Comparative Ethnography Research Articles

Infrastructures of Surveillance and Control in the Invisible City of Waste

ABSTRACT This paper offers a situated analysis of infrastructures of surveillance and control in Rotterdam through Latour & Hermant’s concept of the oligopticon. Oligopticons are networked devices and their supporting infrastructures that render the city in extremely narrow but very clear representations, in this case as a city of waste hotspots. In Rotterdam, public management is designing data-hungry oligopticons that map, control and intervene in the illegal disposal of waste and litter. An analysis of two vignettes from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork finds that these oligopticons do more than simply make visible and control these practices of waste disposal: they instead engage in punitive politics that frames those who illegally dispose of waste as exceptions to a normalizing way of life, fighting not waste but difference. Through ethnographic comparison, this paper aims to evoke thought, imagination and reflection in readers regarding the consequences of infrastructures of surveillance and control and the intimate knowledge that may escape these infrastructures.

A dynamic and critical approach to belonging as a dimension of occupation

ABSTRACT Doing, being, becoming, and belonging have been theorized as dimensions of occupation, yet belonging has received comparatively less attention from occupational scientists. The occupation-based literature tends to equate belonging with connectedness and to take a sedentarist approach in which (transnational) mobilities are considered as a challenge for occupational engagement and belonging. This paper critically examines belonging as developed through occupations and considers its constructed, dynamic, and multifaceted nature in the context of migration. Our theoretical framework is informed by transnational approaches, the mobilities paradigm, and transculturality. We draw from a cross-national comparative ethnography including 86 interviews with recent Vietnamese migrants in Vancouver, Canada, and Paris, France, as well as returning migrants in Vietnam. Our findings address participants’ belonging with regards to 1) routines, social ties, and familiarity; 2) mobile and immobile occupations; and 3) (post-)colonial politics of belonging. This study deepens understandings of the dynamic nature of occupation and belonging as well as how both are shaped by and can reproduce power dynamics. First, we contend that occupation and belonging are inherently situated, yet are not necessarily bounded to a single location. Belonging develops through routine occupations involving familiar people, objects, and amenities, which can themselves be mobile or accessible in multiple settings. Second, we emphasize how some occupations can become benchmarks for belonging, particularly in Western immigrant-receiving countries influenced by assimilationist and (post-)colonial dynamics. Lastly, we underscore individuals’ agency in employing occupations in ways to negotiate and claim belonging to their receiving and/or sending countries.

Caring for herd animals in Isluga

Chapter 3 of the book Earth, Water, Fleece and Fabric, first published in 2002, is presented in this article. It is based on periods of fieldwork carried out between 1986 and the late 1990s. In the previous chapter of the book, it was suggested that camelid domestication arose from the taming of successive generations of animals as part of the daily practices of herding. Domestication was not a once and forall event in the distant past. The present article focuses on the thick description of Isluga people’s herding strategies duringthe 1980s and 1990s. Isluga is an Aymara community in the Chilean highlands, bordering with Bolivia. Caring for camelidsin this community constitutes a process whereby herders sustain and renew lasting relationships between human beingsand herd animals. Cycles of time and space are described in order to contextualisehow and where the herders look after their llamas, alpacas and sheep. All Souls Day marks the arrival of the rainy seasonand Carnival is the event which brings it to an end. The austral summer solstice occurs on the cusp between these two festivalsand coincides with the fiesta of St. Thomas. Isluga people call themselves the «children of Saint Thomas», in a tradition which is inscribed in the topography of their territory. The other season of the year is cold and dry. It is associated with the winds of St. James the Greater and St. Anthony of Padua.The annual cycle therefore unfolds in a calendar of saints’ days accompanied by atmospheric phenomena, which nurturethe pasture grounds. The herding activities take place in a volcanic landscape associatedwith land forms which are perceived to be animated and gendered. The earth is personified as the Wirjin Tayka or Pachamama and the hills as Uywiri. Isluga people engage with these beings on a daily basis. These land forms can serve as aviadores, «providers», associated with the fertility and wellbeing of camelids and sheeps. The composition of the herds of llamas and alpacas is analysed, as well as the classifications Isluga people make accordingto age and gender. Camelid nomenclature is based on the disposition of dark and light colours in the coat of llamas and alpacas. Isluga people use names for their camelids which are intimately related to birds and other beings in their surroundings.The dense description offered makes it possible to analyse the regenerative cycle of water, pasture and fleece in a comparative ethnography, in the light of themes developed in other parts of the book, from which this article has been extracted.

