Ethnographic Account Research Articles

“We don't experiment with our patients!” An ethnographic account of the epistemic politics of (re)designing nursing work

This article draws on ethnographic research investigating experimental reform projects in local nursing practices. These are aimed at strengthening nursing work and fostering nurses' position within healthcare through bottom-up nurse-driven innovations. Based on literature on epistemic politics and critical nursing studies, the study examines and conceptualizes how these nurses promote professional and organizational change. The research draws on data from two pilot projects to show how epistemic politics frame the production and use of knowledge within reform efforts. The study finds that knowledge produced through such experimenting is often not considered valid within the contexts of broader organizational transitions. The nurse-driven innovations fail to meet established legitimate criteria for informing change, both among stakeholders in the nurses' socio-political environment, as well as within the nursing community. The research reveals that the processes inadvertently reinforce normative knowledge hierarchies, perpetuating forms of epistemic injustice, limiting both nurses' ability to function as change agents and healthcare organizations’ capacity to learn.

The Languages of Food and Imagined Communities at a Somali Restaurant in Bellville, South Africa

Abstract This study is an ethnographic account of an ethnic restaurant of the Somali immigrant community in South Africa. It seeks to examine the role that a Somali restaurant plays with regard to the food cooked, served, and consumed as well as the linguistic and non-linguistic ways in which the guests, Somalis and non-Somalis, negotiate their ethnic and national identities and communities in relation to the food and the wider physical and social context of the restaurant, located in the Bellville region of South Africa. A secular environment, South Africa can also be described as fairly xenophobic and Afrophobic. For the collection of data, the study focused on the restaurateur, employees, and guests. The findings indicated that through food memories, habits, and practices, and an aura of conviviality and homeliness, the Somali and non-Somali immigrants developed and sustained a sense of community and solidarity. This is as opposed to the mainly commercial and uniform feel of western (or American) (or) fast food restaurants. As a corollary of this, it is the case that immigrants carry with them norms and values which ought to be drawn from by the host society.

Common Property Resources and Normalization of Encroachment: An Ethnographic Account

The article enquires into the construction of encroachment (of village pond) as an acceptable regular practice in the day-to-day discourse of village life, violating the norms of collective usages of common water bodies. Violation in this case is the outcome of a peculiar social understanding that emerged over a period of time (a) by ineffective functioning of state apparatus and the subsequent proliferation of corrupt network and (b) by the arrival of new technologies of development which replaced the collective action for local resource management and reversed social trust to support violation. While on the one hand this process led to obliteration of distinction between the agent and the victim of violation as a free rider condition exist vis-à-vis encroachment; on the other hand there is an increased sense of vulnerability to the effects of violation. The perception of encroachment in the village community as natural and unavoidable reality gives social legitimation to this violation which affects all.

Of Geosocial Relations and Separations

How might an attention to the role that the geologic plays in everyday social and political formations help reveal and politicize the geographically, temporally, and stratigraphically distributed forms of violence in the Anthropocene? Building on recent work in environmental humanities, anthropology, geography, and feminist geophilosophy that aims to rethink racialized forms of violence alongside planetary forces and earthly formations, this article explores how geosocial relations and exclusions register distributed forms of violence that are often kept separate from each other. Through an ethnographic account of a state-led oil shale exploration project in southwestern Turkey during the eruption of war between Kurdish freedom fighters and the Turkish state in southeastern Turkey in the summer of 2015, the article traces the links and disjunctures between the everyday disavowal of resource exploration and colonial warfare. It explores how the disavowal of war and hydrocarbon exploration forecloses political and ethical possibilities. It further examines how emergent geosocial relations between people and rocks carry the possibility of reckoning with anti-Kurdish war and violence. In doing so, the article invites environmental humanities to rethink methodological and analytical ways of rendering violence visible. The article concludes by speculating about the possibility of geosocial solidarity, or a mode of relation with geological formations and humans that forges connections between racialized forms of othering and planetary scales of time, space, and materiality. As a mode of earthly praxis, geosocial solidarity is what might come after the unfinished task of detangling distributed forms of violence in the Anthropocene.

