Search

This article explores how and to what extent collaborative ethnographic fieldwork enables comparison both inherently and in practical terms. More often than not, ethnographic comparison involves the juxtaposition of studies carried out separately by individuals and relates to comparing arguments rather than empirical incidents. This obscures important contextual specificities across research sites and dilutes the comparative endeavor. We argue that it is necessary to be transparent about the way empirical data are produced for meaningful comparative analysis to be generated. One promising way to ensure this is through a reciprocal engagement with each other's field sites by means of joint fieldwork. This form of collaboration iteratively produces a combination of empirical experiences of bafflement on the one hand and forces the dialogical integration of different epistemological perspectives on the other, which we label "epistemo-methodological disjunctures." Drawing empirically on our collaborative ethnographic research on gang dynamics in Nicaragua and South Africa, we describe how questions surrounding the nature of the object being studied, the practicalities of collaborative comparative ethnography including the importance of understanding each other's "ethnographic ground zero," and the need to reconcile epistemological differences all emerged as critical to shaping the possibilities of comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of policy documents about private housing reconstruction in the wake of Nepal's devastating 2015 earthquakes, we show how the contemporary "house," "household," and "home" are key sites of regulation for the state, as well as for the development and humanitarian organizations that work within it. Our discussion lays bare a more general set of questions about the relationships between these categories that remain unresolved in the anthropological literature, as well as in domains of policy practice that build on it. The experience of postearthquake reconstruction in Nepal has highlighted conceptual limitations in the existing legal definitions of ownership and residence and challenged people's sense of belonging at the affective level. This is in part due to conditions of high mobility that affect patterns of kinship and sociality and demand an understanding of infrastructure as process. We propose a tripartite analytical framework that recognizes the relational complexities between the concepts of "house," "household," and "home" and argue that careful attention to their definitions in both anthropological and policy contexts matters because those terminologies drive processes of change that may begin in moments of natural disaster but extend far beyond that temporal horizon to reconfigure lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trees of the Neotropical genus Crescentia produce hard-shelled fruits used to manufacture bowls. In this work we analyze the role played by these vessels in the material culture of Mesoamerican peoples through archaeological, ethnohistorical (including 19 works and three tribute lists), and linguistic evidence (including 40 native languages). The earliest archaeobotanical record of Crescentia was found in Belize, estimated at least 2400 BP, whereas the first European description was made by Fernández de Oviedo in 1526. Historical texts written from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries tell that the main use of these vessels was as drinking cups (especially for cacao). Current ethnographic evidence reveals the validity of a close association between Crescentia bowls and traditional beverages based on cacao. Terms for designating these trees in 29 indigenous languages from eight linguistic families, with the oldest ones from the Amuzgo-Mixtec and Mixe-Zoquean lineages, confirm that Crescentia vessels constitute an entity clearly distinguishable from Lagenaria. New areas of ethnobotanical, ethnographic, and archaeological research are highlighted for understanding the role played by these vessels in utilitarian and symbolic aspects and the factors that support their persistence among Mesoamerican peoples up to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are India's democratic values? Metropolitan common sense tells us that democracy is an essentially egalitarian political form and that to be good democrats, people, wherever they are and whoever they may be, must espouse equality as a political value. In this essay I challenge this conviction by suggesting that hierarchy is a pivotal value in India's democratic life. Drawing on 15 years of ethnographic work conducted across northern India and touching on the history of democratic thinking in Europe, from Aristotle to Rousseau and Bernard Manin, the essay offers comparative reflections on the nature of "democratic values" in a bid for a more ethnographically grounded theory of democratic life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are India's democratic values? Metropolitan common sense tells us that democracy is an essentially egalitarian political form and that to be good democrats, people, wherever they are and whoever they may be, must espouse equality as a political value. In this essay I challenge this conviction by suggesting that hierarchy is a pivotal value in India's democratic life. Drawing on 15 years of ethnographic work conducted across northern India and touching on the history of democratic thinking in Europe, from Aristotle to Rousseau and Bernard Manin, the essay offers comparative reflections on the nature of "democratic values" in a bid for a more ethnographically grounded theory of democratic life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bat