Ethnography

Auto-ethnographies tracing the fieldwork encounters of anthropologists have become integral to understand the processes of the ethnographic endeavor. In ethnomusicology, ethnographic methodology remains the sine qua non distinguishing our work from that of the musicologist. The field is ubiquitous in our work as the space within which we accumulate the experiences informing our analyses. Equally ubiquitous is the assumption that the field exists outside of our ‘real lives’ (Rasmussen 2004). Yet, with transcultural professional lives becoming increasingly common, and more scholars establishing professional roots in locations formerly allocated as ‘the field,’ there exists an obvious need for a reconsideration of and new fluidity in ethnographic research. If “fieldwork is, in reality, just living” (Reed 2003), then this way of life deserves a consideration in all its complexities, diving into the interstices of personal, professional, and artistic identities.

In this paper, I explore the overlapping and ephemeral spaces of the ethnographic self in the Korean context. Drawing on my own experiences as a non-Korean researcher of Korean music and professor in a department of Korean music, the paper inescapably takes the form of auto-ethnography. The paper uncovers the ways by which performance-based practice of bi-musicality complicates the identity of the researcher, as the ability to perform on an instrument tied to local notations of race-based nationalism transforms the scholar into a curiosity. Through an analysis of my own bimusical practice, I scrutinize the benefits and pitfalls of the constant presence of the foreign researcher in the Korean academic and social milieu.

What are the legacies of violence on gendered patterns of political representation? We examine the long-term effects of a watershed conflict of the twentieth century: the Khmer Rouge genocide, during which 50–70% of Cambodia’s working-age men were killed. Using original data on mass killings and economic and political conditions in Cambodian communes, we find that genocide exposure is positively associated with women’s economic advancement and present-day indicators of women’s representation in local-level elected office. We conduct in-depth, ethnographic interviews with genocide survivors to explore the mechanisms by which violence spurred women into elected office. A crucial finding emerges: In areas that suffered the genocide’s worst killings, widows obtained economic autonomy, providing a template for the economic advancement of women in households maintaining conventional gender roles. The shift in norms regarding the sexual division of labor created intra-communal and intergen...

This thesis aims to contribute to the discussion of everyday multiculturalism focusing on El Raval, a neighbourhood in Barcelona with a growing presence of Pakistani migrants. Among immigrant populations in Barcelona, Pakistanis are most dynamic in terms of entrepreneurship. Within a locality affected by global tourism and gentrification, Pakistani entrepreneurs in El Raval operate within an ethnic enclave economy. I discuss how shopkeepers often rely on co-ethnic resources regarding funding and recruitment. However, ethnic shops are also shown to function as convivial spaces that facilitate contact between an otherwise relatively invisible migrant community on the one hand, and the host society and visitors on the other. Confronted with a superdiverse reality, and driven by the need to survive in a highly competitive environment, Pakistani shopkeepers learned the essential skills to deal with their diverse clientele. I address the concepts of conviviality and cosmopolitanism to demonstrate how Pakistani entrepreneurs deal with their customers, and how their high-entrepreneurship profile contributes to the visibility of the community and the ways in which this shapes the image of Pakistanis in El Raval. 

Keywords: Ethnic entrepreneurship; Conviviality; Pakistani Migrants; Barcelona; El Raval; Cosmopolitanism

The Early Music movement has generated a shift in performance practices of Western Art music and in its pedagogy. Musical analysis, if it became a key in the production of Historically Informed Performances, was always accompanied by a serious contextualization. In this article I will show how practices in Early Music can be seen as essentially postmodern (Jameson, Butt), recalling principles of deconstruction (Norris) for both its epistemology and its pedagogy. Early Musicians build on their knowledge of pre-modern music theories to promote non-canonized forms through an "insistent questioning of [their] own methods and practices" (Tomlinson). This postmodern attitude in knowledge transmission reveals a deep shift in social practices related to fields as diverse as politics and labour organization, and the recent debates between professional musicians are the mirror of difficulties to define one's positioning, especially when founded over such an ungraspable and moveable background. Oscillating between modern ideologies inherited from the Enlightenment and pre-modern concepts of art consumption, between literacy and orality (Goody), this practice, defined by acts of deconstruction, struggles to construct its identity. I consider these attempts as reflecting the peregrinations of a twenty-first-century epistemology in search of itself. In this essay, I partly based my work on ethnographic researches in Southern Europe, alongside scholarship readings and textual analyses.

