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The purpose of this is to share a research experience that employed ethnoso-ciological methodology (Bertaux, 2005) to study men as gender subjects and generational groups. Through in-depth interviews specifically designed to capture the voices and meanings of language from comprehensive perspective of reality, the reflective process of using ethnosociology is explored, and its potentialities in relation to the same object of study are analyzed. This research invites reconsideration of gender analysis, masculinity and culture from their concrete practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Members of the Rohingya ethnos must navigate the Myanmar state's "blunt biopolitics"—a mode of regulation that neither protects nor intensively knows, but rather uses violence to govern, the populations rather than individuals it takes as its object. As classic resistance is ineffective against the excessive sovereign force activated in blunt biopolitics, Rohingya communities across Asia enact strategies of refusal—what this article theorizes as methods for navigating regimes of biopolitical governmentality. As Rohingya refuse literal erasure to persist as a population, that Rohingya identity has become an amorphous object as members manuever between rejection of and assent to their symbolic effacement. They reformulate the ethnic category's contours, both consciously/directly (in response to changing dynamics that their refusal has generated) and indirectly: not only as they enter and exit the ethnos, mimicking spatial peregrinations amid mass expulsion, but also in terms of disjunctive affiliations in which people simultaneously inhabit positions of identification with and refusal of "Rohingya." Refusal hence opens up a consideration of the collective refusing subject that acknowledges that it is simultaneously hypostatized (qua collective actor) while also malleable (qua its ever-mutating constituents and self-conceptions). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Cybersecurity, cyberwarfare, information wars, cyber defense, cyberspace - concepts that have recently increasingly filled the space around everyone. More and more often we hear these words, more and more often they play an important role. The role of the state in the protection of the national social space, the protection of the individual in this information confrontation is also growing. Equally important in our fleeting world is the growing problem of protecting interethnic peace in the country, and especially in such polyethnic states as Ukraine. Nowadays, even relatively mono-ethnic states, due to active migration processes and significant economic changes, have to deal with the security of the interethnic space. After all, the security of the information space is now, without a doubt, also the security of the state.

Introduction. Ethnosociological monitoring in a polyethnic region is conducted not only due to the need for an assessment of the public policy regulation in this field, but also due to the increase in the heuristic potential for preventing various kinds of social conflicts. The objective of the paper is to identify the dynamics of the development of interethnic relations in the Republic of Mordovia and the influence of various stratification processes on the development of ethnic relations, based on a comparative analysis of scientific studies. Materials and Methods. Regular sociological measurements carried out by the Research Institute of Regionology under Ogarev Mordovia State University and by the Scientific Center for Social and Economic Monitoring in 1990–2010 were used as the research materials. The interpretation of the results was carried out using the institutional, comparative and natural historical methods. Results. The main trends in the development of mass consciousness of the population of a polyethnic region in the context of various socio-political periods of the development of Russia have been revealed: from the ‘parade of sovereignties’ that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union to the reactualization of the ideology of a strong multiethnic Russian state. It has been emphasized that over the years, the main reasons exerting a negative impact on the nature of interethnic relations have mainly been not the interethnic conflicts, but the politically or economically marked factors (the economic crisis, inflation, appointment to managerial posts based on the ethnicity of a person, income inequality between representatives of different ethnic origins, etc.). Discussion and Conclusion. Although interethnic relations in the Republic of Mordovia has almost never achieved an increased level of conflict, the republic’s leadership was able to build an effective system for regulating them, which made it possible to minimize the degree of social and ethnic tension in society. The article may be useful to scientists and practitioners in the field of the development of interethnic relations and to all those interested in the issues of ethnosociology.