is often portrayed as a vampire, a taxonomic monstrosity, and a source of the worst evils. Whenever pandemics occur, such as the one currently spread by SARS-CoV-2, this animal is quickly identified as a "reservoir of emerging pathogens" and is among the first to be blamed. Yet many human groups live in daily contact with multiple bat species and eat their flesh, which they praise for its medicinal benefits. Such groups see the bat as a "companion species" with which they cohabit and establish cooperative relationships. In this paper, we use recently gathered ethnographic data from Southeast Asia to show how humans imagine bats and enter into relationships with them. By blurring the boundaries between nature and society, this animal has made itself an appropriate subject of study for contemporary anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a vast and recently reinvigorated body of research, a glaring lacuna remains in the literature on African chief- and kingship. Exogenous sociostructural explanations (Vansina) and the universalist concept of sacred kingship (de Heusch) disregard the endogenous regional process of political centralization. This article proposes a corrected structuralism as a method to detect in cultural processes their endogenous basis, or "tensor": a syntagm paradigmatically "stretched" in time and space. Ethnographic fieldwork in east and central Africa reveals that both chieftaincy and status acquisition revolve around medicine, not governance. The tensor of medicine combines two sacrificial practices, divination and initiation, and two gift-oriented practices, magic and association. In terms of this tensor, kingship is a freak development, violating the democratic principle of medicine. Ethnographic comparison confirms that kings split the tensor by privileging the binding logic of gifts at the expense of divination and initiation, which control the chief's power. In contrast, the colonial impact on centralization is a collapsed tensor, banning the mixed political-religious practices of magic and divination in favor of a religiously legitimated political hierarchy. Tensor dynamics bring out pivots of meaning that shake the European default model of the polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines a methodological posture that I consciously adopted during recent ethnographic fieldwork. I call this methodological posture "belief-inclusive research" (BIR), and I see it as a complementary contrast to existing methodological frameworks that suggest the bracketing out of a researcher's own beliefs. I offer BIR as a distinctive methodological posture for ethnographers who work in and with religious contexts. I demonstrate that the long-standing tradition of bracketing out questions of metaphysical truth during the writing-up phases of anthropology seems to have also impacted the fieldwork phase. I explore the ways that some degree of shared belief—which, crucially, I do not limit to doctrinal beliefs—between researcher and informants has the potential to widen a researcher's access to certain types of data. In highlighting that the long-standing practice of bracketing has limited a researcher's access to some kinds of data and in offering BIR as a new methodological posture, this article lays the groundwork for anthropology to construct new conceptual spaces that actively encourage a researcher to include their own (religious) beliefs and doubts in the midst of fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article puts the analytic of "indigenous cosmopolitics" (as used by Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena) in dialogue with the anthropology of Christianity through an ethnography of a dam construction and resettlement project in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in the area, I explore how both God and Christian ethnotheology became imbricated with a group of indigenous villagers' legal struggle to resist the scheme and the template of progressive, modern citizenship bound up with it. I suggest that the villagers' efforts constituted a form of Christian cosmopolitics that sought to disrupt Sarawakian politics as usual by bringing a previously inconceivable outcome—and a different way of being different—into being. Their eventual victory and its aftermath, however, raise critical questions about the limits and untapped possibilities of "cosmopolitical" proposals, as well as about contemporary anthropology's own ethicopolitical approaches to difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the impact of the implementation of modern pharmaceutical governance methods—specifically, good manufacturing practices (GMP)—on the production of Tibetan medicines in China. GMP is a system of modern pharmaceutical regulation aimed at ensuring the safety and efficacy of drug production. The introduction of GMP to Tibetan medicine stands as a symbol for the industrialization of Tibetan medicine in Tibet. I argue in this article that the introduction of GMP is an important part of a continuous and long-term modernization phenomenon. I therefore started this research by looking into the broader social and cultural transformation processes affecting Tibetan medicine as a whole prior to the implementation of GMP, which helped me to place the impact of GMP in recent historical and social contexts. I examine the more specific impact of GMP implementation on Tibetan medicine in terms of the overall compatibility of the ideologies underpinning these two systems for determining what "good" manufacturing entails. I ethnographically examine the attitudes of practitioners reflected in their narratives about GMP, along with illustrations of local