Repertoires of Anti-caste Sentiments in the Everyday Performance: Narratives of a Dalit Woman Singer

Understanding Dalit women through their lifeworld and life-narratives enables one to understand the caste relations that they negotiate with in their everyday life. Resistance in the everyday life of Dalit women includes how they challenge the existing public spaces, cultural norms, and practices through the creation of a ‘subaltern counterpublics’ space. This space involves collective actions like popular writing, singing, theatrics, etc., to confront the ‘normalised’ caste relationship that prevails within Indian society. The cultural performance becomes the narrative of this counterpublics space in which they intend to reassert their lost identity and dignity. The emergence of alternative public spaces is ‘significant and a necessary condition for democracy’. For Dalit women cultural performers, the everyday resistance practices are deeply embedded in the creation of an alternative worldview, a counterpublics, that both represent their ‘world of (caste) experience’ as well as becomes a space to ‘talk-back’ about their exclusion and humiliation. This article through an ethnographic account, has engaged with a Dalit woman cultural performer and her lifeworld. The article aims to explore the meanings, practices, and challenges that she faces in her anti-caste resistance.

Fixing stone in time: Making and measuring consolidants for heritage futures

Stone consolidants have been used in conservation practices for decades, with an increasingly interdisciplinary scientific attention to their composition and performance. This article is an ethnographic account of the process of testing a new consolidant's efficacy, drawn from fieldwork and interviews with scientists and heritage professionals involved in a European project in 2013. I illustrate, in line with prior scholarship on laboratory time, how time is a central tool of laboratory control, which must be managed to produce evidence of consolidant efficacy. Yet the ‘fast time’ of controlled experimental conditions is also suspect for those working in the field of heritage. By tracing the temporal tensions between scientific evidence making, laboratory practice and heritage practitioners’ values, I illustrate that the project of materially fixing stone in time means intervening on heritage futures.

Exemplary differences: ethnicity, mythic histories, and essentialism in Khovd, Mongolia

AbstractThis article provides an ethnographic account of understandings of ‘ethnic’ difference in Khovd province, Mongolia. It attempts to use said material to challenge the terms of debate within the current concern with ‘essentialism’ in social theory. It is in agreement with constructivist‐inspired observations by anthropologists that so‐called ethnic groups in Mongolia exist partly as ideological ascriptions arising from historical and contemporary political interests. Yet there is an intellectual tension, which sees the anthropologist engaged in the politically important task of the de‐essentialization of identities, on behalf of people who claim said identities as their essence. This article neither accepts ethnic groups as somehow unproblematically real, nor positions such ideas purely as a target for deconstruction. Rather, it provides an account of times when moralized understandings of ethnic difference in the medium of mythic‐historical exemplars are mobilized and examines their impact on social life. It shows that certain forms of essentialism may contain affordances that amplify social and political possibilities, rather than violently close them down. The final provocation is that anthropologists and social theorists would do better to examine the precise nature and effects of particular instances of essentialism rather than instinctively demolish them in general.

“To give life is a journey through the unknown”: an ethnographic account of childbirth experiences and practices in Southern Benin

In Benin maternal mortality remains high at 397 deaths per 100,000 live births, despite 80% of births being attended by skilled birth attendants in health facilities. To identify childbirth practices that potentially contribute to this trend, an ethnographic study was conducted on the use of biomedical and alternative health services along the continuum of maternal care in Allada, Benin. Data collection techniques included in-depth interviews (N = 83), informal interviews (N = 86), observations (N = 32) and group discussions (N = 3). Informants included biomedical, spiritual and alternative care providers and community members with a variety of socioeconomic and religious profiles. In Southern Benin alternative and spiritual care, inspired by the Vodoun, Christian or Muslim religions, is commonly used in addition to biomedical care. As childbirth is perceived as a “risky journey to the unknown”, these care modalities aim to protect the mother and child from malevolent spirits, facilitate the birth and limit postpartum complications using herbal decoctions and spiritual rites and rituals. These practices are based on mystical interpretations of childbirth that result in the need for additional care during facility-based childbirth. Because such complementary care is not foreseen in health facilities, facility-based childbirth is initiated only at an advanced stage of labour or at the onset of a perceived immediate life-threatening complication for the mother or baby. Programmes and policies to reduce maternal mortality in Benin must seek synergies with alternative providers and practices and consider the complementary and integrated use of alternative and spiritual care practices that are not harmful.

