Ethnographic Articles Research Articles

Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture by Edward Tyerman

Reviewed by: Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture by Edward Tyerman Rachel Morley Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture. By Edward Tyerman. New York: Columbia University Press. 2021. xi+353 pp. £28. ISBN 978–0–231–19919–3. Internationalist Aesthetics is ambitious, sophisticated, and wide-ranging. Meticulously researched, it draws on materials housed in eight different archives in Moscow and St Petersburg and a wide range of primary and secondary sources, from newspapers to films, in English, Russian, and Chinese. Tyerman's use of Chinese sources is among the book's greatest strengths; it is a major source of the [End Page 278] originality of his analysis of early Soviet cultural production. 'The book's substantial, if occasionally repetitive, Introduction provides historical and political context, establishes Tyerman's concept of early Soviet artists as 'mediators' between China and Soviet Russia, and defines the titular phrase 'internationalist aesthetics', which refers not to a set of formal artistic rules but rather to 'a series of experiments with different forms' through which Soviet artists pursued their aim of 'connecting Soviet and Chinese subjects within a single revolutionary present' (p. 21). Comprising four chapters, each devoted to a different artistic medium, the book takes the reader from the mid-1920s to the decade's end. Its overarching aim is to illustrate how different forms of early Soviet culture represented China while expressing an internationalist subjectivity. Its central figure, the 'star' of each chapter, is Sergei Tretʹiakov, the Soviet avant-garde writer, theorist, and aspiring film-maker, who spent eighteen months teaching Russian at Beijing University during 1924 and 1925 and whom Tyerman describes as 'the decade's most prominent mediator of China for a Soviet audience' (p. 5). Chapter 1 examines Soviet 'travelling writers' (p. 38), who visited China in the mid-1920s and described what they saw there in newspaper reports, travel notes, and ethnographic articles. They also produced poems and stories, in order to 'transmit China as it really is, without distortion' (p. 47, emphasis original). Focusing on Tretʹiakov and Boris Pilʹniak, the two most prominent writers, while also considering less familiar figures (Aleksei Ivin, Galina Serebriakova, Zinaida Rikhter), Tyerman offers close readings of Chzhungo, Tretʹiakov's 1927 collection of articles on China; his poem 'Roar China' ('Rychi Kitai', 1924); and Pilʹniak's 'Chinese Story' ('Kitaiskaia povestʹ', 1926). He adopts a comparative approach, highlighting differences in the writers' pursuit of internationalist aesthetics while dwelling especially on similarities, such as their focus on 'sight' and 'sound'. Thus, the eyewitness account, which emphasizes 'sight', emerges as an important genre for replacing orientalizing accounts of China with evocations of its revolutionary modernity; while 'sound' and devices such as onomatopoeia are revealed as key tools of internationalist aesthetics, enabling writers to overcome linguistic barriers and to communicate to Soviet readers an authentic picture of modern China. Chapter 2 examines stage productions, offering a comparative analysis of two works that brought China to the Soviet stage in the 1920s: Tretʹiakov's 'docudrama' Roar, China! (Rychi, Kitai!), premiered by Vsevolod Meierkholʹd in 1926, and the ballet that it influenced, The Red Poppy (Krasnyi mak), which was staged by the Bolshoi Theatre the following year. Chapter 3 focuses on China in early Soviet cinema (as a theme and, briefly, as a market for Soviet films). Tyerman considers various genres: the animated agitprop China on Fire (Kitai v ogne, 1925), the first Soviet film about China; Vladimir Shneiderov's expedition film The Great Flight (Velikii perelet, 1926); Dzhungo, the unrealized three-part melodrama which Tretʹiakov planned with Sergei Eizenshtein and Eduard Tisse in 1926; the documentary Shanghai Document (Shankhaiskii dokument, 1928); and the non-extant comedy The Chinese Mill (Kitaiskaia melʹnitsa, 1928), analysed through Isaak Babelʹ's screenplay. Highlighting cinema's affective power, Tyerman argues that its [End Page 279] inherent privileging of the visual over the verbal enabled cinema to offer Soviet audiences a '"face to face" encounter with China' (p. 135), making it the perfect vehicle for internationalist communication. Finally, Chapter 4 concentrates on Den Shi-khua, the 'bio-interview' (p. 188) that Tretʹiatkov assembled from interviews which he conducted with a Beijing student...