professionals' engagement at different stages of implementation. These points of evidence describe the advantages and problems prompted by integrating GMP into Tibetan medicine production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article mobilizes an analytic of racial responsibilization to interrogate the contentious logics of risk-taking and risk-making that shape "the urban entrepreneur," an organizing figure of prisoner reentry workforce development programs in the American city of New Orleans. My ethnographic study explores the fraught relationships between entrepreneurialism and self-actualization by tracing the racialized and racializing evaluations of risk that formerly incarcerated business owners must navigate and negotiate. It uses the illocutionary act of "the pitch" as a performative space to question anti-Blackness within neoliberal capitalism. When refracted through the risk logics of punitive justice institutions, the guiding assumption of the entrepreneur as autonomous, self-actualized agent is fundamentally challenged. For the conjunctively racialized and criminalized, the requirements of entrepreneurialism do not potentiate self-actualization but rather both obscure and re/produce racial histories of dispossession and bondage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many years, scholars have sought to track and explain how objects come to have layered, contested, and evolving meanings over time. This article examines the potential contributions and limitations of a palimpsest theory of objects to help explain such meaning-making practices. A palimpsest is a tablet or parchment from which writing has been partially or completely erased to make space for another text. This proposed theory investigates in what ways objects are palimpsests (literally and metaphorically), able to concurrently contain multiple meanings as each new one is inscribed over past ones. Drawing from Peircean semiotics and current palimpsest theory, this article considers the meaning-making practices of Guanyin (the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion) statues as a case study. With Guanyin figurines, the processes of inscription and erasure can be systematically recorded in contexts of production and consumption by tracking the observed behaviors and expressed beliefs of different social actors and documenting the materiality of these objects as they move through physical and social spaces. The ethnography of things presented here both explores the processes that interweave meanings through Guanyin statues and tests the viability of an overarching palimpsest theory of objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses three Ho-Chunk discussions of "whiteness" (from first contact to the mid-twentieth century) to outline an approach to Indigenous knowledge that challenges approaches that depict other cultures as constituting incommensurable worlds. Arguing that the idea of ontological alterity leads to a form of ethnographic entrapment, it instead theorizes Indigenous knowledge production as a process rooted in empirical observation, moral evaluation, and critical engagement within a common but contested world. The Ho-Chunk examples illustrate a long-term, collective process of inquiry that produced an understanding of settler whiteness emphasizing its relationship to practices of dispossession and governance. They also show events in which such knowledge was used by Ho-Chunk people in efforts to compel white interlocutors to self-awareness and more reasonable forms of behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against anthropological notions of "illness narratives" and "social suffering" as the responsible reception of trauma, this article formulates possible directions in which to expand trauma's conceptual framework so as to respond ethnographically to affective ways of understanding memory, critical agency, and political belonging. Building on ethnographic fieldwork with militarily displaced Kurdish communities in Diyarbakır, in Kurdistan, in Turkey, this article addresses the psychological and political states of spatiotemporal displacement. Taking the encounter of two bereaved Kurdish mothers with antidepressants and antipsychotics as its object of inquiry, the article analyzes the affective state of feeling gej ("spaced-out," in Kurdish), making the case that in this colonial setting of necropolitical destruction and displacement, feeling spaced-out is an assertion of political critique. Such fugitive manifestations of colonial wounding reveal not only the constitution of a medical space of informal economic traffic and diagnostic intervention but also transient states through which bereaved Kurdish mothers actively undertake their own constitution and engage with decolonial imaginaries to sustain mental health. These noncathartic states need not be organized, collective, or even resistant in any standard sense to be considered as a form of outrage at colonial oppression and as expressions of dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeological and ethnographic accounts of violence in small-scale societies represent a baseline for thinking about the ways that violence and masculinity originated and evolved, becoming entwined social processes. Male violence (lethal and nonlethal) is expressed in diverse and complex ways because it is associated with social spheres of power and influence, and it is embedded within ideologies, histories, and collective memories. Applying anthropological research on violence as a generative and transformational social process demonstrates how violence plays a key role in creating, maintaining, and transforming social structures in small-scale