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Each year the United States government detains and deports hundreds of thousands of people who prior to their removal are held in confinement for an average of 55 days. The short and long-term effects of the coronavirus pandemic on migrant detention and deportation continue to be evaluated in real time, including how we can best study it. This paper provides a timely analysis on the relationship between immigration enforcement and confinement, public health emergencies, and ethnographic methods. It makes two contributions. The first is methodological and focuses on the challenges and opportunities of ethnographic methods in carceral settings when pandemic-related protocols have raised additional challenges to conventional in-person prison ethnography. The second contribution is empirical and documents how we adapted ethnographic methods to an interdisciplinary research design and to the exigencies of the pandemic to study the spread of the coronavirus in four immigrant detention facilities in New Jersey, USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Denmark's oldest asylum centre has been in operation in the small town of Jelling since 1993. Here, over time, the institutions of the local community and the asylum centre have merged, spatially and socially. Today, a local daycare centre and the local after-school club operate on the premises of the asylum centre. Based on an ethnographic study of the everyday institutional neighbourliness between 'asylum centre' and 'local community' in this small Danish town, this tale from the field pertains to the overwhelming national media attention that hit the research case halfway through its term – and unpacks how public media collaboration came to alter the very local state of affairs that I was in the middle of studying. It is argued how, more than simply dissemination partners or collaborators, 'the media' instead turned into actual co-creators of the ethnographic field – and so of the concrete empirical findings and analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an historical ethnographic analysis of Sri Lanka's oldest charity, the Colombo Friend-in-Need Society, this article explores changing modalities of humanitarian "relations" in colonial and post-colonial contexts. For two hundred years, "the Society" would provide a model of liberal humanitarianism premised on "friendship," a civil and secular relation that the organisation distinguished from "kinship" on the one side and "religion" on the other. Sorting and ranking kinds of charitable practice according to their relations became a project through which the elite could establish the relative values of different forms of mutuality and autonomy and their contribution to colonial and post-colonial development. Paying attention to the Society's role in this process also helps to reveal the historical contingencies of "relation" as a foundational anthropological concept and analytical objective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate information can be difficult to access in authoritarian regimes. As more and more countries fall under the sway of illiberal leaders, ethnographers may find themselves unable to easily corroborate knowledge that comes from native informants. This article proffers several strategies for researchers to utilize when analyzing unverifiable ethnographic data. Following from sociological and psychological studies of rumor, the article discusses the specific role that rumor plays under conditions of authoritarian governance. Without legal access to information and robust civil liberties and rule of law, it may be risky for researchers and informants alike to dig too deeply into secret information. Assuming that corroboration is impossible, how might an ethnographer analyze the rumors without believing or disputing their factual authenticity? Several possible approaches are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers' subjective positionalities are often presented as explanatory factors in the interpretation and analyses of ethnographic experiences. In geographic and anthropological ethnographies, positionalities are often benignly disclosed to readers under the auspices of being better able to understand specific subjective backgrounds, or the lenses, through which researchers engage with participants, places, and the overall subject matter. While positionality statements have become standard in qualitative research, there is not sustained development of the dynamic nature of positionality as way to better understand, analyze, and theorize through a research project. To contextualize this methodological argument, I draw from ethnographic engagement with a community of individuals facing homelessness who reside in tents and other rudimentary structures in a public municipal park. My own dynamic positionalities are positioned as both a lens through which I understand the "Hillside residents" and also evolving analytical tools that complicate assumed understandings of class and relationships to nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between October 2013 and October 2017 in Hokkaido, northern Japan, this paper explores the trajectories of individuals engaging in hip hop music. Participant observation and narratives indicate that the majority of individuals work as regular members of society (shakaijin) and only pursue hip hop in their free time. The paper highlights the intricate entanglement of individuals in subordination to mainstream values despite their references to elements of resistance. I contend that in contrast to previous generations of hip hoppers who chose to lead lives of open resistance