Economic nationalisms in a world on fire: An introduction

In a time when many national governments are rhetorically, if not practically, turning away from global collaboration and emphasizing economic nationalisms, understood here as a plurality of historically and politically contextualized policies, the authors in this thematic issue explore the possible contributions of comparative ethnographic analyses of economic nationalisms to interdisciplinary, transnational analyses. In this introduction to the thematic section, the editors note the turn to economic nationalisms in the current context of global crises, review the literature on economic nationalisms, and illustrate the strong political and historical variations in economic nationalisms within even the same nation, using India as an example. The three ethnographic articles in this thematic section are discussed in relation to each other. They offer examples from Turkey, Italy, Guatemala and the U.S., with a shared focus on economic nationalisms and the reliance on the labor of transnational migrants displaced by war, land grabs, and climate change even as those vital contributors to national economies are denied cultural and national citizenship – an irony rendered all the more visible during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Historical Examination of Dietary Patterns in Rural Central/Southern Appalachia

Abstract Convenience meals and fast foods have slowly worked their way into the rural Appalachian diet, playing a major role in increased obesity and food-related ailments. Increasing future health providers’ knowledge of historical Appalachian dietary patterns and how health is perceived by rural residents may lead to the development of culturally sensitive nutrition interventions for rural populations. This article describes the historical Appalachian diet and validates the Traditional Central/Southern Appalachian Diet Pyramid (TADP) to inform future nutrition interventions. Fourteen historical cookbooks, five ethnographic articles, and twenty-six oral history interviews were qualitatively analyzed. The four largest categories of the traditional Appalachian diet were homegrown produce (25.8 percent), added fats and sugars (25.5 percent), sources of protein (20.1 percent), and sources of carbohydrates (13.9 percent). Within these individual categories, corn, wheat, potatoes, green beans, fatback, butter, soup beans, and pork were some of the ingredients most commonly mentioned. Findings reveal that the traditional Appalachian diet was primarily based on homegrown or gathered produce with the addition of added fats and sugars, protein, and carbohydrate sources.

Two Fish Moving in their Seas: How does the Body Language of Teachers Show itself who Teach Mathematical Equations?

Background: “Culture hides much more than it reveals and, strangely enough, what it hides, it hides more effectively from its own participants” (Hall, 1959, p. 39). This quote corresponds well to a Persian proverb, also a well-known aphorism that has been widely cited in many ethnographic articles: “a fish will be the last to discover water.” Being immersed in water, surrounded by it, makes it invisible and almost impossible to perceive. In other words, we often do not know our interactional behaviour as mathematics teachers when we perform it in our usual and localised professional practice. Objective: To discuss mathematics teacher’s body language when teaching equations and thus perceive this language in terms of possible fruitful educational action when teaching equations in the classroom. Design: Qualitative methodology. Data collection and analysis: Based on theoretical references that deal with body language, corporeality, and perception, we analysed individually and comparatively the classes of two mathematics teachers who taught equations in Birmingham (United Kingdom) and Rolante (Brazil). Thus, particularly attentive to mathematical culture in the classroom and analysing the localised gestures in the teachers’ teaching of equations and the non-verbal behaviour, we can understand mathematics teaching through body movement, which often goes unnoticed. Results: We understand from the results of this research that perceiving the body language of mathematics teachers, which is produced with speech, gives us indications of the materialisation of the meanings attributed to the equation and how this will possibly affect the very constitution of the student’s mathematical knowledge, in terms of possible meanings attributed to each gesture. Conclusions: We consider that knowing the body language can favour the teacher’s teaching, i.e., metaphorically, knowing the sea can favour the fish to swim.