Bodily boundaries transgressed: corporal alteration through ornamentation in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic at Boncuklu Tarla, Türkiye

Lack of contextual evidence for the use of small personal ornaments means that much of our understanding of ornamentation traditions within archaeological cultures is reconstructed from ethnographic comparisons. New in situ finds from the areas around the ears and mouth in burials at Boncuklu Tarla, a Neolithic settlement in Türkiye, add a novel dimension to the interpretation of stone ‘tokens’ or ‘plugs’. This article presents a new typology for these artefacts and argues for their use as ear ornaments or labrets in a practice involving significant and lasting corporal alteration.

Critique refigured: art, activism, and politics in post‐recession Dublin

AbstractThis article argues that the anthropology of critique has been hampered by an implicit framing of critique as the content of knowledge rather than an orientation to knowledge about the world. It does so building on an ethnographic account of a group of critical citizens in post‐recession Dublin, Ireland. It stages a comparison between two different forms of critique of importance to them: art and activism. Contrary to the assumption that activism and detachment, and moral advocacy and empiricism, are at odds, this ethnographic comparison reveals that here the ultimate critical skill is thought to be the ability to take up different critical attitudes. Moreover, it isn't a lack of detachment but the creation of a ‘critical community’ that makes critique political. Drawing from this ethnographic instance of what counts as critique, this article thus makes a case for an anthropology of critique as itself a critical practice – one that is becoming increasingly urgent as critique as we know it has come to exhibit a hegemony of form in the social sciences and public cultures of debate.

Skill, craft, and poiesis-intensive innovation

What is craft practice? The purpose of this paper is to contrast the categorization of craft practice with that of skill and innovation. I argue for the relevance of innovative skilled practice to future-making. Both skill and craft play an important part in collective engagements with futuring. With an ethnographic methodology, typical of anthropological fieldwork, I have explored skill in dairy farming, cheese making, and currently food gardening. In all these three realms, the results of ethnographic observation are that ideational processes immediately connect to intimate acquaintance with materials and ecosystems (including flora and fauna, soil, climate, landscape and humans). My conclusion is that craft practice and its outcomes imply a highly localized cosmology of evaluation. I show how comparative ethnography allows the mapping of these relations between people and places, and their more-than-local connections.

The dynamic lives of osseous points from Late Palaeolithic/Early Mesolithic Doggerland: A detailed functional study of barbed and unbarbed points from the Dutch North Sea.

Osseous barbed and unbarbed points are commonly recovered from the Dutch North Sea and other Mesolithic sites of northern Europe. Interpreted as elements of projectile weaponry, barbed points are considered by archaeologists to be a technological innovation in the hunting equipment of hunter-gatherers. However, debate about their exact use and identification of the targeted prey species is still ongoing. To shed light on the function of these tools, we analysed a sample of 17 artefacts from the Netherlands with a multi-disciplinary approach encompassing morphometric, functional, and chemical analysis. 14C-AMS dating yielded the oldest date for a barbed point from the Dutch coast (⁓13000 cal. BP). The observation of microwear traces preserved on the tools provides solid evidence to interpret the function of barbed and unbarbed points. We show that there were two distinct tool categories. 1) Barbed points hafted with birch tar and animal or vegetal binding were likely projectile tips for terrestrial and aquatic hunting. We provide strong clues to support the link between small barbed points and fishing using wear traces. 2) Points without barbs served as perforators for animal hides. Our results highlight the importance of use-wear and residue analysis to reconstruct prehistoric hunting activities. The functional interpretation of projectile points must also rely on microwear traces and not merely on the association with faunal remains, historical sources, and ethnographic comparisons.

As if there was a border. Bordering through excision in Melilla and the Canary Islands

This article investigates the social life of excision at the Southern Spanish border. Scholars have documented how excision expands the border project, and how it uses the law to make it more defensible as a practice. Less attention has been paid to how excision is challenged by activist networks, and how the law is used as an instrument to un-make borders. I expand literature on the complex relation between the law and geography in bordermaking by arguing that excision is rather dynamic in nature. A comparative ethnography of Melilla and the Canary Islands reveals that de facto borders created through excision are vulnerable to legal activism. The strategic use of the law can set back the expansion of the border project, tenuously restoring some rights for asylum-seeking and undocumented foreigners. Such setbacks are tenuous because excision is, nevertheless, deeply integrated into a dense web of containment tactics. ‘The undesirables’ might thus recuperate some of their rights at one point but then still face exclusion at another point of the expanded frontier.

