Ethnographic Examples Research Articles

Escalation: Assemblage, archive, animation

ABSTRACT In the uncertain early 2000s when violence between Muslims and Christians racked the Malukan islands on Indonesia's eastern edge, a handful of Protestant ministers waged an iconoclastic attack on a museum collection dedicated to Seram Island's ancestral headhunting culture and centred upon statues and portraits of mythical war captains. I track the heterogeneous sites and incidents that came together in the attack, including the animation of the museum's headhunter collection, as the past exceeded the ways in which it had been previously engaged and managed materially, existentially, and in its effects. Drawing on understandings of assemblage, archive, and cinematic animation, I explore the regime of secrecy and revelation that constituted the driving force behind the museum's continually expanding collection, was embedded in the complex of buildings and artifacts of which the museum forms a part, and entailed in its aesthetic and museographic practices. Taken together, they intimate how escalation, in this ethnographic example, was an always present potentiality – one that became disclosed when headhunting's secrets burst into the world with devastating consequences. What enabled these events, among other factors, was the materiality of the collection and the matter of scale or, more precisely, the visibility of scale such that it is deemed capable of attracting the gaze – directing attention within the spiralling inter-religious violence and turmoil to the headhunter statues and portraits of the museum, triggering a ‘crisis of faith’ in its director, and leaving torn canvases and broken statues in its wake.

From Inclusion to Leadership

Drawing on ethnographic research, Scripture, and theology, this article posits that Christian arguments for inclusion with people with disabilities often fail to undermine ideologies of normalcy lurking at the heart of redemption. By reading the healing of blind Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46–52) with the pitfalls of inclusion and current research in mind, I follow theologian Sharon V. Betcher in challenging readers to resist making disabled persons but “plot props” in able-bodied enlightenment, and let Jesus’ ministry direct us to Bartimaeus’ ministry in the text. I argue that in uplifting the faith and leadership of Bartimaeus, Jesus points to Bartimaeus as the protagonist, inviting us to perceive and receive the faithfulness and leadership of people with disabilities in their seeming disruptions and evident differences. In order to aid able-bodied people in apprehending the leadership of persons with disabilities, I draw on Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s concept of disabled “misfitting,” a feminist materialist notion of disability that emphasizes the importance of context and materiality in disablement. Using the concept of misfitting to analyze ethnographic examples calls attention to the opportunities and possibilities created in disabled people’s leadership and challenges congregations to consider where their paradigms of leadership may still be oriented around ideologies of normalcy and practices of able-bodied inclusion. Indeed, congregations are invited to receive the work of the Spirit in persons with disabilities by entering into dignifying dialogue with new forms of ministry and leadership.

Informal accountability. Street-level bureaucrats’ tactics to defy bad reputation in agencies of the Argentinian justice system

ABSTRACT This article illustrates how employees of the Argentinian Territorial Agency for Access to Justice fear being perceived as lazy bureaucrats involved in clientelist networks. In order to improve their image, they fulfil requirements for formal accountability, but use additional, informal modes of accountability to underline the agency’s performance, impact and relevance. I illustrate that employees identify with the agency they are working for and are inspired in their accountability by methods that have proven to be effective in human rights movements and NGOs. Thus, my ethnographic example invites discussions in the overlapping fields of accountability and political activism.

Academization of Pious Learning: A Student’s Quest in Religious Education

This paper focuses on the move towards “academization” of Islamic religious education in private institutes belonging to the reform movement in Brussels. An attempt is made to think through this move in terms of the sacred knowledge concerned, and the alleged implications for teachers and students of Islam. Some of the crucial elements that go with this shift are the aspiration for “distantiation” in teaching and knowing aspects of internal diversity, as well as the aspired changes in the professor–student (instead of shaykh–disciple) relationship. By focusing on ethnographic examples, the aim is to contribute to our understanding of the importance of the internal debates instigated by an attempt towards academization, the search for coherence that goes with it, its repercussions on people’s daily life and personal sensibilities, as well as on Islamic expert authority formation.

