Ethnographic Writing Research Articles

Finding Words: Risk and Requirements in Theological Ethnographic Writing

Finding Words: Risk and Requirements in Theological Ethnographic Writing

Be Rising Multitude: Zombie Invasion and the Problem of Biopolitics in Max Brooks's World War Z

This essay outlines the transnational history of the zombie, arguing for the figure’s revolutionary potential. Approaching the zombie as a complex social practice, I recall its ritualistic African and Haitian roots, the figure’s transposition from Haitian folklore into American ethnographic writings, and its later Hollywood reconfigurations. Insisting on the zombie’s proto-biopolitical character, I propose to see the figure’s continued cultural currency as predicated on its articulation of political dynamics in the globalized world. Noting the historically inscribed rebellious potential of the zombie, I hold that the newest zombie novels suggest that the zombie horde can be seen as a new political subject in the era of late capitalism—the multitude, heralded by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The transnational nature of the zombie multitude is explored in this essay in the context of Max Brooks’s World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006), which capitalizes on the possible awareness-raising potential of the modern pop-cultural evocations of the zombie.

‘Kresy’ as the heart of darkness: Reading Polish and Belgian colonialisms

‘Kresy’ [ borderlands/outskirts] is a sentimental term used by Poles to denote the lands of today’s Western Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. The Polish rule in that region has rarely been discussed in terms of colonialism. In this article, I employ the framework of postcolonial theory within the context of Polish rule in ‘Kresy’. The article juxtaposes anthropologist Józef Obrębski’s ethnographic writings about Polesia region (a part of ‘Kresy’ that was polonised in the most extreme manner) with Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad – a Polish-British author born and raised in ‘Kresy’, that during his time was subjugated by Russian Empire. The figure of Conrad, whose ambivalent relationship with colonialism was pointed out by many postcolonial scholars starting with Chinua Achebe, becomes a point of departure to think about what Maria Janion describes as ‘the paradoxical Polish postcolonial mentality’: the ambivalence of being a colonised coloniser. The article is an attempt of contribution to the ongoing debate about identity and dependence in the East Central Europe region.

Media Misrepresentation Predisposing Iranian Social Divide

The Islamic Revolution of 1979 brought Iran to be transformed into a new revolutionary theocratic republic. This is in line with the raison d’être of the Iranian constitution, realizing the life of the nation and state based on the noble and universal values of Islam. Meanwhile, the existence of power competition and conflicting conceptions of authority have been reflected in its political constellation. Islam in the realm of this state is not only understood as a religious institution but also a concept of political spirituality. The hijab policy, for example, has become part of Iranian culture ever since and became a political symbol after the government of Shah Pahlavi in 1936 banned the use of the hijab through the Kashf e Hejab decree. An Iranian anthropologist, Sadeq Hedayat, well-known during 1910-1920, argued the “Islamic” culture in Iranian society was in an alienated position because it was considered illogical and anti-modern, while pre-Islamic culture is considered as the original culture of Iranian society in accordance with modern western culture. Such perceptions are ingrained in society, both inside and outside Iran. Especially when the media plays a vital role in shaping public opinion and even in decision making and political consensus. Thus far, biased or political news has been at the heart of the controversy among Iran and the opposing countries. This must be analyzed to find out the deeper issue of the influence of Iran’s misrepresentation in the media on the division of Iranian society through analysis of cleavage theory. From pre-to-post-revolution, divisions in Iranian society were exposed, such as class divisions, political preferences distinctions, etc. Answering this question is accomplished through literature studies, including exploration of the background context, theory, and ethnographic writings of Iran during the Islamic revolution and the post-revolutionary period to demonstrate the problem analysis. In addition, visual observations through various authentic and reliable video recordings and news reports from Iran over the past 5 years are made to examine what is misunderstood by the world about Iran and its people. Meanwhile, to see the empirical side, interviews and discussions were conducted online with Iranian citizens so that the information obtained could present a more comprehensive picture of the present social life of Iranians. Therefore, the results of the analysis should be able to explain how media distortion affects Iran’s political decisions. Because politics plays an important role in the expression of public policy. If the policies

