Period Of Fieldwork Research Articles

The Mid-week Effect and Why Thursdays Are Blue: The Weekly Rhythm of Satisfaction in Hungary

Research on the weekly fluctuation in people's satisfaction has produced mixed results about the nadir of levels of satisfaction in different countries. This paper uses a Hungarian household survey with approximately 3400 individual observations. The fluctuation in satisfaction over the course of the week is assessed according to the day on which the personal interview was conducted during a six-week period of fieldwork. The analysis investigates the extent to which this is the result of a random process. Unlike previous analysis, the nadir in satisfaction (in Hungary) is found to occur midweek. This is explained as being related to workload. The results are robust after controlling for the interviewers' unobserved characteristics or the hour of completion of the interview. Modification in workdays owing to national holidays did not alter the results. The results reveal which social groups are especially vulnerable to fluctuations in satisfaction. This could have practical consequences for a more efficient work-life balance. The paper suggests questions for future research, which in particular should seek to understand differences between nations in terms of the nadir of satisfaction and to find a solution to the self-selection problem that may result in an underestimation of the true size of the weekly nadir.

Demands, identities and repertoire of protest: an analysis of the Mexican cannabis movement

PurposeIn this paper, the author analyzed the repertoire of protest that cannabis activists employ in marches and mass demonstrations. The purpose of this paper is to understand the relationship between key demands and identities surrounding cannabis movement and the repertoire of protest they normally use.Design/methodology/approachThe work was designed as a qualitative case study to build a deep understanding and detailed description of the cannabis movement’s dynamics and an analysis of its repertoire of protest. Data collection was carried out in two fieldwork periods in 2016 and 2017. This phase mainly consisted of ethnographic work and semi-structured interviews. An exploratory study was also carried out in May 2016. Information was mainly collected through interviews that delved into various issues regarding the movement’s internal composition and dynamics. As such, the author conducted 23 interviews with participants in marches and mass demonstrations, as well as with current non-governmental organization members. The compiled information was analyzed according to the “documentary method.”FindingsAlthough the Global Marijuana March brings together users, activists, civil society organizations and politicians, the Mexican cannabis movement has non-articulated demands, it lacks a strong common identity and limited resources for mobilization. These features find an echo in a poor repertoire of protest.Originality/valueThis is the first scholarly and systematic analysis of the Mexican cannabis movement in the academic literature. Further, there is a systematic analysis of the cannabis movement repertoire of protest and how cannabis activists are able to translate their demands and identities into banners, chants, performances, masks and costumes, performances, pamphleteering, and demonstrations.

Organs and organisations: Situating ethics in organ donation after circulatory death in the UK

Controlled organ donation after circulatory death (DCD) has recently been revived in the UK, as part of attempts to increase organ donation rates. The re-introduction of DCD has subsequently become the focus of bioethical controversy, since it necessitates intervening in the care of dying patients to obtain quality donor organs. Transplant policy responses to these concerns have generated new legal and ethical guidelines to address uncertainties around DCD, producing claims that the UK has overcome’ the ethical challenge of DCD. In contrast, by drawing on Lynch's call to ‘respecify’ ethics, this paper argues that ethics in DCD cannot be reduced to abstract directives for practice, but, instead, are composed and dealt with as an organisational problem. To do this, I utilise data from an ethnographic study examining the production of the ‘minority ethnic organ donor’ within UK organ donation settings; in particular, the data pertains to a case hospital which was in the process of developing a DCD programme during the period of fieldwork. Findings show that the ethics of DCD are encountered as practical sets of problems, constructed in relation to particular institutional locales. I describe how these issues are worked-around by creating conditions to make DCD organisationally possible, and through the animation of standard procedures into acceptable forms of practice. I argue that ethics in DCD go far beyond normative bioethical principles, to encompass concerns around: the reputation of hospital Trusts, public perceptions of organ donation, the welfare of potential donor families, and challenges to the work of health professionals caring for dying patients. The paper enriches understanding of ethics in science and medicine by showing how ethics are assembled and negotiated as a practical-organisational concern, and calls for further examination of how DCD gets constructed as a potential problem and is made to happen in practice.