My definition of religion (jubilee conference)

This text reproduces the jubilee lecture by Ramón Valdés del Toro, read in the auditorium of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the Autonomous University of Barcelona on June 2, 2000. Based on a rich selection of cases and ethnographic examples, the text analyzes different definitions of religion and leaves us, as a legacy, a refined definition of religion that confronts us with the question: do we know what it is to believe?

The emergence of the global debt society

AbstractAs a result of the financialization of household and national economies, indebtedness has become a system of domination shaping the making of contemporary subjects. This sort of governmentality through debt is a multifaceted phenomenon affecting people's economic and political behavior in both the North and the South. Disguised and legitimized by the moral obligation to repay debts, and by promises of upward social mobility (for the working classes in the North) and of development (for the population of the Global South), indebtedness disciplines households and neutralizes political agency under finance capitalism, as our ethnographic examples on the mortgage crisis in Spain and on microfinance in Peru reveal.

La spiritualité comme terrain d’entente entre la religion et le sécularisme : une approche ethnographique

This article is based on ethnographic research about the intersections of contemporary forms of spirituality and Catholicism in Italy, Spain, France and Portugal and analyses what social actors mean when they say that they are ‘spiritual but not religious’ (SBNR). We need to go beyond this self-description and try to understand why spirituality is increasingly being constructed in opposition to religion and what our informants mean, when they say that they are spiritual. With this approach we discover that spirituality, religion and secularism are not completely distinct categories but mutually constitute each other (Asad, 2003 ; Fedele and Knibbe, 2013, 2020) and that the SBNR are not necessarily unchurched (Fedele, 2013 ; Fedele and Knibbe, 2013 ; Ammerman, 2013a). Through ethnographic examples I show how spirituality represents a safe middle ground between religion and secularism. It offers a lingua franca that allows describing religious experiences in increasingly secularized societies. This spiritual lingua franca is particularly useful when addressing issues related to gender and sexuality because it allows embracing secular values without renouncing to be religious.

Cinderella of the south seas? Virtuous victims, empowerment and other fables of development feminism

The developmental logic underpinning ‘Cinderella projects,’ in which women of the Global South are targeted for interventions intended to tap and expand their unrecognized economic and entrepreneurial potential. This version of ‘development feminism,’ constructs its female objects as both impoverished victim-subjects and as nascent market-oriented actors. Moreover, development feminist discourse, grounded as it is in seemingly universal ideas of women’s oppression, equality and economic participation, generates paradoxical effects in different social contexts. Drawing on ethnographic examples from Polynesia, the paper illustrates how a homogeneous concept of ‘woman’ makes little sense because local gender categories are complexly intersected by age, socio-economic status as well as by hereditary rank. As a result, development feminisms’ gender interventions transform local individual subjectivities in novel and often unexpected ways, producing new forms of inequality while obscuring others.

Neurochemistry and subjunctivities of depression in Kerala, South India

The narrative of depression as a neurochemical imbalance in the brain or, more precisely, a deficiency of the neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine – largely produced by commercial interests of the international and national pharmaceutical industry and spread globally by international diagnostic systems – has found its way into the offices of mainstream psychiatrists in Kerala. In the clinical encounters, social, economic and existential suffering is thus transformed into a medical condition, treatable with pharmacological means. On the one hand, the setting of a psychiatric outpatient department largely shapes the way depressive patients express their subjectivities. On the other hand, the diagnosis (and explanation) of depression as neurochemical imbalance and the prescription of drugs influences the way patients experience their suffering. Using two ethnographic examples, the aim of this paper is to analyze how subjectivities are construed and shaped in the process of negotiating depression in clinical encounters in mainstream psychiatric institutions in Kerala and how multiple framings and ontologies of affliction are assembled in them. Subjectivities of depression are, it will be argued, less coherent than ambigious and fractured, unstable and fragile. They engage, accentuate and sometimes merge different, often contradictory discourses. They should therefore better be referred to as ‘subjunctivities’. The idiom of depression often becomes a rhetorical device to emphasize affiliation to a scientific medical discourse or citizenship and is often a statement to emphasize ‘scientific temper’ and modernity and to demarcate oneself from backwardness and superstition.