Transnational (Im)mobilities and Informality in Europe

People around the globe rely on informal practices to resist, survive, care and relate to each other beyond the control and coercive presence of institutions and states. In the EU, regimes of mobility at multiple scales affect various people on the move who are pushed into informality in order to acquire social mobility while having to combat border regimes, racialization, inequalities, and state bureaucracies. This text explores how mobilities and informality are entangled with one another when it comes to responding to the social, political, and economic inequalities that are produced by border and mobility regimes. Within this frame, the ethnographic articles in this special issue go beyond national borders to connect the production of mobility and informality at multiple interconnected scales, from refugees adapting to settlement bureaucracies locally to transit migrants coping with the selective external borders of the EU, or from transnational entrepreneurs’ ability to move between formal and informal norms to the multiple ways in which transnational mobility informally confronts economic, social and political constraints. In sum, this volume brings together articles on informality and mobility that take account of the elusive practices that deal with the inequalities of mobility and immobility.

The value of the ethnographic approach to research issues in palliative care.

Qualitative research in the field of palliative care allows for a crucial study of the final stage of life from a social point of view and cultural perspective. This review evaluates the advantages and challenges of applying an ethnographic approach to palliative care research. Thirteen ethnographic articles on organization or quality of care, decision-making, delirium, death, and the process of dying, were reviewed. Most studies use interviews, participant observation, and field notes as their primary data collection techniques. In ethnographic research, cultural issues, relationships and interactions of a group, the meanings and perceptions of the participants, the communication process, and the use of language in a particular and natural context were analyzed. Data collection and information analysis took an average of 14 months in the included studies. The ethnographic method, applied with rigor, is valuable in the analysis of a real phenomenon if the particular context in which the study developed is well defined. With an ethnographic approach, researchers can uncover cultural nuances that evidence different realities.

A critique of Koh’s (2014) ‘Doing class analysis in Singapore’s elite education’

ABSTRACTAaron Koh contributed to a collection of multi-site global ethnographic articles published here (2014, Vol. 12, No. 2) that present class reproduction as operationalised in elite education. While the collection adds to the current international critique of meritocracy, a close look at Koh's contribution reveals that critical ethnography can lose its representational and persuasive power if muddled by theoretical and methodological haziness and if it fails to forefront participants' voices. This response is meant to encourage Koh to re-present his data and position so as to sure up his comment on this important issue.

Provisional Relations, Indeterminate Conditions: Non-Sociological Sociality in South Asia

ABSTRACTIn the introduction to this special section, we present six ethnographic articles that explore the sites and forms of ‘non-sociological sociality’ in South Asia. Set in urban spaces where the familiar vectors of relations, such as ethnicity, class, gender or age, may be attenuated, the articles examine how social and political entanglement is suffused with ambiguity, indeterminacy, provisionality and contingency. In these sites, opaque conditions, open-ended play, double meanings and interpretive scrutiny abound. Spaces such as the racecourse, the bazaar, the university campus or the nocturnal street suggest undetermined conditions and fleeting collaborations which have a wider bearing on cross-cutting forms of sociality in South Asia.

Producing persuasive findings: Demystifying ethnographic textwork in strategy and organization research

Despite the importance and proliferation of ethnography in strategy and organization research, the central issue of how to present ethnographic findings has rarely been discussed. Yet, the narratives we craft to share our experience of the field are at the heart of ethnographic papers and provide the primary basis for our theorizing. In this article, we explain the “textwork” involved in writing persuasive findings. We provide an illustrative example of ethnographic data as it is recorded within fieldnotes and explain the necessary conceptual and writing work that must be done to render such data persuasive, drawing on published exemplars of ethnographic articles. This allows us to show how such texts, through various forms of writing and data representation, are transformed from raw fieldnotes to comprehensible findings. We conclude by asserting the value of these specifically ethnographic ways of presenting evidence, which are at odds with the canonical methods of data presentation in management studies.