Medicine and Kingship

Despite a vast and recently reinvigorated body of research, a glaring lacuna remains in the literature on African chief- and kingship. Exogenous sociostructural explanations (Vansina) and the universalist concept of sacred kingship (de Heusch) disregard the endogenous regional process of political centralization. This article proposes a corrected structuralism as a method to detect in cultural processes their endogenous basis, or “tensor”: a syntagm paradigmatically “stretched” in time and space. Ethnographic fieldwork in east and central Africa reveals that both chieftaincy and status acquisition revolve around medicine, not governance. The tensor of medicine combines two sacrificial practices, divination and initiation, and two gift-oriented practices, magic and association. In terms of this tensor, kingship is a freak development, violating the democratic principle of medicine. Ethnographic comparison confirms that kings split the tensor by privileging the binding logic of gifts at the expense of divination and initiation, which control the chief’s power. In contrast, the colonial impact on centralization is a collapsed tensor, banning the mixed political-religious practices of magic and divination in favor of a religiously legitimated political hierarchy. Tensor dynamics bring out pivots of meaning that shake the European default model of the polity.

ALAN BARNARD (1949‐2022)

Anthropology TodayVolume 39, Issue 3 p. 26-26 Obituary ALAN BARNARD (1949-2022) Thomas Widlok, Corresponding Author Thomas Widlok [email protected] University of CologneSearch for more papers by this authorAkira Takada, Akira Takada [email protected] Kyoto UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Thomas Widlok, Corresponding Author Thomas Widlok [email protected] University of CologneSearch for more papers by this authorAkira Takada, Akira Takada [email protected] Kyoto UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 31 May 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12817Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. References Barnard, A. 1992a. Hunters and herders of southern Africa: A comparative ethnography of the Khoisan peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnard, A. 1992b. The Kalahari debate: A bibliographical essay. Edinburgh: Centre of African Studies. Barnard, A. 1993. Kalahari Bushmen. Durban: Wayland. Barnard, A. 2000. Social anthropology: A concise introduction for students. Abergele: Studymates. Barnard, A. 2007. Anthropology and the Bushman. Oxford: Berg. Barnard, A. 2011. Social anthropology and human origins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnard, A. 2012. Genesis of symbolic thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A. Barnard & J. Spencer (eds) 2004. Encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology. London: Routledge. Volume39, Issue3June 2023Pages 26-26 ReferencesRelatedInformation

Scales of subversion

Scales of subversion

From a museum of Others to a museum of Selves

The mummy of the Altaian Princess is one of the best-known cases of repatriation of human remains in Russia. Drawing on a comparative ethnography of two Siberian museums that conserved her body before and after the return, this article approaches the museums as arenas of affective relations to heritage and as key sites of the enactment of heritage social values. It unpacks the museums’ politics in the Princess’s display to show how and why some affective relations are transformed into “front values” available to audiences, while others remain on the back stage of museum life. It also argues for a more symmetrical approach to sending and receiving museums, which provides important nuances to the analyses of repatriation in terms of power structures and colonial legacies.

On resistance and pluriversal voices of subversive archaism

On resistance and pluriversal voices of subversive archaism

Schnegg, Michael & Edward D.Lowe (eds). Comparing cultures: innovations in comparative ethnography. 234 pp., tables, illus., bibliogrs. Cambridge: Univ. Press, 2020. £19.99 (paper)

Journal of the Royal Anthropological InstituteVolume 29, Issue 1 p. 212-213 Book reviews Schnegg, , , Michael & Edward D., Lowe (eds). Comparing cultures: innovations in comparative ethnography. 234 pp., tables, illus., bibliogrs. Cambridge: Univ. Press, 2020. £19.99 (paper) Rob Borofsky, Rob Borofsky Hawai‘i Pacific UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Rob Borofsky, Rob Borofsky Hawai‘i Pacific UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 31 January 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13873Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume29, Issue1March 2023Pages 212-213 RelatedInformation

A comparative analysis of Syrian refugee family integration in France and Germany

This research note presents a comparative analysis of Syrian refugee family integration in France and Germany, focusing on challenges related to housing, language acquisition, and employment. Through a comparative ethnography involving 20 Syrian families, this study sheds light on the differences and similarities between the two systems. Germany employs a centralised approach, marked by proactive measures implemented after 2015, offering a comprehensive range of services from reception to employment through the Job centre. In contrast, France adopts a more decentralised model, requiring refugees to navigate through multiple structures. Despite these differing systems, both countries exhibit structural barriers that impact refugees, resulting in social downgrading and pronounced marginalization, particularly among the elderly and women. The study shows how the state shapes “human capital” and underscores the need for a more “human-centric” integration approach, emphasising the genuine understanding and well-being of refugees.

