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Antonádia Borges Mats, blankets, songs and flags: ethnography of the politics of funerals in contemporary South Africa In our ethnographies, the refusal of our hosts to previous theoretical frames leads us to transform and expand the anthropological concepts we were attached. In the contemporary South Africa the demands for land constitute a theme involving both the beneficiaries and the agents of the State. In order to explore such issue we face in the present paper a seemingly unusual place-event: the mortuary rituals. In that country, the profusion of funerals provides, to the people who participate in those functions, senses to their engagements in the public policy of land restitution. The involved groups give sense to the events, through intangible sources. Such relationship confronts our common explanations concerning the control of the life as a State affair, i.e., as an exclusive temporal matter. Here we face the challenge of thinking about a State that rules and, per times, is also ruled by the dead. Such approach stands back from theories concerning (i) the inexistence of the State in those places or (ii) the political performance of those groups as a reshaped form of other socialities - as kinship, magic or religion, for instance. Such lesson – learned from those who receive us in our researches – is a starting point for a reflection on the relationship between fieldwork, comparison and the production of ethnographic knowledge, regarding the notions of political life and public sphere. Related works: s.d.: Borges, A., "On Ethnographic Models: a comparative view of urban land struggle
movements in Brazil and South Africa" Antónia Lima Ethnography as an asset: elites' uses of ethnographic work Based on extensive ethnography among financial elite families in Portugal I found that most of the economic dividends produced by these families result from multiple relations and cannot be understood only through an economic perspective. Long term ethnography showed that formal business in our global modern capitalist world also relies on social, personal and affective ties in which informality and amity become as important as professional competence. Although prevailing models of capitalist society represent economics as the basis of its social system, where kinship and personal relations are viewed as destabilizing forces that undermine it, I argue, in contrast, that a significant part of Portuguese modern economy – and its presence in world economy – is mobilized by catholic familial values and ideas that operate as a force behind capitalist development. Related works: 2005: LIMA, Maria A. P. R. P.. "Hommes D’affaires Et Gestionnaires Familiales. Complémentarités et asymétries de genre dans une élite de Lisbonne", Lusotopie, XII (1-2) (2005): 191 - 202. Carolyn Rouse Stakeholders vs. Interlocutors: Anthropologists are often accused of alienating non-anthropologists by their heavy reliance on jargon. While many anthropologists, myself included, intentionally avoid too much anthro-speak, our terminology has emerged from a wonderful engagement with questions of representation and ethics. As a result, substituting “interlocutor” with “stakeholder,” the requisite term in policy speak, blurs conceptual and ethical lines that an ethnographer may prefer not to blur. Drawing on a presentation to an interdisciplinary audience of my longitudinal film project, this paper examines issues of translation. Focusing specifically on the language of Non-Governmental Organizations in West Africa, this paper exposes the ways in which the language of NGOs can be mapped onto the language of colonialism. This paper proposes ways ethnographers can work within the discursive regimes of policy speak in order to be heard in the public realm without compromising an historically informed knowledge about power and engagement. Related works: 2006: Rouse, C., "Jesica Speaks?: Adolescent Consent for Transplantation and Ethical Uncertainty". In A Death Retold: Jesica Santillan, the Bungled Transplant, and Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship. Keith Wailoo, Julie Livingston and Peter Guarnaccia, eds. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Catarina Fróis Knowing Me, Knowing You: Surveillance, Anonymity and Privacy in Ethnographic Studies: a critical account Different social, economic and cultural realities give rise to different political and social actions. Social sciences and ethnography in particular, are especially well suited to act as interlocutors between civilian society, political decision makers and the academy. In this paper, by focusing on issues such as surveillance, the uses of anonymity, confidentiality, new information technologies, privacy and identification procedures (DNA or fingerprint analysis) I will attempt to show how these concerns have become crucial for an understanding of contemporary society and individuals’ actions and interactions, with a special emphasis on the role of ethnographic studies and its contribution towards understanding these phenomena. Related works: 2006: C. Fróis, “Identification and anonymity: two sides of the same coin” (2006) in Re/defining the Matrix ed. by Bartels, Schultze & Stopińska, Peter Lang: Frankfurt am Main. pp: 103-114. Chiara Pussetti Ethnographies of new clinical encounters: In a world of increasing human mobility, many health outcomes are shaped by interactions between care providers and care recipients who are embedded in different discursive practices and culturally based systems of meaning. In these consultations, operators and users often deal with a wide variety of unfamiliar health practices and behaviours. On the one hand, health care providers are confronted by such a sharp gradient of cultural otherness that a real risk arises of inadequacy and even inability to apply routine processes of clinical intervention; at the very least, their effectiveness is strongly reduced. On the other hand, in many cases immigrants lose their bearings when confronted with a biomedical “morality” – defining risk, disease, health and cure, and conditioning the perception and representation of body and emotions – that, for them, does not make any sense. This paper - drawing on the life stories of African immigrants interned in a Portuguese transcultural mental health service - proposes a reflection on the efficacy of these clinical settings. This presentation highlights how the frequent failure of therapeutic interventions in these settings, could be interpreted as a consequence of the partial obscuration or silencing of the voices of the migrants speaking about their very afflictions, lived experiences and discontents, in a context of persisting colonial power relations. Finally, I will try to underline our ethical, political and practical responsibilities as anthropologists confronting human suffering. Related works: 2006: C. Pussetti, «A patologização da diversidade. Uma reflexão antropológica sobre a noção de culture-bound syndrome» (Pathologizing diversity. An anthropological criticism to the concept of culture-bound syndrome), Etnografica, Vol. X(1), pp.5-40, CEAS, Lisboa. Cihan Tugal Islamicizing the City: The transformation of cities constitutes one of the most dynamic aspects of the Islamist movement across countries. Prevalent models have accounted for this phenomenon by referring to the strain experienced by rural immigrants (the largest popular base for Islamism) or their capacity for autonomous politics and network-building. This article aims to explain the Islamicization of the city by studying the interactions between Islamists and the residents in a poor district in Istanbul. The analyses demonstrate that the urban poor are indeed active in forming communities and identities, but also that their agency is deeply shaped by the Islamist project. It is Islamism as political and ideological practice that lies at the root of the city’s religious transformation, rather than Islam as a traditional religious meaning system or the dynamism of civil society. Nevertheless, Islamism becomes prevalent because it is able to link this meaning system and the dynamism of civil society to its project. These arguments are based on a two year-long ethnography and fifty interviews. Related works: 2006: C. Tugal, “The Appeal of Islamic Politics: Ritual and Dialogue in a Poor District of Turkey,” The Sociological Quarterly 47(2): 245-273. Clara Saraiva Cristiana Bastos David Mosse Notes on the ethnography of expertise and professionals in international development The broad question here is, how does international development produce “expertise”, and how does such knowledge “work” within this global system? The paper offers an overview of approaches to the ethnography of expert knowledge in development. It suggests that these ethnographies of expertise offer commentary on the nature and limits (epistemological and ethical) of anthropological enquiry itself. As social researchers engage with expert subjects who operate within the same conceptual world, who have views on their views, who refuse to be objectified, or raise objections to ethnographic accounts, important questions are raised which are of a general significance concerning the practice of anthropology and its contribution to the modern world. The possible insights here are enriched by ‘insider’ accounts that have to contend with the problems of epistemological ‘exit’ from alternative professional roles as a pretext for ethnographic knowledge.The ensuing confrontations around research processes offer insights into the nature of anthropological expertise and its limits. Related works: 2005: ‘Global governance and the ethnography of international aid.’ In (eds) David Mosse & David Lewis The Aid Effect: Giving and Governing in International Development. London & Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press. pp 1-36 Emília Marques Making materiality into an anthropological topic: Theorising the “pervasive materiality of the world … as part of the social” was recently pointed out as “the challenge of the present” in anthropology (Hastrup 2005). Such a subject must be construed against the widespread twin assumptions of “technological determinism” (materiality in more or less extent determines the social and the cultural) and “technological somnambulism” (materiality is socially and culturally neutral) – using the terminology drawn by Pfaffenberger (1988) from the history of technology. A place (among many others) where to study the ways materiality “pervades” the social world are the identity practices and narratives in the work and consumption fields. Though work and consumption are often seen as separated, even opposed, identity arenas, perhaps an understanding of how people intertwine them could contribute to (a) socially locate consumption practices and discourses – challenging the various ideas of consumption as a rather non-critical, homogenising practice; (b) to keep work in the anthropological agenda – against the ‘end of work’ thesis; and (c) to track social uses of materiality across different practices and contexts. Drawing from the initial steps of my post-doctoral research, the paper will thus discuss the process of construction – through theoretical, political and ethical considerations – of work‑and‑consumption as a research topic. [ Ref: Hastrup, K., 2005, Social anthropology. Towards a pragmatic enlightenment?, Social Anthropology / Anthropologie Sociale, 13 (2): 133-149; Pfaffenberger, B., 1988, Fetishised objects and humanised nature: towards an anthropology of technology, Man, 23: 236-252.] Related works: 2005: E. M. Marques, “Estudar o trabalho industrial: aprender com Malinowski, aprender com Marx” [Studying work in the manufacturing sector: learning form Malinowski, learning from Marx]. Comunicação ao seminário Temas e problemas em Antropologia – relatos na primeira pessoa, organizado pelo Centro de Estudos de Etnologia Portuguesa – UNL, Lisboa. Erik Bahre The janus head of insurances in South Africa: Networks of inclusion and bureaucracies of exclusion. Drawing on fieldwork (open interviews, participant observation, household surveys), the increase of insurances marketed for the poor and lower middle classes in South Africa are examined. South African companies, such as Sanlam, Old Mutual, and Metropolitan, establish a myriad of policies in order to incorporate the previously excluded, mostly non-White, poor and middle classes. While poverty, violence, and AIDS put state institutions and social relations, particularly kin, under severe pressure, insurances enable people to manage risks in hitherto unthinkable ways. The paper examines these initiatives as a ‘double faced head’. It reveals how social capital, often of intermediary grassroots organisations, is crucial for the marketing of policies but that, once poor and lower middle class customers try to claim benefits, it is insecure whether they can mobilise these same networks. The paper reveals, how they are caught up in a, at times, Kafkaesque bureaucracy and reveals which type of networks can be drawn on to manage these bureaucracies. This raises fundamental questions with regards to the ability to establish social security through (commercial) bureaucratic institutions. Related works: 2007: E. Bahre, Money and Violence; financial self-help groups in a South African township, Brill Academic Publisher: Leiden (in press). Isabelle Coutant Le sociologue, le délinquant et la sphère publique. Enquête ethnographique en banlieue parisienne au début des années 2000. J’ai étudié deux dispositifs judiciaires chargés du traitement de la délinquance juvénile au début des années 2000, dans un contexte médiatique et politique qui faisait de cette question un sujet « brûlant » (comme en a témoigné la campagne présidentielle de 2002). Si l’actualité a motivé le choix de cet objet de recherche, c’est surtout sur la manière dont elle m’a influencée pendant l’enquête (notamment dans la réorientation de la problématique et dans la manière de mener les entretiens) que je voudrais insister. J’aimerais aussi souligner son incidence sur l’écriture (que dire et comment le dire sans renforcer les stéréotypes ambiants ?) et enfin revenir sur les analyses proposées en montrant comment, tout en pouvant amener à prendre position dans le débat public, l’ethnographie n’en est pas moins une expertise très particulière du fait de la durée de l’enquête, de la réflexivité engagée, et de la multiplicité des points de vue relayés. [download full text > english Related works: 2005: I. Coutant, Délit de jeunesse. La