Ethnographic Evidence Research Articles

“Immigration Knocks on the Door . . . We Are Stuck . . .”: A Multilevel Analysis of Undocumented Youth’s Experiences of Racism, System Failure, and Resistance in Policy and School Contexts

Background/Context: Undocumented youth navigate unwelcoming federal, state, and local contexts in the United States. Although previous research shows the significant impact of immigration policy and enforcement on educational outcomes and social-emotional well-being, this study sheds light on the multiple, intersecting policy, and school contexts that hinder social and educational mobility. Purpose: The purpose of the study is to elicit Latinx undocumented immigrant youth experiences in a southern state to contribute to evolving research on their experiences in K-12 schools. In addition, the purpose was to understand how undocumented youth (a) talk about the policies that impact their daily lives, (b) perceive the organizational-level structures that exist to support them in school and community contexts, and (c) articulate a sense of belonging through their community and school interactions in relation to processes of racialization and its impact on immigration status. Conceptually, the paper uses a multilevel, interactional framework to show the impact of racialization of Latinx undocumented immigrants in policy, school, and community, and relational contexts. Research Design: The study is a 3-year critical ethnography of two Title I high schools in the U.S. South that maintains particularly restrictive policies toward immigrants. Fieldwork from two school sites and interviews with 63 undocumented youth, and relevant personnel deepen our understanding of their status of illegality—specifically how their material lives are impacted by policy and institutional-level dynamics and constraints. Conclusions/Recommendations: The author shows how youth voice through ethnographic evidence counteracts anti-immigrant policies and criminalization of Latinx immigrants; youth critique social policy and institutions that seek to limit their progress in society. The implications for policymakers, educators, and school-based personnel is significant Although legal status may impose certain limitations on undocumented students’ educational opportunities, their educational trajectories are still highly determined by school structures. Knowing this, educators can respond effectively to ensure educational rights and equitable educational practice.

Preventing Communal Violence in Myanmar: Power and Legitimacy in Local Conflict Prevention

Violence between Buddhists and Muslims in Myanmar again reached international attention in 2017 when the newly elected democratic government failed to protect Rohingya Muslims from persecution. While inter-group violence is endemic, however, there are clear and strong examples of peaceful co-existence. This article draws on interview and ethnographic evidence from a case of prevented violence in Mingalar Taung Nyunt, Yangon, in 2017, to argue that engaging with the local, complex, and dynamic process of communal violence prevention can enrich contemporary theories of communal violence. The article draws specifically on insights from the theories of political manipulation and civic engagement to argue that the most effective analysis of communal violence will focus on the power dynamics that shape local responses to escalating threat. In Mingalar Taung Nyunt, violence was prevented through the concerted effort of individuals in unique positions that provided them with the legitimacy and political power that allowed them to successfully de-escalate tensions. The article contributes to the understanding of communal violence by emphasising how the role and importance of inter-group associations, government bodies, and others is shaped by the laws and norms of the community in which violence is escalating. The article’s conclusions furthermore outline how the recent military coup in the country will destabilise local peace-keeping efforts in central Myanmar and how such institutions may be rebuilt.

A Depiction of Indian Muslim Women’s Plight in Culture and Literature Around the Mid-Eighteen Century

This paper locates the Muslim women’s social conditions particularly in the Indo-Pak Subcontinent which largely arose out of two sources; a) evolution of Islam and development of several schools of jurisprudence; b) Muslim’s contact with the Indian culture. Over several centuries, more particularly from the early 13th century onward (by this time, Muslim Turkish rule had been established in India), and the impact of Bhakti movement both on Hindus and Muslims and spread of teachings of Guru Nanak and Bhagat Kabir, Muslims came to adopt many of the Hindu notions and practices. This was in addition to attitudes that came with them by their conversion to Islam. The first part of the paper deals with the effects of Hindu culture regarding status of women on Muslims. The second part of the paper discusses the plight of Muslim women in literature i.e Punjab folk lore of Heer Ranjha. It tries to convey the thoughts on several social customs, particularly emphasizing the various aspects of women’s life. The third part provides the ethnographic evidence which confirms that women, particularly in rural areas, have faced low status and problem connected with rapes, marriages, dowry, and divorces, etc. With solidification of customs, discrimination against a female endures through centuries. As a result, Muslim women were become socially backward, economically susceptible, and politically marginalized segment of society.

Peace by committee: state, society, and the control of communal violence in Bhagalpur, Bihar

ABSTRACT Why do communal provocations generate violence in some moments but not in others? Drawing on 52 interviews and archival and ethnographic evidence from Bhagalpur, Bihar, we develop a theoretical framework to explain how communal conflict might be controlled. In Bhagalpur, we find that a state-society partnership has helped the city to avoid active violence since 1989. Civil society elites gain and maintain local followings by drawing on their access to the state to resolve quotidian problems for their constituents. Doing so cements their status in their communities and imbues them with the credibility to calm communal tensions. These findings illuminate the governance strategies through which state actors might delegate the performance of important state functions, such as maintaining order, to non-state groups. They also reveal a range of tactics through which state-society partnerships might thwart communal conflict in divided societies like India.