This article studies an early-twentieth-century reform in local administration on the Kazakh Steppe. It was catalyzed by the massive in-migration of peasant settlers from European Russia, which required fundamentally new administrative forms and institutional decisions from the state. In 1902 the Russian Empire extended the Temporary Regulation on Peasant Nachalniks, which was previously law only in Siberia, to the steppe oblasts of Akmola, Turgai, Semipalatinsk and Uralsk. In examining discussions surrounding the implementation of the new law, this article uncovers the complexity and ambiguities of the decisions that were made, the problems the new law faced, and the wide array of participants in enacting it. The article also compiles a socio-cultural portrait of the peasant nachalniks and the activities they undertook. Finally, it addresses how the Kazakh population perceived these new officials, and how they interacted with representatives of the Kazakh administration, which was crucial to their effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we consider use of life stories as a tecnique to learn about structural conditions, social class positions and objective working mechanisms of specific areas of human activity. In the first part, we present contributions by Daniel Bertaux on the characteristics of life stories and on the technique of graphing family educational and work trajectories in family trees. Then, based on an example of empirical research on class trajectories in Buenos Aires, we highlight possibilities that the application of these techniques exhibited and some additional attributes to those that had been pointed out by Bertaux. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration studies and questions from an importance position for ethnosociological space of studying of migration problems in Russia and the related problems of ethnosociology as identity, ethnicity, conflict, and ethnic structure are considered. The attention is paid to a problem of ethnicity and approaches to its interpretation. Special attention is paid to the aspect of ethnic migration as a phenomenon as well as from the point of view of approaches. A number of problem areas in the study of ethnic migration such as: a generational problem, adaptation strategies in the urban environment (based on the examples of particular research), political measurement of migration, discriminatory social practices, formation of social networks of migrant communities are considered in the article.

Research in the service of politics? The case of Józef Obrębski The paper concentrates on the circumstances of the production of anthropological knowledge, created in a dynamic tension between its cognitive goal and the way it is used for political purposes. It provides an insight into a complex network of conditions (intelectual, institutional, financial, personal, political) which determined the production of knowledge in interwar Poland within the then emerging disciplines of ethnology and sociology, in the scope of what today we would call social anthropology. This case study takes a closer look at Polish anthropologist Józef Obrębski (1905-1967), a close student of Malinowski, whose outstanding achievements remained mostly unpublished and thus never came into existence in the master narrative of the history of our discipline. In the 1930s Obrębski conducted ethnosociological field research in the Polesie region in eastern Poland (nowadays, part of Belarus and Ukraine), which was part of a large scale scientific project of the Commission for Scientific Research of the Eastern Territories. This project, financed by the Polish government and headed by a politician, general Kasprzycki, was supposed to be an efficient tool in the politics of the so called state and national assimilation of the Slavic-speaking ethnic minorities. Obrębski’s political views, which were democratic and liberal in character, were opposed to the official political line whereas his functionalist anthropological stance was unacceptable for the mainstream Polish ethnology of the era, still rooted in the positivist paradigm. Anthropological knowledge produced by Obrębski, which we would call today a postcolonial and constructivist approach, began to find recognition only after his death. The biography of this scholar and the story of his “unknown” work, a great example of a non-mainstream phenomenon in a provincial country, makes it easier to reveal undisclosed mechanisms of the system and the thought-collectives of science. Nauka na usługach polityki? Przypadek Józefa Obrębskiego Artykuł dotyczy uwarunkowań produkcji wiedzy antropologicznej w dynamicznym napięciu między jej celem poznawczym a zastosowaniem do celów politycznych. Przynosi wgląd w złożoną sieć uwarunkowań (intelektualnych, instytucjonalnych, finansowych, personalnych, politycznych) produkcji wiedzy w międzywojennej Polsce, na polu młodych dyscyplin, jakimi były wówczas etnologia i socjologia, polu, które dzisiaj nazywamy antropologią społeczno-kulturową. Bohaterem tego studium przypadku jest polski antropolog Józef Obrębski (1905-1967), bliski uczeń Malinowskiego, którego wybitne prace w większości pozostały nieopublikowane, nie funkcjonują zatem w wielkiej opowieści o historii dyscypliny. W latach 1930. Obrębski prowadził etnosocjologiczne badania terenowe na Polesiu we wschodniej Polsce (region ten dziś należy do Białorusi i Ukrainy), w ramach wdrażanego tam na szeroką skalę programu naukowego Komisji Naukowych Badań Ziem Wschodnich. Projekt ten, finansowany przez polski rząd i kierowany przez polityka, gen. Kasprzyckiego, miał być skutecznym narzędziem polityki asymilacji państwowej i narodowej słowiańskojęzycznych mniejszości etnicznych. Demokratyczne i liberalne poglądy polityczne Obrębskiego były opozycyjne wobec linii politycznej jego mocodawców, zaś stanowisko teoretyczno-metodologiczne, związane z funkcjonalizmem, było z kolei nie do przyjęcia przez polskich etnologów głównego nurtu, przywiązanych do paradygmatu pozytywistycznego. Antropologiczne osiągnięcia Obrębskiego, które dziś sytuujemy w obrębie podejścia postkolonialnego i konstruktywistycznego, zaczęły zyskiwać uznanie dopiero po jego śmierci. Biografia uczonego i dzieje jego „nieznanych” prac, ważny przykład pozamainstreamowego fenomenu w prowincjonalnym kraju, przyczyniają się do poznania nieujawnionych mechanizmów systemu i kolektywów myślowych w nauce.

