Ethnographic Evidence Research Articles

The Tiger-Dog and its Semantics in the Nanai Shamanic Sculpture: Cultural and Cognitive Aspects

This article describes the Nanai shamanic set, combining two images—a dog and a tiger. The Nanai shamanic sculpture is viewed as a phenomenon reflecting both the subjective and the objective reality constructed by traditional cultural practices. Parallels with Siberian and Pacific cultures reveal the significance of the domestic animal and the wild predator for the people of the Lower Amur. Using folkloric and lexical data, findings of field studies, and ethnographic evidence, folk images of the dog and the tiger are reconstructed. Viewing the problem in the context of collective knowledge about the world reveals the archetypical and modified layers in the image’s construction. The idea of the dog, typical of all the peoples of Siberia and the Russian Far East, is that of a draft animal, assistant, sacrifice, and guide to the afterworld. Its image in the Nanai shamanic sculpture was meant to enhance the power of the spirit. It was often combined with the image of the tiger, personifying shaman’s power and the progenitors. The analysis of the terminology relating to the tiger attests to the Southeast Asian roots of its cult. The tiger semantics in the Nanai culture resulted from a blend of Tungus, Paleoasiatic, and Manchu (Chinese) elements. These images were used by shamans not only as assistants in “capturing” spirits and holding them in “detention”, but also as a means of communicating with the world of spirits.

Microfinance and debt trap –an ethnographic evidence from a village in Bangladesh

This paper studies microfinance and debt trap nexus. We have used an ethnographic approach, unstructured observation and interviews, to develop scenarios with the help of which we try to explain the phenomenon. Our research was carried out in DipKalaMoral, a small village located in Shikalbaha union under Karnaphuli Upazila of Chittagong in Bangladesh. We have found that excessive leverage through multiple borrowing lead to debt trap when households face unexpected income shocks due to economic cycle, unexpected weather (like heavy monsoon), wedding expenditure or paying dowry, and unexpected healthcare expenditure. In addition to that, we have found that informal money lenders tend to exploit households when households are heavily leveraged. Interestingly, we have identified a new phenomenon, ‘borrowing for others’ when households borrow from Micro Finance Institutions (MFIs) to lend money to others. A number of policy measures have been recommended which could be beneficial for policy makers and MFIs.

Transforming Mongolian Wedding Speech Genres in Bilingual Bicultural Urban Inner Mongolia

In Mongolian culture, wedding speeches are a traditional component of a marriage celebration, but in bilingual, bicultural urban Inner Mongolia, China, two hybrid genres have emerged which reflect competing ideologies of languages and speakers. There can be a Mongolian performance with a commentary in Chinese, or a blended Mongolian and Chinese language performance. In these hybrids, Mongolian is often associated with a minority status but an authentic tradition, while Chinese seems to represent a modern majority, but alien, culture. By situating the hybrid and bilingual Mongolian wedding speech genre in the contexts of Mongolian cultural loss and revival, urbanization, and the increasing weight of the Chinese state’s political discourse in public space, the study unravels the complexity and contestations inherent in a hybridized traditional Mongolian speech genre. Drawing on the inherent duality of genre, that is its boundedness/monology and its plasticity/heteroglossia, this paper presents ethnographic evidence of these sociolinguistic representations, and contributes to the understanding of hybrid genre, agency, and a transforming expressive culture in the context of social displacement, cultural shift, and internal colonization in China.

Diagnostic Citizenship and the Biopolitical Uptake of COVID-19 Detection

This essay examines an oddity of SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic testing—referred to here as a ‘persistent positive’—in which an individual can test positive for COVID-19 for weeks or even months after initial infection despite no longer being symptomatic or contagious. In Florida, where recent legislation requires healthcare workers affected by COVID-19 to have two negative test results before they can return to work, the issue of persistent positives poses a significant challenge for a small sub-group. I identify an important disconnect between the biological and the biopolitical where SARS-CoV-2 test results are mis-inscribed into biopolitics as bureaucratic state legal codes and employment requirements. Using ethnographic evidence, I show how their test results are less important than the state’s interpretation and enactment of these test results. I describe a techno-political phenomenon wherein the technical (in this case diagnostic testing) selectively offers up rights to those recovering from COVID-19. Those with persistent positives performatively engage in testing as a means of navigating the legal codes that deny them the right to work. Testing for them is an attempt to return to a normal life, not to find out whether they are living an abnormal one. A breed of biological citizenship, perhaps a diagnostic citizenship, is formed in which they need a certain result, no matter what that result means biologically, in order to exercise certain rights. These reflections encourage a rethink about the role of testing technology as an instrument of government and biomedical authority more broadly.

