Search

In their classic accounts, anthropological ethnographers developed causal arguments for how specific sociocultural structures and processes shaped human thought, behavior, and experience in particular settings. Despite this history, many contemporary ethnographers avoid establishing in their work direct causal relationships between key variables in the way that, for example, quantitative research relying on experimental or longitudinal data might. As a result, ethnographers in anthropology and other fields have not advanced understandings of how to derive causal explanations from their data, which contrasts with a vibrant "causal revolution" unfolding in the broader social and behavioral sciences. Given this gap in understanding, we aim in the current article to clarify the potential ethnography has for illuminating causal processes related to the cultural influence on human knowledge and practice. We do so by drawing on our ongoing mixed methods ethnographic study of games, play, and avatar identities. In our ethnographic illustrations, we clarify points often left unsaid in both classic anthropological ethnographies and in more contemporary interdisciplinary theorizing on qualitative research methodologies. More specifically, we argue that for ethnographic studies to illuminate causal processes, it is helpful, first, to state the implicit strengths and logic of ethnography and, second, to connect ethnographic practice more fully to now well-developed interdisciplinary approaches to causal inference. In relation to the first point, we highlight the abductive inferential logic of ethnography. Regarding the second point, we connect the ethnographic logic of abduction to what Judea Pearl has called the ladder of causality, where moving from association to intervention to what he calls counterfactual reasoning produces stronger evidence for causal processes. Further, we show how graphical modeling approaches to causal explanation can help ethnographers clarify their thinking. Overall, we offer an alternative vision of ethnography, which contrasts, but nevertheless remains consistent with, currently more dominant interpretive approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between culture and the individual is a central focus of social scientific research. This paper examines motivations that mediate between shared culture norms and individual actions. Inspired by the works of Leon Festinger and Melford Spiro, we posit that social network conformation (the perceived adherence of one's social network with norms) and internalization of cultural norms (incorporation of cultural models with the self-schema) will differentially shape behavior (cultural consonance) depending on the domain and individual characteristics. For the domain of gender roles among Brazilian men, religious affiliation results in different configurations of the individual and culture. Our findings suggest that, due to changing and competing cultural models, religious men are compelled to reflexively "think" about what masculinity means to them, rather than subconsciously conform to social (hegemonic) expectations. This study demonstrates the importance of considering the impetus of culturally informed behaviors and, in doing so, provides a methodological means for measuring and interpreting such motivations, an important factor in the relationship between culture and the individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We review ethnographic methods that allow researchers to assess distress in a culturally sensitive manner. We begin with an overview of standardized biomedical and psychological approaches to assessing distress cross-culturally. We then focus on literature describing the development of reliable and valid culturally sensitive assessment tools that can serve as complements or alternatives to biomedical categories and diagnostic frameworks. The methods we describe are useful in identifying forms of suffering—expressed in culturally salient idioms of distress—that might be misidentified by biomedical classifications. We highlight the utility of a cognitive anthropological theoretical approach for developing measures that attend to local cultural categories of knowledge and experience. Attending to cultural insider perspectives is necessary because expressions of distress, thresholds of tolerance for distress, expectations about stress inherent in life, conceptions of the good life, symptom expression, and modes of help-seeking vary across cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of participant observation and questionnaire data, we consider the cultural shaping of video gaming pleasure and distress in face-to-face gaming centers in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. We analyze how and why young adult Indian gamers experience their play as both deeply satisfying and dangerously addictive. To explain this dual consciousness, we join the concept of cultural consonance (individuals' relative consistency with their culture) with the theory of cognitive dissonance (the experience of distress when individuals are unable to eliminate incompatibilities in conflicting beliefs). Specifically, we consider Udaipuri gamers' attempts to minimize distress arising from their commitment to conflicting online and offline cultural norms related to "true gamer" identity and to local marriage and career expectations—an example of what we call cultural dissonance. We highlight how our cultural dissonance account of mental well-being is enhanced by examining intersections of local cultures with global media, attending to the stigma felt by members of oppositional subcultures, and relying on ethnography. More generally, we illustrate how formal cultural norm accounts of health developed in psychological anthropology benefit by engaging broader cultural anthropological theory and method, which refines consonance and dissonance health explanations in the context of social complexity. This paper, then, is an illustration of the power of mixing mathematical and ethnographic methods to understand human experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of assessing psychosocial stress as a process and outcome in naturalistic (i.e., field) settings is applicable across the social, biological, and health sciences. Meaningful measurement of biology-in-context is, however, far from simple or straightforward. In this brief methods review, we introduce theoretical framings, methodological conventions, and ethical concerns around field-collection of markers of psychosocial stress that have emerged from 50 years of research at the intersection of anthropology and human biology. Highlighting measures of psychosocial stress outcomes most often used in biocultural studies, we identify the circumstances under which varied measures are most appropriately applied and provide examples of the types of cutting-edge research questions these measures can address. We explain that field-based psychosocial stress measures embedded in different body systems are neither equivalent nor interchangeable, but this recognition strengthens the study of stress as always simultaneously cultural and biological, situated in local ecologies, social–political structures, and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extending classic anthropological "idioms of distress" research, we argue that intensive online videogame involvement is better conceptualized as a new global idiom, not only of distress but also of wellness, especially for emerging adults (late teens through the 20s). Drawing on cognitive anthropological cultural domain interviews conducted with a small sample of U.S. gamers (N = 26 free-list and 34 pile-sort respondents) (Study 1) and a large sample of survey data on gaming experience (N = 3629) (Study 2), we discuss the cultural meaning and social context of this new cultural idiom of wellness and distress. Our analysis suggests that the "addiction" frame provides a means for gamers to communicate their passion and commitment to online play, even furthering their enthusiasm for the hobby and community in the process, but also a way for players to express and even resolve life distress such as depression and loneliness. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has recently included "Internet gaming disorder" (IGD) as a possible behavioral addiction, akin to gambling, warranting further consideration for eventual formal inclusion in the next iteration of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). Our study leads us to suggest that clinicians only sparingly use IGD as a clinical category, given that medical and gamer understandings of "addictive" play differ so markedly. This includes better distinguishing positive online gaming involvement—also sometimes framed by gamers as "addictive"—from other play patterns more clearly entailing distress and dysfunction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nearly 50 years ago, Marvin Harris published a seminal paper that examined how Brazilians create taxonomic categories of racial identity. In the intervening decades, new cognitive theories and analytical approaches have enabled researchers to investigate cultural domains with increased sophistication and nuance. In this paper, we revisit, replicate, and extend Harris's research by utilizing modern cognitive anthropological approaches such as multidimensional scaling and cultural consensus analysis. Utilizing the same facial portraits as in the original study, we ask a contemporary sample of 34 Brazilians to identify and sort these images by racial identity. We then compare Harris's original data, reanalyzed with modern techniques, to show that Brazilians had, and still hold, structured and coherent models of race. This finding has important social ramifications for race in Brazil and highlights the importance of replicability in the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]