Suchergebnisse

This paper explores ethical dilemmas in situated fieldwork ethics concerning ethnographic studies of adolescent students. While consequentialist and deontological ethics form the basis of the ethical stances shared by ethnographers and research ethics committees, the interpretation of those principles may diverge in school-based ethnography with adolescent students because of the particular role of the adult ethnographer vis-à-vis developmentally immature adolescents not held legally responsible for many of their actions. School ethnographers attempt to build trust with adolescent participants in order to learn about their hidden cultural worlds, which may involve activities that are very harmful to the youths involved. They face many difficult and sometimes unexpected choices, including whether to intervene and how to represent events and adolescents in published findings. Scenarios with examples drawn from research conducted in public high schools are used to illustrate and explicate dilemmas in formal research and latent insider/outsider roles and relations involving harmful adolescent behaviors, advocacy, and psychological trauma. Also examined are analytical procedures used to construct interpretations leading to representations of research participants in the resulting publication.

This study examines the short- and long-term psychological, physical and social health implications associated with pre-1992 investigations and eventual discharge of Canadian military servicewomen for reasons of homosexuality. Theoretically, it sheds light on the impact of the intersection between sexism and heterosexism. The feminist psycho-social ethnography of the commonplace methodology was utilized. The study draws on in-depth semi-structured interviews with 13 former military personnel who self-identified as lesbian. While in the military, study participants were persecuted and forced to adopt various cognitive and behavioural coping strategies to avoid being found out and discharged by the military's Special Investigative Unit. Women reported that the relentless military surveillance, ongoing risk evaluation, and identity hiding contributed to psychological, physical and social health effects, including high stress, physical exhaustion, depression, substance abuse and social isolation. The criminal code's definition of torture and the literature regarding the effects of stalking on victims provide context for the results. The discussion presents policy recommendations aimed at repairing the psychological damage that discharged lesbian service members suffered.

This article examines the ways in which a group of London webloggers or on‐line journal keepers constitute their city. They claim that their strategies for knowing London are derived from techniques for knowing the Internet. In particular, webloggers adapt the activity and culture of on‐line surfing. The article investigates the method of 'blogging' alongside and against the interpretative strategies deployed by urban theorists and sketch writers. It is intended as a contribution to urban anthropology, anthropology of the Internet, the anthropology of knowledge, and the ethnography of London.RésuméL'auteur examine la manière dont un groupe de blogueurs ou d'auteurs de journaux en ligne londoniens constituent leur ville. Il affirme que leurs stratégies pour connaître Londres s'inspirent des techniques employées pour connaître Internet. En particulier, les webloggers ont adapté l'activité et la culture de la navigation en ligne. L'article étudie la méthode de « blogging » parallèlement et en comparaison avec les stratégies interprétatives déployées par les théoriciens de l'urbanisme et les planificateurs. Cet article se veut une contribution à l'anthropologie urbaine, à l'anthropologie de l'Internet, à l'anthropologie de la connaissance et à l'ethnographie de Londres.

The collection of articles in this volume of NAPA Bulletin describes various types of social science research currently conducted in support of federal and state fisheries management by anthropologists and sociologists studying fishing‐dependent communities and fisheries participants. The contributors work for NOAA, National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS); various state fisheries agencies; in academia; or as contract researchers. These articles represent a wide geographical range, employ a diverse set of methods, and demonstrate different research goals ranging from responding to specific statutory or management requirements to establishing broader baseline social information to exploring the theoretical constructs that constrain or advance the field of applied anthropology in fisheries. This introduction provides background to the recent expansion of anthropological capacity in U.S. fisheries management and the divergent methods employed by practitioners. The range of methods includes classic ethnography and survey methods, cultural modeling, participatory research, and quantitative indicators‐based assessment. The compilation of articles presents an opportunity to think about standardizing some methodological approaches for certain types of tasks, while expanding the array of accepted methodologies available to anthropologists advising fisheries managers.

This article explores what the study of witchcraft in an African setting can contribute to current efforts to theorize mass mediation and the imagination it fosters. Recent ethnographies of witchcraft discourses in Africa have continued to associate them with the formation of small‐scale groups, but evidence from Malawi shows how they enable subjects to imagine sociality on an indeterminate scale. The article deploys the concept of mediation to theorize how in this imagination witches mediate sociality as the unrecognized third parties who give rise to recognized social relationships of varying scale. The ethnography of witchcraft discourses in radio broadcasting and an impoverished peri‐urban area demonstrates not only their relevance to apparently disparate contexts but also their potential to exceed the impact of the mass media. The case of a violent conflict involving Pentecostal Christians, South Asian entrepreneurs, Muslims, and members of a secret society provides an example of how arguments about witchcraft had a greater impact on the popular imagination than a mass‐mediated report of the same conflict. The article concludes by arguing that witchcraft discourses should be accorded weight equal to the mass media in theorizing the imagination.

