Comparative Ethnography Research Articles

Introduction

This introduction proposes directions for a comparative anthropology of Muslim and Christian religion. While the anthropologies of Islam and Christianity flourish, comparative inquiries across religious boundaries have remained remarkably underdeveloped. As a result, parallels, overlaps, and situated differences between religious groups in today’s pluralist environments are often disregarded. This piece sets out the aim of this special section to develop ethnographic comparison, not of religious traditions as such, but of the ways in which everyday religious lives take shape within a shared social space, whether local or national. Such comparative work has the potential to provide insights and reveal connections that would likely be overlooked in non-comparative accounts, and that invite a critical rethinking of conventional understandings of difference and particularity.

Place Narratives and the Experience of Class: Comparing Collective Destigmatization Strategies in Two Social Housing Neighborhoods

A growing body of literature has investigated the various ways in which residents of stigmatized neighborhoods respond to and cope with stigmatization. However, these approaches have fallen short in tackling the question of how particular places shape responses to stigmatization. In this article, I take seriously the question of context and, based on a comparative ethnography of two social housing neighborhoods in Finland, show how residents in similar social structural positions differed in terms of the cultural milieus they inhabited, presenting them with different cultural resources for dealing with stigmatization. In the article, I suggest that non-recognition is an understudied but significant consequence of stigma related to social housing neighborhoods. Further, I suggest that depending on the historical and cultural context of the neighborhood, different destigmatization strategies are employed when residents face non-recognition. My data shows that locally lived collective place narratives informed residents’ experiences of class: In one neighborhood, the defining element of the locally acknowledged place narrative was class struggle, whereas in the other it was middle-class aspiration. These narratives served as building blocks for their destigmatization strategies.

Big Ideas from Little People: What Research with Children Contributes to Social Psychology

Beginning in the 1970s, research in childhood studies led to the reevaluation of children’s agency and their contributions to society. In my work on children’s interactions with peers and adults in schools and families, I challenged traditional views of socialization offering the alternative view of interpretive reproduction and associated concepts of peer culture and priming events. I review the development of these concepts and the importance of longitudinal comparative ethnography and audiovisual recording for capturing how research with children contributes both to rigorous reexamination of socialization theory and the field of social psychology more generally. In particular, I focus on the expansion of two theoretical concepts in my work related to the general notion of interpretive reproduction: (1) nonlinear and collective reproductive versus linear stage views of socialization and human development and (2) micro dramas in collective routines in peer culture. In the review of my methods and theory and in the expansion of my theoretical concepts, I continually raise issues regarding reexamination of Mead’s play and game stage and for the need to radically alter or even abandon the traditional concept of socialization.

Comparative History and Ethnography in William Ellis’s Polynesian Researches

ABSTRACTThis article develops recent scholarly efforts to take seriously the scientific work of evangelical missionaries in the South Pacific. Ellis’s Polynesian Researches gives us an insight into the broader issue of the way in which theological concepts could inform the framework of missionaries’ observations of the traditions, manners and functioning of human societies. Central to Ellis’s observations was the idea of idolatry. I argue that Ellis brought together a theological definition of idolatry – in which idolatry represented the sinful worship of created things rather than the creator God – with an Enlightenment idea that polytheistic idolatry was a universal stage in the historical development of civilization. Ellis’s Polynesian Researches gives us a point of entry into understanding some of the ways that European theological ideas were put to new uses in the South Pacific, against the backdrop of the increasingly global exchange of people, goods and ideas.

Cities of Entanglements: social life in Johannesburg and Maputo through ethnographic comparison by Barbara Heer

Cities of Entanglements: social life in Johannesburg and Maputo through ethnographic comparison by Barbara Heer

Assessing post-GFC housing affordability interventions: a qualitative exploration across five international cities

This paper confronts one of the biggest contemporary public policy conundrums globally; the challenge of decreasing housing affordability for urban residents. Aiming to align the international literature with the multitude of policy responses following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), the paper explores ‘in-depth’, and via recontextualisation, the policy priorities and strategies designed to combat housing affordability challenges across five international cities from advanced economy countries – Berlin (Germany), Vienna (Austria), Singapore (Singapore), Sydney (Australia) and Auckland (New Zealand). Carefully guided by critical social science and heterodox political economy literatures, and based on an innovative multi-city comparative ethnography (MCCE) centred on 118 in-depth research interviews with key stakeholders, six approaches are singled out as especially prominent: (1) market-based housing supply; (2) direct price/rent control; (3) construction cost reduction; (4) non-market-based housing supply; (5) demand-side interventions; and (6) urban land market interventions. Whereas all strategies face serious tensions, contradictions and implementation barriers, the latter three interventions are more likely to have a positive and lasting impact. Based on these findings, there is a need for normative reorientation and intellectual innovation in order to expand understandings on those three interventions in the name of affordable housing for all.

