Ethnographic Site Research Articles

Placing 'Queer' within the Department: Researching Non-Normativity in the Washington, DC Police Department

This paper is a reflexive exercise of what I perceive to be informants' readings of my subject position at the ethnographic site. Not only is such reflexivity essential to one's own research project but also a broader discussion of the relationship of anthropology (and anthropologists) to those they study.This paper was presented at the American University, Washington, DC College of Arts and Sciences Ann Robyn Mathias Research Conference and received the Outstanding Presentation by a Graduate Student award.

Local discourse and global research: The role of local knowledge

Detailed analysis of transcripts is a time-honored practice among linguistic ethnographers. In contemporary research, however, interactions among global forces distant from ethnographic sites are critical for analysis and explanation, as is the fact that multiple sites must be covered. Ethnographers' interests, pragmatic relevance, and personal deixis militate against the ability of site-specific talk to serve as raw material for construction of the representations of those distant global forces. In this article, local discourse, as manifested in ethnographic oral-history interviews, is viewed first as a test of the impact of those global forces. Second, the talk is a construction that can be explained in terms of those forces' linkage with global representations. Finally, the concept “fractal” is suggested as a possible way to show such links.NOTE: Support by NIH/NIDA grant no. DA-10736 is gratefully acknowledged.

(Re) Visioning the Ethnographic Site: Interpretive Ethnography as a Method of Pedagogical Reflexivity and Scholarly Production

This article uses and advocates the use of interpretive ethnography as a method of pedagogical reflexivity and scholarly production. Specifically, it seeks to further the discussion of the classroom as a cultural site that places the teacher as both participant and observer in the intense cultural negotiation of lived experience, curriculum, and politics of education. Using the constructive metaphor of pedagogy as drag, the project also suggests that similar to drag (and the performance of gender), pedagogy is about what teachers reveal and what they conceal in the classroom and why. To that extent, the article uses a series of reflective poetic excursions on the nature and experience of viewing and discussing the performance of drag. These excursions take the author away from the formal construct of the classroom but always bring him back to the constructed nature of pedagogy as drag, blurring the boundaries between place and space.

Going for the Global: The Case of Ecstasy

Anthropologists now routinely use global factors to describe and explain meanings and practices uncovered in specific ethnographic sites. In our efforts to explain illicit drug epidemics, we participate in this shift, since changes in a system of illicit drug production and distribution are always a part of the story. In the case study presented here--the increasing use of ecstasy in the late 1990s--we deal with two new problems. First, global and diffuse use of a drug that typically does not bring about clinical dependence makes the selection of a specific ethnographic site less relevant than it has been in past cases. Second, the system for production and delivery lacks the clear organization of such systems in past cases of heroin and cocaine. We conclude with a call, as have many others, for more development of an old anthropological idea, a nonsite-specific global anthropology, one that may also enable more effective participation in many kinds of policy discourse.

Global Ethnography

▪ Abstract Globalization poses a challenge to existing social scientific methods of inquiry and units of analysis by destabilizing the embeddedness of social relations in particular communities and places. Ethnographic sites are globalized by means of various external connections across multiple spatial scales and porous and contested boundaries. Global ethnographers must begin their analysis by seeking out “place-making projects” that seek to define new kinds of places, with new definitions of social relations and their boundaries. Existing ethnographic studies of global processes tend to cluster under one of three slices of globalization—global forces, connections, or imaginations—each defined by a different kind of place-making project. The extension of the site in time and space poses practical and conceptual problems for ethnographers, but also political ones. Nonetheless, by locating themselves firmly within the time and space of social actors “living the global,” ethnographers can reveal how global processes are collectively and politically constructed, demonstrating the variety of ways in which globalization is grounded in the local.

Critical Ethnography in the Time of Globalization: Toward a New Concept of Site

The purpose of this article is to provide one possible answer to the question of how ethnography can remain useful in the age of globalization in which the assumption of a well-bounded site is harder to maintain than ever. The author bases the answer on the example of research, a historical study of the concept of waste involving the case study of a siting controversy around a planned waste incinerator in Hungary. The author argues that George Marcus's solution to the problem above is limited and instead suggests to redefine the concept of ethnographic site by adopting Doreen Massey's global sense of place. The article tackles two political implications of this choice: the subject position of the ethnographer in multiple fields and the consequences for a critical environmental sociology.

Practicing Anthropology in Australia: An Introduction

Applied anthropology in Australia is an increasingly sought after and diverse field of social inquiry and research application. There are several reasons for this interest, including substantial anthropological involvement in the land claims process during the past three decades. Such a process has resulted in anthropologists working for Indigenous groups and land councils, documenting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander interests in land and sea, negotiating resource development agreements, undertaking ethnographic site surveys, presenting evidence in court. A number of contributions to this special edition of Practicing Anthropology provide details of these practical applications of anthropology in Australian settings. Nicolas Peterson describes some of the historial background to the introduction of land rights legislation in the Northern Territory, and Jim Birckhead discusses cultural heritage issues in national parks in New South Wales. Birckhead and Toussaint also raise concerns about anthropological practice and the ethics and politics of representation, including with reference to the relationship between gender and culture.