Temporal bordering in the space of the camp: Producing and contesting abandonment in Skaramagas and Elaionas camps in Athens

This paper focuses on the temporalities of camps and the ways in which abandonment is produced within them through the deployment of temporal bordering practices. It presents empirical ethnographic evidence, gathered between January and June 2017, from Skaramagas and Elaionas camps in Athens. Although intended as temporary humanitarian solutions, many migrants have remained in them for long periods, stuck in a state of temporariness. Camps have been studied extensively through the lens of biopolitics as spaces of abandonment and abjectification. More recently, a growing body of literature is highlighting the everyday micro-politics and tactics of belonging that take place within them. Drawing on the latter, I shed light on the temporal aspects of border control involved in camps, arguing that camps provide a temporal, rather than only spatial, technology that governs encamped migrants through the administration of their time. Thus, the camp governs the critical moment between reception and in/exclusion from the polity. Yet, as I show, within this condition of semi-permanence and semi-presence, camp residents, through the practice of everyday life, being present and visible, create places and give new meanings to existing ones. If the border is enacted through the imposed temporalities of the camp, then its subversion can be found in these everyday place-making tactics. Looking into these micro-practices, this paper contributes to the above debates by exploring camps as temporal technologies of control.

Silver linings: how mental health activists can help us navigate wicked problems.

This article explores how 'wicked problems' such as climate change might force psychiatry to rethink some of its fundamental ideas and ways of working, including clinical boundaries, understandings of psychopathology and ways of organising. We use ethnographic evidence to explore how mental health service 'survivor' activists are already rethinking some of these issues by therapeutically orienting themselves towards social problems and collective understandings of well-being, rejecting 'treatment as usual' approaches to distress. In this way we provide an example of the potential of activists to help psychiatry negotiate the climate crisis.

Reassessing Shamanism and Animism in the Art and Archaeology of Ancient Mesoamerica

Shamanism and animism have proven to be useful cross-cultural analytical tools for anthropology, particularly in religious studies. However, both concepts root in reductionist, social evolutionary theory and have been criticized for their vague and homogenizing rubric, an overly romanticized idealism, and the tendency to ‘other’ nonwestern peoples as ahistorical, apolitical, and irrational. The alternative has been a largely secular view of religion, favoring materialist processes of rationalization and “disenchantment.” Like any cross-cultural frame of reference, such terms are only informative when explicitly defined in local contexts using specific case studies. Here, we consider shamanism and animism in terms of ethnographic and archaeological evidence from Mesoamerica. We trace the intellectual history of these concepts and reassess shamanism and animism from a relational or ontological perspective, concluding that these terms are best understood as distinct ways of knowing the world and acquiring knowledge. We examine specific archaeological examples of masked spirit impersonations, as well as mirrors and other reflective materials used in divination. We consider not only the productive and affective energies of these enchanted materials, but also the potentially dangerous, negative, or contested aspects of vital matter wielded in divinatory practices.

At the Nexus of cinema, city and memory: Resisting the demolition of Istanbul's historical Emek movie theatre

Emek was the oldest surviving movie theatre in Istanbul when it was demolished in 2013 so that a shopping mall could be built in its place, spawning a persistent civic resistance. Sitting at the juxtaposition of the vibrant literatures on urban studies, film studies, and memory studies, the article demonstrates that emotions, evoked by memories, have a part in triggering urban resistance, adding to the flourishing literature on how emotions inspire and sustain activism. Specifically, it provides ethnographic evidence for the presence of a positive link between place attachment and willingness to engage in place-protective behaviour, stressing the role played by memories in this regard. Focusing on a historical movie theatre, on the other hand, also reveals the complex spatiality of cinematic experience, stressing the importance of social relations and vicinity of the theatre (the street in particular) in this specific context. A final set of contributions derived from the case of Emek relates to the notions of “failure” and “sustainability of activism” given that the resistance to Emek's demolition is characterised by its resilience and persistence as well as a determination to “resist to forget”, despite the failure, practices of emotional reflexivity playing a key role in this respect.

