Ethnographic Scholarship Research Articles

The Barbara Procession Among Burgenland Croats in Horvátkimle in the 20th and 21st Centuries

AbstractThe term “Burgenland Croats (Gradišćanskih Hrvati)” was coined by vicar, poet and scholar Mate Mersich Miloradić in 1921, after the majority of Western Hungary's Croatian population became annexed to Austria. By the interwar period an extended use of the term became the norm – it had come to refer to all Croatians living in the remaining areas of the Croatian diaspora, such as Western Hungary, Western Slovakia and Moravia, who had settled in these parts after fleeing the ravages of the anti-Ottoman wars of the 16th century. Worries about the mere existence and survival of the identity of the Burgenland Croat population has been a concern for well over two hundred years. It is fair to ask the question what kind of traditions the collector can expect to find and whether traditions are still in a collectable state in the 21st century, as we approach the 500th anniversary of the re-settlement of this population in Western Hungary. In the present paper I take the example of a specific custom, the Barbara procession of Horvátkimle, to show what it means for a community if one of their practices comes to be included on the ethnographic map of the country. We explore what sort of chances a community has to revive traditions that it had believed to be lost time and time again, and how it affects the life of the community if it succeeds in breathing new life into old traditions by accepting and adapting to the spirit of the times. The paper focuses not on the vanishing traditions, but on resilient tradition constructs that have proved flexible enough to survive. It concentrates not on the signs of the disappearance and assimilation of an ethnic community, but on the scenes and means of preserving such identity. I shed light on the role of individuals and of ethnographic scholarship in the process of preserving traditions.

Pluriversal bodies: Researching care through embodied ethnography

AbstractIn this research note, I outline an approach to embodied experiences of care and caregiving in ethnographic scholarship on care. I describe how ethnographers of care and caregiving can use embodied methodologies, particularly through attending also to the cross‐cultural differences in embodied experiences. In this research note, I bring together care research and cross‐cultural embodied ethnography with my own work in Asia Pacific to outline an approach to researching care in the pluriverse – the multiple, overlapping realities of ontology, culture and experience that underpin all our lives. I draw on Annemarie Mol's conceptualisation of the body multiple (2002), Anna Tsing's understanding of awkward engagement (2005), Gibson‐Graham's reading for difference (2020) and Sean Hsiang‐lin Lei's research on hygiene (2014) to consider how researcher bodies might be useful in detecting pluriversal encounters in caregiving.

Food and ethnographies of folk life: applying a theory of food as intangible cultural heritage to Passing the Time in Ballymenone

ABSTRACT Henry Glassie’s Passing the Time in Ballymenone – Culture and History of an Ulster Community (1982) is a touchstone text in anthropological, folklore, material culture, and ethnographic scholarship in Irish Studies and beyond. In spite of its numerous references to agriculture, cooking, and eating, it remains underexplored with respect to its capture of aspects of twentieth century foodways on the island of Ireland. This essay argues that Glassie’s text (and ethnographies of folklife more broadly) provides rich material for understanding how vernacular food culture comprises intangible cultural heritage as defined by UNESCO (Mac Con Iomaire, 2018).

Surrogacy and dystopian positionality: narrative reproduction between speculative fiction and chick lit

Abstract When it comes to Anglophone surrogate fictions, it seems that one reader’s dystopia is another writer’s chick lit: whereas widely received fictional narratives about surrogacy which are set in a future North America, such as The Handmaid’s Tale and The Farm, are mostly read as dystopian or speculative fiction, the small corpus of novels which negotiate commercial surrogacy in India (Origins of Love, The House of Hidden Mothers and A House for Happy Mothers) all contain chick-lit elements. As this constellation of genres might create the impression that exploitative forms of surrogacy do not exist yet, this article brings together postcolonial and ethnographic scholarship on surrogacy with research from gender and queer studies in order to explore the wider socio-political implications of these generic complexities. Arguing that more work is needed to conceptualise dystopian positionality, the article first shows that speculative and dystopian texts about surrogacy often invite Western-centric interpretations in which the dystopian element is mostly configured in temporal terms while aspects of space and positionality tend to be neglected or universalised. Further unfolding the generic complexities of surrogate fictions, the article then explores the extent to which the chick-lit mode in the texts on Indian surrogacy consolidates biocapitalist consumer market ideologies. In a last step, the article discusses the interconnections between generic conventions and hetero- and bionormative teleologies, and it reflects on the problems which might arise when attempts to deconstruct heteronormative assumptions about reproduction do not simultaneously also question the – often stratifying – implications of bionormativity.