Lost in Transition tells of ordinary lives upended by the collapse of communism. Through ethnographic essays and short stories based on her experiences in Eastern Europe between 1989 and 2009, Kristen Ghodsee explains why it is that so many Eastern Europeans are nostalgic for the communist past. Ghodsee uses Bulgaria, the Eastern European nation where she has spent the most time, as a lens for exploring the broader transition from communism to democracy. She locates the growing nostalgia for the communist era in the disastrous, disorienting way that the transition was handled. The privatization process was contested and chaotic. A few well-connected foreigners and a new local class of oligarchs and criminals used the uncertainty of the transition process to take formerly state-owned assets for themselves. Ordinary people inevitably felt that they had been robbed. Many people lost their jobs just as the state social support system disappeared. Lost in Transition portrays one of the most dramatic upheavals in modern history by describing the ways that it interrupted the rhythms of everyday lives, leaving confusion, frustration, and insecurity in its wake.

Endorsements

“The collapse of the Soviet empire entailed not only the Blitzkrieg dissolution of the socialist economies and one-party states of Eastern Europe, but also immediate accidental and incidental changes in the everyday lives of its residents. With an ear for the ironic, the sensual, the playful, and the tragic, Kristen Ghodsee tells personal stories from this period of dissolution, which began several decades before the Berlin Wall came down. Drawing from her encounters in many years of research in Bulgaria, she portrays the changing nature of experience in that place during that time. Though understood as impoverished at the time, this socialist experiment reveals, in retrospect, lives filled with adventure, surprising friendships, and an openness to forms of engagement and being that makes the fullness of the free market and democracy in the post-Cold War order of today seem, by comparison, pale and predictable.”—John Borneman, Princeton University

“These charming essays have an unintended consequence. Not only are they a documentary ethnography of the lives of people caught up in the painful transition from socialism to capitalism. They are also a sort of Bildungsroman of a young American discovering another world and shedding stereotypes.”—Maria Todorova, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This article analyzes the experience of one of the author's acquaintances, who served almost a month in jail and compares the mechanisms within a current Italian prison with those described in the classics of ethnography and sociology of prisons and in particular in Goffman's writings, finding intriguing and disturbing similarities in the mechanisms of a typical closed institution. carcere, istituzioni chiuse, prison, closed institutions

Jordan, Mandy M. Building Resiliency: The Role of Faith-Based Organizations in the Trauma-Affected Community of Santa Fe, Texas. Master of Science (Applied Anthropology), August 2021, 205 pp., 2 tables, 15 figures, 8 appendices, references, 91 titles. On May 18, 2018, a shooter entered Santa Fe High School, killing eight students and two teachers. Using ethnographic methods, this research examines the role of faith, rituals, language, and symbols in the trauma-affected community during the response, recovery, and resiliency efforts as perceived by the Santa Fe community and those impacted by the tragedy. Qualitative data collected from 100 individuals ages of 17-84 illustrated how historical trauma, community culture, and faith-based organizations impact community resiliency and how illusions of a homogenous view of the community left many feeling shocked, divided, forgotten or muted.

Abstract: This study elaborates the cultural categories of meanings used by seventh-graders at a junior high school to describe their teachers. It examines the common expressions students used in open-ended interviews to describe their teachers and their experience within these teachers' classes. A semantic structure that underlies the terms that students used to describe their teachers was conceptualized in the following form: the highest level of abstraction and generalizability were four foci (academic work, instructional facility, ...

The goal of this unit is to build into the mindset of the students a sociocultural and anthropological understanding of space and place. The key method that this unit aims to provide the students with centers around the notion of empathy in understanding the needs of users, which, in this case, is not just the immediate clients or users of the space proposed for them but also the communities and polity surrounding it. The emphasis of this unit is on the “urban solutions.” In order to achieve this empathy, students will engage in qualitative research methods such as participant observation, open-ended interviews, and analogous and inquisitive participation. In this unit, we will be looking at a real project that is in the centre of public and media attention. Students will think about how this complex community of people are living, selling, maneuvering kinship and business practices through space and time. It is crucial to understand the context, the people and the culture; as there is a real need for design that integrates all of the above. This unit will give the students the training in the methods by which they can systematically collect ‘thick social data’ to
integrate into this urban design lab.

The book charts the attempts of Islam's largest missionary movement, the Tablighi Jamaat (TJ), to build Europe's biggest mosque in London – the so-called Mega Mosque. The book follows TJ from its founding in India in 1926, to its establishment in Britain during the 1940s, to its plans for construction of a controversial mosque in London. The book addresses the issues emerging at the forefront of national debates across liberal democracies: the role of Islam in the west, conceptions of changing citizenship and national identities, and how best to integrate increasingly diverse populations. What happens to illiberal and politically disengaged groups that wish to segregate themselves from what they regard as corrupt and immoral wider societies? How do these groups engage with government policy that seeks to define good citizens as those that are actively engaged in the socio-political life of the community? Zacharias Pieri provides context and insight to answer these and other important questions.

The twenty-first century workplace compels Americans to be more flexible. To embrace change, work with unpredictable schedules, be available 24/7, and take charge of one's own career. What are the wider implications of these pressures for workers' lives? How do they conceive of good work and a good life amid such incessant change?

In The Disrupted Workplace, Benjamin Snyder examines how three groups of American workers—financial professionals, truck drivers, and unemployed job seekers—construct moral order in a capitalist system that demands flexibility. Based on seventy in-depth interviews and three years of participant observation, he argues that the flexible economy transforms how workers experience time. New scheduling techniques, employment strategies, and technologies disrupt the flow and trajectory of working life, which makes the workplace a site of perplexing moral dilemmas. Work can feel both liberating and terrorizing, engrossing in the short term but unsustainable in the long term.

Through a vivid portrait of real workers' struggles to adapt their lives to constant disruption, Benjamin Snyder mounts a compelling critique of the costs of the flexible economy.

Votive objects or ex-votos are a broad category of material artifacts produced with the intention of being offered as acts of faith. Common across historical periods, religions, and cultures, they are presented as tokens of gratitude for prayers answered, as well as the physical manifestation of hopes and anxieties. Agents of Faith explores votive offerings in the context of material culture, art history, and religious studies to better understand their history and present-day importance. By looking at what humans have chosen to offer in their votive transactions, this volume uncovers their most intimate moments in life and questions the nature, role, and function of one of the most fundamental aspects of the relationship between people and things—the imbuing of objects with sentiment. Encompassing exquisite works of art as well as votives of humble origin and material, with objects dating from 2000 B.C. to the twenty-first century, the beautiful illustrations and wide-ranging text expose the global reach of votive practices and the profoundly personal nature behind their creation.

What is ethnomusicology? What is it that ethnomusicologists do? In which ways are ethnomusicologists initiated into the musical culture that they study? How do musical performance and experience help us understand a musical culture? 

This book presents in a concise and intelligible manner issues that matter to both specialists (ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, musicologists and musicians) and the wider music-loving readership. At the same time, the book offers an overview of the history of ethnomusicology and its key theoretical and methodological concerns, and reveals ethnomusicology as a dynamic field of study which is distinguished by its highly interdisciplinary character.

The book is designed for the teaching of ethnomusicology in higher education, and contains a selection of ethnomusicological texts translated in Greek as well as an extensive editorsʼ introduction.

MID-LENT (MIJINQ) AND THE FEAST OF THE FORTY MARTYRS OF SEBASTE IN THE ARMENIAN CHURCH AND FOLK CALENDARS
In the Armenian folk calendar Mid-Lent (Mijinq) and the feast of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste belong to the winter-spring transitional season.
Mijinq is the 24th day of the Great Lent. At first, it was a feast of Spring Еquinox. It was later merged with Easter Holydays, gained 35-day mobility, moving between February 25 and March 22, but kept the customs and rituals of Spring Еquinox. Mijinq has never been included in the church calendar as a canonical feast, but at the beginning of the XIX century was fixed on the church calendar with the other dates of the national calendar. The feast of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste is celebrated on Saturday after Mijinq. The life of these saints and their feast symbolize the death and resurrection, the beginning of a new life.
Therefore, this feast in the church calendar was placed in the middle part of the Great Lent, which is the border between winter (death) and spring (life). From Wednesday of Mijinq to the Saturday, the feast of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, corresponds to the fourth week of the Great Lent and represents a festive-ritual circle during it. Like other traditional feasts, it also has a rich ritual complex, with its essential stages (pre-festive, festive, after-festive) and components (the name of the feast cycle, feast liturgy, beliefs, repast tradition, pilgrimage, marriage rituals, rituals in memory of the deceased etc.).

