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The article offers an ethnographically embedded analysis of a UK‐based Jewish‐Muslim inter‐community network to contribute to anthropological research into the ethical efforts that groups seen as polarized invest in negotiating boundaries of difference. The article makes two sets of arguments. First, it suggests that sometimes such groups have to negotiate not one but several 'borders across difference' and follow diverse ethical routes to navigate them depending upon how they conceptualize these borders. Second, it shows that in negotiating different sets of boundaries, network members often use techniques that at first glance appear to be artificial or even superficial in that they build on formal rules and/or contain no promise of achieving a consensus on issues important for the participants. However, I argue that these seemingly superficial efforts could still be seen as ethical endeavours underpinned by a strong commitment to inter‐group solidarity and that they could be best understood as what Ruth Sheldon has described in her recent intervention in the ethics of Jewish ethnography as the movement between surface and depth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article exposes the need to decolonize and transdiciplinar ethnography, the main objective of the research is to propose a strong transdiscipline and decolonization from the intercultural paradigm as ethical components to redesign new ethnographic approaches, and to promote epistemic and cognitive justice in the social sciences. The methodological process included an exhaustive documentary review, through a database in web pages and academic and scientific search engines. A proposal for participation in the construction of knowledge with the other through encounter, understanding epistemic diversity, and embracing complexity is proposed. Being aware of the thought processes, promoting a new type of collective consciousness; allowing the development of heterodox and critical epistemes. Recognizing at the same level of validity the information and knowledge of western social sciences and indigenous cognition and episteme, and in general all human epistemology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an autoethnographic note on conducting fieldwork with the purpose of documenting; first, outside academia––doing documentary photography; and second doing ethnography and autoethnography within academia. It explores different ways to conduct fieldwork (alone or in groups, ethnographically or autoethnographically) and different traditional and innovative ideas about how the "field" was interpreted commonsensically in the past and could be interpreted now, using the analytical dimension of the hybrid field. It is written both autoethnographically and creatively and includes a short methodological "novel." The research note concludes with a reflection on a particular field-work experience, tackling its limitation and imagining different ways to perform it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the styles of enquiry involved in Lowland South American Amerindian shamanic and narrative discourse genres. The article argues in favour of the existence of an Amazonian mode of thinking strictly related to formulaic composition, commonly found in different verbal poetic genres and its contemporary transformations into written texts published as books by Amerindian researchers and narrators. Taking into account philosophical and anthropological discussions about speculative thinking, this study aims to revise the role of narrative verbal genres in Amerindian ethnology and its ontological backgrounds, as well as offering an alternative perspective on the contrast between writing and oral traditions. The article is based on translations of songs and testimonies collected among the Marubo of Western Amazonia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the constitutive role of blame in kinship as a practice in a low‐income neighbourhood in India's capital city, Delhi. Using ethnographic data, I show how women with serious or chronic illness express blame towards kin for their failures in critical moments: for not providing care during illness, not fulfilling kinship obligations, and even for causing or exacerbating illness. As relationships rupture to reveal the underlying precariousness of kinship, women use blaming statements, accusations, and critique to leverage toeholds of power and take matters into their hands against their families' wishes. Yet even as women forge a degree of agency through blaming practices, I show that these practices can lead, paradoxically, to the repair and reconstitution of kinship. This article builds upon existing scholarship that addresses both the failure of kinship as a system of mutual support and the work of kinship repair in similar marginal contexts in north India characterized by neglect, which render women vulnerable to negative effects. My focus on blaming acts offers a new angle on this intimate terrain, illustrating how women enact the social practice of blame to reshape the dynamics and terms of kinship relations, rather than reconciling themselves to kinship failings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A reflection on making Indigenous films in a colonized world. The author draws on his experience as an Indigenous filmmaker to reflect on the settler's gaze and its implications for an Indigenous film practice. This is accomplished through telling stories and reflecting on films made over several decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different forms of care work are essential for the practice of anthropology in South Africa. In this biographical commentary, I describe how I enacted care work in my anthropological practice. I suggest that what is good about anthropology is its potential to be attentive to the multiple ways in which care work is enacted by us as anthropologists, as teachers of the