Legal yet Illegitimate Governance in Italy

For several decades Naples has exemplified the deficit of legitimacy that now outstandingly mars public life in Italy and across many democracies. Drawing on ethnographic evidence from extended anthropological field research, this article examines the increasing gap between rulers and the ruled, which jeopardizes the authority, therefore legitimacy, of governance. With a focus on this major Italian city, the discussion leads to the conclusion that this gap and its ramifications are a substantial threat to democracy that urgently needs to be understood in depth and comprehensively, eschewing both conceptual superimposition and ideological bias organic to vested interests.

Drug Smuggling and the Stability of Fragile States. The Diverging Trajectories of Mali and Niger

ABSTRACT What is the impact of smuggling on political ordering and stability in fragile states? We investigate how transnational drug smuggling networks affect protection and extraction dynamics, and drive divergent political stability trajectories in fragile countries that otherwise exhibit structural similiarities – i.e. Mali and Niger. Building on ethnographic evidence, we explore the hypothesis that distinctive peace- and state-building strategies result in different degrees of resilience vis-à-vis potentially destabilising factors. To explain variation in political stability we introduce the concept of ‘hybrid state-sponsored protection racket’, in which non-state armed actors are coopted in a protection assemblage under the tutelage of the state.

Treating risk, risking treatment: experiences of iatrogenesis in the HIV/AIDS and opioid epidemics

This paper explores how poor health outcomes in the HIV/AIDS and opioid epidemics in the United States are undergirded by iatrogenesis. Data are drawn from two projects in Southern California: one among men who have sex with men (MSM) engaging with pre-exposure prophylaxis to HIV (PrEP) and the other in a public hospital system encountering patients with chronic pain and opioid use disorder (OUD). Ethnographic evidence demonstrates how efforts to minimize risk via PrEP and opioid prescription regulation paradoxically generate new forms of risk. Biomedical risk management paradigms engaged across the paper’s two ethnographic field sites hinge on the production and governance of deserving patienthood, which is defined by providers and experienced by patients through moral judgments about risk underlying both increased surveillance and abandonment. This paper argues that the logic of deservingness disconnects clinical evaluations of risk from patients’ lived, intersectional experiences of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This paper’s analysis thus re-locates patients in the context of broader historical and sociopolitical trajectories to highlight how notions of clinical risk designed to protect patients can in fact imperil them. Misalignment between official, clinical constructions of risk and the embodied experience of risk borne by patients produces iatrogenesis.

Kaparlgoo Blue: On the Adoption of Laundry Blue Pigment into the Visual Culture of Western Arnhem Land, Australia

It has been argued that laundry blue (whitener) was introduced into western Arnhem Land in the second half of the 1920s by missionaries, where it was used by Aboriginal people in rock art and on a variety of objects. Recent examination of museum collections acquired from the Northern Territory Native Industrial Mission at Kapalga in today’s Kakadu National Park, shows that the introduction of laundry blue into local Aboriginal artistic practices was earlier, around 1900. We discuss two examples of objects painted with laundry blue, a fibre basket and a bark belt, as well as broader ethnographic evidence relating to the significance of the color blue. We argue that the use of laundry blue is not only the result of access to an exotic new color but also has links to existing cultural beliefs.

Close Companions? A Zooarchaeological Study of the Human-Cattle Relationship in Medieval England.

