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What might an ethnographic study of late capitalism look like? Anthropologists have answered this question by increasingly assuming that what distinguishes their discipline is the study of culture- the culture of capitalism, of globalization, and so forth. Instead, we need to balance such concerns with a focus on the material conditions of capitalist reproduction that are not immediately available to experience so that we can expose the way in which processes of social reproduction relate to our experience of being in the world. An exploration of programmes for the development of ‘regional economies’ in Europe shows how these programmes have repositioned social science intellectuals, thereby affecting the ways in which they configure their research and their images of reality. Insofar as these ‘findings’ become the basis for policy, they produce a reality with which the people in these sites have to deal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates whether cultural consensus analysis can be used to examine the central conceptual goal of idealism. The cultural consensus analysis has following advantages: it permits testing of its claims, its assumptions are made explicit and it has been validated using simulated data. However, cultural consensus analysis has not been tested using ethnographic data. It was concluded that operational and conceptual difficulties associated with idealism are dire enough to turn to an alternative approach--realism.

Anthropology is today in search of a public voice for communicating its knowledge, insights, and understanding to a broad public audience. One of the key historical voices of anthropology, the museum, has grown increasingly silent as it struggles with issues of power in the representation of Native peoples and the burden of large, dated collections of material culture. The potential remains for the museum to regain its role as a voice for anthropology by ceding power and easing its overwhelming dependence on the material objects of culture. Museums with a focus on public learning can serve as forums for bringing the full range of anthropological endeavor to a wide and diverse audience, Reintegrating museums into anthropology will require changes in both sides of the relationship: academic anthropology will have to accept museums as a critical vehicle for public communication, and museums will have to commit to significant changes in curatorial responsibilities, exhibits, and collection practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are two basic analytical approaches in social research. The first, using formal methods (e.g., standard statistical analysis), aggregates over the attributes of individual cases to determine the influence of abstract effects on events. This approach, which results in correlations between variables, is unable to provide adequate causal explanations for what happens in particular cases. The interpretive or narrative approach, in contrast, aggregates over events to trace the causal development of a single case. This type of analysis cannot be made reflexive (i.e., cannot account explicitly for the intersubjective nature of data collection procedures in human studies). Thus each method, by itself, is problematic. There have been a number of attempts to combine the two approaches in a single theoretical framework. However, because the constituent approaches are fundamentally different in their ontological and epistemological stances, the proposed reconciliations remain forced. This paper outlines a strategy that sequentially utilizes both approaches, preserving their independent and complementary virtues, while providing formal links that allow the results of one approach to inform use of the other directly. It is hoped that practice of this two-step method will dissipate some of the recent doubts about the value of ethnographic fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's response on comments made on his study "Language as Culture in U.S. Anthropology: Three Paradigms." According to the author, language is so universal in human affairs that one can never talks too much about it. In the beginning of the 20th century, language tended to be taken for granted or reduced to the mere expression of already formed thoughts and social processes, in the consolidations of the social sciences in Europe.