discipline, as well as by our interlocutors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revealing complexity in the world—but also creating it—is at the heart of anthropology. It shapes our engagement with theory and ethics, writing and visual style, and choice of research subjects. But does it create blind spots? I respond to this question by discussing studies of violence, and my ethnographic material in progress on British ex‐soldiers. Owing to the ethical norm of suspending moral judgment of our research participants, we tend to avoid portraying their unlikable traits, internal contradictions, or troubling actions that do not advance our arguments. Ethnography often reveals florid complexity in structures or systems, but it creates simpler depictions of the people who inhabit these forms. Yet, since anthropology has long aimed to holistically capture the truth of social life, it should allow more space in ethnographic narrative for complicated protagonists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fifty years ago, anthropologists, including applied researchers, were caught up in a dilemma of ethics and practice, in the face of criticisms of ethnographic embroilment in colonial, military, and neocolonial projects. But the epistemological crises that this provoked, together with anthropological engagement in political movements, sharpened our commitment to work with others to counter systemic, structural, and enacted violence. Today, continued inequality at local and global levels is deeply complicated by corporate globalization and climate change. Ethnographic research and anthropological engagement is urgent and critical, requiring our persistence to redress social wrongs through supportive, generous partnerships, as advocates and as outspoken witnesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an anthropologist, I have worked with people in both developing new technologies and managing existing ones. Based on this experience, I suggest that although anthropologically informed perspectives can contribute to technology development—from providing insights on particular cases to raising broader questions about a product's impact on society—the route to doing so is sometimes indirect. In this endeavor, anthropology matters by engaging not just the finished product, when critique is so easily possible, but the process of development, as the work is yet underway. Such engagement is enabled by how people leverage their commitments, stances, and manner of being there along the way and over time. To better enable the impact of anthropology in this work, anthropologists would be well served by engaging more with these kinds of applied questions as a part of their training and knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role do passion and poetry play in our research‐based quest to promote social justice? In this piece—a manifesto of sorts—I make a case for prioritizing both passion and poetry in our ethnographic writing. Such a commitment will allow our insights to be learned, our interlocutors' and our own voices to be heard, and our policy recommendations to be heeded. But writing poetically from a place of passion is just the first step. User‐friendly, public writing deserves a sociologically friendly platform. Hence, in the second part of this manifesto, I outline a series of steps that I recommend our discipline take in order to radically scale up our commitment to practice an engaged anthropology. Such tactics will allow us to more realistically promote our knowledge as we advocate for social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropological debates about development are often framed by a moral contrast between pure and instrumental knowledge. But the good of anthropology is situationally produced, as we can demonstrate by reflecting on the discipline's institutional conditions. Institutional contexts sustain our professional identities and research practices, including the claimed differences between them. These contexts are in turn produced by political economies of development expertise and academic knowledge production. Indeed, social anthropology's core research practices were shaped by its configuration within political economies of colonial governance, and they were perpetuated through the expansion of university systems. We should, then, stop sustaining the fictions that our work is situated outside political economies of interest or that we write purely in pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Rather, we need to be more transparent about the economies that determine the kinds of knowledge we produce and the political implications of what we authorize as knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"What good is anthropology?" Rather than accepting a predetermined notion of the good, I ask, What ancestral spirits animate anthropology as a vocation? In pursuing this question, I turn to the inaugural issue of American Ethnologist, which, I suggest, expresses an anthropological spirit readable via Lévi‐Strauss and Rousseau. I examine how this spirit was expressed in other parts of the world, such as the first generation of postcolonial anthropologists in India, as they confronted the question whether India may be seen as a settler colony. How was such a spirit born? As one possible beginning, I offer a creation myth for the birth of anthropological sensibility, located in a key moment of the Ramayana, when its tribal/lower‐caste poet‐author, Valmiki, begins to enunciate differently, after witnessing an act of human, settler violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As anthropology reaches maturity, its contributions are likely to grow. This is because the discipline's practitioners, in writing parochial ethnography, can link a respect for individual difference to our understanding of global humanity. Such a practice aligns with the growing political struggle to retain meaning in an expanding world. Moreover, anthropology's