Being held accountable: why attributing responsibility matters

AbstractDebates over reconciliation, atonement, forgiveness, and forgetting involve political and personal elements, with substantial investments and commitments. I contrast two perspectives: one stresses unconditional forgiveness independent of atonement; the other reflects on the importance of moral responsibility for the formation of the person. Being held accountable, for Ricoeur, matters for the development of the self. For Derrida, forgiveness is a defining aspect of being human, becoming debased when seen as a legal form of justice. I use philosophical arguments and ethnographic writings from Papua New Guinea, Cyprus, and the Holocaust to examine reconciliation and irreconciliation as strategies for either reaffirming or reimagining a common world.

Ursula Le Guin’s Speculative Anthropology: Thick Description, Historicity and Science Fiction

This article argues that Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction is a form of ‘speculative anthropology’ that reconciles thick description and historicity. Like Clifford Geertz’s ethnographic writings, Le Guin’s science fiction utilises thick description to place the reader within unfamiliar social worlds rendered with extraordinary phenomenological fluency. At the same time, by incorporating social antagonisms, cultural contestation, and historical contingency, Le Guin never allows thick description to neutralise historicity. Rather, by combining the two and exploring their interplay, Le Guin establishes a critical relation between her imagined worlds and the reader’s own historical moment. This enables her to both counter Fredric Jameson’s influential criticism of her work – the charge of ‘world reduction’ – and point to ungrasped utopian possibilities within the present. Le Guin’s speculative anthropology thus combines the strengths while overcoming some of the limitations of both Geertz’s thick-descriptive method and Jameson’s theory of the science fiction genre.

How Language Matters: Using Ethnographic Writing to Portray and Reflect on Languaging Actions

AbstractThis study examined 12th‐grade students’ portrayals of their use of different types of languaging actions through ethnographic writing about their participation in sports teams or peer groups and explicit prompted reflections about their languaging actions portrayed in their writing. Analysis of different types of languaging actions indicated that students were most likely to portray and reflect on actions related to building supportive relations with others. They also identified actions involving enacting roles/identities, using “insider language,” expression of beliefs/values and emotions/feelings, coping with conflicts, use of humor/joking, assuming leadership roles, and interacting with adults/coaches. These results suggest the value of students using writing to portray and reflect on the use of languaging actions to enact relations with others, reflection that serves to foster growth in their languaging over time. There is also a need for further research on students’ use of writing to portray different types of supportive relations through languaging.

Minds Overwrought by “Religious Orgies”: Narratives of African-Jamaican Folk Religion and Mental Illness in Late Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Ethnographies

ABSTRACT Language referencing illness and instability in regard to African-Jamaican religions was often used by anthropologists and ethnographers writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It formed part of a wider discourse prevalent at the time that linked folk religions to hysteria and insanity. In Jamaica, this association contributed to social control as religious leaders, such as the prominent Revivalist Alexander Bedward, who were outspoken in challenging the socio-racial status quo, could be incarcerated in an asylum. Furthermore, it enabled the state to turn the populace away from African-derived religions and spiritual practices in order to impose cultural hegemony based on British bourgeois values. This article examines how the writings of ethnographers in the late postemancipation era reflected, reinforced, and occasionally challenged a correlation between mental illness and African-Jamaican folk religions.

Experiments with Empire: Anthropology and Fiction in the French Atlantic by Justin Izzo