societies. The reinterpretation of massacre sites in the ancient Southwestern United States in terms of social ideologies and beliefs offers an important counterbalance to earlier work that portrayed violence as the result of environmental stressors and/or cultural crises. Using an interpretive (poetics) approach that focuses on the ritualized aspects of male violence provides rich insights into the social processes governing the cultural logic that normalizes and institutionalizes violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is war so closely associated with men? Is it an expression of male nature or a product of culture? This survey of masculinity and war considers the proposition that men are predisposed to kill male outsiders, which led to war throughout our species' evolutionary history and selected for additional gender characteristics. Claimed support from study of chimpanzees, archaeology, and mobile foragers is challenged, supporting the conclusion that war is a relatively recent development in our species. Earlier cross-cultural insight into gender-based role segregation is incorporated into a cultural materialist framework, addressed to both the commonality that war is male and to the many exceptions and variations. A sex-based division of labor leads to socially defined men's work, which fosters masculine personalities. Masculinity is culturally antecedent to war but is exapted for combat when war is present, and then powerfully shapes and is shaped by war. Ethnographic cases and ethnological statistics show that socialization for military masculinity is pervasive in war-making societies but variable in what masculinity means, and if and how women participate in war. The next section considers contemporary variations on military masculinities and their harmful impact on women. Finally addressed is why nonwar killing is typically by men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we practice an "anthropology of disability" that is in respectful alliance with the disabled people and disability groups we study? What does critical theory making look like within the politics of such collaborative practice? What valued expertise do anthropologists offer and what do anthropologists gain? In an age of austerity and precarity in academia and in general, disabled people and disability groups struggle for survival while secure funding for grants and programs supporting graduate students and emerging scholars is increasingly precarious. In what interdependent spaces is it possible to imagine disabled activists and scholars working together for survival into an uncertain future? These questions stand at the heart of this collaborative auto-ethnographic essay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Global South, disability is often lived as a family experience. The spatiotemporal context in neoliberal India, characterized by rapid social and cultural change disrupting traditional family structures and creating the possibility for the emergence of new and alternative kinship imaginaries. This paper positions disability within families, to explore intrahousehold dynamics around care work and caring. Using a contextual approach to disability and care, it is the purpose of this paper to capture these micro- and macro-level dynamics in the context of urban families in contemporary India through ethnographically informed fieldwork. The discussion is positioned on the cusp of disability and feminist scholarship and activism. Care is considered as a multidimensional polysemous concept that is both universal and specific in definition and scope; labor, affect, and justice are its predominant components as it intersects with disability. Historically, the biological family is most germane to care. It is families that continue to matter as a critical source of survival for disabled people particularly in low-income countries; and in many instances, they also play the dual role of being oppressive toward the disabled family member(s) to whom they provide support. Gender is a critical structuring principle in the organization of care throughout the life cycle, given women's centrality in procreation, childcare, and the larger domestic sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I explore the relationship between digital place and disability through an ethnographic study of disability experience in the virtual world Second Life. I discuss how forms of landscape and interface shape disability experience, how building relates to "being-inworld" in digital place, and how proximity and collaboration relate to disability embodiment in a virtual context. "Participant building" on a virtual island created for this research, "Ethnographia," complements participant observation and other methods to investigate these questions of digital place. Through these lines of analysis, I develop a notion of "digital topography" to illuminate the implications of digital place for disability and human experience more generally. This allows for differentiating digital places from digital media and thus forging conceptual frameworks that reflect how the internet is not a unitary entity. It also allows for considering digital emplacement as related to, but distinct from, digital embodiment. This helps draw attention to questions of digital placemaking alongside the better-known phenomena of avatars. Avatars are important, but it is crucial to highlight the virtual geographies without which the emplacement of those avatars would be impossible. These materials speak to broad questions regarding embodiment, ability, the digital, and the real. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we practice an "anthropology of disability" that is in respectful alliance with the disabled people and disability groups we study? What does critical theory making look like within the politics of such collaborative practice? What valued expertise do anthropologists offer and what do anthropologists gain? In an age of austerity and precarity in academia and in general, disabled people and disability groups struggle for survival while secure funding for grants and programs supporting graduate students and emerging scholars is increasingly precarious. In what interdependent spaces is it possible to imagine disabled activists and scholars working together for survival into an uncertain future? These questions stand at the heart of this collaborative auto-ethnographic essay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author talks about natufian low-level food production in Southwest Asia. Topics discussed include researchers relics of hierarchic masonry competitions; general approach to stone device reporting divides ground stone tools into two main sections: pounding implements, mortars, and pestles; and surveying ethnographical and ancient Egyptian parallels and by an experimental study.

What are the factors that render environmental concerns salient in people's lives, and under what conditions do people make connections between an abstract concept such as climate change and concrete experiences in their own daily circumstances? Taking as our focus ethnographic work with children in several different ethnographic settings (Barrow, Alaska; Oaxaca, Mexico; Tuv aimag and Uvurkhangai aimag, Mongolia; and East Anglia, United Kingdom), we explore how the children come to articulate environmental knowledge as a process of "figuring out" and the extent to which the children engage with the changing climate as a matter of concern. The paper provides an ethnographic account of the main themes that emerged in each region, before developing a comparative discussion of some key factors that gave shape to how climate change comes to matter in the lives of the children. Three dimensions are explored: the effect of climate change on livelihoods and the proximity of children's experience to those livelihoods, the political salience of the narrative of climate change, and the temporal depth invoked by the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces "ethnographic metacommentary," an experiential, processual, and protracted approach to ethnography. My proposed method goes beyond stating complexity as the defining characteristic of an anthropological project, visual or otherwise. To demonstrate the method, I write an ethnographic metacommentary of my 3-minute film Performing Naturalness (2008), which is about the surveillance of foreigners in Tokyo. A number of contexts on the film are explored—the political situation from which it arose, the background of the experiment chosen for the project, and genealogies of art practice. The method includes the process of "furtherings"—self-reflexive explorations that unpack aspects of the project that often retreat from anthropological ethnography. Overall, in the process of writing this ethnographic metacommentary, this article explores the nuanced experiences of Filipinos in transnational migration, contributes to the conversation on contemporary Philippine conceptual art and its relationship with anthropology and film/art practice, and fleshes out difficulties of representation in collaborative projects due to differences in intentions and locatedness. I show how ethnographic metacommentary is a productive thought process that fleshes out ruptures in the filmmaking process that are often concealed from the audience, and even from the filmmakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of etnos —one of the more controversial anthropological concepts of the Cold War period—is contextualized by looking at its "life history" through the biography of one of its proponents. Sergei Mikhailovich Shirokogoroff was a Russian/Chinese anthropologist whose career transected Eurasia from Paris to Beijing via Saint Petersburg and the Siberian borderlands of the Russian Empire. His transnational biography and active correspondence shaped the unique spatial and intellectual configuration of a concept that became a cornerstone of both Soviet and Chinese ethnography. The theory of etnos turned out to be surprisingly stable, while circulating through various political and intellectual environments ranging from England, Germany, and China to Imperial, Soviet, and modern Russia. This case study presents a history of anthropology wherein networks and conversations originating in the Far East of Eurasia have had unexpected influences on the heartlands of anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is morality? And to what extent does it vary around the world? The theory of "morality-as-cooperation" argues that morality consists of a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation recurrent in human social life. Morality-as-cooperation draws on the theory of non-zero-sum games to identify distinct problems of cooperation and their solutions, and it predicts that specific forms of cooperative behavior—including helping kin, helping your group, reciprocating, being brave, deferring to superiors, dividing disputed resources, and respecting prior possession—will be considered morally good wherever they arise, in all cultures. To test these predictions, we investigate the moral valence of these seven cooperative behaviors in the ethnographic records of 60 societies. We find that the moral valence of these behaviors is uniformly positive, and the majority of these cooperative morals are observed in the majority of cultures, with equal