New traditionalism and religions of the South Asia

In the history of religions, in addition to large religious denominations and smaller ethnic specific cults and practices, there are a number of movements that combine local and ethnic features with global trends and patterns. The generalizing designations of such religious forms are diverse: these are folk or traditional religions, movements of social adaptation, archaic social movements, cult renewal or revival, etc. We are talking about the creative rethinking of the legacy of the past, its transformation, expansion, “reformatting”, re-imagining, and inclusion in a broad modern worldview context. Sometimes they play their role as catalysts for other movements and trends. They set off and complement the main lines of the historical development of other religions, and sometimes contrast with them. Almost always, they are associated with the formation of ethnic-cultural identities, the demarcation or, vice versa, strengthening of ties - real and imaginary. This article, for the first time in Russian ethnographic scholarship, examines the models and strategies for the formation and transformation of the “new old” religions of the East (especially South Asia), which have already become a noticeable phenomenon in the social, political, and cultural life of the region. The article introduces a special thematic section that features contributions by E.A. Renkovskaya, S.I. Ryzhakova, L.A. Streltsova, A.A. Bychkova, and M.B. Shcherbak.

From Savage Minds to Savage Machines: Racial Science and Twentieth-Century Design by Ginger Nolan

Reviewed by: From Savage Minds to Savage Machines: Racial Science and Twentieth-Century Design by Ginger Nolan Émeline Brulé (bio) From Savage Minds to Savage Machines: Racial Science and Twentieth-Century Design By Ginger Nolan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Pp. 284. In this book, Ginger Nolan endeavors to trace the influence of primitivism on design, from nineteenth-century education in industrial arts to the design of technologies for children in the Global South. She argues that understanding primitivism's influence is central (1) to reflect critically on design's goal to support or drive social integration at the expense of political dissensus and organized social movements; and (2) to reconsider the assumptions behind "good" design—that is, design that can be used intuitively due to matching innate human sensory and cognitive proclivities. Her book responds to the architecture and fine arts scholarship on primitivism (Nolan points to Jo Odgers et al., Primitive, 2006, and Jack Flam and Miriam Deutch (eds.), Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art, 2003). Nolan argues it tends to overlook primitivism's enduring impact in the second half of the twentieth century as well as how it shaped other design disciplines. She demonstrates how designers, building on structuralist social sciences, set up some groups as examples of an unreflective and intuitive relationship to the environment in order to derive design principles matching innate human characteristics. Although designers framed their work as a way to smooth the impact of modernization on such "savage" minds, they never fundamentally questioned economic inequalities and in fact benefited economically from the hierarchy between them and the design recipients. Nolan argues that designers therefore impaired the recipients' ability to articulate a different vision for the world, rooted in verbal rather than visual language. Each chapter weaves together evidence of the influence of anthropology on design, artifacts produced by the designers, and documents outlining their vision and discusses the benefits designers derived from primitivism. The first part of the book focuses on industrial design. It opens with Charles Leland's vision of industrial crafts education for the underprivileged. He saw traditional patterns as nature mirrored in human cognition, with two implications: crafts teaching would reconcile body and mind in manual work, and, if core natural patterns were identified, designs could be automatically produced. Turning to the Bauhaus, Nolan articulates how modernist designers legitimated their work as an evolution from traditional guildsmen by identifying natural aesthetic laws. This also enabled them to claim copyright: whereas natural phenomena could not be patented, their translation into designs could. The next two parts focus on architecture and urban design after World War II, when designers aimed to integrate marginalized groups. For architecture, Nolan builds on two cases, the Team Ten collective and Yona Friedman. [End Page 586] She argues that they represent two influential understandings of vernacular architecture in the Global South and their integration into mass housing: one seeking to identify and translate core principles, the other envisioning structures for inhabitants to build on. Here again, designers perceived the recipients of their work as distinctively spontaneous and at the same time as an inspiration for systematic design principles. For urban design, Nolan turns to the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C. She shows the reception among designers of ethnographic scholarship on how the environment shapes thought prior to language. Environmental design can be framed as a means to induce large-scale changes in behavior, especially in the context of audiovisual immersive environments, but simultaneously led designers to speculate on how human subjects might transcend their environment. Nolan concludes with designers' views on the necessary changes to education that would leverage technologies to allow children to design environments. Education is the focus of the fourth part, looking at the Architecture Machine Group at MIT and the Centre mondial informatique et ressource humaine, which supported the development of visual interaction to bypass written literacy. Technologists further argued that computers' flexibility enabled tailoring learning to children and using gamified environments to capture these new savage minds. Nolan comments that this restricts participation to preset design parameters, which are less flexible than writing, while making education a prime market for Global North computer designers. Nolan concludes with a call for...