This thesis is a study of Tottenham High Road, and how the urban blocks which comprise its depth are composed. Depth has a number of components: architecture, space and time; depth is the armature in which people live their social lives, and the place where local cultures emerge. The conception of depth offers a way of capturing urban life in its richness and its reciprocities. The literature about high streets offers few detailed analyses of their spatial and psycho-social ordering and this thesis seeks to fill that gap. The approach is a hermeneutics of praxis, using ethnographic methods, in-depth interviews, and situating the information spatially using architectural drawing techniques. It offers a novel method of investigating and understanding the structures and processes which make up the high streets and which, in aggregate, make the whole city. Tottenham High Road is used here as a case study, a vehicle through which to interpret evidence about the existence and nature of depth, with its manifold structures. Understanding depth is vital to understanding high streets, so this thesis allows a deeper and richer interpretation of high streets than has previously been possible.
There is a problem in planning orthodoxy around high streets, typified in Tottenham: the richness of depth is flattened and codified, in order to frame swathes of city as sites from which to reap economic reward. In fact, depth contains all of human life, and understanding it, therefore, is an ethical responsibility for planning. Depth has a number of characteristics, ordered by different processes and forces. Firstly, physical order, shaped by both economic and social forces. For example, the most public uses are found in the 'shallowest' parts of depth, and these are the most valuable sites because they command the greatest passing trade. Secondly, depth has a social order, through playing out of place ballet by people as they live their lives. The social order operates interdependently and reciprocally with the physical order of depth. Commitment between people and places (citizenship) results in special place cultures, which are hosted in depth. Depth has variation in the scope of decorum from the outer edge of the block to the centre: more things are possible inside the block than at its edge. 
The insights about depth in this thesis are relevant to many areas of life: to planning, to politics and to existing theory, because depth provides an account for the ethical order in which other areas of human life take place. With an understanding of depth it is possible to evaluate planning proposals, efforts at ensuring political participation, to shed light on existing theories such as Cosmopolitanism, and to add a valuable layer of information about the real structures of London to the existing literature.

Human culture and language are deeply intertwined. Anthropologists would have difficulty understanding a culture without becoming familiar with its language and vice versa. In fact, neither one can exist without the other. Like culture, language is continually changing. Societal norms and practices impact the ways that people communicate with each other. Thus, by looking at how people speak to each other, we can deduce certain things about their relationships and relative status in society.

Peacebuilding presents a formidable challenge to anthropology, because it “enframes” our contemporary world in particular ways. In our introduction to the special section on peacebuilding and anthropology we highlight the changing relationship between peace, conflict, culture and academic writing and how the three articles on Northern Ireland, Afghanistan and India-Pakistan address the changing relationships. The articles do not have the intention to present a coherent statement where anthropology “is” in relation to peace and conflict studies. Each of them engages with a different aspect of the discipline and broader question beyond ethnographic fieldwork.

South Asia is a region with unity in diversity, having at least twenty different dominant languages and over two hundred basic dialects. And yet, most of South Asia continues to remain economically poor and "developing" with gender disparity remaining a real concern at the heart of South Asian unity. The 2019 Global Hunger Index ranks all the major South Asian countries in the "serious" category with Sri Lanka coming in 66th, Nepal 73rd, Bangladesh 88th, Pakistan 94th, and India 102nd out of 117 countries. Women suffer the most, as they have to bear the direct burden of gender inequality and, as a consequence, children experience malnutrition. The 2018 Global Nutrition Report states that on average 49 percent of reproductive-age women in South Asia have anemia, and the prevalence of stunting in the population of children under-five is 32.7 percent, which is significantly greater than the global average of 21.9 percent. There is no data available for those who identify as nonbinary, and there is a long way to go before the data gap can be filled despite the official recognition of "third" gender people in Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and Nepal. Ironically, in spite of the official recognition of a nonheteronormative gender identity, homosexuality has yet to be decriminalized in most of South Asia with the exception of Nepal and India, having decriminalized homosexuality in 2007 and 2018, respectively. To read more: https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/genderedlives/chapter/chapter-3-introducing-the-region/

Resumen: en los sistemas religiosos de inspiración afro, como el espiritismo cruzao, la santería, el palo monte y el vodou, entre otros, la oralidad ocupa un lugar relevante. Esto se puede apreciar en diferentes niveles, como la enseñanza de las tradiciones, las prácticas rituales y el quehacer religioso, aspectos que se encuentran íntimamente vinculados. Los mitos, las plegarias y los cantos que aparecen en la escena ritual vehiculizan las posibilidades de transformar la realidad fenoménica de los participan-tes. De aquí se desprende la idea de un decir-hacer, lo cual indica que la palabra no solo es nomina-tiva o enunciativa; la palabra es acción. Sin ella los objetos, las imágenes y las plantas utilizados con fines terapéuticos serían tan solo objetos desprovistos de poder. Así, a partir del trabajo etnográfico y narrativo basado en el trabajo de campo realizado en Cuba en 2013 durante una ceremonia de entrega de Olokun, se discutirá el lugar de la palabra dentro de la santería.