to mainstream values, contemporary youth who largely belong to the "Generation Resignation" (satori sedai) prefer to engage in practices of resistance that may not be evident rather than overt contestation of societal conventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Team ethnography is becoming more popular in research. However, there is currently limited understanding of how multiple ethnographers working together actually share their experiences of conducting team ethnography. There is also an associated lack of explanation regarding how evidence and conclusions are drawn from such collective endeavour. This article attempts to address this absence of detail regarding the practice and conduct of team ethnography. In the following account, the authors present details of the design, development and application of 'team ethnography visual maps' and the collaborative reflexivity that took place within 'team ethnography data sessions' that were each embedded within a mixed methods study of frontline services located in six different National Health Service Trusts throughout England (UK). After a presentation of the ethnographic methods and analyses that occurred as part of team ethnography, they are then discussed in terms of their applied and academic value from a methodological perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at how actors commonly associated with the separate spheres of the state, private industry, and civil society, are engaging in wilful entanglements to improve the Mozambican state's capacities in managing the country's nascent extractive industry sector. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in and around the Ministry of Mineral Resources and Energy, the article suggests that these entanglements renegotiate and co-produce ideas and practices of the state. Historicising and ethnographically unpacking these interactions invites us to rethink one-dimensional accounts of a hollowing out of bounded, nation-state sovereignty under the influence of globalised capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I consider the importance of space and place in ethnographic educational research. The paper draws on research that took place at Educational Video Center (EVC), a non-profit media education centre in New York City (NYC). In this paper I articulate EVC as a place imbued with meaning from the pedagogical practices that take place within and regarding it and argue for a consideration of spatiality in ethnographic educational research. I consider the role of the city landscape in order to identify how knowledge is emplaced and represented through digital, visual technology, and I conclude by outlining the criticality of spatializing our ethnographic practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perhaps the most unique feature of ethnographic fieldwork is the distinctive form of relationality it entails, where the ethnographer's identity as a researcher is not fixed in the way typical of most other forms of research. In this paper, I explore how this 'undesigned relationality' is understood, both in procedural ethics frameworks and by the different disciplines that have come to claim a stake in the 'method' itself. Demonstrating that the ethical issues it entails are primarily conceptualized via the lens of the 'dual role', I use this as a means of exploring the ideal relationship between researcher and subject that procedural ethics frameworks are premised upon. I go on to explore the epistemological differences in ways that ethnographers themselves understand and respond to the multiple forms of relationality that characterize fieldwork and the challenge this poses to the possibility of a pan-disciplinary consensus on ethnographic research ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discipline of anthropology recoils instinctively at the idea that its researchers' labor might contribute to the national security state; other disciplines celebrate the same contributions as evidence of policy impact. In this article, we examine the seductions of espionage for professionally vulnerable (untenured) researchers that employ ethnographic methods but are operating in the shadow of market incentives and the Global War on Terror. We define “extreme fieldwork” as a research design likely to yield the kinds of data that Price identifies as “Dual Use Anthropology.” The bulk of our essay is devoted to providing warrants for the claim that there are strong incentives to brand oneself as an “extreme” fieldworker – which may be the post-9/11 equivalent of chasing what Trouillot called the “savage slot.” We argue that for some topics in certain research settings, uncomfortably, the more care and effort one invests in ethnographic best practices, the more likely it is that the researcher will engage in behaviors that could be confused with spycraft. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the roles of brokers in conducting research in a (post-)conflict context and uses this analysis as a lens to rethink reflexive ethics in humanitarian research. Drawing on fieldwork in Gulu, northern Uganda, the paper analyses the ambiguous position of brokers, and the complex social space in which they navigate. The paper outlines how brokers, in the pursuit of opportunities and in trying to meet expectations of other players, use strategies such as concealing information for researchers, or actively promoting the research project rather than merely facilitating it. It is further argued that research in northern Uganda may reproduce conceptions of war-affected people as vulnerable and of the war-affected context as problem-fraught and in need of intervention. The paper concludes by seeking ways to rethink a reflexive ethical stance in humanitarian research and encourages researchers to take the role of brokers and other stakeholders into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why and how should we auto-archive reflexive ethnographic data? Ethnography is based on a graphic method of written and visual notations, traditionally using notebooks. Reflexive ethnographers have been trained to separate their notebooks in two parts: the concise fieldwork log recording dates, places and events, and the research log putting down emotions and theoretical considerations. In addition, they collect varied documents coming from the field. The whole set makes the scientific value of ethnographic analyses, along with peer value process. My team develops a digital data base where “cases” within “settings” are defined by research objects and questions, and where documents are classified in three levels of confidentiality according to personal data protection and copyrights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists are increasingly required to account for the data on which they base their interpretations and to make it available for public scrutiny and re-analysis. While this may seem straightforward (why not place our data in online repositories?), it is not. Ethnographic ‘data’ may consist of everything from verbatim transcripts (‘hard data’) to memories and impressions (‘soft data’). Hard data can be archived and re-analysed; soft data cannot. The focus on hard ‘objective’ data contributes to the delegitimizing of the soft data that are essential for ethnographic understanding, and without which hard data cannot be properly interpreted. However, the credibility of ethnographic interpretation requires the possibility of verification. This could be achieved by obligatory, standardised forms of personal storage with the option for audit if required, and by being more explicit in publications about the nature and status of the data and the process of interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Events (remarkable, disruptive happenings) are important subjects of study for understanding processes of change. In this essay, I reflect upon the issue of what the ethnographic method has to offer for the analysis of this social phenomenon. To do so, I review three recently published ethnographic studies of events. My conclusion is that it is indeed a very useful method for understanding the feelings and ideas of people who are experiencing eventful situations, for instance around protests or natural disasters. However, using this method also brings about practical difficulties, such as the ‘luck’ that an event occurs at the ethnographic fieldwork site. Next, as transformative responses to events are not bound by the place or time of the happening, other methods (interviews, discourse analysis, surveys) that make it easier to follow them in varying locations and periods might be more suitable for getting a comprehensive picture of their meaning-making dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists exhibit growing interest in the politics of expertise. Analyses of evaluations, economic paradigms, blueprints, censuses, policy instruments and the like have come to occupy an important position in recent research. While much of this emergent scholarship has drawn on historical methods, a growing number of scholars have turned to ethnography. A close reading of this work reveals that ethnographers have actively tailored rather than passively transposed ethnography to the study of expertise. Departing from traditional conceptions of ethnography, these works exhibit growing attentiveness to movement, mediation, and materials. We argue that this retooling of ethnography is not merely a response to empirical realities but rather stems, at least in part, from the influence of science and technology studies, specifically Actor-Network Theory. This case provides the occasion to make a broader point about ethnography as a ‘theory/method package’: theory does not only shape what ethnographers study, but also how they conduct research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on our different experiences of employing autoethnography when researching Islamophobia, using two independent research projects. In particular, we reflect upon our experiences of Islamophobic victimization as a result of being ‘visibly’ Muslim in public spaces in the UK. We discuss our motivation for employing autoethnography and the role of our insider/outsider status in adopting the role of the Muslim ‘other’ in public spaces. Additionally, we consider the nature, extent and impact of Islamophobic victimization upon ourselves, and the coping mechanisms we employed to deal with it. The article concludes by reflecting upon the advantages, ethical challenges and limitations of using autoethnography when researching Islamophobic victimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on how an ethnographer’s approach to field entry, the topic of study, her use of ethnographic methods and contextual factors shaped research participants’ perception of her multiple identities in a Ghanaian hospital environment. Her perceived multiple identities influenced trust and distrust relations between her and her research participants, which impacted on the research project. The article discusses the paradox of the researcher’s negotiation of her multiple identities of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ and its influence on the process of data collection, understanding and analysis of the study topic. The article argues that research projects give birth to the ethnographer. Obviously, the observations of the