Ethnographic Account Research Articles

Nongayindoda: moving beyond gender in a South African context

ABSTRACT In her groundbreaking text, Male Daughters, Female Husbands, Ifi Amadiume offers an ethnographic account which depicts, among others, gender in the making in Nnobi society in Nigeria. This paper, drawing from Amadiume’s work, looks at three related specific moments of understanding gender and sex categories in a South African context. Through empirical research based on a qualitative study; a literary text; as well as visual arts, the paper tracks the notion of nongayindoda, a Nguni term for (gender) fluidity to offer new insights that go beyond Western gender binaries. Nongayindoda has been used to refer to masculine women or men-like women. In some contexts, it has been assumed to relate only to women who have chosen not to have relations with men. Some have considered the term derogatory and thus shied away from using it. In this paper, the term is turned upside and interrogated to reveal broader meanings. In the end, I argue that nongayindoda offers an opportunity to move beyond gender.

An Analysis of Urban Initiatives in Cairo: Locality, Everyday Politics and Relational Space in Cairo’s Unplanned Neighbourhoods

Abstract This article focuses on urban activism and social movements that emerged in Cairo between 2011 and 2014 and argues that in unplanned areas these initiatives shape patterns of agency and social encounter. This contribution therefore investigates the transformative potential activated by the encounters between women of different social background in a small association (ǧamā‘iyya) in the unplanned area of Ezbet al-Haggana, in the north-east periphery of Cairo. Through analytical categories such as the “everyday politics”, “informality”, “relational space” and “capacity to aspire”, the article analyses how the everyday interactions, even within apparently non-politicized actions, reveal features of social change and mobility. The materials presented have been collected during a three-year research period conducted between 2012 and 2015. The fieldwork included 10 semi-structured interviews with local activists and institutional actors as well as an ethnographic account, which will be reported in the text.

Lectio Praecursoria: “This is a good place”: Tsimihety place making, knowledge hierarchies and intensifying conservation efforts in rural northeastern Madagascar

This lectio introduces the thesis ‘This Is A Good Place’: Tsimihety place making, knowledge hierarchies and intensifying conservation efforts in rural northeastern Madagascar. The study is concerned with the rapid rearrangement of nature and the intensification of land use in rural northeastern Madagascar. The author argues that despite intensive efforts of imposed environmental conservation based on notions of biodiversity loss and deforestation, the Tsimihety, a group of swiddeners and rice and vanilla farmers, claim that their environment is a good and viable place to live in. This thesis consequently weaves together an ethnographic account of how the Tsimihety interact and intertwine with environmental conservation efforts and how they transform and are transformed by them in a broader context of commercial interests in land.

Pigs in rites, rights in pigs: porcine values in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

This paper discusses the place of pigs in the mountains of Papua New Guinea, particularly in the Was valley of the Southern Highlands Province. After a brief introduction to the pigs of the region and their herding arrangements, it gives an ethnographic account of their use in various rites, notably those that feature curing, sorcery and cult activities. They prompt consideration of the relevance of concepts used to understand these ritual activities, whether they are offerings or sacrifices or something else particular to pigs in rites. The cults also include large pig kill festivals that have notable socio-political implications. These relate to rights in pigs and their ownership, which are complex issues that impinge on all of the foregoing activities.

Plans, Changes, Improvisations

This article addresses the challenges and reflections of a junior anthropologist while developing research on the delicate topic of reproductive health and infertility in Maputo, Mozambique. Based on participant observation notes, entries in fieldwork diaries, and interviews, and assuming the character of a reflexive ethnographic account, the article concerns personal and research challenges and opportunities experienced during the preparation and development of a research project and a PhD thesis. While reflecting more broadly on processes of knowledge production, history and colonial relations, and on the writing of a scientific account, it provides insights into the pragmatics of research in medical anthropology by detailing the everyday life of doing ethnography, including networking, bureaucratic processes, boredom, the exploration of new fieldwork landscapes, and positionality dilemmas.

Gold governance and goldsmithery: Economic sociology of an informal manufacturing sector in India

In India, gold’s uniqueness lies in its dual demand for ‘sacred’ ritual purposes as well as ‘profane’ economic security. As a scarce commodity, gold is continuously monitored and regulated by the state. This study investigates how communities associated with the craft and trade of gold jewellery cope with state regulations, an aspect that has largely gone undocumented in sociological literature. The article traces the transformation of the goldsmithing sector in post-independence India. The repeal of the Gold Control Act 1968 in 1990 and high demand during the post-liberalisation period gave a tremendous fillip to the gold jewellery sector. The study captures the occupational recasting as a new community of goldsmiths emerged during this period replacing the traditional goldsmithing castes. It contributes to the under-studied field of goldsmithing in India providing an ethnographic account of a triadic relationship between an informal manufacturing sector, state regulation and a self-organised workforce based on regional ties and village networks.