commitment to life as lived research, including private domains and engagement with digital worlds, will also become more significant, while anthropology's ethos of empathy will expand beyond the human. Reaching maturity will require a further repudiation of inequality and colonialism, developing a different relationship to theory, philosophy, and engaged anthropology, as well as fostering a much wider commitment to global education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination of American anthropology from 1974 to 2024 shows that the discipline faces novel challenges in today's "meta," or media ecosystem: two challenges facing theory and two facing ethnography. To remain successful, anthropology must meet these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with a critical examination of the humanist assumptions of critical ethnography, this article interrogates and surfaces problems with the ontological and epistemological orientations of this research methodology. In drawing on exemplar empirical data from an arts‐based project, the article demonstrates the limitations in the humanist‐based qualitative research approach and advances a postdualist, postrepresentationalist direction for critical ethnography called entangled ethnography. Using data from a larger study that examined the perspectives of racialized mad artists, what is demonstrated in this inquiry is that the entanglement of bodies, objects, and meaning‐making practices is central to working with the ontologically excluded, such as those who find themselves in various states of disembodiment and/or corporeal and psychic distribution. We propose the redevelopment of critical ethnography, extended by entanglement theory (a critical posthuman theory), and suggest that for it to be an inclusive methodology, critical ethnography must be conceptualized as in the process of becoming and always in regeneration, open to critique, extension, and redevelopment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropology and its marquee method, ethnography, have recently been promoted as an analytical key for unlocking problems faced in other domains. This review addresses two books that argue for the value of this anthropological lens: Anthro‐Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life, by Gillian Tett, and How to Think like an Anthropologist, by Matthew Engelke. The differences between these works highlight the risk of deploying anthropology as a means to other ends, without subjecting those ends to the same theorization and scrutiny as one's topic or methods. While these authors demonstrate that there is significant value that the anthropological toolkit can provide, both in life and in business, there remains a fine line to be drawn between the instrumentalization of the discipline and the broader pursuit for knowledge and meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tackling aversions to theory in the social sciences and humanities, this piece unpacks the bad faiths and myopic commentary directed at non-positivist and conceptually driven texts. Drawing on critiques and defenses mounted in the 1980s, 1990s, and the present—alongside exchanges inside and outside the classroom—it mounts an unapologetic defense of theory centering the skillful labors that allow us to compare, argue, distill, critique, abandon, rework, and interpret phenomena. Zeroing in on the empirical and theoretical moves always at play in ethnography, it argues on behalf of the value of allowing lines of thought to carry us obliquely along as much as explicate things. Some closing injunctions around foregrounding what is exciting and nourishing about theory and the pleasures and possibilities of adopting an experimental ethos toward it are put forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text aims to reflect on the premise of a future designed, thought and imagined from a deanthropic approach that makes it possible to redirect planetary life. It is organized in three moments: the first one describes the notion of time and the future from an anthropic vision, where we situate the main discussions on ways of meaning and understanding the instant and the future. the second deals with the deanthropic turn in the social sciences, a position that places the human in dialogue with the non-human, establishing other kinship relationships.In the third moment we narrate two experiences from ethnography: that of Don Andrés, a Chichimeca prayer man (land) and that of the Aerocene by the artist, architect and activist Tomás Saraceno (air), where both hold illuminating and feasible discourses to think about futures in the plural and, above all, beyond the human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article titled "LIVED FUTURES: ORIENTATIONS AND FUTURE PRACTICES IN UNCERTAIN TIMES" presents a dossier on the orientations and practices of the future in uncertain times. The editors of the dossier were surprised by the amount of articles received that addressed the theme of future time, as they considered that this topic did not have a significant presence in the Spanish-speaking academic debate. The article highlights the diversity of perspectives and approaches present in the dossier, as well as the importance of exploring the multiple futures that are constantly contested in society. It also mentions the temporal turn that the field of social sciences and humanities has experienced in recent decades, where greater attention has been paid to future time. [Extracted from the article]

The outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic has changed many persisting modalities of human life. It has made a huge impact on the lives and livelihoods of people living across the globe. Imposition of restrictions on the movement made life difficult for researchers of many fieldwork-based social science disciplines like anthropology, sociology and others. It is in this context, this article tries to explore the possibilities, advantages and disadvantages of some of the new and emerging approaches like virtual/digital ethnography. This article plunges deep into the methodological issues of doing ethnographic fieldwork to show that innovative research strategies have always been adopted on grounds of the sheer necessity of capturing human life within complex and ever-transforming social situations. Thus, growing instances of innovative research strategies that researchers are adopting now might be seen as the need of the situation; whether good or bad, proper or improper, only the future will tell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the socio-spatial ethnography as method for the study on the historical territorialities of native peoples in the Americas. This work was developed between 2018 and 2021 into master's degree dissertation in Human Geography at El Colegio de Michoacán, as a part of qualitative research carried out on Territorialities of the Maleku native people in Costa Rica (1860-2020). The Maleku inhabit a territory demarcated by the government in 1976, that encompasses only 2934 hectares in the middle basin of Frío River, which defines the core of their ancestral territory. The lands, lagoons and rivers in this territory are sacred places, the Maleku have been dispossessed of them since the beginning of colonization in 1860. The socio-spatial ethnography on Maleku territorialities follows different critical methods of the Social Science. It was established intercultural dialogues with the community, based on ethical commitments. For this purpose, qualitative research techniques were implemented, such as participant observation and ethnographic dialogues with Maleku collaborators. Also, documentary-historical reviews were implemented as well as semi-structured interviews with expert non-indigenous collaborators. Further, quantitative methods were applied to analyse demographic, cadastre registry and agrarian data with geographic information on Maleku territorialities. Diverse cartographic products were obtained because of the analysis of unpublished territorial data, which allowed to conclusions on the socio-spatial incidence of land tenure and territorial rights to Maleku people by the Costa Rican government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employing a racialized gendered lens, we explore the perceptions of status threat and victimhood among a sample of White Americans following the 2016 presidential election. Specifically, we draw upon such theoretical and empirical work to frame our analyses of the associations between perceptions of a white "victim" ideology and anti-Black Lives Matter (BLM) sentiments and how such associations may be conditioned by support for Trump and holding patriarchal gender normative beliefs. We propose that the BLM movement may be perceived as a "threat" to many White Americans. Furthermore, we believe Whites' anti-BLM sentiments will be enhanced by support for Trump, given his racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, and oppressive tendencies. Moreover, we believe that these associations will differ based on gender and beliefs in patriarchal gender norms, as White men and women are likely to feel status threat in varied ways. Mix support for our propositions and complex gendered differences are revealed. Implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article titled "Emotions in research in the humanities and social sciences" analyzes the importance of emotions and the body in research in the humanities and social sciences. The book's directors, Stéphane Héas and Omar Zanna, highlight the relevance of these themes in scientific production and their relationship with cognition and learning. Additionally, the ethnographic work carried out worldwide in the study of representations of colonial empires and decolonized peoples is mentioned. The theoretical and methodological approach proposed in the book considers emotions as useful guides in the research and analysis process, and not as obstacles to rationality. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines Erna Brodber’s 1994 novel, Louisiana, as a methodological invitation to the field of Black Studies to query how we do the work of black study. A Jamaican social scientist turned novelist, Brodber finds the tools of social science and notions of Western rationality and reason that undergird it insufficient for the unique challenges of recovering a past characterized by violent rupture and irreparable loss. In turn, she takes up fiction to imagine a new method and field of study to fill in the gaps of black diasporic history. Merging anthropology and sociology with literature, she produces a fictionalized ethnography—the novel Louisiana—that undermines the tenets of Western Enlightenment thought, its various offspring (social scientific method, History, Christianity, and technology), and their attendant claims to truth, facticity, and progress. Mobilizing the epistemes embedded within black diasporic cultural and political practices such as spirit possession, music, storytelling, and grassroots labor organizing, Louisiana constructs a counter-archive of diaspora that is at once sacred, feminist, and communal. Ultimately, the novel sketches the contours of a new interdisciplinary method and field of study—perhaps Brodber’s own version of Black Studies—that foregrounds 1) “sacred praxis” vis-à-vis spirit possession as a legitimate mode of knowledge acquisition, 2) the “global black south” as a nodal point of diasporic relationality, and 3) a dispossessive logic and an ethic of humility and surrender in the research process that serves as an affront to notions of liberal individual personhood and the hierarchization of peoples and knowledges that produced and sustain the Western “order of things.