justice face aux quartiers, La Découverte, 2005. Javier Auyero (& Debora Swistun) The Social Production of Toxic Uncertainty Based on a two and one half year long team ethnographic research on environmental suffering in an Argentine shantytown, this paper examines a) the role played by powerful experts (state officials, doctors, lawyers, etc.) in the production of uncertainty and confusion about toxic contamination, b) the relationship between widespread confusion, suffering, and domination, c) the powerlessness of ethnography (and of, us, ethnographers as public intellectuals) to c1) lift the veil of widespread collective confusion, c2) diminish the suffering endured by the people with whom we shared long hours during fieldwork. Related works: 2007 (forthcoming): J. Auyero (with Debora Swistun), “In the Midst of Garbage and Poison. Towards an Ethnography of Environmental Suffering,” Contexts. Jean-Yves Durand A reification is a reification is a reification. Ethnographic authority and the certification of crafts. In the last three decades, especially in Europe, there has been a proliferation of more or less institutionalized attempts at revitalizing all sorts of traditional rituals, festivals, food products, crafts. Linked up with the redefinition of the “popular” in transnational capitalist economies, this phenomenon has now been throroughly studied by social sciences, generally in terms of “invention of traditions” or “comoditization of culture”. It sometimes leads to questions of cultural ownership which are similar to the issues raised, in developing settings, by corporate efforts aimed at identifying (mostly ethnopharmacological) “folk knowledges” marketable on a global scale. The Western cases are also informed by the current audit culture: in order to be sold, “cultural heritage” now often needs to be “certified”. The certification of embroidered handkerchieves from northern Portugal is a process in which ethnographic authority was called upon to foster the authenticity of a product. Wary of any risk of indulging in reification, most ethnographers steer away from such situations or they cautiously stick to the “observation” side of their favorite method. They know that their approach cannot but highlight the dynamics and paradoxes inherent to the oxymoronic nature of products which are “traditional” as a result of the deliberate adscription of this quality, and that it will thus hardly meet the expected definition of objective criteria and static norms for certification. As an answer to the invitation for participating in such a definition, and with a thimble on every finger, an ethnographic needlework was undertaken in the past two years. Besides leading to wonder whether reification can and should always be avoided, a look at the right and wrong sides of this project shows what strategies and negotiations can help get a somewhat seamless result, simultaneously pragmatic and avoiding to restrain cultural dynamics. [full text not available] Related works: Forthcoming: J.-Y. Durand, “Saberes”, in J. L.García García; M. Cátedra; M. J. Devillard; A. Barañano (eds.), Voces. Temas Claves de la Interculturalidad, Madrid, Editorial Complutense. João Leal José Virgílio Pereira Joseph Masco The Nuclear Public Sphere Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic research on nuclear politics in the United States, this paper interrogates the possibility of a “nuclear public sphere” in post-Cold War America. It argues that nuclear weapons are not simply technologies embedded in the expert discourses of scientific production, military planning, and foreign policy; they are also cultural artifacts with a deep social history in the United States. Today, every U.S. citizen is addressed by the official nuclear logics supporting the “war on terror,” even as government secrecy works to limit the possibility of engaging those logics. Thus, the terms of a “nuclear public sphere” are increasingly complex even as the political stakes could not be higher. The paper examines how threat and secrecy have become mutually constituting aspects of state power since World War II, and interrogates the bomb as the basis for a new social contract in the United States. I argue that the linked project of secrecy/threat mobilization has enabled the recent conversion of the U.S. from a counter-communist to a counter-terrorist state. Ultimately, the paper explores the ethnographic challenge of locating and engaging a nuclear public sphere in the U.S., and assesses the epistemological consequences of state secrecy and threat mobilization for citizens and the state. Related works: 2004: J. Masco, “Nuclear Technoaesthetics: Sensory Politics from Trinity to the Virtual Bomb in Los Alamos” American Ethnologist 31(3):1-25. Juliana Prates Santana As crianças em situação de rua: O objetivo do presente trabalho é descrever o cotidiano de