The Ethnography of Infrastructure

This article asks methodological questions about studying infrastructure with some of the tools and perspectives of ethnography. Infrastructure is both relational and ecological—it means different things to different groups and it is part of the balance of action, tools, and the built environment, inseparable from them. It also is frequently mundane to the point of boredom, involving things such as plugs, standards, and bureaucratic forms. Some of the difficulties of studying infrastructure are how to scale up from traditional ethnographic sites, how to manage large quantities of data such as those produced by transaction logs, and how to understand the interplay of online and offline behavior. Some of the tricks of the trade involved in meeting these challenges include studying the design of infrastructure, understanding the paradoxes of infrastructure as both transparent and opaque, including invisible work in the ecological analysis, and pinpointing the epistemological status of indictors.

Resituating the Place of Educational Discourse in Anthropology

This critical essay examines the place of educational discourse in contemporary anthropology. I address the growing influence of “cultural studies” frameworks in anthropology—especially in research on popular culture, media, and identity—and the corresponding neglect of specifically educational discourses and practices, in and out of schools. To illustrate, I briefly examine recent research by four noted cultural anthropologists who mention the effects of schools at their field sites but pay insufficient attention to complex educational discourses and practices. Then I address the reasons why most contemporary anthropologists outside the subfield of “anthropology of education” ignore or downplay the role of modern schools in structuring identities and power relations, both locally and globally. I end with a programmatic synthesis: to recognize and account for the continuing power of schools in most contemporary ethnographic sites, even as we broaden our vision of “education” and extend our analytic tools well beyond schools. This resituating of educational discourse in anthropology might accomplish two important things. First, it could arrest the trend toward subfield specialization and provide a more unifying research program. Second, it would promote anthropology's renewed engagement with some of the most pressing problems of democracy and public policy, fostering an organic link between our multiple roles as teachers, researchers, and institutional actors, [education, identity, cultural studies, ethnographyJ

Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach

Capis An Edaphic Approadi. DANIEL MILLER New York: Be% 1997; x + 357 pp. On a first reading Capitalism appears scattered and confusing; on a second reading it is significant and provocative. The first reading stems from Capitalism's seemingly erratic jumps from one social context to another and from one agent's perspective to another's in its descriptions of commodity production in Trinidad, Capitalism's ethnographic site. A second reading clarifies Miller's major proposition: commodities are produced not only as objects with market by manufacturers, but also as of value, Miller's key concept, by brand owners, advertising executives (Capitalism's research foci, heretofore neglected by anthropologists), and even consumers. That reading also reveals how those projects generate social and cultural contradictions among and between such producers. For example, Trinidadian sweet drink manufacturers seek market share and profit through creating local and transnational brand name reputations, as well as through advertising agents' ads and promotions. Yet, brand names and products are also projects of value. Solo company's sweet drinks wear the oldest, indigenous brand name. Its brand, therefore, represents authentic Trinidadian nationalism; loyalty to the brand is loyalty to Trinidadian identity. But in other contexts Trinidadians identify as global consumers of higher quality foreign drinks. Coke, therefore, lends its reputation for quality to its local franchiser, Cannings. Local company executives face the problems of positioning the company in the market and of positioning themselves within larger global conglomerates. They represent themselves to conglomerates as having local expertise necessary to reinterpret or replace homogenized, global marketing campaigns by locally relevant, but for conglomerates more expensive, ones despite suspected lesser effectiveness. Conglomerates often accede so as to increase the local office's importance and because consumer reaction is unpredictable. of a local branch's nationalism, therefore, structurally contradicts that of its conglomerate's globalism. Profitability is not the only value at issue; material culture's logic cannot be reduced to market culture's commodities. Rather, commodities are complex symbolic formations (p. 4) produced and reproduced by multiple agents in a dynamic history of production, distribution, and consumption. Advertising agents create ads using their own models of consumer preferences as well as current aesthetic and professional models. The result is a genre of capitalist realism . . . a kind of hyperreal idealized world of (p. 191). It has its own self-referential standards and expectations about which Trinidadians are highly sophisticated, because for them the world of ads is similar to the world of cinema elsewhere. Consumers also have their own categories and discourses: red drinks stand for East Indians and black drinks for Africans. Yet, consumers in each ethnic group tend to drink and identify with a drink's other qualities in the opposed category, for example, Indians consume Coke, a black drink, because of its modernity. Commodities such as drinks become, therefore, objectifications, out of commerce's control, for projects of whereby each group appropriates imaginary aspects of the other's identity. Surprisingly, advertising executives tend to ignore consumers' categories for their own. Reactive fear of competitors, networks of social peers, and unpredictability of consumer reaction, more than profitability, motivate them. Miller concludes that cultures of consumption and production can operate separately, because assigning blame for advertising campaign failures is difficult. …