ethnographer, who is the main research instrument, of her own position, are an important source for data collection. Participation and positioning in organizational activities can provide the ethnographer with a personal experience of her study topic and data that enhances understanding of organizational processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary approaches to evaluating ‘complex’ social and health interventions are opening up spaces for methodologies attuned to examining contextual complexities, such as ethnography. Yet the alignment of the two agendas – evaluative and ethnographic – is not necessarily comfortable in practice. I reflect on experiences of conducting ethnographic research alongside a public health evaluation of a community-based initiative in the UK, using the lens of ‘missing out’ to examine intersections between my own ethnographic concerns and those of the communities under study. I examine potential opportunities posed by the discomfort of ‘missing out’, particularly for identifying the processes and spaces of inclusion and exclusion that contributed both to my ethnographic experiences and to the realities of the communities engaging with the initiative. This reveals productive possibilities for a focus on ‘missing out’ as a form of relating for evaluations of the impacts of such initiatives on health and social inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual(ized) harassment during ethnographic fieldwork is often described by female researchers as a ‘rather common’ experience, yet it continues to be marginalized in methodological discussions and anthropological training. Rather than silencing accounts of these experiences, it is necessary to include them in the analysis of acquired data and to reflect on them in ethnographic writing. This article raises awareness and stimulates discussion about this neglected aspect of social research. It considers ethnography as a gendered practice in which gender norms, the (a)sexuality of the fieldworker, and power relations directly influence research and the researcher’s safety. It discusses the consequences of sexual(ized) harassment for the ethnographer, makes suggestions regarding how to deal with it in situ, and highlights the complex relationship between personal safety and researchers’ ethical obligations towards their informants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to illuminate the theoretical basis for rhythmanalysis as developed by Henri Lefebvre, who intended it to be a transdisciplinary concept that could be used to theorize everyday life, ‘from the most natural (physiological, biological) to the most sophisticated’. I will attempt to show how this concept can be transformed into a toolkit to research people groups (such as refugees, migrant workers, professionals) where it is impossible to conduct traditional ethnographic fieldwork either because of the difficulty of access or when an event (such as migration) has already taken place. It is a mainly theoretical paper informed by the author’s research on older migrants in Britain. It argues that if the principles behind rhythmanalysis can be distilled to conduct ethnography in absentia for a migrant worker group, then these same principles can be adapted to conduct research in most spaces where access and/or co-presence are difficult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Palestine is often approached either as a site of ‘resistance’ or of recent neoliberal de-politicization, the case of young university students defeats dichotomous categorizations and points to the more complex and layered nature of political subjectivities. Drawing on unique ethnographic fieldwork as a student at Najah University in Nablus, this article addresses students’ political subjectivities against the backdrop of three macrochanges in Palestinian recent history: the professionalization of politics, the tightening of internal repression, and the neoliberal economic turn. Overall, the study argues that, while Najah undergraduates maintain a strong nationalist discourse, they have come to conceptualize ‘politics’ as negative, at once ineffective and dangerous. Caught up in a web of conflicting social expectations, the pessimism vis-à-vis the political field leads them to abandon traditional sites of participation and to adopt a cynical yet ultimately political approach to consumption in an attempt to ‘change air’ and ‘just live’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the content and processes of embodied resocialization that occur at a children’s weight loss camp. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, I provide the children’s accounts of their decision to attend camp. In addition to teaching the children to implement body projects through strategic and embodied means, the structured environment at camp allowed for the recalibration of the campers’ habits. Social control supported weight loss at camp but ultimately created problems for effective resocialization. This paper contributes to a better understanding of processes of embodied resocialization and the tension between self-control and social control when resocialization occurs in an immersive environment for a short period of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term social interaction is used so commonly, to the point of obscureness, often without defining or setting limits to it. In-depth micro visual-ethnographic analysis of sleepers’ awakenings in public places offers a list of typical bodily behaviors which may indicate when interactions start/end. This becomes evident by video analysis of NYC subway commuters’ awakenings in natural settings. While awake, individuals’ bodies point-out specific situational directions. However, while snoozing, corporeal directions lay off and sleepers’ body-idioms, self-presentations, and pointing-acts mute. Consequently, dozers become relatively directionless, relaxing bodily boldness. Following this understanding of public physical patterns, I argue that, contrary to conventional microstudies’ understandings, even in public places interactions have clear corporeal-experiential limits that can be operationalized and defined. I suggest naming this other (non-interactional) family of social behaviors interalia (from Latin, ‘among others’, i.e., being relatively indistinct corporeally). This study aims to provide a contemporary applicable toolkit for ethnographers of everyday lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks ‘What is a life worth?’ by analyzing the wrongful death lawsuit for Douglas Morales, an undocumented student who died in 2008 at 17 from brain injuries suffered playing football. The paper first examines how sociologists and New Jersey law monetarily value a child’s life, especially when undocumented status would have decreased long-term earnings. Second, it uses ethnographic, counterfactual methods to do a ‘sociological autopsy’ offering a plausible alternative, a more positive scenario – including a path to legal status – for Douglas’s future life. It uses interviews and document review to establish Douglas’s life habits, leveraging sociological and psychological research on immigrant youth achievers to predict higher future earnings. The paper advances ‘public sociology’ by deploying ethnographic, case-oriented methods to challenge the devaluation of this undocumented life, critique American immigration policies, and to help the decedent’s family directly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article brings together findings from two separate ethnographic studies that explore the motivations, behaviours and experiences of those who voluntarily engage in high-risk activities. Focusing on Csikszentmihalyi’s phenomenology of enjoyment, and taking a particular interest in the psychological and experiential aspects of action, the accounts of skydivers and climbers are presented and discussed in relation to each of the components Csikszentmihalyi has identified as necessary for providing a deep sense of enjoyment. The aim of the article is to show how the concept of flow provides a useful framework for understanding the attractions of engaging in high-risk pursuits that are often overlooked. This contributes to an understanding of particular rural settings, specifically mountains and flying sites, as a backdrop for meaningful action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To call a place rural is to categorize it as a particular kind of place and, often, to presume that particular kinds of being innately occur there. Over the past 20 years, however, trends in British rural studies have problematized easy ascription; this article is an ethnographic contribution within those trends. If it is no longer adequate to read the rural as a container for being, then, as I contend here, rurality can be explored anew through doing. I draw upon David Matless’s (1994) frame of ‘doing the village’ representationally, and amplify it to include concepts of place as representational and relational. I thus use ‘doing’ to read the multiple ways in which diverse residents in a Northern England village engage with both their real locality and with nationally shared rural imaginings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes some analytical and methodological approaches to the urban ethnography of the human voice. Drawing on research among Protestant Christians in Seoul, South Korea, I consider the voice along three semiotic dimensions: the relationship between body and sound, the relationship between speech and song, and the relationship between the literal voice and more metaphorical understandings of voice (as perspective, political position, personhood, style, etc.). By focusing on Seoul’s rapid postwar urbanization, the growth of Protestant Christianity, and the intersection of these two phenomena in the suppression and erasure of signs of struggle and hardship by a certain population among the city’s Christians, I demonstrate how a focus on the human voice has the potential to illuminate important issues in the urban ethnography of newer Asian ‘megacities.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary India, large numbers of Muslims tend to be segregated into ghettoes. Even when this is not the case, the study of Muslims is often stalked by a ghetto mentality reflected in thematic choices made by the researcher. Can consideration of everyday aspirations enable a shift away from this ghetto mentality? Or does the ghetto reassert itself as effect, beyond its spatiality, in a wider culture of suspicion that marks the relationship with the other in an urban milieu? This article ponders whether there is a way out of the ghetto for Muslims. I consider this through a reflexive narrative of my personal experience of conducting research among Shi‘a Muslims in Mumbai. I reflect upon whether the paradoxical dynamic between keeping at a distance yet reaching out is intrinsic to any ethnographic research or acquires a distinct edge when conducting research among Muslims in urban India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While urban dimensions of landscapes and the physical environment are often regarded as built structures that relate to functionality in modern life, cities are also sites of human experience that comprise social relationships, memories, emotions, and how they are negotiated on an everyday