frequency across all regions of the world. We conclude that these seven cooperative behaviors are plausible candidates for universal moral rules, and that morality-as-cooperation could provide the unified theory of morality that anthropology has hitherto lacked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies kinship systems as topologies of social space. These topologies emerge as agents become contiguous through physical interaction and mutually substitutable through perspectival shifts. Social space is structured by the temporal asymmetry implicit in the concept of generation and by a gendered polarity of containing and being contained. The different ways this gendered polarity is incorporated into relations of contiguity and substitution result in diverse topologies that are manifest in architecture, residence, and mobility patterns no less than in genealogies and relationship terminologies. These variations are illustrated through comparison of the segmentary systems of West Africa, the dualist organizations of central Brazil, and the asymmetric alliance systems of eastern Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies a significant interpretive issue for prehistoric archaeology: distinguishing adult ritual actions from the activities of children in the archaeological record. Through examining ethnographic accounts of recent huntergatherer children and reconsidering archaeological patterns and assemblages in light of these data, we explore how the results of children's play can be--and likely have been--misinterpreted by archaeologists as evidence for adult ritual behavior in prehistoric contexts. Given that children were a significant component of past hunter-gatherer (and other) societies, the fact that the material components of their activities overlap tremendously with items used in adult rituals must be routinely considered by archaeologists if we are to reconstruct robust understandings of past peoples all over the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although concerns about complexity and multiplicity have long been at the core of ethnographic research, this article moves beyond such descriptive terms and develops a theoretically engaged concept of unevenness and combination. We argue that unevenness is not just the outcome of capitalist development; it is politically momentous. Unevenness emerges from the struggle between capital and labor and from the historically specific ways that they configure social space. Because power coalesces in some places and social relationships and networks become dense, whereas they recede in other places, we need to understand how labor contributes to making these lumps and how the differentiated parts of a causally interactive world combine and intertwine to create novel social, cultural, and political configurations. We can then better understand the current moment in which labor is fragmented and differentiated. The analysis draws on case studies of the Saturn automobile factory in Tennessee and the oil export enclave of Barrancabermeja in Colombia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the inception of the discipline, anthropologists have endeavored to explain why people the world over develop ideas that lack empirical support and how such ideas are accepted as true. This article deals with a claim found among the Nage people of eastern Indonesia, namely, that extremely elderly people grow tails. The idea is discussed in relation to local experiences of aging and the elderly and in relation to cosmological beliefs with which it appears consistent, and it is further analyzed in the context of Nage folk biology. By drawing on cognitivist theory, it is then demonstrated how the representation comprises a counterintuitive idea that readily combines with intuitive knowledge relating to observable processes of physical change in elderly humans. Also discussed are a notional taboo on looking at the putative tails that reinforces the belief, in part by adding to its counterintuitive appeal, and the idea’s potential for enabling younger people to distance themselves ontologically from senility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A revised version of the tenth Eric Wolf Lecture, given in Vienna in November 2015, this article works with three interlocking elements of Wolf 's research agenda: historical ethnography conducted across interlocking scales with a view to exposing the different fields through which power operates. I use two moments in my own research. The first serves to characterize Wolf 's research framework as a lens through which to expose those social relations of particular interest for a critique of capitalist society at the time he was writing. The second is then used to suggest possible extensions of Wolf's work for a similar agenda in the present. Characteristics of the 1970s and 2010s are distinguished, on the one hand, for the society of capital and, on the other, for people who identify themselves with the community of Huasicancha in the central highlands of Peru. Such a historical ethnography is thereby employed to reveal shifts in the interlocking scales of social relations alongside changes in fields of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines two paradoxes. The first is ethnographic: queer activists in Bologna, Italy, are concerned with defining themselves in opposition to fixed categories of identity and the forms of politics based on them. In so doing, however, they must engage with the risk that this endeavor of difference-making itself becomes as fixed and uniformas the identities to which it is opposed. The second paradox is theoretical: a range of anthropologists have recently argued