“She Is a Woman, She Is an Unbeliever—You Should not Meet with Her”: An Ethnographic Account of Accessing Salafi-Jihadist Environments as Non-Muslim Female Researchers

The Salafi-jihadist environment, which seeks to remain closed and clandestine, is extremely hard to access. Moreover, the milieu is gender segregated and hostile towards non-Muslims, even other Muslims who are not considered “real” Muslims. Depending on the researcher’s positionality this can either further complicate or facilitate accessing the milieu. Based on methodological experiences from ethnographic fieldwork (interviews and observations) in Denmark and Sweden, this article aims to unravel how researcher positionality influences different layers of access when investigating Salafi-jihadist environments. Acknowledging that gaining access is a continuous process throughout the entire research process, we specifically explore how our positions as non-Muslim female researchers both thwarted and assisted in: 1) the initial stage of searching for and contacting potential informants; 2) gaining further access through building trusted interpersonal relations; and 3) accessing sensitive emotional insights in the interview situation. The article argues that gaining and maintaining access as non-Muslim female researchers requires that the researcher be ready to play along with stereotypical gender views, undergo “trust tests,” and manage one’s own positionality by undertaking ‘emotional labor’ in accordance with stereotypical perceptions of women as, for example, providing comfort.

Labors of Love: On the Political Economies and Ethics of Bovine Politics in Himalayan India

This essay asks how conceptualizing love as work might provide a fresh perspective on love’s politics. In offering an ethnographic account of how love for Gau-Mata, the Cow-Mother of the idealized Hindu nation, fuels a right-wing Hindu nationalist politics of cow-protection in India’s central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, I suggest that the specific arrangements of labor through which affective attachments are organized critically shape the ethics and politics of love. More specifically, I depict how different kinds of situated labor produced varied kinds of love in the conjoined social worlds of right-wing gau-rakshaks (cow-protectionists) and rural women dairy farmers in Uttarakhand. For these social actors, genuine love for the cow manifested in a willingness to labor for her. Yet their understandings of what this loving labor entailed differed starkly. This article examines three distinct kinds of work—protection, service, and care-labor—that these actors variously undertook out of love for the cow. It traces how these different labors produced a varied set of relationships, affiliations, and obligations that crucially shaped the ethics and politics of love. Ultimately, I show, attending to the varied labors of love in situated social worlds reveals how love can condition a variety of often conflicting political and ethical possibilities, working simultaneously as a force of transcendence, fascist violence, and repair.

MORTUARY RITES IN COVID-19: MOURNING & BURIAL RITES OF MIGRANTS IN NORTHERN PUNJAB

Purpose of the study: This study aims to highlight how death serves as a central feature of social ties among the natives of Northern Punjab. Death is a great leveller and one of the most curious aspects of human cognition. Bereavement follows the terminal rites de passage; the transition of the deceased from this world to the other world.
 Methodology: By using an inductive approach, the ethnographic account of the most significant rite of passage; death was gathered. The primary data is based on case-based narratives and empirical findings gathered during in-depth interviews and participant observation at the locale. A total of thirteen cases of death migrants are discussed in this paper.
 Main Findings: The findings reveal the social pressures the family of the deceased encountered in the pre and post-death phase both in the country of origin and in the country of destination, how horrors of COVID-19 infection kept the entire bereaved families at a halt to decide their funerary rituals, pandemic’s effect on the body’s postmortem clearance and death certificate, arrangement for the morgue and grave while the decision of burial was in process, familial politics engaged in decision making, the journey back to the native soil, the burial, mourning, condolence and bereavement rituals of Potohar.
 Applications of this study: This paper solely focuses on the death rituals of migrants from the Northern Punjab region in COVID-19. The study provides an understanding of the religio-cultural rituals and their transformation in the global pandemic.
 Novelty/Originality of this study: The researcher has prepared an account of the death rituals based on the close observations and in-depth insights during the mortuary rites of migrants who expired during the pandemic COVID-19 during doctoral research. No such research has been carried out in Potohar (Northern Punjab) in this context.