crianças em situação de rua inseridas em uma instituição de atendimento destinada a esta população. Descrever tal cotidiano significa contar as trajetórias de vida dessas crianças, acompanhar as suas relações com os pares, com as famílias, com os educadores e outras pessoas significativas. Significa também conhecer as expressões culturais dessas crianças, como a dança, a música e os grafites feitos nas paredes e chão da instituição. Além disso, é de suma importância conhecer e compreender suas brincadeiras, as regras que estabelecem na instituição, assim como seus desejos e projetos de futuro. Para apreender este cotidiano através da percepção das crianças realizei uma pesquisa participativa, em que as crianças foram convidadas a se expressarem usando as mais diversas linguagens, como o cinema, a fotografia, a música e a dança. Aliada a essas diferentes técnicas realizei uma etnografia que foi de extrema importância para uma maior compreensão do contexto de investigação, possibilitando a integração dos dados obtidos através das outras técnicas utilizadas. Related works: 2005: J. P. Santana, "Os adolescentes em situação de rua e as instituições de atendimento: Utilizações e reconhecimento de objetivos", Psicologia: Reflexão e Crítica, 18(1), pp.134-142. Karin Knorr-Cetina Frontrunning ethnography I am addressing forms of specialized ethnography that have the goal to "run ahead" of contemporary Western societies in the sense that they try to capture something about where these societies are headed. This sort of ethnograpy meets with public interest after the fact, so to speak, that is after it has been completed, and it often takes its clues from what happens in the public sphere or in public discussions. Examples will be provided from the ethnographies I conducted in complex expert systems. I will also discuss the notion that ethnography is a special purpose instrument of theoretical sociology. [full text not available] Related works: 2002: K. Knorr-Cetina (with Urs Bruegger), “Global Microstructures: The Virtual Societies of Financial Markets“, American Journal of Sociology 107(4), January: 905-95. Loïc Wacquant Social and Professional Obstacles to the Circulation of Ethnography Drawing on the differential reception of fieldwork carried out in neighborhoods of relegation and prisons in several countries, as well as on my experience as editor of Ethnography for seven years, I discuss the hurdles that stand in the way of the progress of ethnography as a distinctive mode of inquiry and form of public consciousness. I argue that the professional and statutory organization of academic research --including epistemological timidity, methodological fetishism and exclusivism, disciplinary and national patriotism, the rivalry of traditions of field research focused on contests for statutory eminence-- and the position of eethnographers in that organization constitute more serious impediments than the sociopolitical isolation of scholars and structural political censorship that weighs on social science in civic debate. I consider the international circulation of ethnography as a possible remedy to strengthen and sharpen the craft. [full text not available] Related works: 2007: “Estigmatização territorial na época da marginalidade avançada.” Sociologia. Problemas e práticas (Lisboa), 16 (Fall): in press. Luís Almeida Vasconcelos A Festa Trance: Lugar, Transformação e Mobilidade O objecto da comunicação é um tipo específico de festa rave que decorre de um também tipo específico de música electrónica, o trance. Na sua grande maioria estes eventos ocorrem em lugares afastados de quaisquer centros urbanos; efémeros na sua duração, eles constituem ainda expressão localizada da circulação global de uma forma distintiva de música de dança. São, nesta medida, um locus privilegiado para inquirir algumas questões relativas à construção do lugar – no que, também nessa construção, se articulam as dimensões públicas e privadas do espaço – e à maneira como este se articula com diferentes formas de mobilidade. [full text not available] Luís Baptista Luís Fernandes Manuela Ivone Cunha Ethnography and the Public Sphere Related works: Forthcoming: M. I. Cunha, "Closed Circuits: Kinship, Neighborhood and Imprisonment", Ethnography. Marcelo Rosa Landless experiences: youth and social movements in Brazil and South Africa The aim of this paper is to compare the role youth have had both in the national and international expansion of the Brazilian landless movement or MST (“Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra”) and in the South African “Landless Peoples Movement” (LPM). These movements have been sharing their experiences for several years, despite their completely different “generation structures”: the Brazilian structure is supported by very young militants - around the age of eighteen - while the South African structure is organized by senior activists – around the age of fifty. A comparative perspective helps us understand the impact and possibilities of each particular generation structure on these movements through their specific tactics and discourses and the social reactions they awaken. Related works: s.d.: Rosa, Marcelo, "The South Way: State and Agrarian Oligarchies through the contemporary spirit of