Editor’s Letter

This issue marks the third year of the current editorial group’s work on Public Culture, and I hope we’ve delivered on our promise to update the journal, both substantively and stylistically, while also preserving its role as an outlet for imaginative social research and theory. We’ve made some significant changes, adding the Forum essays, the Public Culture interviews, and a number of new contributors. We’ve also helped to launch a sister publication, Public Books (www.publicbooks.org), which has already reviewed hundreds of works of fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, memoirs, children’s books, apps, and more, generating vigorous debates in something close to real time. I’m happy to report that our readership is growing — not only online but, improbably, in print subscriptions, too. Please help us continue expanding the Public Culture project by spreading the word about the journal and website and by letting us know what we can do better. There are more changes to come.It’s no accident that this issue is focused on questions about change and technology. It begins with a pair of Forum essays on new technologies of connection, by two leading thinkers on the topic, Cathy N. Davidson and Zeynep Tufekci. Davidson’s piece, which follows up on themes introduced in her acclaimed book Now You See It, focuses on the role of technology in higher education, while Tufekci’s addresses the vexing question of how new media are remaking social life. The issue also includes interviews with Peter Galison and Ulf Hannerz and a pair of ethnographic articles, by Christina Dunbar-Hester and Daniela K. Rosner, examining the kinds of ethical and political projects involved in repair work. These essays resonate with “Urban Design from Below,” in which Jennifer Mack illustrates how, in one Swedish town, a group of Syriac Christian immigrants gradually transformed the built environment, remaking the city without a master plan. And, in different ways, questions about public participation in the body politic are central to Joseph Massad’s essay, “Love, Fear, and the Arab Spring,” and “Affective Economies and the Politics of Saving Babies’ Lives,” by Mara Buchbinder and Stefan Timmermans.As the editor, I’m proud to publish such extraordinary work from this diverse set of authors. But I know more than anyone that it would be impossible without the help of the editorial board, particularly senior editors John Jackson, Andrew Lakoff, Sharon Marcus, Fred Turner, and Caitlin Zaloom, as well as the editorial office staff: managing editor Plaegian Alexander, associate editor Stephen Twilley, assistant editor Kavita Kulkarni, senior editorial assistant Saniya Ghanoui, and departing editorial assistants Emma Hickey, Khiara Ortiz, and Kathryn Tam. I hope you don’t mind me thanking them here.

Styles of Causal Thought: An Empirical Investigation

While most work on causation in ethnography addresses the normative question of what ethnographers should do, this article addresses the empirical question of what ethnographers actually do. Specifically, it investigates whether ethnographic articles make causal arguments and how these arguments are made. The authors draw on a content analysis of 48 ethnographic articles sampled from four groups of sociological journals: contemporary generalist journals, contemporary specialist journals, mid-20th-century generalist journals—all in the United States—and contemporary generalist journals in Mexico. They find that ethnographies in U.S. contemporary generalist journals are most likely to advance strong and central causal claims and to use logical and rhetorical devices comparable to those used in quantitative articles. They also find that most Mexican ethnographic articles undertake a different kind of project, which they call “shedding light” on social phenomena. In addition to offering one methodological and...

Global pressures, local reactions: higher education and neo‐liberal economic policies

As a summary piece, this essay describes more fully the wider globalizing context in which both students and institutions of higher education are now located. It explores three transitions that signal this new configuration: the creation of new information and media technologies; the transformation of time and space; and the expansion of the culture of consumption and the consumption of culture. The essay then discusses the four ethnographic articles in light of these new social realities.

Maternidade desnaturada: uma análise da barriga de aluguel e da doação de óvulos

O artigo discute representações sociais de duas práticas decorrentes das novas tecnologias reprodutivas ou reprodução assistida. Na fertilização in vitro, o procedimento de transferência do óvulo fertilizado de uma mulher para outra separa a maternidade genética da gestacional. Isto se traduz em duas práticas sociais: a doação de óvulos, em que a gestante é designada à mãe, e a maternidade gestacional substituta ("barriga de aluguel"), em que a mãe é a fornecedora do óvulo ou idealizadora da gravidez. O foco é a análise dessas representações no discurso jurídico e em matérias da grande imprensa brasileira, além do exame de etnografias sobre doação de óvulo e maternidade substituta. A oposição entre Natureza e Cultura é uma chave para compreender a recepção distinta dessas práticas.

The "Exotic" and the "Domestic": Regions and Representation in Cultural Anthropology

Regional scholarship is an enduring feature of cultural anthropology. But how does work from different regions compare in terms of published scholarship? This article offers some preliminary answers based on a longitudinal study of ethnographic articles in major English-language journals over the past seven decades. The dominance of North America in the early decades of the 20th century has given way to articles on more areas, especially Oceania, Asia, and Africa. A preliminary explanation of this shift involves graduate programs and academic career paths that favor exotic and pure research in contrast to domestic and applied research.