basis. Embedded within these processes of sociality is how the senses mediate one's engagement with urban life, hence rendering insights into the multi-sensory character of urbanity. This article surveys a range of sensory methodologies that may be harnessed towards articulating the social life of the senses in urbanity such as smellscape walkabouts in order to explicate the doing of sensory ethnography in urban contexts. The aim is to elucidate how place, social actors, and sensory experiences come together in the production and analysis of urban ethnographic research, including the embodied constitutions of researchers in the process of data generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue seeks to highlight the ways in which diverse Asian cities – Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore – exceed current urban theorization. Modest, but nonetheless more-than-local re-theorization, can proceed from such empirical excess, which itself can only be derived from sustained ethnographic examination of cities in all their diversity. Relatedly, we cast Asia as a frontier for ethnographic strategizing – where, rather than merely importing and applying methodological tools from elsewhere, new ways of ‘doing’ cities emerge from reflexive engagement with emergent urban forms and ways of life. Considering diverse urban contexts in Asia, we foreground the aspirational dynamics of cities and ethnographic approaches to studying them. This has produced findings that have pushed the theoretical understanding of aspirations beyond Arjun Appadurai’s initial formulations in three ways. First, breaking from the dichotomy of pastness and cultural futures, the authors have found pastness making up important ingredients for aspirations. Second, the urban middle classes could very well express subaltern aspirations for and with subaltern groups, and it would be a mistake for us to ignore the sense and sensibility of the middle classes on account of their purported lack of subalternity. Third, the capacity to aspire is primarily achieved in the embodied production of space and limited by the same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This comparative ethnographic study charts the similarities and differences in crafting the job search enterprise following the Great Recession at two nonprofit programs in Minneapolis: Career Net, a support group for middle-class job seekers, and Good Deeds, a welfare-to-work service. Both programs attempted to create flexible, productive, and disciplined job seekers, but this unique comparison reveals how these organizations differently reproduced neoliberal subjectivities: Career Net helped participants actively re-craft their personal and professional selves through personal branding and social networking, training participants to become self-entrepreneurs. Good Deeds, on the other hand, took a more top-down approach to controlling client behavior, relying on program requirements and sanctions to keep clients in line and shuffle them into low-wage work. Cohering along lines of race and class, Career Net and Good Deeds underscored the demands of employability and further tipped the power scales in the interest of capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders creative city planning strategies in light of a Bourdieuian field model of cultural production. Creative city discourse imagines street-level artistic scenes as tolerant milieus that attract creative human capital and promote growth, whereas a field perspective views art scenes as generating logics and practices of exclusion. Using ethnographic observation and interviews with artists and other stakeholders in art crawl events in Portland, Oregon, and Nashville, Tennessee, this article describes how artists interact with their audiences in new urban contexts. Art crawls are monthly, coordinated, gallery-opening events that bring together art scenes and new audiences in particular times and districts, and they have proliferated in cities of all sizes in recent years, notably in places without rich traditions in the arts. This article finds that artistic professionals work to attract crowds, but the logics of their field then require sorting and selecting between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a part of a larger ethnographic study of urban beekeepers in New York City, this article considers the challenges of conducting multispecies participant observation – being in the field with both human and non-human informants, beekeepers and bees. Keeping in mind the intra-active nature of human/insect entanglements, we explore how to interpret and translate the actions of another species while resisting anthropomorphic descriptions. Through a decentering of the authors, the bee is reflexively rendered as a non-human informant and an actor in its own right. The embodied experiences of conducting participation observation with humans and insects are used to speculate on the possibility of an ontology of bees and the idea of intra-species mindfulness. This work is in dialogue with the field of multispecies ethnography, actor-network theory and critical animal studies, positioning the bee though networks of ethnographic data and translation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the politics of dependency in researcher–assistant relationships. By doing so, it reflects on how these dynamics are always already predicated on broad personal histories and a range of emergent dependencies. Taking the politics of dependency in fieldwork seriously charts a path towards more fully understanding the quixotic production of ethnographic knowledge. Specifically, this paper reflects on the author’s relationship