Simple SummaryThe population of medieval England (AD 400–1400) was largely employed in farming-related activities. Cattle were crucial as providers of power as well as milk, meat, and hides and were valued economically and socially. From the mid-seventh century, cattle husbandry increasingly relied on draught cattle for arable production and agricultural tasks such as ploughing, hauling, and carting. Analysis of cattle bones from archaeological sites permits the reconstruction of herd demographics and assessment of the use of cattle for traction through analysis of age and sex profiles, and the presence and severity of pathological and sub-pathological changes to the lower limb bones of cattle. When combined with ethnographic studies and historical documents, it is possible to perceive how attitudes to cattle have changed over time. By integrating multiple lines of evidence (archaeological, ethnographic, and historical), this study reveals how the value of cattle changed over time from a status symbol (representing accumulated wealth) to a commodity. A peak in the use of cattle for traction between the mid-ninth and mid-eleventh centuries may have increased the proximity of human–cattle bonds, which perhaps diminished in subsequent years as the demand for younger cattle increased to feed a growing urban population.Across medieval Europe, cattle commanded a major, if shifting, economic and social value, and their use for meat, milk, and traction is well established. Although the changing roles of cattle throughout this period may have influenced relationships between humans and cattle, this has been largely neglected in historical and zooarchaeological studies. Data from nearly 700 archaeological assemblages of animal remains have been used to provide an overview of the herd structures (age and sex) of cattle populations for England between AD 450 and 1400. These have been analysed alongside pathological and sub-pathological changes in over 2800 lower limb bones of cattle from seventeen archaeological sites to provide a better understanding of the use of cattle for ploughing, hauling, and carting. The findings were considered alongside historical documents and ethnographic evidence to chart changing human–cattle relationships. Results indicate that human–cattle relations varied with changing economic, agricultural, and social practices. From the mid-fifth century, cattle were a form of portable wealth, however, by the mid-ninth century, they were perceived as a commodity with monetary value. From this period, close human–cattle bonds are likely to have been widespread between plough hands and working animals. Such bonds are may have diminished with the increasing number of young beef cattle kept to supply the urban population from the mid-eleventh century.

Probabilities of designed locations of ceremonial foci: the Chaco Meridian, temple IV at Tikal, and a large-scale sacred Adena river landscape

ABSTRACT Considering that prehistoric cultures may have had the socio-religious need and technical ability to create accurate geometric patterns across a large landscape, limited ethnographic and archaeologic evidence are reviewed. Simple but accurate land surveying is discussed. Since any set of existing sites at larger scales coincidentally creates accurate three-point alignments and right-angles, the critical research problem attempts to distinguish designed from random geometry. Unpublished patterns involving great kivas in Chaco Canyon and Temple IV at Tikal are tested for probabilities of design. The more expansive third test considers the location of 26 prominent Adena mounds in relation to 32 river confluence points and four highest mountains in a geographic area some 900 × 1200 km, just slightly larger than a Chacoan world. In 14 test boxes modeling the locations of the 26 mounds, 1000 sets of random points replace equal numbers in each box. Each set is searched for numbers of three-point alignments and ninety-degree angles at or under 0.10º accuracy. Chaco and Tikal tests show a strong likelihood of design at these sites; in the Adena, data indicate a high probability that some number of existing patterns were intentionally surveyed.

V. Ya. Propp’s Theoretical Views (On the Example of Russian Folk Tales)

In this article, V.Ya. Propp’s methods of studying Russian folk tales from an ethnographic point of view, to what extent can these tales serve as an ethnographic source about Russian people? if possible, he illuminates how ethnographic reality is described in the reality of a fairy tale, and its theoretical views on what the relationship should be between real ethnographic evidence and a fairy tale.

Between Tradition and Modernity: Customary Structures as Agents in Local Governance in Ghana

Local governance in many developing countries attracts several stakeholders who maintain a lot of significance in improving well-being, service delivery, accountability, and responsibility. The plural legal system where government structures exist side by side with customary structures in many countries south of the Sahara provides an opportunity to explore relationships, partnerships, and interactions among them. With ethnographic evidence from Kpandai District in Northern Ghana, this article explores customary structures not only as cultural and religious leaders with authority embedded in tradition but also as major stakeholders in local governance. The article argues that historical factors, coupled with limited government presence at the local levels, have positioned customary structures as an accessible channel to the people in the district. Customary structures have forged informal relationships and partnerships with government structures to bring the government closer to the people and to access basic services.