Death in Folklore : A selective listing from the journal of the Folklore Society

Folklore journals are probably not the first (nor even the last) resource that scholars in death studies think of consulting. Yet, for over 100 years, folklorists have maintained an interest in the cultural aspects of death and burial—funeral customs; popular beliefs about death, dying and the afterlife; the folklore of forewarnings of death; and so on. An electronic search of folklore sources discloses over 500 articles, notes and queries about aspects of burial, death and dying. The library and journal of the Folklore Society (founded 1878) therefore represent a neglected, but potentially valuable, information resource. Longer scholarly ethnographic and descriptive articles begin to feature from the mid-1960s, but the sample listing of about 100 items is dominated by early notes and queries from folklore collectors. Though perhaps dated in tone, these are interesting reading and give an insight into the way official culture is transmuted into informal practice. In order to contextualize this material, an introduction charts the changing face of folklore studies in Britain—from the study of the customs, narratives and beliefs of the rural poor to the description of the vernacular culture of all sections of society.

Appealing Work: An Investigation of How Ethnographic Texts Convince

This paper examines how written research accounts based on ethnography appeal to readers to find them convincing. In particular, it highlights the role of rhetoric in the readers' interaction with and interpretation of the accounts. Extending relevant work in the literatures of organization studies, anthropology and literary criticism, the paper develops three dimensions—authenticity, plausibility and criticality—central to the process of convincing. Further, through the analysis of a sample of ethnographic articles, it discloses the particular writing practices and more general strategies that make claims on readers to engage the texts and to accept that these three dimensions have been achieved. Through authenticity, ethnographic texts appeal to readers to accept that the researcher was indeed present in the field and grasped how the members understood their world. Strategies to achieve authenticity include: particularizing everyday life, delineating the relationship between the researcher and organization members, depicting the disciplined pursuit and analysis of data, and qualifying personal biases. Through plausibility, ethnographic texts make claims on readers to accept that the findings make a distinctive contribution to issues of common concern. Plausibility is accomplished by strategies that normalize unorthodox methodologies, recruit the reader, legitimate atypical situations, smooth contestable assertions, build dramatic anticipation, and differentiate the findings. Finally, through criticality, ethnographic texts endeavor to probe readers to re-examine the taken-for-granted assumptions that underly their work. Strategies to achieve criticality include: carving out room to reflect, provoking the recognition and examination of differences, and enabling readers to imagine new possibilities. The empirical analyses, which highlight both the rhetorical and substantive aspects of convincing, suggest that at a minimum ethnographic texts must achieve both authenticity and plausibility—that is, they must convey the vitality and uniqueness of the field situation and also build their case for the particular contribution of the findings to a disciplinary area of common interest. These analyses also suggest that the most provocative task and promising potential of ethnography is the use of richly-grounded data to not only reflect on the members' world, but more importantly to provoke an examination of the readers' prevailing assumptions and beliefs.

The Okams Sound in Bongu

In preparing for folklore research in the Papuan village of Bongu, I carefully examined everything pertaining to the folklore of New Guinea in the diaries and ethnographic articles of N. N. Miklukho-Maklai. My findings were totally unexpected. Essentially, no one had previously attempted to look at his works with the eyes of a folklorist. Yet scattered through the pages of Miklukho-Maklai's works are exceptionally interesting information and very valuable observations and comments on Papuan folklore - the musical entertainments and tastes of the Papuans, their songs, dances, games, theatrical performances, and particularly, their musical instruments. These materials, assembled and organized, made it possible to picture Papuan folklore as a well-defined system. Of course, much was lacking and much was fragmentary. One might, for example, regret that the scholar left so few transcriptions of the texts of Papuan songs, and that he described few typical instances of the performance of songs in everyday rural existence. However, his most important merit lay in the fact that he included folkloric subject matter in the program of his ethnographic studies. Miklukho-Maklai was the discoverer and first investigator of the music and musical practices of the Papuans. Let us add: a sensitive, keen-eyed, and as in everything else, precise scholar. He approached folklore as an ethnographer and wrote about only what he had himself seen and heard, without recourse to conjectures, guesses, and reconstructions. For this reason his notes and observations, however fragmentary - and not always systematic - they were, inspire the fullest confidence. For the scholars of today they are a guiding thread and contain material providing the point of departure for current investigations.