This paper is about the ambiguous relationships between Europe and the Mediterranean as they are revealed in the anthropological studies on modern Greece. Although anthropological understanding is now considered richer when historical knowledge complements fieldwork, this was not the case in the pre-1990s studies, when anthropology stayed away both from social time and from historical and political science research within the country. This paper examines the difference between the native and the non-native points of view in anthropology and claims that this difference is best studied in the context of the post WWII world order, where the 'western' model dominated unhindered in the 'free world', creating inequalities between center and periphery. The ethnography of Greece brings out problems of method related to cultural distance between observer and observed in a European context, where this distance is less explicit. While many studies have focused on the paradox of Greece's incomplete inclusion in the West, the opposite question has now to be dealt with: is the 'western' ethnographer 'at home' in Greece? How is one to define what distinguishes the ethnographer's world from the world where the observed belong?

This paper is about the ambiguous relationships between Europe and the Mediterranean as they are revealed in the anthropological studies on modern Greece. Although anthropological understanding is now considered richer when historical knowledge complements fieldwork, this was not the case in the pre-1990s studies, when anthropology stayed away both from social time and from historical and political science research within the country. This paper examines the difference between the native and the non-native points of view in anthropology and claims that this difference is best studied in the context of the post WWII world order, where the 'western' model dominated unhindered in the 'free world', creating inequalities between center and periphery. The ethnography of Greece brings out problems of method related to cultural distance between observer and observed in a European context, where this distance is less explicit. While many studies have focused on the paradox of Greece's incomplete inclusion in the West, the opposite question has now to be dealt with: is the 'western' ethnographer 'at home' in Greece? How is one to define what distinguishes the ethnographer's world from the world where the observed belong?

Drawing on a school ethnography and the voices of graduate students, this paper explores the concept of robust hope with reference to the ideal of social justice in education policy and practice. Although the arguments to support a commitment to social justice in education systems, schools and teacher education programs, are often well-articulated, the pedagogical and political strategies to achieve such goals often remain elusive. If we are to reclaim the utopian imagination of socially just schools and egalitarian society we need to move beyond naive optimism to cultivate a notion of robust hope that is praxis-oriented and fully cognisant of the complexities, tensions and difficulties associated with the task. "Getting real" in this sense requires the development of conceptual ideas to critique existing social arrangements, a vision of an emancipatory alternative, and a set of political strategies and resources to affect progressive change. Notwithstanding the difficulties of contesting market-driven approaches to education, this study reveals that there are "resources of hope" in schools, educational institutions and the broader community to guide teachers and teacher educators in pursuing a goal of socially just schooling. ; C1

This paper is about the ambiguous relationships between Europe and the Mediterranean as they are revealed in the anthropological studies on modern Greece. Although anthropological understanding is now considered richer when historical knowledge complements fieldwork, this was not the case in the pre-1990s studies, when anthropology stayed away both from social time and from historical and political science research within the country. This paper examines the difference between the native and the non-native points of view in anthropology and claims that this difference is best studied in the context of the post WWII world order, where the 'western' model dominated unhindered in the 'free world', creating inequalities between center and periphery. The ethnography of Greece brings out problems of method related to cultural distance between observer and observed in a European context, where this distance is less explicit. While many studies have focused on the paradox of Greece's incomplete inclusion in the West, the opposite question has now to be dealt with: is the 'western' ethnographer 'at home' in Greece? How is one to define what distinguishes the ethnographer's world from the world where the observed belong?

In the wake of an international crackdown against preferential tax regimes, Caribbean tax havens and other jurisdictions have adopted "due diligence" procedures to manage financial and reputational risk. Due diligence relies on qualitative forms of evaluation and defers grounded and definitive knowledge claims through continuous peer review. In doing so, it mirrors certain forms of ethnographic practice at a number of levels of scale. This article tracks the shifts in financial regulation from crime to harm and from certainty to scrutiny and reflects on their implications for ethnography-as a limited and open-ended process of evaluation warranted by qualitative forms of judgment. It seeks to complicate our picture of contemporary capitalisms by drawing attention to the nonquantifiable and the ethical that lie "inside" them. Where conventional forms of ethnographic critique might look to expose the political or economic interests behind actions, symbols, or social relationships, this article has a more modest goal: to try to understand the similarity of form between due diligence and anthropology. © 2005 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.