The paper concentrates on the circumstances of the production of anthropological knowledge, created in a dynamic tension between its cognitive goal and the way it is used for political purposes. It provides an insight into a complex network of conditions (intelectual, institutional, financial, personal, political) which determined the production of knowledge in interwar Poland within the then emerging disciplines of ethnology and sociology, in the scope of what today we would call social anthropology. This case study takes a closer look at Polish anthropologist Józef Obrębski (1905-1967), a close student of Malinowski, whose outstanding achievements remained mostly unpublished and thus never came into existence in the master narrative of the history of our discipline. In the 1930s Obrębski conducted ethnosociological field research in the Polesie region in eastern Poland (nowadays, part of belarus and Ukraine), which was part of a large scale scientific project of the Commission for Scientific Research of the Eastern Territories. This project, financed by the Polish government and headed by a politician, general kasprzycki, was supposed to be an efficient tool in the politics of the so called state and national assimilation of the Slavic-speaking ethnic minorities. Obrębski's political views, which were democratic and liberal in character, were opposed to the official political line whereas his functionalist anthropological stance was unacceptable for the mainstream Polish ethnology of the era, still rooted in the positivist paradigm. Anthropological knowledge produced by Obrębski, which we would call today a postcolonial and constructivist approach, began to find recognition only after his death. The biography of this scholar and the story of his "unknown" work, a great example of a non-mainstream phenomenon in a provincial country, makes it easier to reveal undisclosed mechanisms of the system and the thought- collectives of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study critically examines how masculinities and intersecting ethnonational and social class identities underscore the social and political agencies of excombatants in Northern Ireland and in the specific context of community-based peacebuilding. The authors draw on interviews with female and male leaders in grassroots and governmental organizations, which illustrate how state-led practices of exclusion reshape such intersectional identities and increase the instrumentality of hypermasculinist, pseudo-paramilitary practices in maintaining excombatants’ status and control on neighborhood levels. The research documents how structural dynamics of excombatants’ social class locations and political disaffection help shape their social agencies of “resistance,” underscored by desires for autonomy and recognition, and channeled by ethnogendered scripts rooted in both violent cultures of paramilitarism and nonviolent peacebuilding masculinities. The implications on women of male excombatants’ takeover of leadership roles in the community sector are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose This paper aims to deal with the social ontology of ethnos with regard to the problem of “neutralization” of consciousness and the method of intuition.Design/methodology/approach This paper relies on the observation that the epoch we live in has originated the ontology of ethnos as a “cracked subject” connected with the dissolution of “self”.Findings The results show that the ontology of ethnos by itself as the synthesis of natural, social and universal forces is undergoing the asymmetric synthesis of sensual individuation and the act of thinking. However, thinking as some “fold” of the existence correlates with the extended understanding of subjectivity as the dissolution of the historical consciousness.Originality/value This paper proposes that the new ontology of ethnos is eventually connected with the “flickering” subject, with the “flickering” of the historical thinking and with the “masks” of the historical subject itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zulema Valdez and Tanya Golash-Boza offer an integrative framework for the sociology of race and ethnicity to bridge a divide undergirding different, yet related perspectives in the field. Their work provides an initial roadmap for linking the cultural perspectives often taken in the study of ethnicity to the structural perspectives utilized in the study of race. The authors put these perspectives in dialogue with one another to elucidate the strength of integrating commonly used approaches in each area, while avoiding the pitfalls of relying only on one paradigm. Behind much of sociology’s theoretical developments to understand racial and ethnic groups’ experiences in US society, and in relation to global discussions of race and ethnicity as well, are influences of identity and ideological processes inflected and reflected by whiteness. This comment reflects on how these processes can shape future conversations considering the intertwined cultural and structural processes framing group experiences and life chances. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Igbo traditional society is patriarchal in nature with a prevalence of gender stereotypes. Men train their male children to grow up bold, strong, courageous, audacious and fearless while women on the other hand groom their female children to be soft-spoken, subservient and gentle. Both men and women have accepted their gender roles as a characterization which fate and destiny have bestowed on them, and are sensitized and indoctrinated in such a way that there are no conflicts between the two groups on the basis of their inherent traditional roles (cf. Ozumba, 2005). In the context of the Igbo traditional setting and within the confines of the gender stereotypes women are generally not viewed or perceived by their male counterparts as having the same status. This perception of women is often reflected in the social use of language to the extent that women are sometimes socially addressed and described with biased and discriminatory linguistic remarks and expressions. This paper descriptively examines, from semantic and pragmatic viewpoints, some discriminatory and biased Igbo linguistic expressions used by some men against women in contemporary Igbo society. The data for the study were collected mainly through oral interviews. The findings reveal that women are addressed and described with derogatory linguistic terms and imagery, portrayed as inferior to men. Based on the findings, the paper recommends a re-orientation of Igbo men from a young age, starting with parental discouragement of this trend in the home. Further studies on the general attitude towards women in contemporary Igbo society as linguistically expressed are suggested since such studies will constitute veritable sources of research information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology is interested in cooperation with other social sciences with the aim to provide richer knowledge and achievements of akin disciplines. Ethnosociology represents special multidisciplinary realm that makes one of new stage in scientific research in ethnology and sociology. Main trait of ethnosociology origin belong to the process of investigation of multidimensional "folkways", namely efforts to provide multidisciplinary scientific approach for investigations of traditional societies. Contemporary ethnosociology is longing for the connections among main sociological hypotheses, presuppositions of ethnomethodology and personal psychological observations of individual. Traditional ethnosociology deals with research in the forms of traditional life, as well as contemporary ethnosociology strives for preserving of national identity.

Against the background of recent methodological debates pitting ethnography against interviewing, this paper offers a defense of the latter and argues for methodological pluralism and pragmatism and against methodological tribalism. Drawing on our own work and on other sources, we discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of interviewing. We argue that concern over whether attitudes correspond to behavior is an overly narrow and misguided question. Instead we offer that we should instead consider what interviewing and other data gathering techniques are best suited for. In our own work, we suggest, we have used somewhat unusual interviewing techniques to reveal how institutional systems and the construction of social categories, boundaries, and status hierarchies organize social experience. We also point to new methodological challenges, particularly concerning the incorporation of historical and institutional dimensions into interview-based studies. We finally describe fruitful directions for future research, which may result in methodological advances while bringing together the strengths of various data collection techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1947, Australia has formally resettled more than 750,000 refugees. During that time, researchers have successfully completed more than 150 Masters and doctoral theses and published more than 900 articles, books and reports about issues of refugee settlement in Australia, with about half of them being published in the past 10 years. In this paper, we discuss the development of the production of knowledge about refugee resettlement. We identify trends in the literature, such as the emergence of an ethno-specific focus, and the concern with settlement's psychological and emotional impact, and relate them to policy changes. We suggest that scholars need critically to take stock of the knowledge produced so far and be more cognisant of the international scholarly debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the findings of an undergraduate Ethnography of the University Initiative (EUI) course in which students examined the university's efforts to improve the racial climate of the campus. These institutional efforts are intended to create a more comfortable environment for under-represented minority students who often comprise a significantly smaller group on campus than in their home neighbourhoods and high schools. Many minority group students experience isolation and discomfort connected to a lack of 'ownership' of campus spaces and traditions, which tend to be monopolised by white students. In my EUI class, which was sponsored by the Office of Minority Student Affairs (OMSA) at the University of Illinois (U of I), under-represented minority students focused their ethnographic projects specifically on campus-sponsored programmes intended to facilitate interaction across racial and ethnic groups. Of particular interest to students were programmes related to residence halls and campus social spaces. The findings presented here indicate that campus-sponsored programmes to increase race awareness that depend upon students' voluntary participation may be less effective in bringing students together than required classroom-based programmes and informal interaction through shared extra-curricular passions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a first-person account of the author's experience teaching an undergraduate course on local queer culture, using her own campus as the site for primary research. The course asks how students might understand the role of Midwestern public universities in the production of queer culture. And how might such knowledge revise understandings of queer culture and its locations, both in the past and in the present? The author describes the course design, the goals of introducing undergraduate students to two scholarly methods (archival research and ethnography) and a number of original research projects undertaken by students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows that an ethnography of communication approach is not only relevant to an understanding of how ways of speaking and language codes define the social-group boundaries of specific speech communities, but (1) that it can be equally pertinent to the analysis of the ideologies and language use of certain communities of practice, and (2) that it can be used to trace historical developments in such communities of practice intertextually. The 'community of practice' on which I concentrate is the evolving segment of the world of international diplomacy that was preoccupied with the formulation of legal frameworks regulating warfare from 1856 to 1939. The source materials consist of a compilation of treaty texts, and the focus of the analysis is (a) on basic communicative terminology surrounding concepts such as arbitration, armistice, declarations of war and of neutrality, mediation, ultimatum, and the like, and (b) on regulatory discourse surrounding means of communication, from 'bearers of flags of truce' to cables, postal correspondence, telegraph ships, and wireless telegraphy. Ingredients of context-specific and historically situated ideology of communication are brought to the foreground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central argument defended in this paper is made up of two interconnected statements: i) that a minimally defined rationality is an anthropological constant, being shared by all conceivable human cultures; and ii) that this "commonality of reason" constitutes the basis on which inter-cultural understanding is possible. In proving the first thesis (the universality of reason), the paper contrasts Western thought, epitomized in scientific reason, with non-Western thinking patterns, expressed by ethno-sciences, magic rituals, and other knowledge practices. The conclusion drawn from this comparison is that both modern scientific reason and non-literate peoples thought patterns are two "cognitive modes" sharing a strong structural similarity. Building on some loci classici of anthropological literature written by Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, and Lévi-Strauss (among others), the paper argues that although modern Western science and indigenous knowledge(s) share a common rational denominator, the two cognitive modes are nonetheless hierarchical, the former being epistemically superior to the latter thanks to its unique self-correcting methodology. The paper ends by arguing the case for the possibility of understanding the Other(s) by way of reason, a possibility grounded on the commonality of reason between cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article gives detailed analysis of five basic stages of development of the Russian political science researches works on the rights of the Russian-speaking minority living outside the Russian Federation. The author displays asynchrony of the development of foreign policy of the Russian Federation concerning the Baltic States and actualization of the theme of ethnic minorities in the countries of the former Soviet Union. This article also offers the typology of the Russian research centers which are engaged in this work. Work of structural divisions of the Russian Academy of Sciences, analytical structures at classical universities, formally independent non-commercial research centers, actively supported by the state structures of the Russian Federation, as well as work of independent analytical centers existing mainly at the expense of Western grants, activity of which is connected with projects on ethnic minorities in the Baltic states, is analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article by Tassadit Yacine explores the impact of Algeria on the formation of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological and political views. Bourdieu arrived in Algeria in 1955 as a soldier after graduation from the Ecole Normale Superieur. After his service he began teaching philosophy at the University of Algiers in 1958. Bourdieu became a vocal critic of the colonial war in Algeria while pursuing research into the sociology of transformation of Algerian rural society. Bourdieu’s anti-colonial and anti-war views led to his deportation from Algeria. According to Yacine, the Algerian experience was formative for Bourdieu. Studying the colonial society, Bourdieu acquired intimate knowledge of power relations and social stratifications, which he later applied in his studies of French rural societies, and French academic and popular cultures. It was in Algeria that Bourdieu developed his “social chirurgic method,” and established an attentive approach not just to conventional, direct violence, but also to predominantly covert forms of domination through language, culture, and different forms of symbolic capital. To a large extent this happened during the process of Bourdieu’s intensive socialization into the milieu of Algerian intellectuals, many of whom provided Bourdieu with detailed information on Algerian society. In Algeria, Bourdieu’s search for a scholarly identity coincided with the search for a political indentity, and both aspects imbued the sociologist with a methodology attentive to issues of domination. At the same time, his personal background - his origins in provincial France and his knowledge of cultural differences submerged in the French national state - prepared Bourdieu for understanding inequalities in Algeria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]