Beyond the Case: The Logics and Practices of Comparative Ethnography

Beyond the Case: The Logics and Practices of Comparative Ethnography

The Origin and Character of God: Ancient Israelite Religion through the Lens of Divinity, Yahweh before Israel: Glimpses of History in a Divine Name and Yahweh: Origin of a Desert God

The Origin and Character of God: Ancient Israelite Religion through the Lens of Divinity, Yahweh before Israel: Glimpses of History in a Divine Name and Yahweh: Origin of a Desert God

The Spatial Mobility Trap? How Urban Contexts Shape the Spatial Mobility of Male Undocumented Youths

Some scholars have argued urban autonomy creates inclusive spaces for migrants, while others have argued interiorized border security and discriminatory policing constrain racialized migrants. This article examines the extent to which the urban context represents a spatial mobility trap for urban undocumented youths as they become adults, based on data from longitudinal comparative ethnography with undocumented youths, schools, and civil society actors in Paris and New York City. Public schools, public transportation, policing, and informal labor market practices distinguish the urban regimes of migrant il/legality in the two cities, shaping how such youths move within and outside urban space. These elements may magnify or mitigate legal‐status distinctions between undocumented youths and others. As protections for undocumented minors waned at adulthood, New York City's regime blurred legal‐status distinctions, accelerating intracity mobility for most youths while Paris's approach brightened such distinctions, limiting mobility. These findings contribute a spatial mobility perspective to studies of migrant illegality and an urban sociology perspective to the transition to adulthood.

How gatekeeping became digital: infrastructural barriers to participation in conventional and platformized cultural production

ABSTRACT Digital platforms supposedly allow global corporations to exert novel infrastructural power over cultural participation due to platforms’ increased centrality as key gatekeepers. Extant theorizations of global capitalism, however, suggest infrastructural power as a longstanding feature of capitalism, especially in media industries. How novel is the infrastructural power of platforms? How does platformization affect cultural participation? Through an ethnographic comparison of conventional and platformized cultural intermediaries (respectively, a music distribution company in 2010 and a multi-channel YouTube network or MCN in 2015), I show continuity in infrastructural power alongside distinctive differences in logics of inclusion/exclusion – what I call hard and soft gates. Hard gates exclude while the soft gate simultaneously increases participation and heightens circulation inequality. These modes of infrastructural gatekeeping follow from the operations of each case’s distribution technologies: automated warehousing and associated barcodes in the music case and algorithmic search and metrics in the YouTube case. Considered alongside recent research, my findings suggest that policy on participation must consider how value-laden infrastructures impact participation and visibility in digital culture. More broadly, my findings suggest that the transition to ‘the digital’ demonstrate continuity rather than a sharp ‘disruption’ by ‘platform capitalism.’

Digital Tedious Work and Developing Novel Outcomes with Digitization

Digital technology is pervasive in creative work, yet how it shapes the process of making novel outcomes remains underexamined. Drawing from a comparative ethnography of two settings in which digitization prevails—Nashville music production and systems biology cancer research—we present a model of digital tedious work in developing novel outcomes. We discover that exploiting digitization's potential for unlimited experimentation and refinement amplifies digital tedious work. Digital tedious work is highly repetitive, time-intensive, requires substantial expertise, and is inherent to creating with digitization. If not managed deftly, digital tedious work undermines the generation and synthesis of novel ideas. We find that actors engage in three curbing practices—truncating technology, automating, and zooming in and out—to limit digital tedious work and move the creative process forward. Our study offers three contributions: First, we develop a model of how digital tedious work arises throughout the creative process, why it becomes problematic, and how actors engage in curbing to respond. Second, we demonstrate the essential role of curbing practices as a necessary complement to exploiting digitization. Third, we provide evidence of how digital technology not only supports but also undermines the development of novel outcomes by exposing the pitfalls of digitization’s unlimited possibilities.