Deadlines: doing times in (Dutch) hospice

For a person to enter a Dutch hospice as resident, a clearly articulated deadline is needed: a life expectancy of three months or less. This paper argues that this institutional timeframe of a singular, clock-timed period of more or less linearly approaching death (the end of time), affords life to unfold in hospice as a relatively clockless multitude of temporal orderings enacted by staff and residents (the time of the end). Based on a period of ethnographic fieldwork in hospices and focusgroup interviews with hospice staff, I analyse how temporal orderings manifest and intersect in different ways. The quality of these intersections presence end-of-life normativities in ways that may be instructive when designing and reflecting on end-of-life care.

“We sing to touch hearts”: Choral musical culture in Pretoria East, South Africa

The purpose of this study was to explore the culture of choral singing among children and youth in Pretoria East, South Africa. The philosophical underpinnings of the choirs, the roles of choirs within local and national communities, and the perceived values and benefits of participation were examined. This collective case study required the integration of standard ethnographic strategies employed over the course of a month-long period of fieldwork and two shorter follow-up visits. I observed approximately 40 hours of rehearsal and 25 hours of performance, focusing on five choirs in and around the University of Pretoria. I also conducted 22 semi-structured interviews with choristers, directors, staff members, and parents. Participants identified a philosophy of “message bearing” as the primary goal of choral performance. Innovation and diversity in programming and competition were additional emergent themes related to this philosophy. Choirs were found to have multiple roles, including recruiting and marketing, promoting diverse South African musical cultures, and cultivating a national, South African identity. Participants described a wide range of musical, social, educational, and personal benefits associated with participation, with choristers most commonly alluding to choir as a means of “relaxing.” Choir emerged as a source of bridging social capital, encouraging cooperation among participants from diverse racial and cultural backgrounds, promoting intercultural understanding and trust, and cultivating a broadened sense of national South African identity.

What influences a woman’s decision to access contraception in Timor-Leste? Perceptions from Timorese women and men

Timor-Leste’s Maternal Mortality Ratio remains one of the highest in Asia. There is ample evidence that maternal deaths may be reduced substantially through the provision of good-quality modern methods of contraception. Many Timorese women wish to stop or delay having children. However, even when health services make contraception available, it does not mean that people will use it. Collaborating with Marie Stopes Timor-Leste, this qualitative research project used decolonising methodology to explore perceived influences contributing to contraceptive choices, and gain insight into how women’s decisions to access contraception in Timor-Leste occur. Over two fieldwork periods (2013 and 2015), we used focus group discussions and structured interviews to speak with 68 women and 80 men, aged 18–49 years, across four districts of Timor-Leste. Findings demonstrate that the decision to access contraception is often contentious and complicated. These tensions echo concerns and ambiguities contained within global and national reproductive health policy. Overwhelmingly, participants emphasised that despite her wishes, a woman can only rarely exercise her right to access contraception freely and independently. She is most often constrained by family, cultural, traditional and educational influences.

Resilience of socio-ecological systems in volcano risk-prone areas, but how much longer? Assessment of adaptive water governance in Merapi volcano, Central Java, Indonesia