Local leaders in national social movements: The Tea Party

ABSTRACT The literature on Tea Party activity is a debate between structuralist and culturalist interpretations of the movement’s macro-processes – its origin and meanings – that neglects the micro-processes of organizing Tea Party activity (meetings, rallies, and so on). To address that gap, this article presents the results of a six-year ethnographic comparison of Tea Party chapters in Western North Carolina, focusing on the role of chapter leaders. It finds that these leaders are best understood through micro-process theories that locate them on the border between two different arenas: a national context in which elite-driven advocacy groups seek policy change, and their local context of citizen activism. Chapter leaders’ ability to control the flow of messaging from national organizations to members, and the reverse flow of member activity to different causes, affords them space for agency to pursue idiosyncratic agendas. Like other social movements, the Tea Party is not solely determined by larger social forces, but instead created by interaction between a variety of inter-connected actors.

Anthropology applied to the analysis of social deviances and the effects of uprooting on individual trans-generational behavior

This article aims to clarify some points of view and aspects on the relationship between multiculturalism and migration, and the relationship between minor and major normative jurisprudences, against the dynamic background of historical and anthropological processes, in a criminological perspective, and using some theories that argue why the phenomena of deviance are associated with intercultural and ethnic contexts. The interaction between outgroup and ingroup, while modern societies are engaged in solving problems related to the management and control of regulatory deviance, seems to bring out spaces to think, thanks to the onset of the ethnographic method in criminological studies. Criminology and ethnography can therefore profitably experiment with a scientific relationship, in the light of the sociology of deviance. New concepts invite to formulate a different approach, less constrained by specializations, but tending to obtain a result of a balanced scientific exchange full of perspectives. In this way, some of the reasons behind the deviant behavior among minorities will appear clearer. It can be argued, for example, that concepts of proximal and distal stress expand the translations of the problem. The cessation of the social bond, the semantic differences between landless and native minorities, seem to have a role in the dynamics of deviance, psychopathology, and crime. The sub-cultural community, the training and educational conditions are all recurrent themes, but they often assume an unexpected value in the eternal struggle for space. The class struggle and the reasons behind the enormous amount of laws appear to be the result of contrasting relationships between majorities and minorities. The problem of cultural deviances does not always seem clear and complete, if interpreted by the individual sciences, they easily run into scientific reductionism and redundancy. Stitching together edges that tend to remain far away could be possible only provided that the different perspectives can be connected, and that the tool of comparative ethnography is regarded as a fruitful link with criminology. Semantics is enriched with concepts, such as the syndrome of socio-cultural adoption, probes the implications of the cultural bond that redefines the existential plots of the condition of the migrant in modernity. The disruptive effects of the stress of minorities, or the disbelief of minorities towards the normative majority, are only some of the concepts with which I have tried to represent the motivations that are at the base of a basic hostility of some social communities to the rules. A multi-scientific approach has an experimental structure, a crossroads of different experiences, which aims to build lexicons and widen and diversify the semantics of deviance, questioning the particularisms and the singular exasperation of the perspectives of hermeneutic excesses. As Europe prepares to deal with the impact of epochal migration, the comparative method is able to provide empirical considerations for a reading consistent with history, and less involved with academic speculation, and ideological needs. Understanding the dynamics that underlie the criminal deviance between minorities, is not only an exercise of absolute social vanguard, but tends to build new bases and theoretical and practical references better systematized, which dictate complex work agendas, expanding the knowledge on the real relationship between criminal deviance and ethnic communities.

The earliest evidence for mechanically delivered projectile weapons in Europe.