The myths and legends of king Satoshi and the knights of blockchain

ABSTRACT In this paper, we present an ethnographic account of the quasi-religious romanticism of the crypto-community towards blockchain technologies. To do so, we explore the cultural significance of phenomena such as myth, faith, and ritual, without excluding both the realms of technological practices and techno-scientific narrative. Drawing on a comparison with the legend of King Arthur, we analyse how the legendary creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, translates contemporary anxieties resulting from the financial crisis and the centralisation of power. By analysing white papers, we further explore the persuasive narratives which convey how ethics and virtue can be encoded into software, and, finally, we describe the secular rituals that reinforce cohesion among the community – in moments which are often guided by charismatic preachers and specialists. We argue that blockchain technologies have had a symbolic impact in re-invigorating enchantment and material romanticism towards finance and technology, which has had a wider impact on the social perception and acceptance of the transition to a digital society.

Bad parrhesia: the limits of cynicism in the public sphere

Bad parrhesia: the limits of cynicism in the public sphere

The Energetic Brain Club in Life and Death

SummaryJapan’s aging society leaves many of its eldest residents to encounter loneliness and social isolation. However, the elderly in Japan and elsewhere are rarely passive vessels to fate and often use available tools to meet their needs. Exploring loneliness and its remedy, this essay presents an ethnographic account of a single Energetic Brain Club meeting in the Tokyo sprawl. While, on paper, the club is aimed at preventing dementia, cognitive declines frequently remain a peripheral topic. Elderly members partake in hospitality rituals and engage in long, meandering conversations about family, memories, struggles, and politics. In the process, they find commiseration, connection, and a salve for loneliness.

Can the Popular Disembody Populism? Students and the Re-appropriation of the Nationalist Floating Signifier in Contemporary Indian Politics

This ethnographic account chronicles the journey of one of the largest anti-government protests since India’s independence. It examines the pivotal role of students—initially activists and then first-time participants—in crystallizing challenges to the ruling dispensation, not only by opposing it directly, but through subverting its way of claiming representation. More specifically, it is the strategic reuse of the pervasive anti-institutional and anti-elite discourse at the top—while replacing its majoritarianism with inclusiveness—that enabled protesters to disembody the populist modality of the current Indian Prime Minister. Protesters’ short-lived success was achieved through an enactment of the popular, embodied in a diffused fashion by faceless, peaceful and feminized protesting masses. The popular successfully appropriated the claim to be the people through invoking a ‘derivative’ nationalist repertoire in part shared by the government, emptying its anti-minorities subtext through appropriating floating signifiers of patriotic belonging such as the Indian constitution, the flag and the anthem. By engaging on how relatively small communities of politicized students used the campus ecology and its neighbouring spaces as territorial and ideational nodal points for the mobilization of less politicized cohorts, the article underlines their significance in the political articulation of dissent in contemporary Indian democracy.

Layering risk work amidst an emerging crisis: an ethnographic study on the governance of the COVID-19 pandemic in a university hospital in the Netherlands

The start of the COVID-19 pandemic early 2020 has confronted healthcare sectors with risks and uncertainties on an unprecedented scale in recent history. Healthcare organisations faced acute problems, the answers to which had to be provided, and recalibrated, at short notice and informally. University hospitals played a pivotal role in providing these answers and in (re)calibrating institutional arrangements. Based on ethnographic research in an elite university hospital in the Netherlands, in this article we explore the concrete practices of governing risks and uncertainties that COVID-19 posed for the organisation of healthcare. Our fieldwork consisted of the observation of meetings at the level of the hospital boards, the staff, and the regional level. We collected relevant documents and interviewed key-actors. This approach offers us a large dataset on acute risk governance ‘from within’ and allows us to offer a layered ethnographic account of managerial practices. In our analysis we focus on conceptualising the work-as-done in the university hospital as risk work. We show how the risk work of our participants is generally characterised by high speed and delineated by scarcities. We differentiate between three modes of risk work: working on numbers, working on expertise and working on logistics. This risk work appears innovative, but our analysis stresses how participants’ work happened in interaction with traditional institutional logics and routines.

Local Tales of Sufism in Quebec: Secular Politics of Moderation and the Production of Charismatic Muslims

Through exploring the representations and political participation of the Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufi order of Montreal, this article analyses the relationship between Sufism, secularity, and political authority in Quebec in ongoing debates around religious “moderation” and State neutrality laws post-9/11. I offer an in-depth but necessarily bounded ethnographic account of this Sufi group in an attempt to expose a process of localisation and instrumentalisation of a particular Muslim identity in Quebec reflecting local pressures of religious reformation. I will argue that the charisma attached to the Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufi order, as articulated by politicians as well as non-Muslim Montrealers, is one that has emerged most particularly in the past 15 years and is embodied in the current local leader of the community, Shaykh Omar Koné. Yet, this charisma operates within centuries-old Orientalist discourses about Sufism and Islam, and most notably is validated in Quebec through recent secular politics of “moderation” and State neutrality bills as heritage of the 1960 Quiet Revolution. Writing as a French-Canadian, in this article, I will offer an insight into the construction of a Sufi consciousness in Quebec, a tale that I trace through multiple accounts, though primarily through my interactions at the Montreal Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufi Centre and with their imam, Shaykh Omar Koné from 2014 to 2017.