that the relationship between theoretical and ethnographic material should be one of identity or correspondence. Yet such arguments, although highly stimulating conceptually, often reproduce in form what they refute in content--abstraction and metaphysical speculation--thus reinscribing the difference between our concepts and our data. This article connects these ethnographic and theoretical questions while also deliberately holding them apart. The beginnings of an answer to both, it suggests, lie in an explicit attention to the boundaries and differences, rather than simply the isomorphisms, between theory and ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the publication and reception of my book about corruption in Nigeria as a form of ethnographic evidence that is useful to interrogate the fraught relationship between the concepts of culture and corruption. The evidence points to multiple misunderstandings--but also to the powerful political purposes for which accusations of corruption (and, more specifically, notions of corruption as a cultural problem) can be wielded. This essay builds on work in anthropology that takes seriously the reality that the people we study may read what we write, and it uses local reactions to a monograph about corruption as analytical leverage to illuminate the anthropology of corruption. But this article takes the examination of local responses to a book about corruption one step further, comparing them with the reception and critiques generated within anthropology. I argue that, in juxtaposing these reactions, we can see the many ways that concepts of corruption and culture--and the understanding of the relationship between the two--can be mobilized for different purposes and with different effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on comparative ethnographic fieldwork conducted in urban Mozambique, the United States, and Sierra Leone, the article is broadly concerned with the globalization of temporal logics and how specific ideologies of time and temporality accompany health interventions, such as those for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection and AIDS (HIV/AIDS). More specifically, we explore how HIV-positive individuals have been increasingly encouraged to pursue healthier and more fulfilling lives through a set of moral, physical, and social practices called "positive living" since the advent of antiretroviral therapies. We describe how positive living, a feature of HIV/AIDS programs throughout the world, has taken root across varied political, social, and economic contexts and how temporal rationalities, which have largely been underexamined in the HIV/AIDS literature, shape communities' responses and interpretations of positive living. Our approach is ethnographic and comparative, with implications for how anthropologists might think about collaboration and its analytical possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a comprehensive framework for the comparative analysis of collective identities and corresponding processes of identification, framing, and alignment. Collective identities are defined as activated categories of likeness, distinction, and solidarity, located within any one of a number of possible frames (e.g., nationality, religion, and gender) and aligned series (e.g., national, regional, or local categories of identification). Emphasis falls on the dynamics of identification, framing, and alignment within limits that are cognitive or semantic, on one hand, and social, economic, political, or legal, on the other. Specifying the limits within which identification, framing, and alignment may vary allows us to elide sterile debates about whether collective identities are invariable or variable and to focus instead on variation in the relative frequency, typical duration, and degree of ease or difficulty of acts of identification corresponding to distinguishable types. Such dynamics are examined with reference to codeterminants of identification: situations, circumstances, and actors’ motives. In conclusion, we reflect on the qualitative and quantitative consequences of variable forms of identification in collective action. Multiple examples illustrate the utility of the framework for comparative analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this special issue, we examine how publics are brought into being through historically specific media practices. We treat the question of new media as an invitation to explore changing conditions of communication across a number of ethnographic locations. We argue that these changing conditions have challenged our capacity to understand the nature of publics. It is important to emphasize that none of the contributors perceives new media as a coherent object of attention that can easily be isolated as an entity; nor do the contributors locate its novelty in its digital format. Instead, they examine modes of mediation that entail the technological but are not reducible to it. This approach allows anthropologists to keep the referent of new media open and remain attentive to emerging forms of public life that are working outside of or adjacent to the logics of both the digital and the technological. Our hope is that this collection of essays contributes to an anthropological understanding of media that illuminates important aspects of the political economic present, attends to the erosion and reanimation of anonymity in public life, and captures dynamics of staging, projection, and response within and across ethnographic sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to the recently reemerged discussion of ethical ethnographic research by exposing and analyzing interrelated