Microscopic analysis of backed lithic pieces from the Uluzzian technocomplex (45-40kya) at the Grotta del Cavallo (southern Italy) reveals their use as mechanically delivered projectile weapons, attributed to Anatomically Modern Humans. Use-wear and residue analysis indicates the lithics were hunting armatures hafted with complex adhesives, while experimental and ethnographic comparison supports their use as projectiles. The use of projectiles conferred a hunting strategy with a higher impact energy and a potential subsistence advantage over other populations and species.

Wandering through the Mesolithic. An archaeostatistical approach to explore the mobility patterns in eastern Iberia

Tracing hunter-gatherer's mobility has been a recurring topic both in anthropological and archaeological literature. Following Binford's approach (1980), ethnographic comparisons have been brought out in order to better understand mobility patterns among Palaeolithic and Mesolithic groups, and how they relate with their environment, thus formulating a system where a main difference in mobility structure is pronounced on the distinction between residential and logistical camps.After some efforts made in order to relate the lithic record with such model (Clark and Barton, 2017), in this work we explore how lithic industry can be a reliable proxy for understanding the mobility patterns of the last hunter-gatherers of the Eastern Iberian Peninsula by studying a number of Late Mesolithic lithic collections. We try to bring a new insight into Clark and Barton's analysis, both by combining different sites -implementing geographical variability- and by taking into account functionality and its possible statistical traces, as shown by blades, bladelets and geometric microliths. We focus on the differences found at each site and how they relate with lithic industry in order to test hypotheses regarding mobility patterns.

Photography, politics and childhood: exploring children’s multimodal relations with the public sphere

In qualitative research with children visually oriented and multimodal approaches are identified in the literature as more appropriate for approaching children’s meanings and feelings often deemed to lie beyond the realm of language. In our own research, a comparative ethnography which enquired into the relationships between childhood and public life, with six-to-eight year olds in three cities (Athens, Hyderabad and London), we have reflexively experimented with the employment and remixing of methodologies which would allow us to explore such relationships. In the process of our research, incorporating different visual and ethnographic methods, we have developed a data collection and production process, an adaptation of the photo-story, which allows for a multimodal, processual and reflective enquiry into children’s relationships of concern and politics of care. We review the central visual methods in research with children, we then proceed to provide a documentation of the method, its development and its rationale. Consequently, we provide some examples of the photo-story method’s implementation in the Connectors Study together with a discussion of the production processes of the photo-stories themselves and our readings of them. We conclude with a section with reflections on the method, which, we argue provides a departure point from which we may rethink the political in childhood, as well as the ways in which photography is employed as a research method in the social sciences.

Towards a Progressive Asian Linguistic and Cultural Psychology

Traditional Linguistic and Cultural Anthropology has been predicated on traditional systems of thought, such as colonialism and that the west has been a purveyor of intellectual work and its traditions. Consequently, the shaping of Asian and non-Asian academic and industrial sector has emerged to separate these two regions, though dynamically. This paper seeks to provide a new framework for Anthropologically describing Asian Linguistic and Cultural contexts, which show great contradiction. The paper builds on colonialism and post colonialism, and then draws on a comparative ethnography of Asian and non-Asian regions, to present that the symbolic typologies of each of these regions show contradiction. The paper then presents that these contradictions speak against both traditional notions of Asia and non-Asia, and that traditional Linguistic and Cultural Anthropology can become modal, and can be realigned to incorporate complex perspectives in the symbolic analysis of language and culture.

Doing Comparative Ethnography in Vastly Different National Conditions: the Case of Local Grassroot Activism in Russia and the United States

Disgusted by political institutions, many activists around the world are rejecting normal politics in favor of hands-on, tangible local action. This looks similar all over the world, including in the two countries on which the paper focuses, Russia and the United States. Is it? Scholars and activists alike compare one society’s activism to another; this paper suggests ways of asking useful questions in cross-national ethnographic research. Controlling the variables of cultural, political/legal, social, and spatial conditions is impossible. With so many “out of control variables”, can comparison make any sense? Activists have varied “styles” (Lichterman & Eliasoph The American Journal of Sociology, 120(4): 798–863, 2014) of coordinating local activism in any country. Each style encounters different frictions, depending on a nation’s specific cultural, political, social, and spatial conditions. Local, interest-based, grassroot activism is a typical American “style” and is also venerated in American cultural narratives that celebrate local democracy. American activists encounter friction when trying to enact this style, when, for example, they realize that money brings power. For Russian activists, the very same style is a “surprising discovery”. Russians encounter different frictions when trying to enact this style. Examining continual, recursive pragmatic tests shows how activists move towards more, towards less, or towards different kinds of politicization.