with Saiful (a pseudonym), who worked with the author during research at the India-Bangladesh border. Saiful was addicted to heroin. This addiction both compromised and enabled a productive research engagement in an unstable place. But Saiful’s heroin use was only one of a series of dependencies that structured our relationship and this research project. Using the lens of dependency to unpack the construction of the field and of ethnographic knowledge more broadly, this paper reflects on a range of questions, including access, anxiety, insider-outsider politics, and entanglement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article brings anthropologist and research assistant into mutually reflective critique of one another, the researcher–assistant dynamic, and the challenges of fieldwork in contemporary India. The authors have worked together in the politically charged, ethnologically saturated context of ‘tribal’ Darjeeling since 2006. To realize the potential of their partnership, Middleton and Pradhan were forced to come to creative terms with the problematic legacy of anthropology in South Asia. Working with – and ultimately through – the colonialities at hand, they have pursued a ‘postcolonial ethnography’ replete with new objects of analysis, new modes of study, and new forms of ethnographic connectivity. Asking what made them work as a dynamic duo and what ethnographic possibilities exist in the postcolonial era, ethnographer and assistant here come together to reflect upon and reproduce the dialogics of ethnographic practice, so as to explore the characters, conditions, and im/possibilities of contemporary ethnography – postcolonial and otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers two revenants – a man and a ghost – who haunt the Fann Psychiatric Clinic in Dakar, Senegal. Following Derrida’s assertion that haunting is historical, I take seriously the concept of haunting and insist upon its relevance to anthropological inquiry. As a mode of storytelling that comes from a particular way of apprehending the world, I argue that anthropology might give credence to specters as social figures and assign ethnography the task of chasing after ghosts, not simply for the poetic spaces they may open up but out of a concern for justice and responsibility in the past, present, and future. My own ethnographic encounter with the two revenants described here has generated questions about the often taken-for-granted equivalence of the real and the true. Likewise, it has encouraged me to interrogate the unpredictable (and oftentimes uneasy) cohabitation of memory and history, both within the Fann Clinic and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research deals with exclusionary processes of social ascription in which low socio-economic status is linked with disregard, in turn ‘producing’ a disrespectful or contemptuous treatment of others. On the basis of an ethnographic study of Hauptschüler in Berlin, Germany, the production of and dealing with contempt is looked at from different angles: as processes of refused recognition, as discrimination based on race/ethnicity and class in the school system, and with regard to negative and derogatory media representations. A wide range of social practices of Hauptschüler – friendship, body-practices, emotions, and irony – are considered as mechanisms of coping with contempt and thus take on a political meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the borderlands of northeastern Cambodia, booming regional demand for luxury rosewood timber has seen the recent expansion of illegal cross-border logging in Laos. This article outlines Khmer–Lao villagers’ interactions with border authorities that enable their cross-border logging and their construction of anti-elite political narratives to critically engage with other ethnographic studies of the remote borderlands in Asia. I argue that in the quest to challenge dominant top-down assumptions of the remote borderlands as beyond state power and to highlight the unique dynamics of borderlands, ethnographic studies of these regions can focus overly on political opposition. I propose more recognition of, firstly, the desire and distrust in borderlanders’ engagements with different authorities, and secondly, the commonalities in contestation that emerge across different national spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnographies of NGO and nonprofit practices are increasingly focused on the social lives of middle-class liberals who significantly shape how societies recognize social suffering and its redress. At the same time, the boundaries between academic and NGO worlds are blurring ever more as ethnographers prioritize ‘engaged’ projects and as more doctoral students enter graduate school with NGO experience. This article addresses the distinctive dilemmas that arise from this lack of distance between ethnographers and research subjects and particularly the difficulty of critically examining the moral sentiments of progressive actors. I tell the story of a first fieldwork project in which I struggled to objectify the social power of professional education reformers who already analyzed themselves and whose efforts to combat race and class inequalities seemed to be beyond reproach. The narrative explores how the particularity of their norms and ideals continually threatened to disappear in the contexts of university life, of critical ethnographic literature, and of the fieldwork itself. I argue that a direct focus on the production of morality is crucial to grasping the meaning of ‘progress’ as a product of struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the ideas about working-class culture