Reviewed by: Experiments with Empire: Anthropology and Fiction in the French Atlantic by Justin Izzo Xavier Lee Experiments with Empire: Anthropology and Fiction in the French Atlantic BY JUSTIN IZZO Duke UP, 2019. ix + 282 pp. ISBN 9781478004004 paper. Justin Izzo’s book Experiments with Empire considers how writers on both sides of the color line adapted anthropological tools—mainly ethnography—in order to document social life in the 20th-century Francosphere and create new spaces for creative intervention. Heeding the particular history of French anthropology and its role in sustaining the at-times contradictory ambitions of the French colonial empire, this book’s impressive project is to propose what Izzo calls “a third interlocutory mode” that mobilizes anthropological forms to envision alternative modes of postcolonial critique (7). The French and Francophone writers he discusses write themselves into a broader system of knowledge-making and worldbuilding while also gesturing toward the particular problems that come with writing from within the ruins of empire. The book’s chapters examine novels, nonfiction, and film from the French Atlantic world that incorporate ethnographic methods into the production of art. Chapter 1 considers the ethnographic writings of Michel Leiris and Amadou Hampâté Bâ during their time as colonial administrators during the Second World War. Izzo attends to the ways that both Leiris and Bâ navigated and articulated their subject positions with French Africa. He avoids prescriptive dichotomies that might otherwise position someone like Leiris—who decried the impact of racism in greater France—as an irredeemable colonizer and someone like Bâ as a misguided collaborant. In chapter 2, Izzo continues this process of positional disentanglement through a study of Jean Rouch’s ethnofictional filmography. Focusing on a triptych of films in Rouch’s lengthy career, this chapter considers how Rouch’s African actors produce a kind of self-knowledge that is inevitably shuttled along by the anthropological gaze of the camera. The result is a kind of fictive détournement wherein the director bends documentary into fiction and storytelling into ethnography. Chapter 3 marks a turn toward the Caribbean, stopping first in Haiti to discuss the legacy of Jean Price-Mars’s Ainsi parla l’Oncle on what Izzo calls Haitian “ethnographic nation building.” Attention is paid here to the relationship between the changing tides of folk culture and the backdrop of the American occupation and the Duvalier regimes in Haitian fiction. Chapter 4 takes us to Martinique, where Izzo examines the trio of Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. It is in this chapter that one clearly sees the relationship between literature and the human sciences as more of a dialogue than a process of appropriation. All three of these novelists use what Izzo names “an ethnology of Relation” to illuminate the social problems produced by the afterlives of colonialism and slavery in the French Caribbean. The book then comes to a close in France, where Izzo [End Page 226] considers the crime novels of Jean-Claude Izzo and their counter-cartographies of postcolonial Marseille. Experiments with Empire is well worth considering if you are looking for a way to think about empire and its aftermath without falling into an often dead-ended and retrenched mode of negative political critique. The work straddles a line between a metacommentary on the field of anthropology and the more traditional tool of close reading. Izzo does not agonize over the obvious colonial roots of the modern discipline of anthropology nor does he explore the ethical problems attached to ethnography as a tool of knowledge production. While some readers may find this to be a theoretical shortcoming, it demonstrates that Izzo’s project is more invested in the uses of anthropology to influence both literary and social forms. Experiments with Empire ultimately provides a roadmap in French studies for interdisciplinary scholarship that theorizes alternative possibilities for the study of postcolonial life. Xavier Lee Yale University xavier.lee@yale.edu Copyright © 2020 The Trustees of Indiana University

Uncertain Self in Ethnographic Research and Writing

This article asks the ethnographer to revisit questions about representing the self as an ethnographic researcher in the context of fieldwork, but especially in dialogue with readers through scholarly writing. How does—or can—the ethnographer maintain transparency about how their social positions shape their research questions, access to material and fieldwork spaces, conversation partners, and theorizing? Using a particular example of the author’s own experience in misunderstanding the ways in which she was received by her interlocuters in the field, this article suggests that the ethnographer must rethink how the researcher self is formed by writing about the “messiness” of fieldwork, and not relying on simple statements of positionality in ethnographic writing.

Templates of Ethnographic Writing in Organization Studies: Beyond the Hegemony of the Detective Story

Using a translation lens, we explore templates for writing ethnography in organization studies and their evolution over time through the analysis of all ethnographic papers published in the premier journal Administrative Science Quarterly, 1956-2018. We found three templates of ethnographic writing. Few early ethnographic papers resemble travelogues, as they use theory to explain a unique case based on firsthand experiences of the author. Most studies read like detective stories, using extensive, quantified data from a case and systematically analyzing it to advance theory. This template has remained predominant over time. Finally, some ethnographic papers read like postmodern detective stories, in that they attempt to create knowledge from lived experience, while also hinting at the partiality of this knowledge. This template appeared around the turn of the century but is today rare. The overall low number of ethnographies and the lasting hegemony of the ethnography as detective story template reflect the strict disciplining of ethnography into the emulation of positivist research, constraining knowledge creation in organization studies. We conclude by offering researchers some strategies to recover the strengths of templates available in the past to broaden the boundaries of existing norms for writing ethnography today.