American Afterlives

In the United States, death practices have been undergoing a rapid transformation in the last 20 years. Moves towards creative, individualized observances are accompanied by new material practices. I deploy ethnographic examples of three entrepreneurs who make objects from cremated human remains. The entities discussed here cannot be comfortably called either human or non-human. They are both. And they are designed to facilitate on ongoing relationship with the dead. These new entities are not exactly commodities, although they may be produced through similar means. Embraced primarily by agnostics, they are not exactly religious relics, although they contain preserved parts of the human body. They come closest to being a personal fetish, or a radically material type of ghost.

Imposter Paranoia in the Age of Intelligent Surveillance

Artificial intelligence, deep learning and big data analytics are viewed as the technologies of the future, capable of delivering expert intelligence decisions, risk assessments and predictions within milliseconds. In a world of fakes, they promise to deliver ‘hard facts’ and data-driven ‘truth’, but their solutions resurrect ideologies of purity, embrace bogus science reminiscent of the likes of anthropometry, and create a deeply paranoid world where the Other is increasingly perceived either as a threat or as a potential imposter, or both. Social sorting in the age of intelligent surveillance acquires a whole new meaning. This article explores the possible effects of algorithmic governance on society through a critical analysis of the figure of the imposter in the age of intelligent surveillance. It links a critical analysis of new technologies of surveillance, policing and border control, to the extreme ethnographic example of paranoia within outlaw motorcycle clubs – organizations that are heavily targeted by new and old modes of policing and surveillance, while themselves increasingly embracing the very same logic and technologies themselves. With profound consequences. The article shows how in the quest for power, order, profit, and control, we are sacrificing critical reason and risk becoming as a society not unlike the paranoid criminal organizations.

“Traditional Mexican Midwifery” tourism excludes indigenous “others” and threatens sustainability

Drawn by the allure of “ancient cultures,” tourists inadvertently consume deauthenticated indigenous practices, including ethnomedical traditions such as midwifery. This is especially true in the case of “Traditional Mexican Midwifery” since stark differences exist between how midwifery practices unfold in indigenous contexts and how they are represented to global tourists. “Traditional Mexican Midwifery” tourism is a unique lens for examining some of the underlying, intersectional issues threatening “sustainability” in ethnomedical tourism. When nonindigenous individuals position themselves as representatives of “Traditional Mexican Midwifery” and indigenous midwives are excluded from profit chains, this type of tourism not only fails to meet the needs of the indigenous people it fetishizes, it actually excludes them from the equation entirely. While overt prejudice and racial discrimination of the colonial era no longer exist, neocolonial tourism in the form of “Traditional Mexican Midwifery” tourism subtly reinforces romanticized stereotypes of the indigenous “Other.” Ethnographic examples, gleaned from multi-sited research in Mexico and Brazil, demonstrate the usefulness of “Traditional Mexican Midwifery” for critiquing existing misapplications of responsible tourism and proposing more sustainable futures. Tourism can be an indigenous process (in which local residents both motivate and reap the benefits of tourism), or it can serve a neocolonial agenda (in which tourism development and profits unequitably favor transnational elites). Current forms of “Traditional Mexican Midwifery” tourism are unsustainable due to intersectional exclusion of indigenous women based on race, class, and gender. To dismantle intersectional inequality in “Traditional Mexican Midwifery,” coordinated efforts by Mexican Secretary of Health’s Traditional Medicine and Intercultural Development (TMID), Mexican Midwifery Association, and critical tourism scholars and activists are required.