My brilliant city: Naples, urban poverty and the ‘ethnographic imagination’ of Elena Ferrante

ABSTRACT Elena Ferrante’s ‘Neapolitan Novels’, published in English between 2012 and 2015, tell the coming-of-age story of two women born in a poor neighbourhood in post-war Naples. The international success of this four-part series of novels – named in the Italian edition after the title of the first novel, L’amica geniale (‘My Brilliant Friend’) – testifies to the enduring popularity of the urban poor of Naples as a literary subject. This article discusses several key issues of urban poverty that emerge from the series (i.e. social exclusion, ghettoization, widespread illegality, endemic violence and women’s oppression) and analyses how they are narrated, drawing on two classic texts of ethnographic scholarship: Thomas Belmonte’s The Broken Fountain (1979) and Italo Pardo’s Managing Existence in Naples (1996). In doing so, it reconsiders Ferrante’s narrative from a socio-anthropological perspective and assesses her ‘ethnographic imagination’ vis-à-vis two opposing tendencies in the literature about the urban poor of Naples: one geared towards stigmatization and the other towards romanticization. The article thus argues that the ‘Neapolitan Novels’ offer a refreshing take on a deeply stereotyped subject, countering (at least in part) the process of ‘othering’ that traditionally affects the literary representation of Naples’ urban poor.

Climate Politics and the Power of Religion, edited by EVAN BERRY

Is religion an overlooked resource in the quest to overcome international gridlock on climate change? Or is its power exaggerated, doomed to fizzle once lofty ideals meet real life? These two questions once served as the intellectual centers of gravity in discussions of religions and climate change. Evan Berry’s edited volume Climate Politics and the Power of Religion marks a welcome new phase of scholarship, one that shifts our attention from questions about the potential of religion writ large to questions about specific religions, at specific times, scales, and places. A companion volume to Understanding Climate Change Through Religious Lifeworlds (edited by David Haberman, 2021), Climate Politics and the Power of Religion aims to address three gaps in the existing literature: the paucity of literature on religions outside the richer countries of the global north (especially Christianity); a secular bias in the social scientific literature on climate change; and inadequate attention to politics in the religion and environment literature (3). To accomplish this, the volume assembles scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, with a heavy emphasis on anthropology—a natural outcome of the project’s stated aim of emphasizing ethnographic scholarship (vii). The chapters of Part I analyze the role of religious actors and ideas in national-level climate policy discussions, via case studies in the Philippines, Trinidad, and India. The chapters in Part II articulate theoretical concerns about the treatment of religion in climate research. Part III investigates “novel and emerging modes of religious engagement with climate politics” (7) in India, Peru, and Puerto Rico. Crosscutting these divisions are three broad questions, the answers to which are assessed in the final chapter: how are religious actors shaping national and transnational climate disputes, how are religious norms shaping the understanding and experience of climate change on the ground, and finally, how is climate change changing religions.

New frontiers in the platform economy: place, sociality, and the embeddedness of platform mobilities

The aim of this special issue is to bring together ethnographic scholarship on last-mile logistics work, sometimes called ‘platform labour’, into a more direct conversation with the mobilities framework. The introduction argues that although platform mobilities often employ a rhetoric of unrestricted flow across time and space, the movements of people and technologies associated with them are in fact entangled in the social, political, economic, and ethical relationships that characterise the places in which they operate, and in unexpected ways. The contributions, based in a wide range of settings globally, provide empirical insights into how platform mobilities are embedded in a range of both new and long-standing societal dynamics that cannot be described through relations of economic extraction alone.

Accounting for Culture in Deliberation through Meta-discursive Analysis

This study suggests a meta-discursive approach for analysing citizens’ perceptions of public discourse in their society, as a basis for adapting deliberative theory to the particularities of varying contexts. Utilising qualitative meta-discursive analysis of open-ended responses collected from Israeli communication students (N = 204), we examine Israelis’ descriptions of existing public debate and their perceptions of the desired nature of public debate, thus disclosing cultural-discursive barriers to deliberative practice. We found that respondents’ perceptions of existing political discourse point to non-deliberative characteristics which align with ethnographic scholarship, while their normative concept of public discourse aligns with deliberative norms. Based on these findings, we propose a theoretical premise for the cultural adaptation of deliberative theory, which suggests engaging in a meta-discursive study of a given speech community as precursor to adapting deliberative norms to specific cultural contexts.