Exploring the Origins and Expansion of the Nyaminyami (Water Spirit) Belief Systems among the BaTonga People of Northwestern Zimbabwe

Abstract Water spirits are an integral part of African traditional religious beliefs and ritual practices. Like many other African traditional religious practices and beliefs, water spirit beliefs are characterized by complex ‘myths’ surrounding their origins. In that regard, this paper explores the origins and expansion of the Nyaminyami (water spirit,) beliefs prevalent among some BaTonga people of northwestern Zimbabwe. It argues that these beliefs were exotic to the BaTonga people. In so doing, it substantiates the assumption by Elizabeth Colson and Thayer Scudder that Nyaminyami was a foreign idea to the BaTonga people. This study brings in new contemporary evidence to substantiate and extend this diffusionist perspective. It provides evidence from ethnographic research conducted among the BaTonga and Shangwe-speaking peoples living in the immediate vicinity of the Kariba Gorge area from April to November 2017. This study also rests on the wider scholarship on water divinities in Africa that explains the emergence of water divinities in different societies through diffusion of ideas. The study further examines the ways by which the cultural borrowing may have occurred, as well as the period and the extent to which the diffusion of ideas occurred, based on the ethnographic evidence.

“One Man’s Meat Is Another Man’s Poison’: Marungi and Realities of Resilience in North West Uganda

ABSTRACT Approaches to resilience in post-war contexts prioritise systems-based thinking above everyday realities. This paper explores reconstruction through marungi (khat) in North-West Uganda. Presenting ethnographic evidence, we chart connections between marungi and resilience among growers, traders and “eaters”. Firstly, we argue for a consideration of the actual resources through which individuals and households build capacity to withstand shocks following war. Secondly, we explore inequities within production lines and the effects of criminalising khat, to demonstrate trade-offs within prospects for post-war prosperity. Ultimately, we argue for process-based analyses of how resilience is negotiated in contingent circumstances.

Synergy and discount of punishment in the public goods game

Punishment has been verified as an important mechanism for promoting cooperation. Ethnographic evidence shows that punishment is coordinated within the group. Thus, we take into account the nonlinear group interaction and propose the synergetic and discounted punishment depicting how fines imposed on defectors nonlinearly accumulate within the group. We further model the replicator dynamics on regular networks and investigate the equilibria of evolutionary dynamics in structured populations. Our results show that cooperation can not be the unique stable equilibrium in well-mixed populations. However, for structured populations, the results indicate that cooperation can be the only stable equilibrium. The interior equilibrium is always an unstable equilibrium in well-mixed and structured populations, which means that cooperation and defection cannot coexist. For low values of β, the high network degree k is favorable to promoting cooperation. On the contrary, the low network degree k becomes beneficial to promoting cooperation with β increases.

‘Iñche kai che’: settler colonialism and erasing the past in Gülumapu/Chile

ABSTRACT Setter colonialism is dedicated to the elimination of the native, not just from territory but from the past. This form of elimination comes from the mistranslation or misunderstanding of names and terms that identify individuals and communities, which the colonists then use to separate Indigenous peoples from their own pasts. Many researchers have argued that the modern Mapuche are the result of ethnogenesis in the late eighteenth century, in part from misuse of the Mapuche language mapuzugun in describing communities in the past. This paper argues that, based on ethnographic, archaeological, and historic evidence, Che is the correct autonym to use for the Indigenous inhabitants of Wajmapu, the territory comprised of southern Chile and western Argentina, before the Che themselves began using the autonym Mapuche in the eighteenth century.

Competing Versions of Reality in Honduras: State Theory as a Tool for the Anthropologist Expert Witness

AbstractIn this article, I explore some challenges and strategies for anthropologist expert witnesses working on cases where home‐country governments depict an overall more positive situation than what the applicants claim. Drawing upon an anonymized Honduran asylum case, I discuss the utility of state theory for debunking fallacious home‐government sources that downplay dangerous situations while exaggerating state achievements, suggesting ways to illuminate the inherent political motivations of government reports. Honduran asylum applicants flee from gang violence, political violence, and gendered violence, now more than a decade after the June 2009 military coup that ruptured already fragile public institutions. While official Honduran government reports claim that the state is alleviating such problems by creating new programs and laws, ethnographic evidence from anthropologists working with anticoup social movements suggests that the state's security apparatus often exacerbates violence, and that the mere act of passing legislation does little in practice to protect vulnerable Hondurans.