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to ethnographically reflect on the entanglements between different religious practices through the perspective of Terecô, an Afro-Brazilian religion eminently practiced in the city of Codó, state of Maranhão, Northeastern Brazil. Specifically, it investigates the viradas (rhythm turns) that highlight the relationship between Terecô and Tambor de Mina (another Afro-Brazilian religion), to better understand the terms of these entanglements that challenge dominant trends in Brazilian Social Sciences since the nineteenth century. Terecô's incorporation of certain elements of Tambor de Mina is carried out in such a way that the relationship between the religions is established by maintaining the differences, in a dynamic that sheds light onto the notions of encounter, mixture, and syncretism. Thus, I propose an investigation of the idea of virada as mobilized by Terecô's practitioners so as to reposition the classic debate on syncretism and the entanglements between different religious practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the impact of the book People's Law and State Law: the Bellagio Papers, edited by Anthony Allott and Gordon Woodman, published in 1985. It sets out why I consider this publication to be a seminal text in establishing and developing the field of legal pluralism, which had a great impact on both the development of the Journal of Legal Pluralism and on my own development as a young legal scholar. In looking beyond the text, I consider the ways in which scholars have engaged with the book's call for legal and social science to "work from a new map". In doing so I explore a recent arena of scholarship involving international intervention. The article highlights the important contribution that empirical studies can make to research on legal pluralism, by moving beyond the binaries of state and non-state actors, as well as through pursuing how scholars are adopting a more integrated and relational approach to law, one that may involve breaking down traditional disciplinary boundaries. In particular, I explore how concepts such as space and time contribute to a multi-dimensional, scalar perception of law at odds with a formalist, state-centred view of legal pluralism. This allows new insights to be generated into the operation of plural legal structures and constellations in which people operate allowing for a view of law that involves multiple networks of relations cutting across international, national and local boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented in the diversity and depth of discussions in the field of sociology of education, with reference to different national contexts. It focuses on studies dealing with the populations of Finland, Israel, Denmark, Taiwan, India and Sweden. An overview of youth policies as governed by a framing of the problematisation of young people in Finland is presented.

This article explores what air means and entails in penal settings and examines how carcerality attaches itself to air. With inspiration from social science approaches to the study of air, I propose that the lived experience of prison air can be fruitfully analyzed through the notions of breath, smell, and wind. This point is explored through two incidents about prison air drawn from ethnographic fieldwork in Myanmar. Together they illustrate a shift in Myanmar penality from a martial logic of destroying the enemy towards an internationally infused rationality of control and care. The first is a tale of an imprisoned engineer's subversive effort to improve the air quality in prisons; the second, the design and building of tuberculosis wards in prisons that aim to bring prison air in line with international standards. The analysis of these incidents broadens the analytical sensorium of prison air by drawing attention to, on the one hand, a basic empirical and affective sensing of air, recognising air as a scarce and coveted resource that prison actors' appropriate to survive. On the other hand, attention is drawn to the possibility of sensing with air, whereby the discourses, technologies, rules, and practices of air can be utilized as entry points for the analysis of prison governance and the transitional dynamics of penality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how research projects of academic career were an ethnography of an alternative school and a photographic field study of a planned community. Topics include still photography in the social sciences teaching in an Anthropology-Sociology department and advocate in a variety of educational programmes and reform initiatives to visualise educational standards, student achievement, or school change.

Drawing on the work of Ivan Illich, our special issue reanimates iatrogenesis as a vital concept for the social sciences of medicine. It calls for medicine to expand its engagement of the injustices that unfold from clinical processes, practices, and protocols into patient lifeworlds and subjectivities beyond the clinic. The capacious view of iatrogenesis revealed by this special issue collection affords fuller and more heterogeneous insights on iatrogenesis that does not limit it to medical explanations alone, nor locate harm in singular points in time. These papers attend to iatrogenesis' immediate and lingering presences in socialities and structures within and beyond medicine, and the ways it reflects or reproduces the racism, sexism, and ableism built into medical logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Howard Becker's practice of description has been debated, critiqued and reclaimed in a range of fields including sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, Science & Technology Studies, critical drug studies and more recently Heather Love's (2015) appraisal of deviance studies. Much of this debate concerns the uses of social research methods and their political effects. Taking up these issues with the construction of social scientific knowledge in Becker's work, this article returns to the methodological problem of description in Becker's research on drug use. Focusing on the legacy of Becker's empirical studies of deviance and