In 2012, about 1.3 million people lived on the slopes of Merapi, one of the most active volcanoes in the eastern part of Java Island in Indonesia. A majority of Merapi inhabitants, grouped together in small villages, live off agricultural income, relying on hydraulic infrastructures for their daily activities. Not only do these farming activities require a substantial amount of water, but an entire community in one village also depends on water resources to maintain its organization and functioning. The proximity of water availability and its access with community dependence on it is well illustrated by the first water management position in the community initiatives: the term socio-hydraulic system highlights the dependency of the community organization profile on water resources. However, the eruption of Merapi in 2010 and the following pyroclastic flow or lahar-related crises have recently made water availability and access to water the main challenges to be addressed by the hydraulic community. Many research projects have highlighted actions taken by the Merapi communities to face successive disasters using the resilience concept, which is closely linked to sustainability. However, the interviews we carried out in 2013, 3 years after the eruption and a few months after lahar recurrences, revealed persistent fragilities and readjustments to water management in hazard-prone areas. This present work first aims to discuss multiple social vulnerabilities and in some cases, the capacity to adapt, by investigating the hydraulic community’s responses in the face of lahar issues after the 2010 Merapi eruption. In order to reassess the resilience concept and to draw the limits of its operative aspects, studies of multi-dimensional responses to the interviews and of explicative factors have been developed within the Merapi community. Focusing on resources, people’s roles and socio-environmental risks, we discuss the main influence of the ‘cultures of risks’ observed through a 1-month period of fieldwork, a notion that add another focus to the notion of local resilience(s): in doing so, we defend the idea that risk assessments must be undertaken through a systemic approach, focusing on the coupled-notion vulnerability/resilience, and we question the limits of the operative aspect and the durability of the resilience concept on longer temporality and geographical scales.

An experiment in story-telling: reassembling the house in Ladakh

In 2013, my friend from previous periods of fieldwork, Deen Khan, suggested we photograph some of his favourite belongings and the few packed-away memories that he had managed to retrieve from one of his stores at the time. Other Ladakhis were puzzled by Deen’s extensive and haphazard collection but he and I made a small ‘storyboard’ from some of the objects, which I explore in relation to Deen’s unfolding biography from 2013-2017. The storyboard, as a collaborative endeavour, becomes a mechanism that foregrounds the material moorings of both biography and ethnography, brings them together in unanticipated ways and illuminates their many connections. In illustration, I show how references to partition drew connections between the state and its frontiers, relations among Buddhist and Muslim Ladakhis, and patterns of familial inheritance.

AGEING ‘HERE’ OR ‘THERE’? SPATIOTEMPORALITIES IN OLDER LABOUR MIGRANTS’ RETURN ASPIRATIONS FROM THE AZORES

In this article, I seek to unpack the multiple spatiotemporalities in older migrants’ ideas about return, shedding light on the complex set of motivations and imaginaries that precede return migration. The paper springs from a space-time approach based on the assertion that return aspirations are permanently shaped and negotiated both in and out of place. The discussion is framed around 36 in-depth life narrative interviews with later-life labour migrants living in the Azores, and a seven-month period of ethnographic fieldwork. The role of spatial dimensions such as the place of settlement and the country of origin, and temporal features such as age, length of stay in the host country or stage of life at the time of migration, is discussed in detailed. The paper identifies a ‘family-work matrix’ and a ‘home-host country dialectic’ as central forces shaping migrants’ thoughts and possibilities of return. The multi-stranded, time-fluid, space-induced, context-dependent nature of (return) migration decisions is highlighted and it is shown that an apparent satisfactory social integration in the place of settlement does not, by itself, prevent migrants’ desire to return.

Political Participation and Institutional Trust of Young Adults in Ukraine: Matching Economic and Political Conditions with European Social Survey Fieldwork Periods, 2004–2012

Political Participation and Institutional Trust of Young Adults in Ukraine: Matching Economic and Political Conditions with European Social Survey Fieldwork Periods, 2004–2012

O Beco dos Artistas e a subversão das normas de gênero

O presente artigo é resultado de uma etnografia realizada, durante três anos, sobre um espaço de sociabilidade GLS denominado Beco dos Artistas, em Salvador-BA. O seu intuito é articular teoria e prática e, para isso, recorre a teorias que versam sobre o corpo e o gênero e analisa os dados que emergem do campo à luz dessas reflexões teóricas. A título de apresentação, o Beco dos Artistas possuía, no período de campo, quatro bares – Green Bar, Bar Cultural, Bar de Eduardo e Camarim – e o espaço da rua. Os relatos contidos nesse artigo versam tanto sobre o comportamento quanto sobre as práticas dos frequentadores nesses espaços.