The Origins of the Video‐Cued Multivocal Ethnographic Method

In 1982 I began using classroom videos as cues for ethnographic interviews. My colleagues and I asked practitioners in three countries to respond to videos shot in their own and each other’s preschools. The video cues worked to produce conversations that we used in our 1989 book Preschool in Three Cultures to present perspectives on the same events by cultural insiders and outsiders. This article tells the story of the origins and evolution of the Preschool in Three Cultures method, a video‐cued ethnographic method that has multiple influences, including Margaret Mead’s use of film in comparative ethnography, psychological anthropology’s use of projective tests, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and multivocality, and Linda Connor’s video‐cued interviewing of a Balinese shaman.

Tracing Communicative Patterns: A comparative ethnography across platforms, media and contexts

Abstract This article outlines a research design for a qualitative comparative study of communication across platforms, media and contexts – in China, the US and Denmark. After addressing the limitations in previous research on digital media in everyday life, we argue in favour of a comparative ethnography of communication that emphasizes the study of intermediality by taking a people-centred approach. The methodological design combines network sampling and maximum variation sampling with communication diaries and elicitation interviews. This design makes it possible to collect small and deep communicative trace data, to capture individuals’ unique linking of all the communication tools and channels available to them and, in turn, to identify the role of the internet as it interacts and intersects with other forms of communication.

The Case for Comparative Ethnography

To what extent can comparative methods and ethnographic inquiry combine to advance knowledge in political science? Ethnography is becoming an increasingly popular method within political science. Yet both proponents and detractors often see it as a technique best suited for producing in-depth knowledge about a particular case or for explicating the meaning of a particular political behavior. This article argues that comparative ethnography—ethnographic research that explicitly and intentionally builds an argument through the analysis of two or more cases—can be of particular value to political scientists, and to scholars of comparative politics in particular. The approach can hone our theoretical models, challenge existing conceptual categories, and help develop portable political insights. This article has two goals: (1) to show that comparative ethnographic research deserves a prominent place in the repertoire of qualitative methods and (2) to elaborate the logics of inquiry behind such comparisons so that scholars will be better equipped to use them more frequently. Two or more cases are not always better than one, but comparative ethnography can yield new and different insights with important implications for our understandings of politics.

A comparative ethnography of nutrition interventions: Structural violence and the industrialisation of agrifood systems in the Caribbean and the Pacific

Public health interventions that involve strategies to re-localise food fail in part because they pay insufficient attention to the global history of industrial food and agriculture. In this paper we use the method of comparative ethnography and the concept of structural violence to illustrate how historical and geographical patterns related to colonialism and industrialisation (e.g. agrarian change, power relations and trade dependencies) hinder efforts to address diet-related non-communicable diseases on two small islands. We find comparative ethnography provides a useful framework for cross-country analysis of public health programmes that can complement quantitative analysis. At the same time, the concept of structural violence enables us to make sense of qualitative material and link the failure of such programmes to wider historical and geographical processes. We use ethnographic research carried out from April to August 2013 and from June to July 2014 in Trinidad (with follow-up online interviews in 2018) and in Nauru from February to May 2010 and August 2010 to February 2011. Our island case studies share commonalities that point to similar experiences of colonialism and industrialisation and comparable health-related challenges faced in everyday life.

Ethical complexities in participatory childhood research: Rethinking the ‘least adult role’

This article draws on data from a comparative ethnography of two UK primary schools to explore the complexities inherent in Mandell’s ‘least adult role’. In the interest of gaining insight into children’s informal productions of sexuality and gender, this role was used to gain access to peer group cultures and diffuse the imbalance of power between researcher and researched. However, while found to be productive in a number of ways, ‘least adulthood’ was revealed as a positionality suffused with practical, ethical and emotional complexities, and characterised by a fundamental misconstruction of the workings of ‘power’. In line with recent critiques that have recognised both ‘power’ and ‘agency’ as largely under-theorised in childhood research, I conclude this article by offering a tentative alternative to least adulthood, which attempts to respond to some of the key methodological and ethical challenges in contemporary childhood ethnography.