Review: The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Diné Belonging, by Kristina M. Jacobsen

Review: <i>The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Diné Belonging</i>, by Kristina M. Jacobsen

Nationalism: What We Know and What We Still Need to Know

Amid the global resurgence of nationalist governments, what do we know about nationalism? This review takes stock of political science debates on nationalism to critically assess what we already know and what we still need to know. We begin by synthesizing classic debates and tracing the origins of the current consensus that nations are historically contingent and socially constructed. We then highlight three trends in contemporary nationalism scholarship: ( a) comparative historical research that treats nationalism as a macropolitical force and excavates the relationships between nations, states, constitutive stories, and political conflict; ( b) behavioral research that uses survey data and experiments to gauge the causes and effects of attachment to nations; and ( c) ethnographic scholarship that illuminates the everyday processes and practices that perpetuate national belonging. The penultimate section briefly summarizes relevant insights from philosophy, history, and social psychology and identifies knowledge gaps that political scientists are well-positioned to address. A final section calls for more comparative, cross-disciplinary, cross-regional research on nationalism.

The Rasūlids and the Bountiful Sea: Marine Resources, State Control, and Maritime Culture in the Southern Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden (626/1229‒854/1454)

Abstract Relying on textual, ethnographic, and environmental scholarship on Yemen and the comparative insights of research into fisheries in the premodern Mediterranean world, the present study surveys the types of marine resources that appear across a wide range of literary and documentary sources pertaining to Yemen during the reign of the Rasūlids from the early 7th/13th to the mid-9th/15th century. Although Rasūlid-generated texts pay relatively scant attention to fishing, they clearly demonstrate the interest of the Rasūlid state in both the subsistence and commercial economy that fishermen procured. Moreover, when combined with the testimony of travelers and chroniclers and of iconography on a series of Rasūlid coins from the port city of Aden, these sources shed light on the inclusion of fish in Yemeni non-elite and elite diets, the place and roles of fisherfolk in Yemeni society, the maritime symbolism current in Rasūlid times, and ultimately the relationship between shores and inland centers of Rasūlid power. In aggregate this material suggests that the Rasūlid state maintained a symbiotic political and cultural relationship with fishing communities, which had direct access to and the primary role in harvesting and processing the resources in question, yet remain in the shadows of recorded history.

Crafting values: economies, ethics and aesthetics of artistic valuation

ABSTRACT This special issue brings together ethnographic scholarship to explore the interlinking of diverse personal, social and larger institutional forms in and through which artistic value emerges. Rather than being inherent in the formal features of art objects or merely a discursive construct, value as craft signifies an arena in which beliefs, ideologies, and histories interweave with art practices, events, and materialities. The articles included in this issue, then, highlight both the constructed and performative aspects of artistic values through a common focus on ethnography and a shared emphasis on temporality, practice, and institutional forms. Accordingly, art is a process both crafted – composed of judgements and social interaction – and crafting – able to individually or collectively mobilise and enable desiring investments in its capacity as art. The interdisciplinary effort at hand retains the sociological ethos and political implications of social constructionism, while looking at how acts of valuation enable affective, agential and aesthetic responses.

Ethnography and Biblical Studies: ‘A Land Flowing with Milk and Honey’ as a Case Study for Re-contextualising a Familiar Phrase

Abstract The expression ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’ has traditionally been understood to refer to the abundance of food and fertility in the promised land. However, this article argues that this phrase has become overly familiar and thus certain strategies should be employed in order that contemporary, dominating assumptions about milk and honey in biblical texts may be reconsidered. In order that biblical scholars may refrain from imposing their own expectations or ideologies onto the ancient Israelites and Judahites, ethnographic data that exposes us to a diversity of alternative understandings in relation to food are worth being aware of prior to biblical exegesis. Through exposure to the use of dairy products and the connotations of honey as reported in ethnographic scholarship, this article offers a re-conceptualisation of what milk and honey may refer to as a pair in biblical texts. As a consequence, the benefits of such inter-disciplinary methods are made apparent.