Pioneering women revisited: Representations of gender in some Israeli settlement museums

This study examines the representation of women in museums that are devoted to the preservation and celebration of the Zionist nation-building ethos of the 1920s and 1930s (i.e., Israel's pre-state era). These representations are encoded in the rhetoric of the museum guides. In the official discourse and the interpretive stances to which they give voice, the museums that provided ethnographic sites for this inquiry uphold the prevalent myth of gender equality in pioneering groups as if relates to women's participation in the male-dominated pubic sphere of “productivity” in agricultural and road construction work. At the same time, they reproduce representations of women as ambivalent participants in the pioneering enterprise. Their positioning within the redefined domestic sphere of communal living, women all too often remain marginalized participants; at times they are even “storified” as essentially objects of the male gaze.

Reconstruction of the ethnographic field sites: Mediating identities: Case study of a Bohra Muslim woman in Lamu (Kenya)

Abstract The notion of the ethnographic field site as a bounded and discrete unit has come under increased scrutiny with some reaching the realization that anthropologists and their subjects of research form part of an interdependent world. A key concern identified is that demarcation of experiential knowledge of field from theoretical discourse of the academia has obscured and problematized the issue of multiple and translocal identities. Deconstruction of the process (fieldwork) and product (written account) of anthropological enterprise has, nevertheless, sustained the assumption that it is the anthropologists who are the quintessence of mobility, a status that makes them the omnipotent “seers.” On the other hand, the people in the field, (the natives), are immobilized in settings where they are studied. This form of reification affects researched, Third World women the most, as their active engagement in the construction of multiple identities remains unnoticed. This paper engages in the debate over the reconstruction of the field, based on my indigenous research experiences among Ismaili Muslims in Western Canada and Bhora Muslims in Lamu (Kenya). These experiences are discussed in relation to multiple identities of a Bohra Muslim woman.

Ethnoarchaeology: The need for a post‐mortem enquiry

Abstract Through examples derived from a study carried out in the New Guinea Highlands, it is demonstrated that there is a rapid period following abandonment of a site where intensive site formation processes become ‘stabilized’. If this is also found elsewhere in other cultures, climates and economies, then ethnoarchaeological studies should move one methodological step further by including the excavation of ethnographic sites which have been the subject of these intensive processes. This extra body of data should put ethnoarchaeology even closer to archaeological situations.

Racial and class boundaries

~r l '~he ' Village-No~hton," a community area of . I t Eastern City is important as an ethnographic research site because it is a prototype of the urban problem area. Northton is predominantly black, economically depressed, and spotted with urban blight. The Village, on the other hand, is at present racially "integrated," while becoming increasingly white and middle-income; dwelling units are being refurbished at a quickening pace. The Village has a deserved reputation as one of the most culturally and racially mixed--and socially toleran t -a reas of the city. Yet, skin color is a highly important symbol in public areas, used for gaining clues to the next person's social class and personal proclivities. Encounters between strangers on the street are often significantly influenced not only by a person's skin color, but also by gender, age, dress, and comportment--especially as these work to define particular public situations. Private gatherings range from homogeneous to highly mixed, expressive of a certain social tolerance within the area. In striking contrast to the generally recognized concept of the "zone in transition" as an area of increasing blight, poverty, and "social disorganization," the present community area in transition is characterized by the promise of social stability, individual refurbishment of dwelling units, and rising property values. If in earlier days well-to-do white urbanites fled neighborhoods when blacks and other minorities moved in, the situation in the present community seems somewhat reversed. The well-to-do (usually but not always whites) are moving in, and the poorer people (often blacks) are moving out or are being displaced outright. Northton is often referred to, particularly by those who identify with The Village, as "the ghetto." And it appears that Northton is being slowly absorbed or modified through accretion by those moving in and identifying with The Village. The Village-Northton area comprises mainly Victorian-style houses with large porches, surrounded by nicely planted yards and old-fashioned wrought-iron fences. During the day and after the evening rush hour, the streets are generally quiet and downtown Eastern City seems far away. Throughout the area, youthful black-male street groups are predominant, some lounging on street comers, others casually moving about. Their members are generally perceived, though not always correctly, to be unemployed or involved in the "underground economy," inclined to engage in criminal or uncivil acts. Residents, blacks as well as whites, very often presume these males to be "up to no good" until they demonstrate otherwise; the area's street crime is readily attributed to them. Black males tend not to be trusted on the streets. Such working conceptions of street life serve as a source of often subtle but enduring racial and class divisions, if not alienation and hostility, in a supposedly tolerant community area. The effects of such conceptions become even more complicated by increasing changes in the racial and class composition of the area. The transition of the area is a source of community concern; at times, it results in tension on the streets, if not increased street crime. Often, law-abiding black males find themselves disavowing criminality. This is indicated in the following statement by a young black male: