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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]

Festivals have emerged as a compelling subject of study within the realm of the social sciences, with disciplines like popular musicology showcasing festivals as a prominent area of investigation. These cultural events have demonstrated a profound and enduring impact on various generations, solidifying their significance in contemporary history. In the ever-evolving landscape of rapid social change, festivals have evolved into both traditions and heritage. Our research centered on the musical landscape in the city of Cáceres has culminated in the creation of a Festival Route rooted in the pertinent facets of its history and unique sociocultural context. The methodology employed in this study revolves around the development of comprehensive databases that encompass various parameters, principles, and elements. These databases are instrumental in crafting adaptable musical itineraries tailored to the individual participant's characteristics, including age, educational background, place of origin, and explicit or intrinsic interests. Moreover, they factor into the duration of the route. These databases draw upon the findings of historiographic and ethnographic research, shedding light on the music performed and cherished within the city of Cáceres throughout its rich history. This paper primarily delves into the educational aspects derived from the socio-cultural phenomenon of festivals, specifically in the realms of music pedagogy and value-based education. Our Festival Route is designed with a particular focus on youth engagement, weaving together key locales within the city to create an enriching and educational experience. [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]

Copyright of Revista Razón Crítica is the property of La Fundacion Universidad de Bogota Jorge Tadeo Lozano and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Razón Crítica is the property of La Fundacion Universidad de Bogota Jorge Tadeo Lozano and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The integration of social psychiatry and clinical anthropology has a rich history marked by shared interests in phenomenology and scientific epidemiology, shaping mental healthcare significantly. Social psychiatrists and clinical anthropologists strive for a holistic comprehension of mental illnesses through extensive research and deepening knowledge of their respective disciplines. The amalgamation of social psychiatry and anthropology helps elucidate the complex interplay between mental health and societal dynamics, fostering culturally sensitive care. Anthropology offers a comparative understanding of mental health care, highlighting the influence of culture on the experience of mental stress and care provision. It also addresses research gaps and promotes interdisciplinary collaboration. Transdisciplinary approaches bridge clinical practice and social context in public mental health, providing comprehensive insights into mental health issues, and paving the way for culturally informed interventions. Applied anthropology, particularly, plays a crucial role in evaluating community acceptance of health initiatives and developing effective interventions tailored to specific contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resumo Este artigo se propõe a explorar o fenômeno das intensas interações entre grafismos rupestres, valendo-se da interlocução teórica entre Arqueologia e Etnologia indígena brasileiras. As interações em painéis rupestres são aqui analisadas em duas regiões de Minas Gerais: o Vale do Rio Peruaçu e Diamantina, áreas de pesquisa da equipe do Setor de Arqueologia do Museu de História Natural e Jardim Botânico da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), enfatizando-se a primeira. Em ambas, há numerosíssimos casos de interações, quando novas pinturas (ou gravuras) são compostas em painéis que já estavam pintados (e/ou gravados). A interlocução com a Etnologia que aqui se faz tem como foco algumas das noções centrais apresentadas nos trabalhos etnográficos e nas sínteses etnológicas sobre sociedades ameríndias, sobretudo o caráter intensamente relacional de suas cosmologias e suas concepções sobre agência de não humanos. A proposta central, a partir do estudo dos acervos gráficos dessas duas regiões de Minas Gerais, é pensar a relação como elemento crucial da prática de pintar paredes rochosas já pintadas, relação essa em que pessoas e pinturas são, ambas, sujeitos.

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]

The ontological turn (OT) is a loose cluster of theoretical approaches within cultural anthropology that advocates a synthetic, overarching way forward for ethnographically oriented cultural anthropology. We argue that in order to contribute substantively to ethnobiology the OT needs to distance itself from a long-standing tradition of thinking within ethnography that assumes some kind of fundamental divide between the natural and the social sciences. This distancing seems especially unlikely in light of the meta-anthropological nature of the OT as primarily a perspective on ethnographic methodology. Instead, we advocate for naturalistic theoretical alternatives for thinking about human sociality, where philosophical innovation develops in concert with ongoing empirical work across the biological, cognitive, and social sciences. We illustrate this perspective by drawing on two naturalistic accounts likely to prove more fruitful for ethnobiological practice, namely, trans-genera models of sociality and progenerative views of kinship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Seminare Learned Investigations / Seminare. Poszukiwania naukowe is the property of Francis de Sales Scientific Society / Towarzystwo Naukowe Franciszka Salezego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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]

The handling of recidivism crimes is carried out in a series of systems called the criminal justice system, which is a means in society to tackle crime. The components of the criminal justice system in Indonesia are the police, prosecutors, courts and correctional institutions. Correctional institutions provide guidance so that convicts become human beings who are useful in the future. From this, researchers are interested in reviewing the Impact of the Industrial Revolution 4.0 Era on the Development of Prisoners in Indonesian Correctional Institutions. In this research, the authors used an ethnographic study system research approach with a descriptive approach. Ethnography is a social science research method. This research concludes that there are factors related to the lack of success in personality development and recidivism. The main focus of research is to develop a distribution system for the work of channeling prisoners' work through the industrial revolution 4.0. [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 latest IPCC report estimates that approximately 1 billion people will be at risk from coastal hazards in the near term due to coastal population increase, sea-level rise and other coastal changes. This will occur in a world that is changing rapidly due to climate change, ecosystem decline, human development and the projected transformations of the economy to meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement. In this context, social sciences provide a pivotal perspective to coastal adaptation, for example, while assessing barriers and opportunities across scales, from local to global. This scoping review explores how social sciences support coastal adaptation. We show that Political Sciences, Economics, Sociology and Geography are already supporting coastal adaptation. Yet, scientific fields such as legal sciences, psychology, history and archaeology as well as anthropology and ethnography are less developed in the context of coastal adaptation to sea-level rise. New research avenues could also integrate education, media and communication research and aim at truly interdisciplinary studies linking different branches of social sciences with coastal science and climate services. This effort could help moving from a coastal adaptation often focused on coastal engineering protection to a broader vision of coastal resilient development, also addressing the challenges of mitigation, sustainable development and coastal ecosystem decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes the works related to the understanding of performative practices as a phenomenon of modern culture and art; it highlights the principal trends of the studies of this phenomenon. The reasons for the growing interest in the study of performative practices were clarified, the complexity and ambiguity of this phenomenon as a special socio-cultural communicative action, having the appearance of an "artistic event," a theatrical action, a dynamic symbolic action affecting all channels of human perception, was emphasized. The work is aimed at the analytical study of the essence of specificity of performative practices within the framework of various study optics from the standpoint of social and cultural anthropology and art history, in direct connection with social and cultural life, human emotions, cultural patterns, etc. The aim of the paper is to identify the theoretical definition of the "performative practices" concept in the contemporary humanities, which will allow solving the scientific problem of determining the essential specificity of performative practices as a modern cultural phenomenon. General scientific approaches, principles, and methods employed made it possible to consider the phenomenon of performative practices from different angles: theoretical interpretations of the basic forms of performative practices were compared using the comparative method; the use of the structural-functional method helped to determine the components creating an idea of the meaning of certain performance elements as the forms of manifestation of performative practices in modern culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Razón Crítica is the property of La Fundacion Universidad de Bogota Jorge Tadeo Lozano and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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]

The approach of cameraethnography developed by Bina Elisabeth Mohn links ethnographic description to a "permanent work on gazes." The aim of this essay is to decipher this approach in pedagogical, as well as in methodological, terms by referring to an empirical study within artistic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the 'affective turn' within social sciences, alongside the shift to a more emotional public and political sphere, and the implications of these shifts for the study of social policy. A context of austerity cuts and reforms to welfare services contributes to heightened and unstable emotions surrounding services. A case study of Sure Start Children's Centers in the UK is presented, in two areas where centers were threatened with closure. Interview and ethnographic material with both staff and service users is presented to show how emotions became heightened and politicized in this context. Both staff and service users articulated the values of the centers in new ways, drawing on intimate and emotional registers of experience. Overall, the material shows how in this context, emotions can be understood as place-based, relational and politicized, potentially producing different values and visions of welfare services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 essay-like study primarily explores the position of the social sciences within the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (Československá akademie věd, ČSAV) during the first two decades of its existence. It emphasises especially the gradual shift from its accent on sciences which could be used in political or national propaganda, such as archaeology, philosophy or ethnography, to sciences as a tool for the expert control of society, such as sociology, political science and psychology. Even though especially during František Šorm’s chairmanship (1962–1969) efforts were being made to squeeze the social sciences out from the ČSAV and thus deprive them of the benefits of development in a privileged institution, they were able to defend their position. The dispute was not only over the degree of exactness but also over the compatibility between the key working methods and the ČSAV’s mode of operation. [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]

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]