labor hire. The ethnography of Ghanaians’ harsh livelihoods in Naples provides the empirical basis for the book’s main theoretical argument, presented as a coda to the first section and further developed throughout the book. Lucht opens his theoretical discussion in Chapter 3 with a simple question: “why this suffering in Naples is preferable to life in the village in Ghana with one’s friends and family” (83). The conundrum is addressed through a discussion of the classic anthropological notion of reciprocity, which...

Science, Politics, and Prejudice: The Dynamics and Significance of British Anthropology’s Failure to Confront Nazi Racial Ideology

For two years in the turbulent mid-1930s, the Royal Anthropological Institute co-convened an expert committee tasked with scientifically evaluating Nazi claims about race. Called the Race and Culture Committee, this body was created at the behest of Charles G. Seligman and given the unofficial objective of producing a strong anti-racist statement attacking the anthropological notion of a pure Aryan race. Scientists and other scholars of Jewish descent were intentionally excluded from the Committee to pre-emptively avert attacks on the report’s validity by anti-Semites. However, such a report was never produced due to the interference of members who were committed to defending Nazi Germany and the country’s racial policies. Using newly uncovered sources, this article argues that the Committee was doomed to failure from the start, and that its demise prevented the collective British anthropological establishment from attacking Nazi views on race with a unified voice before the Second World War despite an emerging consensus that the German government’s pronouncements were scientifically indefensible. More significantly, there is also now evidence that the obstructionist faction within the Committee was taking its ideological direction directly from German scientific practitioners with their own agendas during this period, raising questions about the relationship between science, politics, and interactions between academics and the state. It was only with the later publication of We Europeans that mainstream British scientists would declare their opposition to Nazi racial views, but by then the opportunity to make a more impactful stand had been lost.

Rosa Canosa . Etnogenesi normanne e identità variabili: Il retroterra culturale dei Normanni d'Italia fra Scandinavia e Normandia . (Collana del Dipartimento di Storia Dell'Università di Torino.) Turin: Silvio Zamorani. 2009. Pp. 189. €24.00.

Although long neglected by historians, eleventh and twelfth-century southern Italy has gained much recent attention as an area that once contained a quadrilingual kingdom of Muslims, Jews, and Greek and Latin Christians under Norman control. In the past decade no fewer than three monographs have appeared in English on the Muslims of southern Italy. There has been, at the same time, an even larger growth in the study of the Norman kingdom and its principalities in the eleventh century. This recent enthusiasm for southern Italy as a “frontier” and a point of cultural contact, exchange, and relative tolerance is further complicated by longstanding questions over the origins of the Normans and the construction of their own identity (sometimes called normanitas) during the eleventh-century conquests. In the eleventh century, the Normans created a kingdom that would survive, in one form or another, until the unification of Italy. Normanitas itself has been a difficult notion for scholars to define, and questions about its experienced reality and its persistence have vexed historians. Were Normans really a people (gens or natio in the Latin sources); was the notion of their normanitas simply a function of their many and capable northern and southern European historians of the eleventh century; did they assimilate or change that identity in the twelfth century in the territories they conquered, and if so, how? These are some of the questions at the heart of Rosa Canosa's book. The study takes as its foundation the anthropological notion of ethnogenesis—that ethnic identities are socially constructed and plastic—derived here from studies of Gothic identity and the fragmentation of the Roman Empire in late antiquity. This school of thought has argued, to generalize, that the Gothic “invaders” of the Roman Empire formed a larger ethnic identity around a few chief warriors who transmitted to them a traditionskern, a nucleus of traditions and customs, only after entering the Empire. Canosa uses this as a general model (this comparative approach is one of the useful aspects of the work [p. 154]), and she insists that the Normans formed a separate sense of normanitas in Italy that varied by author but emphasized their Christianity and bellicose virtues (p. 67). Her study ends around 1130 when she considers the specifically Norman identity to have been replaced with a more general “French” identity, at least in terms of origin, and when power was “denormanized.” This notion has been challenged by others working in different sources, notably charters and legal evidence. The greater use of lineage as an identity strategy among Lombards than among Normans is taken by Canosa as evidence of a Norman desire to erase difference once conquest was complete (p. 145). But it is a relative difference, and the Normans continued to recognize social difference as legitimate within their multi-ethnic kingdom throughout most of the twelfth century.

Regulating cell lives in Japan: avoiding scandal and sticking to nature

The life sciences in Japan have been reappraised since late 2007 developments in human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell research. This article analyzes how Japan's research on fetal cells, human embryonic stem cells and iPS cells is co-produced with policies on funding, sourcing, bioethics, international regulation, and intensifying international competition. I argue, first, that regulation of human embryonic stem cell research (hESR) in Japan, though attempts have failed to engage the public, has been shaped through the leverage of social groups; and, second, that the 2007 reappraisal of hESR and the efforts made to advance to clinical applications in 2008 reflect a change in the orientation of policymakers toward regulation. Using anthropological notions of natural symbols, the article shows how the regulatory emphasis on what is regarded as ethical in the case of hESR has been confused with “safe” procedure, and how a risk-averse change in favor of iPS cell research according to stem cell scientists actually formed the reckless option.

Gramsci's concept of common sense: a useful concept for anthropologists?

The article begins with a brief look at the anthropological notion of culture and some of its ghosts, contrasting this with Gramsci's very different approach. It goes on to look in detail at Gramsci's concept of ‘common sense’, arguing that common sense as theorized by Gramsci provides anthropologists (whose discipline is so concerned with the quotidian) and others, with a useful theoretical tool with which to map everyday life. Gramsci's understanding of common sense encompasses its givenness – how it is both constitutive of our subjectivity and confronts us as an external reality – but also stresses its contradictions, fluidity and potential for change. To help clarify the specific character of the Gramscian notion of common sense, the article compares it with another concept that has been widely embraced within anthropology and elsewhere: Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus – a notion, I argue, that remains in many ways tethered to its anthropological origins.