ECONOMIC AND CULTURAL TRADITIONS OF KUMANDINS OF PIEDMONT ALTAI IN NIKOLAI SHERR'S WORKS

The paper outlines some aspects of economic and cultural traditions of Kumandins who are one of indigenous people of Russia that is referred with North Altaians who fall under Turkic ethnic and linguistic community. The author of the article by using ethnographic writings made by Nukolai Sherr (1867–?), a Russian political deportee and a researcher, describes basic elements of Kumandins of the 19th and 20th century, such as dwelling, food, clothes, names peculiarities of farming, gathering, cattle breeding, hunting, and highlights the next specifics of Kumandins' economic culture: dominance of harvesting, weak farming. On Nikolai Sherr's notice, Russian settlers had a big effect of development of Kumandins' economic traditions.

Of Braids, Blades and the Djinns of Winters Past

The essay is second in a series of ethnographic writings documenting events and practices that make the Kashmiri people’s resistance today. The protracted, violent political conflict in the region ...

Reserved and Irreverent. Some Considerations on Erving Goffman’s Ethnographic Writing Style

Discretion and irreverence are two generally recurrent features when one refers to Erving Goffman. Even if their juxtaposition seems unlikely, both characteristics are strictly connected: they reveal the distinguishing trait of Goffman’s sociological gaze. The aim of this paper is to consider discretion and irreverence not only as hallmarks of the public presentation of Goffman’s self, but as methodological choices in developing his unique ethnographic writing style. Comparing Goffman’s way of writing to classical ethnographic writings, one will realize that they are very different: Goffman’s ethnographies are definitely more discreet, but his discretion actually underlies an irreverent, critical and desecrating eye. Staying in the shadows and ‘watching how people snore’, Goffman leads an attack both on the taken for granted assumptions of traditional ethnography, and on hierarchies and legitimate boundaries between social worlds. He violates the boundaries between highbrow culture and lowbrow culture, between sociology and literature; but what is most disquieting, is his violation of the borderline that divides reality from fiction.

SCOTTISH MEDICAL ETHNOGRAPHY: COLONIAL TRAVEL, STADIAL THEORY AND THE NATURAL HISTORY OF RACE,c.1770–1805

AbstractThis paper will present a comparative analysis of the ethnographic writings of three colonial travellers trained in medicine at the University of Edinburgh: William Anderson (1750–78), Archibald Menzies (1754–1842) and Robert Brown (1773–1858). Each travelled widely beyond Scotland, enabling them to make a series of observations of non-European peoples in a wide variety of colonial contexts. William Anderson, Archibald Menzies and Robert Brown in particular travelled extensively in the Pacific with (respectively) James Cook on his second and third voyages (1771–8), with George Vancouver (1791–5) and with Matthew Flinders (1801–3). Together, their surviving writings from these momentous expeditions illustrate a growing interest in natural-historical explanations for diversity among human populations. Race emerged as a key concept in this quest, but it remained entangled with assumptions about the stadial historical progress or “civilization” of humanity. A comparative examination of their ethnographic writings thus presents a unique opportunity to study the complex interplay between concepts of race, savagery and civilization in the varied colonial contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Two Faces of the Manchu Shaman: “Participatory Observation” in Western and Chinese Contexts

Russian anthropologist Shirokogoroff and Chinese ethnographers have provided different understandings of Manchu shamanism. The former approach is centered in the psychological dimension based on the Western context while the latter approach focuses on the ritual and sacrificial systems based on a non-Western Chinese context. However, an in-depth analysis of Chinese ethnographic writings shows that the Chinese context also embodies aspects of existing Western concepts. Due to the fact that both approaches have problems in writing cultures, the author suggests that a constructive dialogue between the Western experience and Chinese experience should be conducted in reconstruction of shamanism theories.