presented in Paul Willis’s classic monograph (1977) Learning to Labour apply or do not apply to the data generated by an ethnographic analysis of a London construction site that I conducted in 2003/4. While Learning to Labour had significant relevance to understanding the class-bound masculine cultures of the construction workers, because building work has a pre-industrial history and a post-industrial contemporary, the claim that working-class masculinity is driven predominately by the features of industrial work life is found wanting. Rather than being bound exclusively to industrial work, the exigencies of working-class-bound masculinity could be found in the builders’ problematic and attenuated relationships with the modern state and its legal and moral injunctions. Such relationships to the modern state illuminate why fundamental features of working-class masculine culture are reproduced in a post-industrial global London by both migrant and more indigenous workers, and thus also illustrate part of the reason why class and ethnic inequality persist in the contemporary UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the use of violence by police officers and gendarmes in Ghana and Niger. We analyse how popular discourses, legal and organizational conditions frame the police use of violence. Acts of violence by police are situated in this inconsistent framework and can be seen as legal and appropriate, despicable and brutal, or as useful and morally legitimate. Thus, every time the police use violence, they face a major dilemma: legally and morally justified violence can be a source of long-term legitimacy; but because of multiple possible readings of a certain situation (according to different, conflicting moral and legal discourses), the very same action has potentially delegitimizing effects. Our own position as participant observers made us aware of these contradictions because, as researchers, we were confronted with a similar dilemma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study draws upon ethnographic data from a group of homeless persons residing in a 24-hour donut shop that doubles nightly as an ersatz shelter. This article examines the role of ‘urban hybrid spaces’ – spaces that serve dual roles as legitimate business establishment and homeless habitation or hangout – in facilitating the construction and enactment of more dignified identities for the unhoused. Ethnographic data depict the strategies by which unhoused individuals utilize an urban hybrid space to verbally, symbolically, and performatively assert and maintain a ‘patron identity’ – understood as someone who is housed, employed, autonomous, occupies the donut shop legitimately, and associates with other such people. I argue that this identity is uniquely facilitated by the social and physical context provided by the donut shop qua private business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'problem of other minds' is central to sociological theory and of immediate importance to contemporary research on subjectivity and interiority. How do we cultivate and maintain an intersubjective space during silent, private, experiences? Drawing on Alfred Schutz's phenomenology, this study challenges the common view which regards silence as an obstacle to social relations. The data consist of two years of participant observation of vipassana meditation practices in Israel and the United States. Vipassana meditation is conducted in complete silence, discouraging group sharing of meditation experiences, thus offering an extreme case of silence and privacy. The findings illustrate how, despite the absence of direct verbal communication, the practice of meditation still holds important intersubjective dimensions. I suggest that covert mechanisms of silent intersubjectivity play an important role in everyday social life and require further ethnographic attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on four 'tales from the field', provided one each by the authors, this article examines the ethical and moral dilemmas ethnographers can face during their research. In particular, we address two key questions. First, what does being ethical actually involve? Second, is there a moral duty owed by researchers and, if so, to whom is this duty owed? The article reviews current debates over ethics in ethnographic research, specifically the responsibilities of the researcher to his/her research subjects, before turning to the four 'tales from the field'. These tales form the basis for a discussion of a researcher's ethical responsibilities when confronted with wrongdoing, in different forms, in the course of their fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the presence of muck, dirt and animal detritus is a quotidian and generally unremarkable feature of everyday working life for farm vets, it has special relevance to social scientists seeking to understand how they assemble their professional identities. But the cultural significance of muck and mess as a material condition of working life for vets - and other professionals more generally - has been largely under-theorized by researchers and demands further ethnographic analysis. Drawing on Bourdieu's concepts of symbolic and cultural capital, as well as anthropological insights informed by the sociology of science, this article explores the meanings that one group of farm vets ascribe to muck. The ethnographic account that follows seeks to reveal the ways in which the presence of muck, mess and disorder functions as a cultural artefact bestowing power and prestige that both structures and regulates the vets' social and professional relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]