Ceremony, Medicine, Caffeinated Tea: Unearthing the Forgotten Faces of the North American Stimulant Yaupon (Ilex vomitoria)

AbstractYaupon (the unfortunately named Ilex vomitoria) is a holly commonly used as yard décor in the southeast United States, but many North Americans will be surprised to learn that it is the source of a stimulant tea that has been in continuous use for nearly a millennium. Yaupon is more than a drink; it is a window into questions of identity, community belonging, and how the New World was inserted into the global economy. From Cabeza de Vaca's sixteenth-century brush with the beverage, yaupon has iterated between ceremony, medicine, and caffeinated tea as inhabitants of North America—Indigenous, enslaved, and settler colonial inhabitants of North America—have harnessed the leaf's properties to different, culturally situated aims. This article traces narratives, recipes, and medical descriptions of yaupon from contact to the present, and compares these against material and archeological records to explore differences between settler and extractive colonial encounters with Indigenous psychoactive substances (and thus indigeneity). The story of yaupon reveals contests between regimes of knowledge, the political economy of colonialisms, and the fraught intersections of identity and cuisine. Despite abundant ethnographic, documentary, and scientific evidence to the contrary, the scientific and medical literature long mislabeled yaupon as emetic. This raises questions about how knowledge is transferred and how scientific authority is constructed. I argue that indigeneity, race, and class have steered how yaupon has been understood, and help to explain why a popular caffeinated product waned at a time when the use of stimulants was increasing, and “proletarian hunger-killers” were on the rise.

Deciphering ancient ‘recipes’ from charred cereal fragments: An integrated methodological approach using experimental, ethnographic and archaeological evidence

This paper assesses a series of experimentally generated cereal fragments with the aim to develop criteria for interpreting archaeological remains of ground cereals. Modern grain of einkorn and barley was subjected to processing by means of grinding, boiling and malting and then charred under controlled laboratory conditions. Neolithic replica grinding stones, cooking pots and hearths were used for the production of modern reference material, informed by ethnographic observations. In this way a range of different types of cereal fragments were generated. Our results are based on observations on the fracture surfaces of these cereals, using stereomicroscopy and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). Diagnostic features for specific grain treatments have been identified that facilitate the interpretation of ancient foods using cereal fragments. Bulging of the fracture surface is the main criterion for the identification of fragments generated prior to charring as the result of ancient grinding. Parboiling of grain in a liquid towards the production of bulgur (boiled in water) or trachanas (boiled or soaked in milk/sour-milk etc) can be identified archaeologically and in certain cases, ground barley may be distinguished from ground malt. Charring ground grain during cooking in liquid or preparing wort for brewing is also potentially identifiable in archaeological material. Archaeological finds of ground wheat from Mesimeriani Toumba in northern Greece dated to the end of the 3rd millennium B.C. are interpreted as boiled grain, dried and ground, corresponding to some form of bulgur or trachanas. Our results contribute new information towards the identification of past culinary practices such as grinding, boiling and brewing with cereals.

Horizontal and vertical politics

The spatial expressions of egalitarian and hierarchical political relations, respectively along the horizontal and vertical axis, are visually illustrated in a broad cross-cultural perspective. The dichotomy between los de abajo (those below) and los de arriba (those above) is explored in contemporary Venezuelan politics, using ethnographic and visual evidence. The socialist party, which presents itself as representative of los de abajo, has been increasingly criticized for being los de arriba both by the opposition and by grassroots PSUV (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela; United Socialist Party of Venezuela) activists who denounce the persistence of hierarchical dynamics through metaphors such as paracaido (para-shooter) and poner la escalera (holding the ladder).

Мальтинский бестиарий: птицы, змеи и другие…

The paper presents the results of a complex study of the collection of zoomorphic figurines from the Upper Palaeolithic site of Malta in the Angara region of Eastern Siberia. The materials described and analyzed in the paper were obtained during the excavations by M. M. Gerasimov in 1928—1958 and are currently divided between four museums in Saint Petersburg, Moscow and Irkutsk. Based on morphometric, stylistic, technological and use wear analyses in combination with zoological, archaeozoological and ethnographic evidence, the authors propose new classification and interpretation of the zoomorphic figurines they studied. The Malta zoomorphic sculpture is notable for its realism, attention to details and sophisticated techniques of manufacture and decoration. The proposed classification forms the basis of the information system “Art of Malta culture”.