In this article I have examined one particular funding policy for special education in Ontario. Specifically, I was concerned with the deleterious effects of the interpretations and implementations of this policy. To make claims to fund special needs, school boards had to implement a highly impersonal bureaucratic process that separated the textual mode from the lived reality. The all‐consuming process of identification and labeling of students guided by stringent Ministry‐imposed criteria led to unwanted and unintended consequences. Key words: education policy, funding, accountability, institutional ethnography, special education, Ontario education Dans cet article, l'auteure analyse une politique de financement ayant trait à l'orthopédagogie en Ontario. Elle se préoccupe tout particulièrement des effets délétères des interprétations et des applications de cette politique. Les commissions scolaires qui voulaient demander des fonds pour soutenir l'intervention orthopédagogique ont dû mettre sur pied un processus bureaucratique très impersonnel qui séparait l'aspect formel de l'intervention de la réalité vécue. Le processus fastidieux d'identification des élèves qualifiés d'« élèves en difficulté » à l'aide des critères stricts imposés par le ministère a entraîné des conséquences indésirables. Mots clés : politique en matière d'éducation, financement, imputabilité, ethnographie institutionnelle, orthopédagogie, éducation en Ontario.

This article examines the different positionings that preschool children develop towards the collective narrating of a school field trip to an educational farm in which only about half the class participated. The report of this excursion took place during the morningronda(the Spanish equivalent to sharing time or news sessions) and organized the children and the teacher in two groups of participants, those who went on the field trip and those who stayed home. I argue that these children displayed four discursive strategies towards the narrative and narrated events: (a) children who participated in the field trip couldincludeorexcludethe rest of the class from their narrative space; (b) children who did not participate in the field trip couldaffiliatewith orresistthe narrated events. The episode is discussed as exceptional in a classroom where precisely it has been argued thatrondaconversations play a key role in developing group identity, and shows how children have resources to develop varied stances towards school initiatives and even question the institutional and socio-economic arrangements that configure these activities. (Classroom Discourse, Ethnography of Communication, Narrative Inequality, Positioning)

In the context of nationalizing, secularizing or Kemalist states, analyses of Islamist movements are often thrown back on notions of traditionalism or atavism. In a related vein, for certain social theorists writing on modernity, the uniqueness of the West is clarified through an imaginative [mis]interpretation of other cultures or civilizations. Too often, however, the apparent gains in Western self-insight reflect an 'inability to constitute oneself without excluding the other' (Cornelius Castoriadis). Ironically Castoriadis himself, in a project we might term an ethnography of the West (see his writings on ecology, capitalism, rationality, contemporary culture, racism, Greek philosophy/history, & the environment) is prone to the same vice, especially in his identification of the West as the sole autonomous society. This article argues that in the sharia institution of a legal autonomy, Islam & Islamism alike demonstrate an affinity with modernity as defined by Castoriadis. In the light of this Islamist autonomy, it concludes that Castoriadis' vision of modernity as a struggle between opposed imaginaries of autonomy & rational mastery needs reformulating. 54 References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright 2004.]

The Dutch civil servants, missionaries, business people, and others living and working in the Dutch East Indies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries looked homeward to a society in process of being 'pillarized' into socio-religious blocks. Some scholars have observed how the new nation that arose from that colony, Indonesia, developed a similar kind of structure calledaliran(literally, currents or streams) best known to scholars, perhaps, through Geertz's classic ethnography,Religion of Java. There is surely some ontogenetic relationship between Dutch 'pillarization' and Indonesian aliranisation. Drawing on ideals about a public church embedded organically in a particular society and culture, avolkskerk, Protestant missionaries brought a different theological version of Christianity compared to their Catholic competitor, but also like that competitor, church-affiliated schools, hospitals and social services. Modernist Muslim organisations such asMuhammadiyacopied these religiously based services and institutions, thus 'pillarizing' Islam in response to the Christian presence. It is not surprising, then, that when Indonesians were first able to form political parties, some of these were also defined along sectarian lines – Catholic, Protestant, traditionalist and modernist Muslim.