The Work to Make Piecework Work: An Ethnographic Study of Food Delivery Work in India During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper considers food delivery work as a form of piecework that is conducted via a particular workflow system -- the food delivery platform and its delivery app. We offer an ethnographic account of food delivery labor during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Indian city of Pune. Our inquiry is focused on (1) the workflow that structures food delivery work and (2) how economic considerations shape how workers work with and around the workflow. Our findings depict both the workflow that structures the delivery work and the efforts workers make beyond it to deal with contingencies and unexpected requirements they encounter on the ground. We recognize the workers' efforts as essential to make the workflow work but also to make the piecework arrangement work for them. We highlight how, in this setting, money is not just the motivation for engaging in gig work; rather, economic considerations infuse every aspect of the work process. Acknowledging the distinct shape gig work takes in a Global South context, our study highlights the value of in-depth,in situ understandings of how gig workers' economic considerations are entangled with their interactions with the technology that structures their work. Our key contribution lies in mapping outthe workflow of piecework andthe work to make piecework work, specifically in a Global South setting, by drawing upon classic CSCW themes around workflows and piecework to strengthen the contemporary scholarly discussion concerning gig work.

Lathrop Preservation Campaign: social mobilisation to save public housing in Chicago

This article provides an ethnographic account of the Lathrop Preservation Campaign, a grassroots effort to prevent the demolition of Lathrop Homes, one of the most diverse public housing developments in Chicago, Illinois. In 2000, the Chicago Housing Association implemented a Plan for Transformation to redevelop public housing throughout the city, based on a nationwide effort to deconcentrate poverty in subsidised housing and create mixed-income communities. The Lathrop Preservation Campaign, which consisted of residents, organisers and allies, worked to stop the demolition of Lathrop Homes, minimise the loss of public housing units and to prevent the displacement of residents. Through participant observation and interviews, the authors trace how the community came together to challenge the use of poverty deconcentration programmes and to mobilise around issues of historic preservation and racial discrimination.

Covid-19 infection as ritual process in Venda, South Africa

This article offers an ethnographic account of Covid-19 infection in Venda, South Africa. During July 2021, a research interlocutor and I tested positive for the virus and embarked on a 10-day period of isolation together. During this time, we practiced steaming rituals (u aravhela) on a daily basis and observed several healing practices related to eating, drinking and observing space. For me, the anthropologist, it was a period of intense participant observation; for the interlocutor, it was a period of teaching during which he became a makeshift ritual expert and I, his apprentice. Simultaneous to our isolation, exaggerated rumours about the interlocutor’s illness circulated in the area. This article frames Covid-19 infection as a Turnerian rite of passage whilst using ethnographic evidence to illustrate weaknesses in Turner’s model. The article concludes that the rumour and ritual around Covid-19 revealed the interconnected dynamics between stability, instability and efforts to make certainty under profoundly uncertain circumstances.