A new method of three-dimensional morphometry for analyzing the functional potentialities of bifaces. Contribution to the study of artefacts from AU P3 from the “Caune de l’Arago” (France)

The analysis of the functional potential of bifaces, which are artefacts extending beyond our technical memory, is based on direct (micro-wear) or indirect approaches (experimentation, relationship between form/function, comparative ethnography). Indirect approaches are fundamental when artefacts are not well enough preserved for micro-wear analysis, which is frequent for the middle Pleistocene. This article proposes a new method based on the three-dimensional acquisition of artefact images, enabling us to measure cutting edge angles and depth of cut. This process allows us to distinguish, in particular, between cutting edges created for longitudinal or transverse cutting. The application of this analysis to bifaces from UA P3 of the “Caune de l’Arago” brings to light tools with a high functional potential for longitudinal cutting, some of which were used for incising, others for deep cutting. These results corroborate those obtained by most micro-wear analyses and present new ways of interpreting the functional potential of bifaces.

Denominations as (Theological) Institutions: An Afterword

Denominations as (Theological) Institutions: An Afterword Joseph Webster When is a church a church? What makes a church a denomination? What makes a denomination an institution? And what constitutes that institution: people, the law, money, divine approval, or something else? In asking questions such as these, Handman, Opas, Hardin, and MacLochlainn usefully address denominational forms as institutions, which has long been a sociological concern—most especially in the work of Goffman (1961)—but has arguably received comparatively little attention within the anthropology of Christianity. Taken together, then, the articles in this collection address not just questions about form and function, but also questions about how the self becomes built into structures that regard rules and norms as an important, even sacred expression of Christian life and truth. The collective specificity of the ethnographic cases that we have been presented with is hard to miss: Lutheranism in New Guinea, Pentecostalism in Samoa, Methodism in the Philippines, and Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism in Amazonia. Importantly, when Catholicism does make an empirical appearance, it is very often described in the context of its largely negative interpretation by non-Catholic (and often anti-Catholic) Christians. As such, it seems fair to begin by asking whether or not these articles address the Anthropology of Christianity, or actually the Anthropology of Protestantism? More than this, are we really talking [End Page 1123] about a specific kind of Protestantism, namely experientially intense Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism? To be clear, this observation need not be read as a critique, at least not as previously formulated by Hann (2007) in relation to what he calls “The Anthropology of Christianity per se.” Instead, the striking denominational (or perhaps, typological) similarity I find in these articles’ ethnographic cases may be read as a strength rather than a weakness. This seems true insofar as the kind of ethnographic comparison I attempt below is able to proceed on a surer footing, given that some (but certainly not all) of the emic theological assumptions at play appear to be held in common. The tense relationship between Protestant ecclesiology and soteriology, for example, emerges as a trend across all four articles. If anything is to be gained analytically by echoing the concerns of our informants (and I think there is) then we might venture to pose a theological question such as: is religious division the product of the sins of pride, greed, and idolatry, or are such divisions the result of a godly insistence on the singularity of biblical truth? Rephrased anthropologically, we might ask: what are the institutional forms of Protestantism, and what differences do these forms make? To this end, Courtney Handman’s article examines the colonial and more recent history of Christian mission in PNG, whereby denominational competition is both an empirical reality and an embarrassing and self-contradictory theological problem. Examining the strikingly self-aware commentaries of Lutheran missionary John Kuder, Handman shrewdly points out how denominational difference both matters a great deal and is seen as a product of unspiritual division—a division that is seen to undermine the universal claims of the gospel of salvation. Here, we are confronted with the Lutheran problematic of deciding whether the gospel of salvation is to be framed within denominational specificities or within a pan-Christian attachment to the person and work of Christ. While Kuder would surely want to claim the latter, it seems that the former keeps asserting itself in a context where disagreements with other groups calling themselves Christians forces these missionaries to make sense of who they are and what their message is, but always in relation to what they are not and what their mission is not. Crucial to this is Handman’s equally important observation that all this has a deeply paternalistic tone, namely that the children (that is, the natives) shouldn’t see the parents (that is, the denominationally divided missionaries) fighting. More than this, such a paternalistic desire [End Page 1124] for public unity is further colored by assertions of authority and higher truth claims, whereby “Father definitely knows best.” But why this shame about denominationalism? My sense is that this emerges from something within the Protestant tradition in the way that truth is imagined to...