Capital accumulation and capital controls in South Africa: a class perspective

ABSTRACTThe article analyses capital controls (CC) in South Africa in light of the historically and geographically specific social relations of production. It highlights the role that CC have historically played in reproducing particular forms of capital accumulation, and sheds light on the CC currently implemented by the state. The analysis draws upon quantitative data from the national accounts, descriptive data on CC from policy documents, and interviews conducted during a period of extensive fieldwork. The article makes three main arguments. First, CC have played a key role in facilitating the reproduction of essential capitalist social forms, namely the state and money, and have been instrumental in the management of class relations. Second, the concrete forms that CC have taken are inseparable from the historical-geographical specificity of accumulation and the uneven unfolding of crises and social class struggles. Third, working classes have had an active (though indirect) role in shaping CC policies.

Indigenous and Intercultural Education in Latin America: Assimilation or Transformation of Colonial Relations in Colombia

ABSTRACTScholars have questioned whether experiences in indigenous university education in Latin America are institutional arrangements for emphasizing diversity within a neoliberal multiculturalist fashion or if they are innovative pathways to transform colonial relations of power and knowledge systems. One might think that as happened with primary and secondary education, the growth of institutional experiences in indigenous university education in Latin America and the Caribbean simply served the purpose of consolidating a homogenous citizenry in liberal states. This paper offers three different cases on Indigenous education in Colombia to examine this question. The outcomes are significant because regardless of the type of university, the main difference lies in whether indigenous education (universities or programs) were planned and established with and from indigenous peoples and not simply for Indigenous people. The participation of Indigenous organizations was decisive in the scope and objectives of each case analyzed. The data were collected during several periods of field work in 2014 and 2015. The research process involved an extensive literature review, conversations with Indigenous scholars and leaders of two Indigenous experiences on university education, and an analysis of the PAES initiative at the National University of Colombia.

Debate

This article examines the ways in which American gun owners deploy a particular ethical system in their responses to instances of mass gun violence. I argue that anthropology is uniquely situated to provide a better understanding of how this ethical system is produced, thereby allowing us to move beyond the falsely dichotomous terms of the gun control debate. Recently returned from a period of fieldwork with a gun rights activist community in San Diego, California, I use ethnographic data to show that owning a firearm brings with it an ethical system that makes the prospect of giving up guns in the aftermath of a mass shooting even less attractive to my informants. Furthermore, this article focuses on what has been called “the problem of evil” by demonstrating how my informants order the world into “good guys” and “bad guys.” This opposition becomes personified into a more general notion of good versus evil, thereby placing particular people in the category of the human and others in the category of the inhuman, or monstrous.

Duften af frihed i det åbne fængsel – en analyse af hvordan det opleves at afsone i et åbent fængsel

Sociological interest in prisons has traditionally focused on common features with most attention paid to the more restrictive and closed prison regimes (Liebling 2004; Crewe 2007). This has changed over the last 10 years in part becauseof John Pratt’s publication of his two-part article, “Scandinavian exceptionalism in an era of penal excess”. The shift has led to an interest in the qualitative differences that characterise different kinds of prison regimes and has createdan awareness of the fact that a prison is not just a prison (Crewe 2011; Crewe, Liebling & Hulley 2014). The current article concerns the open prison, a regime that plays a big role in the Nordic countries. In the article, I investigate how inmates experience the transition from closed to open prison regimes, and how it feels to serve time in a regime without prison walls. In addition, I explore the ways in which inmates experience their possibilities for taking part in life outside the walls. The empirical foundation is based on interviews and a six-month period of fieldwork in a Danish open prison.

Grassland tenure, livelihood assets and pastoralists’ resilience: evidence and empirical analyses from western China