the critiques of his research methods, it addresses the problem of description in the research process. In reviewing the methodological relevance of Becker's problem of description as a tool for thinking sociologically, the paper evaluates the contribution of descriptive methods for contemporary sociology and knowledge production. In so doing, it demonstrates how description is transformative of objects, problems and disciplinary practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines cross-ethnic friendships among ethnic minority and Han majority students at a Chinese university. This university is characterized by its institutional mission to meet the needs of ethnic minority students and its commitment to serving as a minority-majority university. However, our study demonstrates that high levels of intergroup contact cannot be presumed in ethnically diverse environments. In fact, patterns of cross-ethnic friendships varied widely among ethnic minority and Han students as a result of various factors such as language fluency and ethnic homophily. Gordon Allport's intergroup contact hypothesis provided a useful conceptual framework to highlight the conditions that either constrain or promote positive intergroup contact and cross-ethnic friendships in higher education settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complexity is everywhere. From biology to genomics, from anthropology to public policy, experts are marveling at the complexity of the phenomena they study. Yet in recent years, scholars have warned against taking all of this complexity at face value. In this spirit, this article frames "complexity" as an epistemic artifact traceable through particular histories and traditions of knowledge‐making. Attributions of relative complexity to different societies have a long history in anthropology. Archaeologists, in particular, have defined and redefined, debated and deconstructed complexity, leaving behind a lively textual trail. Examining this trail as a case study, the article investigates some of the different and sometimes conflicting logics behind what gets to count as complex, when, and why, as well as behind the more general expansion of complexity's reach in recent decades. By doing so, it exemplifies a way of approaching complexity as an anthropological problem and as a dominant problematic of our times. [knowledge, complexity, epistemology, archaeology] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using long-term research in a Navajo community as an example, this paper examines how the social construction of anthropological research (including theoretical frameworks and writing strategies) shapes the silences and omissions in any particular historical period. Gender, ethnicity, age, and economic/political transformation also play roles unveiling some omissions while creating others as relationships shift and deepen over decades. I outline three major periods: the 1960s, when a social science model that emphasized theoretical problems, data analysis, and objectivist prose held sway; the 1970s, when feminist anthropology reoriented analysis to a focus on women, power, and authority; and the "dialogic turn," when ethnography began to include women's voices, the presence of the anthropologist in the text, and attention to the power relationship between the researcher and the interviewee. Each period entails its own omissions and silences, but acknowledging them allows anthropologists to make more provisional conclusions and be forward looking, seeking ways to shift our future theoretical frameworks and reinterpret our observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social practice theories have attracted attention for their potential insights into how to change transport systems towards "healthier" states. However, most evidence is from small-scale qualitative case studies. We explored whether a synthesis of qualitative evidence on mobility practices in one country, informed by meta-ethnography and a Bourdieusian approach to practice, could produce theory that is of sufficient abstraction to be transferable, yet also capable of informing intervention planning. The synthesis identified three third order constructs: mobility practices result from habitus plus capital in fields; specific configurations of local mobility practices are shaped, but not determined, by material infrastructures and social structures; and changes in practice happen across a number of scales and temporalities. This body of evidence as a whole was then interpreted as an integrative "storyline": Mobility systems are complex, in that outcomes from interventions are neither unilinear nor necessarily predictable from aggregations of individual practice changes. Infrastructure changes may be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for change. Moving systems towards "healthier" states requires changing habitus such that "healthier" practices align with fields, and that interventions take sufficient account of the power relations that materially and symbolically constrain or enable attachments to and changes in mobility practices. Meta-ethnography is a useful approach for integrating qualitative evidence for informing policy. • Mobility practices result from habitus embedded in diverse overlapping fields. • Fields of transport overlap with others like sociability and sport. • Social and material infrastructures are important, but they do not determine change. • Practices are malleable as actors change fields, acquire/lose capital, or social fields change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although qualitative research approaches such as ethnography have been applied to the field of sport (e.g., Bricknell, 2001; Hughson and Hallinan, 2001) Sparkes (2003) has suggested that it was not until the late 1990s that sport researchers began to embrace ethnographic frameworks underpinned by critical and postmodern theories. As such, the value of these research designs has not been fully