Affective Scholarship: Doing Anthropology with Epistemic Affects

AbstractThis article discusses the potential of fieldworkers’ affects as epistemic processes. It showcases lessons from long‐term fieldwork in diverse geographical locations (Indonesia, Germany, and Tanzania) and insights from our affective inquiries into coming of age on the streets, Sufism, and antiretroviral HIV‐therapy. Inspired by ethnographic writings relating to psychological anthropology and the “affective turn,” we propose epistemic affects as a core analytical means for venturing into a nuanced understanding of the processes, situations, persons, communities, and places we study (with). The article defines epistemic affect, situates it in contemporary debates on how to make affect epistemologically productive, and offers several field episodes to illustrate how affects might open up empirically robust ways of knowing. Finally, it introduces the broader idea of affective scholarship, which advocates systematic explorations of anthropologists’ relational engagements with interlocutors, the practices they study, and the things and places they encounter. [affect, emotion, epistemology, ethnography, fieldwork, method]

On the Verge of Total Extinction? From Guaikurú to Kadiwéu in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Abstract This article seeks to move beyond simple narratives of decline and disappearance in the history of Brazil’s indigenous peoples during the nineteenth century. To do so, it examines the very sources that perpetuated the idea that Indians were vanishing: the writings of amateur ethnographers, in this case three authors who visited the Guaikurú and their descendants, the Kadiwéu, in western Brazil during the mid- to late nineteenth century. At first glance, these authors depict the remnants of a native society on its way to extinction. When analyzed in the context of colonial-era records and later ethnographies, however, they reveal important continuities in native strategies and modes of interaction with outsiders. In particular, the early ethnographies contain evidence of deeply rooted but flexible practices of alliance, appropriation, and resistance. Like many indigenous groups in the interior spaces of Brazil, the Kadiwéu used these strategies to defend their autonomy and territory during a century of challenges.

From partisan war to the ethnography of European Turkey: the Balkan career of Ivan Liprandi, 1790–1880

ABSTRACTThe Balkan entanglements of the Great Powers have long interested historians of war, diplomacy, and nation-building in South-Eastern Europe. Although tsarist officers played a central role in Russian policies in the region, historians have rarely treated their writings as expressions of specifically military concerns and preoccupations. The present article seeks to fill this gap by reconstructing the Balkan career of Ivan Liprandi, a Russian officer, partisan leader, and self-styled expert on the European part of the Ottoman Empire during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The article traces Liprandi’s effort to turn his direct experience of partisan warfare into knowledge and place that knowledge at the disposal of the Russian military command. Liprandi’s remarkable Balkan career testifies to the growing interest of the Imperial Russian military in the ethno-confessional profile and political attitudes of the local population as factors contributing to victory or defeat. Liprandi’s statistical and ethnographic writings on the Balkans are also indicative of the nexus between the military and civilian forms of knowledge that emerged in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

“Not Far from the Kingdom of God”: Shamanism and Colonial Control in Russia’s Eastern Borderlands, 1853–1917

Using the ethnographic writings of Russian Orthodox missionaries working among the Siberian Buryats, a Mongolic people resident along Russia’s border with Chinese Mongolia, during the second half of the nineteenth century as a case study, this article argues that local colonial contexts and anxieties strongly informed Russian ethnographies of Siberian religion during the nineteenth century and, in particular, influenced an important turn toward treating shamanism as a “Siberian religion,” regionally specific and worthy of scholarly treatment as a religion. The missionaries used shamanism as a means of labeling and describing cultural changes among the Buryats—changes that were favorable to their understandings of the Russian Empire as a space dominated by developmental processes that would lead towards cultural cohesion. Lamaism, with which shamanism was juxtaposed, served as a means of marking transnationally connected Buryats as lying outside of this space of cultural control, even though they were unquestionably subjects of the Russian Empire.