The reification of identity narratives in teacher–student discourse during an inquiry project

AbstractWe present a year‐long case study that documents the interactions between a teacher–research–mentor (TRM) and two 11th grade students working in their school laboratory on an extended inquiry project that is part of reformed mandatory requirements for advanced‐level matriculation in physics. Both the students (females) and the TRM (male) are Arab citizens of Israel, and the school is a public Arab school in Israel. Data were collected through videotaped participant observation of authentic working sessions and interviews with the TRM and the students. The analysis combines an ethnographic account with discourse analysis informed by a sociolinguistic approach that aims to answer the following research questions: (1) how are a teacher's identity‐narratives reified in teacher–student discourse in authentic sessions of mentoring students' inquiry? (2) how do they shape students' learning? and (3) how do they emerge from social–historical contexts? The findings problematize the challenges involved in engaging students from nondominant communities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics learning. The analysis articulates the complexity of this challenge by showing how teachers' identity narratives shape the social construction of student–teacher discourse, generate tensions that undermine successful implementations of reformed learning experiences, and how this vicious cycle is profoundly influenced by the embedding social and historical contexts. The implications for research and practice are discussed.

That Which They Will Not See: Climate Denial as a Vector of Epistemological Crisis in the Contemporary United States

ABSTRACT Climate denial continues as a cultural epistemology for anthropogenic climate change in the United States, despite worsening impacts. This article offers an ethnographic account of rural areas in three states in the southern US – Arizona, Louisiana, and Missouri – based on long-term participant observation and interview data. Engaging with the literature on agnotology, the social construction of ignorance, the argument is made that this literature as it pertains to climate denial does not go far enough in accounting for the persistence of the rejection of climate science. Theoretically drawing from anthropological work on the incommensurability of paradigms, the argument is based on a tripartite construction of denial as produced through an interaction of a cultural norm of radical empiricism, a political-media ecosystem funded by fossil fuel companies, and a cosmological schema derived from conservative white evangelicalism. The result of this process is an epistemological crisis in contemporary American society.

Planning context: Flexible plans and mayoral authority in French urban planning

In this article, I consider the relationship between urban planning and context by investigating the planning practices associated with a land-use plan in Bordeaux described as “adapted to context.” Invested with flexible rules, the plan description followed a tendency in French urban planning concerned with being strategic, prospective, and participatory. It was also the result of metropolitan planning. Through an ethnographic account, I show how local politicians’ references to context related to concerns with mayoral authority in times of planning powers transferred to the metropole. Using permit reviewers’ skills, mayors mobilized flexible rules to manipulate building permit decisions prepared in compliance with the metropolitan plan. It is widely acknowledged that urban planning is affected by as well as affecting different contexts. I outline a complementing approach by drawing on engagements with context in anthropology and STS-scholarship, to propose that the practices associated with the same notion in Bordeaux are telling of how urban planning contributes to making contexts. Since calls for context direct attention and shape which issues and local communities are prioritized, these insights on the relationship between planning and context urge attention to how appeals to context, as never value-neutral or ready-made, gain importance across different urban planning issues and settings.

Social Inclusion through Necessity Entrepreneurship: An Ethnographic Account from Kutupalong

Social Inclusion through Necessity Entrepreneurship: An Ethnographic Account from Kutupalong

Algorithmic State Violence: Automated Surveillance and Palestinian Dispossession in Hebron's Old City

AbstractThis article provides an ethnographic account of automated surveillance technologies' impact in the occupied West Bank, taking Blue Wolf—a biometric identification system deployed by the Israeli army—as a case study. Interviews with Palestinian residents of Hebron subjected to intensive surveillance, a senior Israeli general turned biometric start-up founder, and testimonies from veterans tasked with building up Blue Wolf's database provide a rare view into the uneven texture of life under algorithmic surveillance. Their narratives reveal how automated surveillance systems function as a form of state-sponsored terror. As a globalized information economy intersects with the eliminatory aims of Israeli settler colonialism in Hebron, new surveillance technologies erode Palestinian social life while allowing technocratic settlers to recast the violence of occupation as an opportunity for capital investment and growth. Attending to the texture of life under algorithmic surveillance in Hebron ultimately reorients theories of accumulation and dispossession in the digital age away from purely economistic framings. Instead, I foreground the violent political imperatives that drive innovations in surveillance, in Palestine and worldwide.