realized. The benefit for sport management researchers in applying critical and postmodern thought to ethnographic approaches is that it sharpens their critical consciousness. This article therefore develops an argument for applying critical and postmodern thought to ethnographic approaches to sport management research. In doing this we (a) provide a brief historical sketch of social science research paradigms; (b) outline the benefits of applying critical and postmodern thought to sport manage­ment ethnographic research; (c) present examples of current sport and sport man­agement ethnographic research that applies critical and postmodern frameworks; and (d) provide insight into the concerns that sport management scholars should consider when applying ethnographic research designs that embrace the tenets of postmodernism. Through this discussion we conclude that, although ethnographic approaches inspired by critical and postmodern thought are not the panacea to solve all research problems, if applied correctly they can only further enhance out knowledge of the research issue under investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates about changing contemporary Western societies have emphasized the increasingly fluid and fragmented nature of identities, suggesting that people draw their sense of identity from increasingly diverse sources, including sport and leisure lifestyles. Drawing on ethnographic work on windsurfing subcultures, this article explores the ways in which participants create and perform (sub)cultural identities through their "'new sport" consumption and its attendant lifestyle. The paper identifies the main features of the windsurfers' status system, illustrating that demonstrating commitment, not the conspicuous display of equipment or subcultural style, is central to the meanings the windsurfers give to their participation and subcultural identity. The paper concludes by examining to what degree purported features of contemporary postmodern culture, such as a loss of self- identity, are reflected in such seemingly "image-based" new sport consumption practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What types of refugees do Americans prefer for admission into the United States? Scholars have explored the immigrant characteristics that appeal to Americans and the characteristics that Europeans prioritize in asylum-seekers, but we currently do not know which refugee characteristics Americans prefer. We conduct a conjoint experiment on a representative sample of 1800 US adults, manipulating refugee attributes in pairs of Syrian refugee profiles, and ask respondents to rate each refugee's appeal. Our focus on Syrian refugees in a 2016 survey experiment allows us to speak to the concurrent refugee crisis on the eve of a polarizing election, while also identifying religious discrimination, holding constant the refugee's national origin. We find that Americans prefer Syrian refugees who are female, high-skilled, English-speaking, and Christian, suggesting they prioritize refugee integration into the U.S. labor and cultural markets. We find that the preference for female refugees is not driven by the desire to exclude Muslim male refugees, casting doubt that American preferences at the time were motivated by security concerns. Finally, we find that anti-Muslim bias in refugee preferences varies in magnitude across key subgroups, though it prevails across all sample demographics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unsustainable wildlife trade is a pervasive issue affecting wildlife globally. To address this issue, a plethora of demand reduction efforts have been carried out. These necessitate consumer research which provides crucial knowledge for designing and evaluating targeted interventions. We implemented a rigorous consumer survey on saiga (Saiga tatarica) horn use in Singapore, where usage is legal and widely sold. Saiga are Critically Endangered antelopes from Central Asia with horns (often marketed as ling yang) used in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Few past studies have assessed saiga horn consumers. This work is the most extensive consumer research to date specifically characterising saiga horn consumers and usage. We conducted 2294 in-person surveys on saiga horn use with Chinese Singaporeans, employing neutral questioning approaches. We found 19% of individuals reported saiga horn as a product they choose most often for themselves and/or others when treating fever and/or heatiness (a TCM state of illness), indicating a minimum estimate of high-frequency usage, not including possible low-frequency users. Overall saiga users were most characterised as middle-aged Buddhists and Taoists. However, saiga users were found in a range of demographic groups. Women preferred saiga shavings (the more traditional form), while men preferred saiga cooling water (the more modern form). About 53% of individuals who used saiga horn themselves also bought it for someone else. Buyers for others were most likely to be female middle-aged Buddhists or Taoists. Key motivating reasons for usage were “it works” and “someone recommended it to me.” The top two reported recommenders were family and TCM shopkeepers. Saiga users were more likely than non-saiga users to perceive saiga as a common species in the wild. This research holds significance for interventions targeting saiga horn consumption within Singapore and throughout Asia, by identifying potential target audiences, product types, non-desirable alternatives, and motivations for use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores why cultural anthropology needs the psychiatrist. Topics discussed include hope to construct a generalized picture of the life of society; obtrude observations that smacked of the personal or anecdotal; and dismiss the implicit problem raised by contradictory statements and the ultimate criterion of value interpretation of truths of mathematics or physics or chemistry.