Pastoralists in western China are highly vulnerable due to harsh natural conditions and the poor socioeconomic environment they confront. More than 50% of the pastoralists in major grassland areas are living below the survival line; moreover, around 90% of the usable grasslands in China have been degraded to some degree, and the degradation expands at a rate of two million ha per year. Enhancing pastoralists’ resilience is desirable for the economic development and social stability in pastoral areas. As an important aspect influencing livelihoods, grassland tenure in China has not been well studied to learn how it affects the welfare of pastoralists, and what can be done to strengthen their resilience. Based on the evidence from four periods of fieldwork conducted by the authors during 2005–2014, the study applies an analytical framework adapted from the sustainable livelihood theory to examine the interactions of grassland tenure, livelihood assets of pastoralists and their resilience. Main findings show that the existing grassland tenure arrangements cause unbalanced and decreased livelihood assets, which in turn reduce the resilience of pastoralists by lowering their capacities of coping with stresses or shocks. Of the policies and measures aiming to enhance the pastoralists’ adaptive capacity and ongoing development, building social capital is critical. Developing functional livelihood asset markets such as grassland rental markets and financial markets will also contribute to a more robust livelihood structure.

“When the Sun Rises, I Sleep”: The Ambiguities of Public Sleep among Young Brazilians on the Street

This article draws on six periods of fieldwork in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, stretching over a decade. Sleep ethnographies are explored through 24-hour participant observation among a specific street population and narrative interviews with 12 young men. The empirical material shows how sleeping on the street means making conscious choices and continuous risk negotiations, seeking to reduce risk of attacks, abductions, and homicides while being most vulnerable. The safety strategies employed demonstrate the ambiguities of sleeping in public, revealing how co-sleeping is both a way of seeking safety and a source of risk, how sleeping in the public gaze is perceived as comforting by some and detested by others, and why darkness and silence are desired by most, but sunrise and movement are preferred by some. The street dwellers’ relationships with peers, passersby, and police are in constant flux, and the places they appropriate for sleep are shaped by time and social relationships. The article concludes that the sleep patterns are responses to as well as reinforce the ambiguities of the wider social, spatial, and temporal dimensions of street life.

Discovery of the Queen Caste of the Myrmicine Ant Meranoplus pulcher Sharaf, 2014 (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

The queen caste of the Arabian species Meranoplus pulcher Sharaf, 2014 is described and illustrated for the first time. The queen caste of the species is apparently rare with only a single specimen collected over a two-year period of intensive field work in southwestern Asir Mountains of Saudi Arabia. A distribution map of the species is presented.

A Sociocultural Analysis of Social Interaction and Collaboration Within the Cooking Practices of Children

ABSTRACTThis article applies sociocultural theorizing as a tool to analyze children’s collaborative cooking practices through the key sociocultural concepts of social interaction and collaboration within a school cooking club. The “everyday” activity of cooking is examined using field notes gathered through participant observations, diary entries, and semistructured interviews with child and adult participants. The fieldwork sample included 18 participants age 9 to 11 years and two adult participants. The sociocultural nature of the children’s learning during cooking practices was tracked over a 14-week period. Observed incidences of situated learning, legitimate peripheral participation, and guided participation were tracked throughout the fieldwork period. The analysis identifies the processes through which participants are able to contribute to and distribute shared knowledge. Through tracking the collaborative learning processes and the contrasting pedagogical practices, the research identified the learning trajectory of the “newbies” via legitimate peripheral participation (as observers and silent contributors), and explored how, through fractionally increasing participation, the newbies become main members (masters) of this community of practice. The findings confirm children’s collaborative cooking practices as a lens through which social interaction and collaboration can be examined, while also highlighting the complexity of opposing pedagogical practices.

Visiones del Perú en la Antropología peruana (1941-2015)

Se orienta una reflexión sobre el papel de la antropología en el país. Luego de un largo recorrido de investigación de la realidad pe-ruana en los Andes, la Amazonía, Lima y Villa el Salvador, y los varios períodos de trabajo de campo en México, Ecuador y Bolivia. Descubriendo, el proceso político de los zapatistas en Chiapas y de los movimientos políticos indígenas en Ecuador y Bolivia, en los que se cuestiona el orden establecido y, se ofrece nuevos horizontes, no solo para los pueblos indígenas y nuestros países, sino también para el mundo entero, se presenta a continuación, la visión del Perú desde una reflexión antropológica que bien se puede extender a todas las Ciencias Sociales y las Humanidades. Es ubicar el proceso, las tendencias y los cambios que sobre el país se expresa desde la antropología.