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The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography has issued a call for papers on the topic of ethnographies of infrastructure. The aim is to examine how infrastructure has been studied ethnographically, exploring its visible and invisible elements, material and non-material dimensions, geopolitical and economic implications, and its relationship to other structures. The special issue seeks papers that offer theoretical perspectives and methodological treatments of infrastructure, grounded in empirical case studies or critical reviews of existing ethnographies. The deadline for submissions is October 1, 2024. [Extracted from the article]

Axel Sommerfelt's paper for the symposium organized by Fredrik Barth ahead of the publication of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries is given a broader readership in this issue. This biography provides some background to the perspectival differences between Axel Sommerfelt and Barth, that revolve around issues of political inequality, experience and historicity. Axel Sommerfelt shared Barth's anti-essentialist view on ethnicity, but did not fully embrace the instrumentalist underpinnings of Barth's perspective. He was theoretically influenced by the Manchester school, and directed attention to political domination from the point of view of the dominated, a focus that grew out of his ethnography from Ruwenzori in Uganda. Judicial institutions constituted an important arena for the negotiation of ethnic boundaries, and specifically, Toro-Konzo relations were partly shaped in judicial contexts that Toro controlled, under British protectorate supervision. His interest in resistance was also influenced by his upbringing in Norway during Nazi occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paper Kinship: Law, Power and Resistance in an Ethnographic Scene with Foreign Migrants starts from an "ethnographic scene" with foreign migrants in a lawyer's office to discuss the role that migratory documents play on kinship in the transnational movement. By doing this, it highlights how the state and the Law discipline these relations and how migrants themselves, using the legal logic of documentary production, elaborate themselves as persons, in resistance to state power. Based on this experience, named here as paper kinship, a reelaboration of the concept of document is proposed, encompassing both the bureaucratic agency and that of the subjects of documentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs digital ethnographic methods to explore the Facebook fan group for the popular podcast My Favorite Murder. We argue that the My Favorite Murder podcast and Facebook group, while providing a potentially unique feminist online space for its members in its early days, quickly devolved into a toxic space rife with conflict and ultimately destroyed by white-centred feminism and white supremacy. We explore failed gatekeeping practices in relation to other Facebook podcast fan groups that have met a similar demise. Finally, we question whether truly inclusive anti-racist feminist spaces can exist in capitalistic models of media production and consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During 2018, three academics employed what they referred to as "reflective ethnography" to examine the hypothesis that many disciplines (e.g., sociology, educational philosophy, and critical race theory) are motivated by extreme ideologies, as opposed to generating knowledge. The authors published, or had accepted, seven "hoax" articles in a number of peer-reviewed journals. When the story broke in the Wall Street Journal, the authors stated that the articles advocated a number of ludicrous, inhumane, and appalling ideas. For example, one argued that men should be trained like dogs with shock collars. Their acceptance for publication was therefore taken as evidence for the kind of ideas that many academic disciplines will advocate. In the present article, I will show that the central aspects of the hoax articles do not match with how they were later described by the hoax authors and many other commentators (e.g., journalists). Despite the vast amount of media coverage, this has (virtually) gone unnoticed. I will suggest that the widely accepted narrative of the so-called Grievance Studies affair is incorrect. [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]

The paper outlines newly minted estimation procedures and techniques to tackle these challenges for the case of massive data samples. i Editors' Choice Paper Volume 23(1) The B I JGS i b B Editors' Choice b of articles represent papers that the editors see as providing an especially significant contribution to the field. With the first issue of 2021, it is our pleasure to announce two novel initiatives to acknowledge and celebrate the outstanding quality of research published in the journal: first, the new annual B I JGS i b B Best Paper Award b , and second, the B Editors' Choice b of their favorite paper of each issue. [Extracted from the article]

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In this paper, I draw on two childhood ethnographies to ask basic questions about the foundation of child writing. The first question is, where does writing come from in young children's lives? Answering this question will lead us to childhood play as the foundation of writing. The second question is, how do educators negotiate an inclusive, playful classroom culture in racially divisive and neoliberal times? This question will lead to a critical consideration of forming an inclusive culture in a racially and culturally diverse classroom. In this time of uniform, mandated curricula, rampant in the United States and elsewhere, and of the dismissive attitude towards play and towards childhood diversity (e.g., in race, culture and socioeconomic class), it is worth revisiting basic questions about the beginnings of writing in childhoods. The questions are relevant whether a child is writing on paper, screen, slate, or sand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article synthesizes some results of the author's Ph.D. thesis, an ethnography about Brazilian adults who lived without papers until the moment they sought their birth certificates, which were being offered as a free public service in downtown Rio de Janeiro. In a dialogue with the concept of the 'margins of the state' (Das and Poole in Anthropology in the margins of the state, School of American Research, New Mexico, 2004), the article shows how undocumented people disregard themselves as subjects and analyzes the birth certificate as an institutional rite (Bourdieu in A economia das trocas linguísticas, Edusp, São Paulo, 1996), demonstrating that the search for papers is also for rights and citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay draws on ideas from the history of the natural sciences—on "personae" and "paper technology"—to explain how the subculture of social anthropology emerged at the London School of Economics in the 1930s. It argues that the figure of the social anthropologist coalesced around a number of practices and symbols that Bronislaw Malinowski had done much to imbue with charisma and that his students attempted to reproduce in their own research. Historians have proposed that part of social anthropology's success lay in its practitioners' ability to foster a fictive individualism in their writing, cultivating an inward attitude of experience founded on acts of the self upon the self. This essay shows that the kind of knowledge produced in Malinowski's seminar was, in fact, a highly sociable, rather than an individualistic, affair. Social anthropologists in the 1930s constructed a mutually constitutive relationship of field and seminar. These were connected spaces, held together in the act of fieldwork—a practice that transcended and linked the geographical distance between the metropole and the periphery in the crucial years of the discipline's development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]