ethical, epistemological, and methodological dilemmas encountered in my ethnographic study of single-mother child protection families in the Netherlands. Systematically applying the current American Anthropological Association's ethical principles to my research and using one particular day of fieldwork as an example, I illustrate that these anticipatory principles inadequately address emergent ethical dilemmas, as six core dimensions of ethnographic research ethics and integrity often still conflict with one another. Hence, I argue that the current AAA's principles do not take into account that ethnographic research is simultaneously immersed in a dynamic context of relations and power hierarchies, embedded in theoretical reflexivity, and instrumentalized through the embodied subjectivity of the ethnographer. I draw lessons for a constructive discussion on how to deal with ethical concerns in ethnographic research by starting from ethnographic practice to expose, discuss, and critically engage with ethical issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I outline an integrated framework for the study of culture, called evolutionary cultural anthropology, that highlights culture and its interactions with biology and ecology. Applied research during Ebola outbreaks and several decades of research with hunter-gatherer children of the Congo Basin are utilized to illustrate evolutionary cultural anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seeing bodies and evolutionary histories as quantifiable features that can be measured separately from the human cultural experience is an erroneous approach. Seeing cultural perceptions and the human experience as disentangled from biological form and function and evolutionary history is equally misguided. An integrative anthropology moves past dichotomous perspectives and seeks to entangle the "inside" and "outside," methodologically and theoretically, to move beyond isolationist trends in understanding the human. In this paper I illustrate the underlying rationale for some anthropological lack of engagement with neo-Darwinian approaches and review contemporary evolutionary theory discussing how, in combination with a dynamic approach to human culture, it can facilitate integration in anthropology. Finally, I offer an overview of the human niche concept and propose a heuristic framework as a set of shared assumptions about human systems to help frame a sincerely anthropological and emphatically evolutionary approach to the human experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the failure of anthropology, at least since the 1970s, to look at the big picture: what the four fields can contribute to each other. It focuses on kinship as a key example, on other aspects of sociality, and on language and symbolic thought. I argue that an understanding of humanity as a whole, and especially hunter-gatherers, is important for grasping the nature of the human species. Cultural or social anthropology progressed to a large extent through kinship studies, and it is here also that we should look. The transformation of a Ju/'hoan kinship structure to a Khoe one is used as one key example. The deeper history of language itself is another. After these examples, I return to general issues, including the ways in which the diverse branches of anthropology, especially social anthropology and linguistic anthropology, serve to enlighten each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to be sustainable, larger-scale social systems require containing nepotistic tendencies, which are potentially disruptive in multiple domains of social activities. Many formal institutions of our modern democratic states seem to facilitate such offsetting. The ethnographic records provide many examples of large tribes not relying on either formal institutional frameworks or strict hierarchies to articulate the diverging requirements of kin-group allegiance and broader social affiliations. How does greater social complexity emerge in such decentralized societies? Among the different informal solutions presented in the literature, we find an interesting one: age-set systems, which involve the grouping of coevals in cross-kin associations. An essential aspect of such systems is their ability to enable the swift neutralizing of the basic pull of nepotism without intensive investments in a formal institutional apparatus, as is observed in more complex and modern social systems. When great benefits can be obtained through social exchange in large cooperative networks, an age-based organization helps counter familistic preferences by creating new incentive structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on 30 months of collaborative ethnographic fieldwork in a high-poverty, crime-ridden area in metropolitan Buenos Aires, this paper scrutinizes the political character of interpersonal violence. The violence described here is not the subaltern violence that, thoroughly documented by historians and social scientists, directs against the state, the powerful, or their symbols. It is a violence that is neither redemptive nor cleansing, but it is deeply political in a threefold sense: (a) it is entangled with the intermittent and contradictory form in which the police intervene in this relegated neighborhood, (b) it has the potential to give birth to collective action that targets the state while simultaneously signaling it as the main actor responsible for the skyrocketing physical aggression in the area, and (c) it provokes paradoxical forms of informal social control as residents rely on state agents who are themselves enmeshed in the production of this violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]