Suchergebnisse

Ethnographic Experiments with Artists, Designers and Boundary Objects is a lively investigation into ethnographic practice. Richly illustrated, it invites the reader to reflect on the skills of collaboration and experimentation in fieldwork and in gallery curation, thereby expanding our modes of knowledge production. Francisco Martínez increases our understanding of the relationship between contemporary art, design and anthropology, imagining creative ways to engage with the contemporary world and developing research infrastructures across disciplines. He opens up a vast field of methodological explorations, providing a language to reconsider ethnography and objecthood while producing knowledge with people of different backgrounds. At the heart of this study are the possibilities for transdisciplinary collaborations, the opportunity to use exhibitions as research devices, and the role of experimentation in the exhibition process. It is critical reading for researchers of Anthropology, Material Culture and Museum Studies, and for any reader with an interest in ethnographic methods.

"Microeconomic Modeling in Urban Science proposes an interdisciplinary framework for the analysis of urban systems. It portrays agents as rational beings modeled under the framework of random utility behavior and interacting in a complex market of location auctions, location externalities, agglomeration economies, transport accessibility attributes, and planning regulations and incentives. Francisco Javier Martinez Concha considers the optimal planning of cities as he explores interactions between citizens and between citizens and firms, the mesoscopic agglomeration of firms and the segregation of agents' socioeconomic clusters, and the emergence of city-level scale laws. Its unified model of city life is relevant to micro-, meso- and macro-scale interactions."

Front Cover -- Microeconomic Modeling in Urban Science -- Microeconomic Modeling in Urban Science -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Foreword -- References -- Acknowledgments -- Notation -- 1 - Introduction -- 1.1 Initial Motivation -- 1.2 Toward an Urban Science -- 1.3 About the Book -- Book Content -- Book Structure -- 1.4 Issues in Urban Structures -- Land Use Problem -- Land Auctions -- Externalities -- Regulations -- Accessibility -- The Economy -- Urban System: Land Use and Transportation Interaction -- 1.5 Issues in Urban Modeling -- Why Modeling? -- Diversity of Choices and Their Perceptions -- System Size -- Complex System -- Bottom-Up Approach -- Stochastic Approach -- Discrete Modeling -- Residential and Nonresidential Activities -- Location Representation -- Location Prices -- Static Versus Dynamic Approaches -- 1.6 Remarks -- References -- 2 - Accessibility∗ -- 2.1 The Concept -- 2.2 Alternative Measures -- 2.3 The Microeconomic Measure of Interactions -- 2.4 Definition of Access -- 2.5 Measuring Access -- Spatial Interaction Entropy Model -- Discrete Choice Random Utility Model -- 2.6 Location Externalities and Agglomeration Economies -- 2.7 Summary -- Technical Note 2.1: Spatial Interaction Entropy Model -- Technical Note 2.2: Discrete Choice Random Utility Model -- Exercise 2.1 -- References -- 3 - Discrete Urban Economic Theory -- 3.1 Introduction -- The Structure of a Land-Use System -- Characteristics of the Market -- 3.2 The Consumer Location Problem -- The Household Location Utility Approach -- The Bid-Auction Approach -- The Auction in the Real Estate Market -- The Willingness to Pay -- The Auction Allocation Process -- The Hedonic Price -- Firms' Location Problem -- The Firm Continuous Location Model -- The Firm Discrete Location Model -- 3.3 The Bid-Choice Equivalence -- 3.4 Suppliers' Behavior

This Forum sets out to contribute to the understanding of anthropologists' identification with their discipline, the homogeneity of anthropologists as an academic group, and how our disciplinary boundaries are constructed and embodied. It provides different angles on the academic demarcations influencing how anthropology is practiced in Europe. Four colleagues explore different ways of questioning the boundaries of our discipline, opening up spaces for remaking anthropology (what can be said and done, and by whom).

Boundaries influence how we live, the way we do and see things – but how? What role do boundaries play in effecting disciplinary shifts or stability in turn? And who is excluded when tracing epistemic frontiers and hard notions of relevance? This theme issue discusses the porosity of anthropology's borders and the difficulty of establishing scholarly authority. We set out to reopen the conversation about the permeability of academic boundaries, exploring different conceptual, methodological and historical reconfigurations with and within European anthropologies. We also discuss how the epistemic and institutional boundaries of our discipline are changing, affecting in turn what people can know and with whom, as well as our sense of professional strength and vulnerability.

This article asks how a post-Soviet city went global and became something else, mutating, in the sense of generating a new set of features that go beyond a narrow understanding of postsocialism. The research provides a synthetic conceptualisation of Narva and the organisation of its ordinary life, by combining methods of urban observation and classification with geographical and ethnographic descriptions of this city. Using visual imagery of urban objects, along with field annotations and interview quotes as the materials analysed, the article carries out a Narvaology that consists in deploying this city 'as method'. It points out that cities such as Narva require a more relational and multi-scalar language, one with broader theoretical and methodological implications, able to account for fragmentary socio-political issues.