The ritual stance does not apply to magic in general

Contrary to the author's proposed classification scheme, I argue that most magical practices are better viewed as "instrumental" rather than "ritualistic." Much ethnographic and historical evidence shows that magicians and ritual experts often have elaborate causal theories regarding how magic actions lead to the putative outcome, and the "physical/mechanical" versus "supernatural" distinction in causal mechanisms needs serious reconsideration.

Corporate Policy, Male Breadwinners, and Their Family Care in Aging Japan

A rapidly emerging set of carers are men who combine care for older relatives with employment. In Japan, a 2015 government initiative aimed at reforming work to make employment and care compatible by 2020 failed to reduce the approximately 100,000 annually quitting employment mainly due to care for older relatives. This paper aims to evaluate the initiative’s limited impact through a multilevel understanding of the roll-out of the family care policy. Stakeholder views, based on 32 interviews including with employers, the Japanese Business Federation, local care providers and NPOs, are juxtaposed with the perspectives of employed male family carers drawn from 37 qualitative in-depth narrative interviews complemented by participant observation in the Tokyo area in 2019. The ethnographic fieldwork evidences informants’ diverse engagement with care for older relatives underpinned by strongly held cultural views of care provision being a ‘private’ issue, which contrasts with government attempts to make family care a ‘social’ issue by broadening stakeholder participation. Further, corporates tend to have tacit reluctance to transform working practices to accommodate care. Thus, employed men’s devotion to work competes with the culturally embedded notion that carers should be committed to care provision. In conclusion, such a disjuncture is a major factor in the government initiative’s failure. Although cultural values and meanings in policy evaluation theories are often neglected, this research points to the significance of ongoing (re)construction of the socio-cultural notions congruent with social policy enablement.

A cognitive account of manipulative sympathetic magic

ABSTRACT Frazer’s theory of sympathetic magic has been extremely influential in both anthropology and comparative religion, yet the manipulative aspect has not been adequately theorized. In this paper, I formalize sympathetic magical action and offer a naturalistic explanation of manipulative sympathetic magic by attributing it to a combination of environmental regularities (i.e., things that are similar and/or physically proximate tend to co-vary) and human causal cognition (i.e., the tendency to mistake correlation as causation), and supply ample ethnographic and historical evidence for my arguments. In doing so I also specify the variables involved and re-classify sympathetic magic into four distinct types for analytic convenience.

Economic Change and Occultic Sika Bone: Market Women’s Responses to Increased Financialization in Ghana

AbstractSet in a context where material accumulation is valorized, this article analyzes narratives of sika bone (bad money) as expressions of economic uncertainty by market women operating in an era of increased financialization. The ethnographic evidence supports previous arguments about the impact of economic change in this millennium, a change that fosters both rationality and superstition in equal measure. Salifu proposes that sika bone indicates a sense of uncertainty fostered by economic change in the supply of cash and formal credit, a sentiment that is expressed by applying old notions about occultic means of accumulation to new and equally enigmatic circumstances.

Reflective Design in Action: A Collaborative Autoethnography of Faculty Learning Design

Research on how university faculty design courses has been limited and marked by modest detail on faculty design processes. Addressing this gap, seven faculty members supported by an educational developer at a teaching-intensive university used collaborative autoethnography (CAE) to explain how university faculty engage in reflective, iterative approaches to learning design. Collaborative analysis and interpretation of systematically collected data drawn from individual experiences in learning design reveal how faculty use reflection as a tool in learning design to recognize problems, devise solutions and constructively process emotions. Through reflection, faculty identify design solutions that are responsive to circumstances during course delivery, capture reasoning that informs design solutions for future course iterations and accurately gauge the appropriate timing of design changes based on factors such as scale and feasibility. This article offers detailed ethnographic evidence and new findings that enrich our understanding of claims made in previous interview-based studies of faculty design.

BRIQUETAGE AND BRINE: LIVING AND WORKING AT THE CLASSIC MAYA SALT WORKS OF EK WAY NAL, BELIZE

AbstractSystematic flotation survey and spatial analysis of artifacts at the submerged salt work of Ek Way Nal reveal evidence of a residence, salt kitchens, and additional activities. Ek Way Nal is one of 110 salt works associated with a Late to Terminal Classic (A.D. 600–900) salt industry known as the Paynes Creek Salt Works. Wooden posts that form the walls of 10 buildings are remarkably preserved in a peat bog below the sea floor providing an opportunity to examine surface artifacts in relation to buildings. Numerous salt kitchens have been located at the Paynes Creek Salt Works by evidence of abundant briquetage—pottery associated with boiling brine over fires to make salt. As one of the largest salt works with 10 buildings, there is an opportunity to examine variability in building use. Systematic flotation survey over the site and flagging and mapping individual artifacts and posts provide evidence that the Ek Way Nal salt makers had a residence near the salt kitchens, along with evidence of salting fish for subsistence or surplus household production. The results are compared with ethnographic evidence from Sacapulas and other salt works.