Protest in the Face of Catastrophe: Extinction Rebellion and the anti-politics of grief

Extinction Rebellion (XR) is a novel environmental movement formed in 2018 which uses non-violent civil disobedience to communicate the catastrophic severity of anthropogenic climate change, protest for urgent action to be taken by governments to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025, and advocate for the establishment of a Citizens’ Assembly to lead government policy on climate justice. This dissertation serves as a general ethnographic account of the movement and specifically analyses the process by which activists construct, sustain and perform their subjectivities through the use of grief and work of mourning. By exploring this complex process and the New Age outlook which informs it, in both the setting of a retreat workshop and street protests, I argue that XR activists are doomsayers who express and authenticate the truth of climate catastrophe through the performance of their own grieving subjectivities. I suggest in turn that this approach constitutes a highly emotive and humanistic form of anti-politics orientated towards the articulation of the truth against ‘the system’. keywords: climate catastrophe, grief, doomsaying, subjectivity, anti-politics.

“I Can’t Do All This—This Is Nuts!”: An Ethnographic Account of the Challenges Posed by Vajrayāna Deity Yoga in a Western Context

“I Can’t Do All This—This Is Nuts!”: An Ethnographic Account of the Challenges Posed by Vajrayāna Deity Yoga in a Western Context

Recovery- and sobriety-support groups in a music community: An ethnographic study of Phish, the Phellowship, and the sensorium of sobriety

Purpose/introductionThis article provides an ethnographic account of members of the Phellowship, a group of sober concert goers who connect and sometimes attend informal meetings at Phish concerts. The work attends to the ways this group is meaningful for people's sobriety and livelihoods. The overall purpose of this article is to provide a rich description of a novel approach to the creation and extension of a culture of recovery and sobriety through music and music communities. MethodsThis article utilizes two years of ethnographic data collected from interviews with roughly 20 participants and conversations from participant observation with people who are generally representative of the demographics of this group and fanbase (25–55, white, about half male and female presenting). The ethnographic data were physically coded into emergent themes and analyzed to highlight the important facets of participation and experience of members of the Phellowship. This method of qualitative analysis utilizes aspects of phenomenological inquiry, in that the subjective experiences of individuals are described and analyzed, to meet the larger aims of an ethnographic analysis that explicates the understandings and cultural practices of this community in their own words. ResultsThematic results include the performative and oral importance of narration at meetings, the semiotics of recovery and their community, the extension of sobriety beyond their “programs” or health-related arenas, and, most importantly, the role of connection and community. Each topic and result includes first-person accounts from interviews and participant observation to explicate how these thematic areas were chosen and have become meaningful for members of the Phellowship. DiscussionThis nonprogrammatic approach to recovery and sobriety that focuses more on cultural practices and salient versions of people's everyday identities, rather than “healing” and process seems to be a promising and novel addition to better the lives of people with substance use disorders. This group, and the network of these groups that exists in the jam band music scene at large, could act as a model for person-first approaches to recovery that incorporate different elements of sociality, community, and creative expression.

Play space in plain sight: the disruptive alliances between street trees and skateboarders

ABSTRACT This article is an ethnographic account of searches for play space in Newcastle, Australia, specifically for skateboarding. Street skateboarding is predicated on unstructured play at ‘found’ spots in the urban landscape assembled from surfaces, objects, and obstacles. Without access to established skateparks during COVID-19 lockdowns, the search for play space became an exciting part of lockdown life, and street trees were surprising guideposts for locating unpredictable surfaces and angles. Through these observations, this article explores the potential of street trees in generating play space through skateboarding, making three arguments. First, street trees are overlooked as potential play space compared to trees living in parks, reserves, and playgrounds. Crucially, street trees generate play space by assembling and re-assembling the urban landscape in unpredictable ways. Second, skateboarders and trees are unexpected allies in unstructured play and the disruption of urban order. Third, street trees produce skate spots by modifying the built environment, challenging ideas of mutually exclusive realms of nature vs. city, grey vs. green, play vs. passivity, and use vs. misuse. These examples may not fit idealised notions of human-tree relations, but they open new possibilities for thinking about these relations and where we seek and find play space.