Palabras clave: decir-hacer, oralidad, patakís, religiones de inspiración afro, santería cubana

Sayaing-Doing in an Olokun Ceremony

SUMMARY In Afro-inspired religious systems such as Espiritismo Cruzao, Santeria, Palo Monte and Vodou, among others, orality plays a central role. This can be observed at different closely linked levels such as the teaching of traditions, ritual practices, and religious work the myths, prayers, and hymns that appear on the ritual scene support the possibilities of transforming the phenomenal reality of the participants. This gives rise to an idea of a saying-doing, which indicates that the word is not only nominative but also expository; the word is action. Without it, the objects, images and plants used for therapeutic ends would be simple objects devoid of power. Thus, drawing from the ethno-graphic and narrative work based on the fieldwork carried out in Cuba in 2013 during an Olokun ceremony, I will discuss the role played by the word in Santeria.

Keywords: Afro-inspired religions, Cuban Santeria, orality, patakís, saying-doing

"In recent projects I have used flip cameras with participants from ethnic minority communities who were recording their experience of adult learning as enrichment. In another project we used more expensive cameras in a health setting in order to examine what the priorities were for service users. The footage has had multiple benefits and we continue to develop the use of visual technologies and methodologies:

• to empower and support the participation of service users and clients;
• to provide evidence and documentation of outputs and project delivery;
• to support the creative personalization of service delivery;
• to inform project evaluation;
• to demonstrate accountability;
• to improve the accessibility and awareness of services;
• to influence policy and strategic development options;
• to foster dialogue between groups of people - both vertical (client to manager) and horizontal (client to service user)

The main body of this short paper evaluates eighteen benefits or advantages associated with auto-ethnographic methodology"

This chapter builds on the final section of the last, continuing the focus on female workers. Bodies in space form the primary emphasis of the chapter. This involves an exploration of the relationship between bodies and work and also an examination of the ways in which female bodies move through and across spaces of home, gully, factory and city. Two trajectories of marginalisation – that constructed around Muslim minority status and that cemented within hegemonic gender norms (Ray & Qayum 2009) – intersect in the production and reproduction of feminised sectors of the labour force. Other factors were also significant, class in particular. Those labouring in situations like those of Noor and her family were universally at the bottom of both social and labour hierarchies. In a context that often situated women’s engagements with the labour market – particularly when they involved leaving the domestic space – as symbolising low socio-economic standing, it was the families with the smallest incomes that provided the labour for finishing work.

VITA
Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment
With photographs by Torben Eskerod

Updated Blurb (2013)

Zones of social abandonment are emerging everywhere in Brazil’s big cities—places like Vita, where the unwanted, the mentally ill, the sick, and the homeless are left to die. This haunting, unforgettable story centers on a young woman named Catarina, increasingly paralyzed and said to be mad, living out her time at Vita. Anthropologist João Biehl leads a detective-like journey to know Catarina; to unravel the cryptic, poetic words that are part of the “dictionary” she is compiling; and to trace the complex network of family, medicine, state, and economy in which her abandonment and pathology took form.

An instant classic, Vita has been widely acclaimed for its bold fieldwork, theoretical innovation, and literary force. Reflecting on how Catarina’s life story continues, this updated edition offers the reader a powerful new afterword and gripping new photographs following Biehl and Eskerod’s return to Vita. Anthropology at its finest, Vita is essential reading for anyone who is grappling with how to understand the conditions of life, thought, and ethics in the contemporary world.

University of California Press, 2013

Awards
2013 J.I. Staley Prize, School for Advanced Research

2007 Margaret Mead Award, Society for Applied Anthropology and American Anthropological Association.

2006 Anthony Leeds Prize, Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology.

2006 Stirling Prize, Society for Psychological Anthropology.

2006 Outstanding Book Award, Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change.

2005 Eileen Basker Memorial Prize, Society for Medical Anthropology.

Honorable Mention, 2005 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, Society for Humanistic Anthropology.

Asupra omului văzut ca entitate dinamică cu tendinţe de perfecţionare (intelectuală, socială, economică) acţionează concomitent o serie de rituri cu valenţe diverse, uneori chiar contrare. Astfel, integrarea într-un nou context nu se produce brusc, ci doar printr-o succesiune de rituri ce separă treptat individul de vechiul context şi altă serie de rituri ce îl agregă mereu într-o altă poziţie. Aceste rituri acţionează cu intensităţi diferite raportat la un anume moment temporal. Dacă imediat după ieşirea dintr-un cadru iniţial riturile de segregare sunt predominate şi intense, cu timpul au loc integrări temporare, iar riturile de acceptare se manifestă din ce în ce mai puternic. Apare astfel evident pe de o parte, o interferenţă a riturilor de trecere, iar pe de altă parte, o interferenţă a riturilor de trecere cu alte categorii de rituri.