From the text of Deleuze and Guattari, entitled Rhizome, some reflections are developed around the possibility of rhizomatic writing and anthropology. To this end, the following expository axis is followed: 1) bearing in mind the sui generis character of a text as a rhizome (written as a plateau), some points are made on how that text could be addressed; 2) a rhizome is explained and exemplified in general, 2.1) the characteristics of a rhizome are developed following the same map proposed by Deleuze and Guattari: principles of connection and heterogeneity, multiplicity, allocating rupture, cartography and decal, 3) some of the implications a rhizomatic conception would have regarding scientific practice, 4) retaking the notion of the book set forth by the authors reflections on reading, writing in general and ethnographic writing in particular, 5) questions regarding in what sense anthropology is, or could be, rhizomatic, 6) contemporary capitalism is proposed as being tendentiously rhizomatic, and 7) reserve is advised against a posture pretentiously rhizomatic in the academic context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While diaspora communities have become more critical of Female Genital Cutting (FGC), there are also trends of continuity. To explore the interplay between continuity and change, I designed a study among Somali migrants in Norway. A team of six Somali research assistants collected data from 72 male and female research participants between 16 and 57 years of age through in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. The aim of the study was to gather knowledge that could improve interventions among migrant populations. The study findings indicate that the experience of FGC as a practice in transition implies that people have to maneuver between different and partly contradictory social norms. The paper first discusses the contradiction between a strong negative attitude toward FGC and very low engagement. The lack of engagement is explained by the increased privatization of FGC and insecurities due to the transition and disempowerment with regard to challenging the FGC practices of relatives based in countries of origin. Second, the paper explores the contradiction between perceptions of FGC as a disappearing practice and the recognition of trends of continuation. Trends of continuation include those related to perceptions of risk during travel to countries of origin, resistance to defibulation, support for sunna circumcision and insecurities regarding the significance of FGC for marriageability. Thus, despite an almost universally negative attitude toward FGC in the form of infibulation, ongoing changes can, to some extent, hamper further change. This suggests that to ensure further progress in the abandonment of the practice, these complex and interconnected expectations must be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The annual ethnographic performance SJS-Who? is an example of how theatre may survive or even thrive in an educational/institutional environment that seems increasingly indifferent to the arts and humanities. In addition to being a meaningful educational experience for many students, SJS-Who? has successfully increased the profile of performance work within the department, college, and university. It also offers an opportunity to publicly critique university policy and campus climate. However, there are risks to aligning theatre with social science, and about the work's efficacy as an activist tool within a larger institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of discipline in shaping writing for publication has been widely acknowledged in EAP research, and a wealth of studies that seek to characterise and differentiate disciplinary writing have been published. However, a conceptualisation of disciplines as clearly demarcated territories may be outdated given the "constantly changing and dynamic [...] contemporary university" (Manathunga & Brew, 2014, p.45). In light of these changes, our article interrogates the centrality of discipline in research-based writing, from the academics' perspective. To do so, we adopt Trowler (2014a) reconceptualization of discipline as an analytical framework. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven scholars in two social sciences. Interview data was supplemented by an analysis of the participants' research-based outputs. The results highlight the contested nature of disciplinary affiliation and reveal the range of factors that participants perceive to be "shapers" of writing for publication, beyond discipline: epistemological/methodological, structural and individual. Based on the results, we argue that Trowler's new metaphor of discipline enables us to account for our findings, and conclude with recommendations for EAP writing for publication interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social work assessments, and in turn clinical judgment and intervention practices, are increasingly framed by standardised tools and technologies that are digitised. These tools and technologies mediate social workers' relationships with services users, while also privileging, and in turn reiterating, particular identities and particular forms of knowledge. In this article, I am interested in how standardised tools and technologies, like computers, operate to mediate the relationship between social workers and services users. I work with an autoethnographic narrative in order to examine standardised social work practice. Methodologically, autoethnography rests within a reflexive frame of qualitative research, allowing us to excavate our experiences in order to understand how our lives are ordered and knowledge is socially constitutive. In mining this narrative, I am interested in the body, and in particular, the corporeal dimension of standardised practices. I historically locate these practices, and use the work of Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault to examine how tools and technologies function in relation to the body, even when there is no direct physical, bodily contact. Ultimately I argue that there is a scientific discourse underpinning current clinical practice and I use the framings of Donna Haraway to understand the implications of this for social workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a central contention of this special issue that an anthropological engagement with repetition has the capacity to open up fertile fields of comparative ethnographic and historical work. In this introduction, we link our approach to past anthropological and philosophical works, connecting for instance to discussions of historiography, rhythm, scale, and the characterization of experience. We move on to consider the present and future uses of the concept of repetition, providing five 'dimensions' that we consider helpful in exploring its nuances as well as its potentialities. These dimensions we designate as matters of production, medium, anticipation, consequence and scale. Each might be recognized within the discourse of informants or ethnographers or both. What they are intended to do is to provide an operational framework through which to anatomize processes of repetition as observable in whichever 'field' we are investigating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]