Material Culture, Indigeneity, and Temporality: The Textile as Legal Subject

Anthropological and ethnographic scholarship examining textiles in Mesoamerica has traditionally focused on gender, cultural continuity, space/place, its semiotics, and its reproduction of the universe. Literary studies approaches interpret this corpus as another form of literacy, discourse, and ontologies. Recently in Indigenous movements, weaving and textiles have acquired a more politicized edge. In 2019, the question of textiles inspired a flurry of discussions around intellectual property, and, especially, copyrights. This article examines the epistemological divides between authorship and weaving, commons and community, temporality and ancestors and how decolonizing the tenets of intellectual property law may help protect indigenous weavings.

The Ethnography of Things Military – Empathy and Critique in Military Anthropology

ABSTRACT Reflecting on the troubled relationship between anthropology and the military, we do so by discussing the underlying epistemological, methodological, and moral claims of the distinction between an anthropology of and an anthropology for the military. Through the term ethnography of things military, we propose to reposition military anthropology as intense engagements with militarisation through empathic immersion in things military. We develop this term through feminist critiques of militarisation and compassion, through discussions of critique and empathy as part of (critical) ethnographic scholarship, and through anthropological debates about the relationality of fieldwork and ethnographer-interlocutor relations. Suggesting that an ethnography of things military relies on empathic engagements with military lifeworlds, we argue that the relationship between empathy and critique in military anthropology should be understood as a continuous collaborative (and not always predictable) process of interrogating military lifeworlds’ frames of reference without necessarily sharing compassion or sympathy for them.

Making the Familiar Strange: An Ethnographic Scholarship of Integration Contextualizing Engineering Educational Culture as Masculine and Competitive

This paper emerges out of ethnographic scholarship on marginalization in present-day engineering education. I pursue a scholarship of integration to contextualize my own and others’ engineering education research with critical, cultural, and historical accounts of engineering. I structure the narrative around the ethnographic themes of masculinity, competition, and competition-as-masculinity. Within each theme I situate present-day ethnographic observations of engineering educational culture, elaborate on those observations with historical context, and return to consider how historical context extends the original ethnographic observations. The implications for the study are threefold: (1) generating a new functional lens on engineering educational culture as masculine and competitive, (2) communicating useful historical context to stakeholders in engineering education, and (3) demonstrating the value of integrative scholarship to promote further interdisciplinary collaboration.

Congregants and Citizens: Religion and Naturalization among US Immigrants

Scholars and pundits have long debated whether religion helps new immigrants integrate politically in the United States. Those who see religion as an integrative institution cite the country’s history of vibrant religious congregationalism that supports connections between the native and foreign born, while critics point to anti-immigrant hostility, Christian nationalism, and patterns of religious membership that can reinforce social segregation. This article aims to adjudicate this debate, using a large sample of survey data, the New Immigrant Survey (NIS), fielded among new legal residents in 2003/2004. I find that religious membership is associated with increased probability of naturalizing in a short (3.5–7 years) timeframe and is stronger for those with greater human capital and income and longer tenure in the United States. Involvement in US-origin congregations also exhibits a stronger effect on naturalization than involvement in national-origin congregations. Additionally, I find that religious minorities, though less likely to be members of congregations, are independently more likely than Christian immigrants to naturalize in the same timeframe. These results are interpreted as support for a view of organized religion as a setting for American identity formation and a basis for mobilizing resources in response to anti-immigrant sentiment. For certain groups, organized religion seems to support a type of selective acculturation that combines American citizenship with the establishment and/or retention of a distinct ethno-religious identity. The article thus affirms, with caveats, the broader relevance of a long tradition of ethnographic scholarship on immigrant religion in the United States.

Quantifying Qualitative Scholarship: A Fool’s Errand or a Methodological Necessity?

This paper describes our efforts to systematically generate knowledge from ethnographic and other qualitative scholarship as a way of bridging intellectual gaps found in quantitative research. We ground this scholarly endeavor in the study of gangs, which has a lengthy history in the field of criminology, yet lacks a coherent, coordinated, and comparative understanding of gang dynamics, behavior, and impacts. We discuss the importance of acknowledging the multiple and mixed methodologies used in gang scholarship and detail the inductive, deductive, and iterative process that helped us (1) develop a comprehensive coding instrument for coding a range of qualitative works, (2) establish the instrument’s inter-rater reliability, and (3) remain cognizant and reflexive about the strengths of both quantitative and qualitative research. Finally, we share the critical yet informative challenges we faced throughout the project and conclude with reflections on why the project was unsuccessful in the way we originally envisioned.