Analyzing entangled territorialities and Indigenous use of maps: Atikamekw Nehirowisiwok (Quebec, Canada) dynamics of territorial negotiations, frictions, and creativity

This paper highlights the relevance of analyzing entangled territorialities and Indigenous use of maps in order to better understand what Lévy describes in terms of “spatial capital”—the socio‐economic dynamics and power relationships maintained and negotiated between the stakeholders interacting within the Indigenous forestland. More specifically, it discusses the entanglement dynamics of land tenures coexisting today within Nitaskinan, the ancestral territory claimed by the Atikamekw Nehirowisiwok. Within Nitaskinan, members of the First Nation negotiate the continuity of their practices, occupation, and use of ancestral hunting territories with state institutions, logging companies, and non‐Indigenous members of civil society who have interests in the land resources. All these stakeholders implement different territorial regimes that interact and sometimes conflict. Based on concrete ethnographic examples, the analysis presented here focuses on the compromises, frictions, resistance, and creativity that are part of territorial coexistence between Indigenous and non‐Indigenous people.

Interpretative trajectories towards the understanding of negative features using Terraço das Laranjeiras Bronze Age site as a case study

In prehistoric sites, the most common features identified by archaeologists are negative ones, such as pits, postholes, hearths, sunken hut, and among others. However, interpretations are not easy, and some researchers prefer not to reflect upon them, classifying them as rubbish pits while other researchers argue that these structures have other functions. This paper describes and discusses different types of negative structures and how archaeobotanical studies can guide their interpretations. In order to exemplify this problem results from the Terraço Laranjeiras will be discussed. This Middle Bronze Age site is located in the Sabor Valley (NE Portugal), where different types of negative features are the only archaeological evidence of human occupation. Some of these features were initially interpreted as storage pits, and the plant remains as the result of such activities. However, the archaeobotanical analyses compared with ethnographic examples led to a different interpretation. The results from this research show that wild taxa are more common than cultivated taxa and that the majority of the plant remains are chaff and weed seeds rather than cereal grains. To conclude, the carpological remains – the abundance of chaff fragments and weeds – are probably by-products from an early cereal processing stage (e.g. threshing), these findings suggest that the site was used for processing cereal and not necessarily for storing it.

The storage of pulses during the Bronze and Iron Ages in the East of the Iberian Peninsula: Examining the archaeological data through the lens of ethnography

Cereal storage is a widely studied subject in archaeological literature. Other agricultural products such as pulses, by contrast, have received little attention. Ethnographical research and the few exceptional finds of these products, nonetheless, reveal their important role in past societies. The disparity between cereals and legumes can also be indicative of differences between their respective agro-cultural processes. The detailed study of their different agricultural processes, such as storage or processing, can thus offer a better interpretation of the role of pulses throughout Prehistory.This article specifically presents a study of pulse seed remains and their possible link to archaeological storage structures in the East of the Iberian Peninsula throughout the 2nd and 1st millennium BC. Due to the scarcity of pulse remains recovered in the place where they were stored, structures that could have potentially served to store them are compared with ethnographic examples. The archaeological and ethnological data collected in this research has led to defining certain categories of pulse storage systems in the study, which in turn serve to identify a series of differences and similarities between pulse and cereal storage systems adapted to the needs of each botanical family.

Maisha ni kuvumiliya – patrimonialism, progress and the ambiguities of waiting in Goma, DR Congo

Maisha ni kuvumiliya – ‘Life is patience’ is a very popular catchphrase in Goma, the capital of Eastern Congo’s North Kivu province. Patience takes waiting as a starting point for progress and points to the uncertainties on the horizon. In a world of velocity and mobility, young people, who are so often forced to wait, feel frustrated about being ‘stuck’ or in ‘waithood’. Drawing on ethnographic examples gathered during longitudinal fieldwork carried out since 2008 in Goma, DR Congo, I will analyze various biographical trajectories that indicate that waiting, despite its immobilizing effects, should not be reduced to a passive experience; it can also be understood as productive space in which Goma’s youth engage in relational practices with the objects/subjects they are waiting for. The ambiguities of waiting become manifest in Goma’s political economy where gerontocratic and patrimonial politics dominate and impede progress. As context-specific practice, waiting is connected to larger discussions around youth, experiences of temporalities and political-economic factors.