This research explores the relationship between knowledge production and place by studying different notions of disciplinary and personal peripherality. In an auto-ethnographic manner, the author discusses some of the power relations at work and the politics of representation of an anthropology being done at the margins of European scholarship. By analysing his own professional trajectory, the author surmises that the question of centre or periphery highly depends on the perspective applied (i.e., methods, labour conditions, institutional support, funding, the scale, access to jobs…). Also, he argues that there is a distinct form of reflexivity at the margins, as well as a distinct temporal regime – characterised by discontinuity. To contrast and complement his personal insights, the author invited fifteen scholars working in Estonia to share their experience of researching "at the margins". Based on their responses, the author concludes by admitting that being at the periphery is relevant, yet circumstantial – something to be aware of, yet not definitive or a determinant. The article contributes to the discussion on the need to differentiate, contextualise and problematise the question of the academic marginality, making this issue more nuanced by putting the ethnographic focus on the conditions of possibility among practitioners and the state of being peripheral.

This special section explores and problematises the disciplinary boundaries of European anthropology by studying the shifting conditions of our work and changing centres of gravity in the field. The contributors have been invited to think about what the concept of "European anthropology" brings actually to the fore, while working in a context of changing epistemic relations, labour conditions, institutional assessment and claims to disciplinary validity. This set of papers and commentaries proposes to approach European anthropology as a specific kind of relation between localities and practitioners, not an essence. Polemically, we argue that European anthropology does not exist as a single, easy to define entity precisely because it exceeds its conditions of possibility and goes beyond geographic relations and separations. Additionally, we pose as problematic not only the conjunction of the adjective European and the noun anthropology, but also the separate standing of each of them and what kinds of relations are established as a result (possession, placing, aspiration, rejection and so on). We conclude that a key feature characterising European anthropology is its transnational character – multiplying the relations with what has been traditionally considered non-anthropological and non-European, and troubling of the boundaries of the discipline.

This article proposes an artistic performance to reflect on the labour of fieldwork. The experimental method consists in installing myself at a café in Lisbon and Tbilisi for 35 hours beyond the reach of smartphones and laptops and then doing nothing. Across this exercise, time slows, opening a clearer window into ordinary life. The intervention raises questions about the way digital technologies transform the temporality and experience of ethnographic fieldwork. The essay sets up to make a methodological contribution to a growing literature on 'inactivity' and about experimental methods, reminding us that observation is a tiring physical experience and that slow time is correlated with anthropological quality. Doing nothing appears as a slow time being in front of others, which enables a break of consciousness, suspends politics of relevance, and leaves space for serendipity and embodied imagination. ; Peer reviewed

This article discusses different processes of appropriation of history in three former Soviet Republics. It provides a context for the recent historical retrofitting by taking the re-monumentalisation of the past in Estonia, the popularity of pseudo-history in Russia, and the current state of the Stalin museum in Georgia as symptomatic of wider social processes. New forms of convergence are shown between the historical and the political by the replacement, emptying of meaning, and remixability of past symbols. The author concludes that the Soviet world has been put to political and communicative uses as a familiar context to refer to; also that the process of retrofitting historical narratives is not over yet in any of these societies.

Is the 1989–1991 frame of understanding still relevant? Did history already throw away the empty bottles of the 1991 celebrations? Et que reste-t-il de nos amours? With this series of articles and a comment, we set out to explore the ways in which European societies, and Europe itself, differ from what had been hoped and designed in the years 1989–1991. The contributions included put the emphasis on the different horizons of expectation and realms of experience that have their roots in 1989–1991, exploring whether this period continues to define individuals, societies and historical representations of Eastern Europe and beyond. We thus reflect on the relevance of the study of past expectations in order to understand what has happened during the last decades around us, promising new directions of research regard- ing social transformation, political rhetoric, collective memory and how historical and personal narratives match or contradict.

The power law is a fundamental scaling relationship in the dynamics of organisms and ecological systems. That cities exhibit this law with increasing returns to scale is an empirical finding reported by recent studies. I formulate a microeconomic model of urban systems that supports this evidence assuming a stochastic model, which is based on extreme value theory and random choice to describe all urban agents' rational stochastic behavior and on Alonso's urban economic principles. Thus, the observed superlinear increase in rents and wealth emerges, in addition to the classical scale economies, from individuals' and firms' behavior due to population diversity and size. A dynamic model of cities' growth follows, allowing us to predict the expected evolution of urban organizations.