A sacred social: Christian relationalism and the re‐enchantment of the world

AbstractThis article intervenes in an ongoing debate as to whether or not Christianity introduces individualism into the lives of its converts. Drawing on an ethnographic account of Emmanuel, a French Catholic Charismatic community, it demonstrates that, counter to the argument that in social cases where Christianity is central, individualism emerges as a prominent value, in some cases it is relationalism that shapes Christian ethical aspirations. I argue that differences observed across contexts in expressions of value and configuration of personhood may be the result of the varied manners in which divine presence is experienced and understood to inhabit the world across Christian communities. Bringing God into the centre of ethnographic analysis in accounting for these differences broadens the debate's comparative reach, while underscoring the manner in which divine agency shapes the ethical aspirations of religious persons and their orientations to social others. Considering the ethical and political implications that one's orientation to the social can have, further investigation is called for into the manner in which the divine is experienced and invoked in social and ritual life.

Western Theory - Vietnamese Praxis

This paper provides an ethnographical account of the experience of setting up an open access library of working alongside and in close collaboration with different parties within an academic environment over the period of four years in Hanoi. It provides useful lessons for consideration for those who would like to facilitate the blending of western practices in librarianship with local knowledge in developing countries such as Vietnam. It also presents a platform for an outside's view of the practice of teacher librarianship.

The Justice We Deserve: War Crimes Prosecutions in Guatemala

Despite persisting impunity, over the past several years Guatemala has made important strides in prosecuting war crimes committed during the internal armed conflict (1960–1996). This article provides an ethnographic account of the 2018 Molina Theissen trial, which resulted in the conviction of four senior military officials for crimes against humanity, aggravated sexual violence, and forced disappearance. An ethnographic study of this critical human rights trial can help us understand how a country with a relatively weak judicial system and well-organized spoilers has managed to hold the intellectual authors of wartime atrocities responsible for their acts. It also contributes to a richer understanding of the construction, meaning, and impact of human rights prosecutions for victims and the broader society, and what role they play in broader public debates over the historical memory of conflictual pasts.

Peer support workers’ conceptions of drug users and the implications for service provision

This paper explores how independently organised peer support workers conceptualise drug users to determine how they deliver their service. The work is undergirded by Spiro’s critique of the social view that conceptions of the human are fixed, and his contention that sometimes the concept of the self is set aside for utilitarian purposes. A literature review indicates that different conceptions of the drug user as the ‘psychological self’ and the ‘social self’ are variously held by public health, peer support workers employed by public health and independent peer support workers. An ethnographic account thereafter investigates how independently organised peer support workers prioritise three conceptions of the ‘social self’: drug users are hurt by social exclusion; they can benefit from shared experience; they can achieve social inclusion with peer support. The paper concludes with a discussion on the implications of using social conceptions of drug users in the provision of service and signals considerable scope for investigating how independent organisations of peer support workers attend drug users seeking recovery.

Towards the Founding of a Native Clergy and the Revival of ‘Mamacha Cocharcas’: Popular Lived Catholicism in the Wake of Vatican II

In the years directly following the Second Vatican Council under the guidance of its second bishop Mons. Enrique Pelach i Feliu, the Andean diocese of Abancay—founded in 1959 in one of the most rural and most indigenous areas of Peru—experienced the founding of a new seminary intended to train a new generation of native clergy, and a concerted clerical effort to revive and promote the Marian pilgrimage of the Virgin of Cocharcas. The former meant the advent of a generation of native clergy made up of men born and raised in rural farming families in Abancay and native speakers of Quechua, the local indigenous language, which transformed the relationship between the institutional Church and indigenous Catholics from one rooted in antipathy and hostility to one based in a shared cultural background and language. The latter meant the elevation of the indigenous figure of Sebastian Quimichu as exemplar of both Andean Catholic faith and practice for his role in founding the Marian shrine of Cocharcas, and the legitimisation of popular Andean Catholic practices that had previously been stigmatised. This article provides a dual historical and ethnographic account of these events, and in doing so demonstrates the profound transformation of rural Andean lived religion and practice in the years following Vatican II.