Ableism and its discontents: Food as a form of power, control, and resistance among disabled people living in U.S. Institutions

Food insecurity is a significant problem in the U.S., disproportionately impacting people with disabilities. Yet, little scholarship exists about disability and food, particularly on people in institutions, with even less from disabled people’s perspectives. This article presents two ethnographic examples from different types of “community placements.” These first-hand accounts by disabled people explore the shape that food insecurity takes in different institutional group-home settings, and how one balances the competing needs of health and freedom. They demonstrate how notions of power, control, and resistance, and underlying ableist assumptions about “appropriate bodies,” play out on a day-to-day basis. They highlight an acute awareness by the occupants themselves of these power dynamics and thus, how cautious they were to be critical of their care providers. They further document how severely disabled people can, and cannot, exercise control over what, when, where, and with whom they eat—with implications for both nutrition/health and sociality/inclusion.

KULTURNÍ SLOŽKA SÉMANTIKY ČESKÉ FRAZEOLOGIE

Attention, paid by modern linguistics to studying multilateral relations between language and culture, made the author think about some Czech idioms, origins of which are not quite clear (e.g. dát / dostat něco do vínku). The word vínek in modern Czech has two meanings – a diminutive to a wreath and a ribbon. Both meanings could influence the semantics of this idiom. To reveal it, the author turned to numerous ethnographic examples and states that the figurative meaning of this expression arose as a result of the formation of the verbal noun vínek, which meant, in fact, a gift, usually money, to a newborn from his godparents.He was not laid under a wreath or ribbon, but wrapped in some kind of blanket. Other expressions that are analyzed in the article, on the contrary, contain well-known words of Slavic languages (for example, hryvnia, Kozak), are a common linguistic heritage of the past, but are implemented differently in phraseological images. The author tries to explain the linguistic-cultural phenomenon of Czech phraseology and paremiology against the background of East Slavic languages.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Short Story “Property of Woman” by Sara Suleri

Postcolonial literature, by definition, is deeply concerned with the histories, normally with retelling or reassessing the way in colonial/ postcolonial histories have been presented in colonial/ western accounts (Ramone, J. 2013). Critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a tool used to analyse the spoken and written texts to expose the unrevealed ideologies. The purpose of the research is how the author has controlled the mind of people through the writing in short story “property of woman”. The objective of the research is to highlight that what kind of lexicons (discourse markers, modifiers) are being used to control the minds of readers. The researcher has manually collected all kinds of lexicons (discourse markers and modifiers) from the story. This present study answers two questions: 1) What kind of discourse markers and modifiers are used by Sara Suleri to control the minds of readers? 2) How these discourse markers and modifiers are helping to clarify the main theme of the story “property of woman”? For the analysis of data, Van Dijk’s Socio-cognitive model (2006) based on ideology and discourse, has been applied to explain the mind control. The result of the study is that the author has extensively used the lexicons which control the minds of her readers and engaged them in story. The conclusion of the study is that the theme of the story is sociological and ethnographic example of postcolonial literature which analyses female experience in social and political circumstances. Keywords: postcolonial, literature, discourse markers, modifiers, nostalgia DOI : 10.7176/JLLL/64-04 Publication date: January 31 st 2020

Channeling, Agency, and Strategic Information: The “Semiotic Ideologies” of New Age Culture

One important aspect of religious practices and representations concerns the way information is handled. This article understands religion as a form of imagination, giving human properties to “nonhuman” agents (and vice versa), and thus, the rules of communication and interaction with such agents play a special role in religious culture. Webb Keane’s theory of “semiotic ideologies” is one tool that facilitates the study of religious norms, expectations, and rules. In New Age culture, practices of “information exchange” with imaginary superhuman agents and transpersonal forces are based on specific psychophysical techniques, often called “channeling” or “contact.” The analysis of specific ethnographic examples related to ufological channeling demonstrates that this practice forms new types of collective agency, a distinctive feature of New Age culture itself.