Are some cultures more mind-minded in their moral judgements than others?

Cross-cultural research on moral reasoning has brought to the fore the question of whether moral judgements always turn on inferences about the mental states of others. Formal legal systems for assigning blame and punishment typically make fine-grained distinctions about mental states, as illustrated by the concept of mens rea, and experimental studies in the USA and elsewhere suggest everyday moral judgements also make use of such distinctions. On the other hand, anthropologists have suggested that some societies have a morality that is disregarding of mental states, and have marshalled ethnographic and experimental evidence in support of this claim. Here, we argue against the claim that some societies are simply less ‘mind-minded’ than others about morality. In place of this cultural main effects hypothesis about the role of mindreading in morality, we propose a contextual variability view in which the role of mental states in moral judgement depends on the context and the reasons for judgement. On this view, which mental states are or are not relevant for a judgement is context-specific, and what appear to be cultural main effects are better explained by culture-by-context interactions.This article is part of the theme issue ‘The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling’.

Cloaks and torsos: image recognition, ethnography and male initiation events in the rock art of the Western Cape

ABSTRACT Ethnographers and anthropologists have noted that no examples of group male initiation rituals have been recorded among the southern San, although they are known to have taken place further north in Angola, Botswana and Namibia. A detailed rock painting in the southwestern Cape Cederberg, South Africa, is composed in such a way that we argue that it is evidence that ‘initiation camps’ for young men did also take place in the Cape and were recorded in painted form. Of critical importance to the understanding of the imagery is the relationship between male hunter, the eland as quintessential prey animal and the transformation of the skin of the eland torso into a worn cloak. We suggest that conventional depictions of cloaks, highlighting that transformation, were used to identify initiated figures whereas naked figures were to be understood as initiates or uninitiated. All human figures in this composition are, we submit, men by sex, by gender or by both. Under discussion is the recognition of imagery and the role of ethnographic evidence in such recognitions.

Re-Thinking Protection for LGBTI Refugees in Kampala, Uganda: A Relational, Trust-Based Approach

Abstract This article problematises protection for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) refugees in contexts of state-condoned persecution against this group. Based on ethnographic evidence from Kampala, Uganda, we draw attention to the homogenising tendencies of centralised protection systems in cities in the global south, which are primarily centred on nationality-based communities. We examine the processes of social exclusion that limit the involvement of LGBTI refugees from the Great Lakes Region in such communities, de facto placing them outside the parameters of institutional refugee protection. We then focus on their relational experiences of protection and safety within the office of an LGBTI support group in Kampala and argue for a micro-level approach that considers how LGBTI refugee protection is grounded in the geopolitics of the everyday. Our findings underscore the limitations of institutional policy and practice, which continues to overlook the protection gap that exists for LGBTI persons within the refugee population in Uganda. In order to remedy this protection gap, we suggest that a critical reconsideration is needed of the participatory spaces and cooperation between LGBTI refugee-led advocates and refugee serving institutions and decision-makers.

Antagonism beyond employment: how the ‘subordinated agency’ of labour platforms generates conflict in the remote gig economy

AbstractThis article investigates why gig economy workers who see themselves as self-employed freelancers also engage in collective action traditionally associated with regular employment. Using ethnographic evidence on the remote gig economy in North America, the UK and the Philippines, we argue that labour platforms increase the agency of workers to contract with clients and thus reduce the risk of false self-employment in terms of the worker–client relationship. However, in doing so, platforms create a new source of subordination to the platform itself. We term this phenomenon ‘subordinated agency’, and demonstrate that it entails a ‘structured antagonism’ with platforms that manifests in three areas: fees, competition and worker voice mechanisms. Subordinated agency creates worker desire for representation, greater voice and even unionization towards the platform, while preserving entrepreneurial attitudes towards clients.

Master Frame and Flat Floor-Timber: An ‘Architectural Signature’ of the Mediterranean Shipyards?

This article is an attempt to analyse the master frame form characterised by a flat floor-timber, a sharp or shaped turn of the bilge, and more or less straight sides. This form of master frame is associated with the Mediterranean architecture of the ‘frame-based’ principle, as attested from the end of the 5th century to the beginning of the 6th century AD Dor 2001/1 shipwreck (Israel), which is considered as one of the five origins (Root 4: Nilotic-riverine) of the ‘frame-based’ architecture. A series of medieval and modern wrecks of coastal ships and galleys bear witness to this form of master frame linked more generally to the Mediterranean whole moulding. In view of the consistency of these archaeological as well as ethnographic evidence on traditional Mediterranean shipbuilding, this form of master frame with a flat floor-timber appears to be one of the most revealing ‘architectural signatures’ of the practices of Mediterranean shipyards.