neoliberalism in Brazil" Margarida Moz When Ethnography and Sexuality Clash Having studied gay and lesbian issues in Lisbon, my hometown, has confronted me with a series of issues regarding the presentation of my own sexual identity. During the last years of my ethnographic experience I have had to position myself regarding my own sexual identity as most of the times just being an anthropologist undergoing field research was not enough to justify my presence in some of the events I took part. The literature on the subject often raises this question and even more so for those who claim that gay and lesbian studies have often been addressed by outsiders who haven't been able to grasp the whole of the situation. But the biggest challenge is to answer to peoples doubts which are mostly unrevealed. You know it is there to be answered, but why should it matter and how far can it take you? Maria Cardeira da Silva Fragility as attraction, Orientalism as merchandize, anthropology as marketing. New trends in tourism lead to its ‘moralization’ while commoditization of authenticity is re-enacting orientalism in some touristic encounters. My presentation will discuss these and other entangled phenomena of popularization, making use of some ethnographic examples which resulted from fieldwork conducted in touristic sites in Morocco and Mauritania. [full text not available] Related works: 2005: M. Cardeira da Silva, “L’Espace du Tourisme dans l’Anthropologie de l’Espace”. In Arquitectonics. Mind. Land and Society. MUNTAÑOLA, J. e PROVANSAL, D. (Eds.), “Anthropologie et Espace”. Barcelona: Ed. UPC. Maria do Mar Pereira Media Coverage of Ethnographic Work: Opportunities, Problems and Dilemmas Coverage of research in mainstream media is a crucial means for the circulation of ethnographic knowledge. It may play a particularly important role in the case of research that problematises dominant discourses about what is ‘normal’, ‘natural’ and/or ‘ideal’, because media visibility of such ethnographic inquiry can enable it to participate more centrally in the public (re)shaping of those discourses. Related works: 2006: M. Pereira, Construindo Diferenças e Semelhanças no Recreio: uma Análise Performativa da Negociação do Género entre Jovens, dissertação em Sociologia, ISCTE, Lisboa. Mario Small Lost In Translation: How Not to Make Qualitative Research More Scientific. In recent years, a number of ethnographic researchers in sociology have attempted to address the limitations of qualitative research by appropriating methods and insights from classical statistics, such as worrying about “bias” and “selection on the dependent variable.” This effort has been consistent with King et al.’s (1994) Designing Social Inquiry, and is often positively received by funders and social scientists concerned with the scientific status of ethnographic research. In this paper I draw on published sociological ethnographic research and on my work in housing projects in Boston and among mothers in childcare centers in New York to assess these efforts. I suggest that these efforts, recommended by both quantitative and qualitative researchers, are largely ineffective and likely to undermine the strengths of ethnographic work. Related works: Forthcoming: M. L. Small, “Lost in Translation: How Not to Make Qualitative Research More Scientific.” In Michèle Lamont (editor), Report from Workshop on Interdisciplinary Standards for Systematic Qualitative Research. Washington, DC: National Science Foundation. Megan Comfort Clemmer and Sykes in the “Tube” at San Quentin: The Secondary Prisonization of Women Visiting Inmates. The steep rise of the United States’ carceral population over the last three decades has led to a growing interest in the repercussions of incarceration on inmates’ families and close associates. Among many activists and researchers, discourse on this issue has centered on a portrayal of the correctional facility as a wholly destructive institution that ruptures kinship and social ties by removing wage earners from the family home, suspending relations of care-taking and reciprocity, and stigmatizing both individual lawbreakers and their intimates. However, ethnographic field work conducted in the visitor waiting area (known colloquially as the “Tube”) at northern California’s San Quentin State Prison reveals that this representation does not correspond to the surrounding context of poverty, social marginalization, domestic distress, and collective fatalism affecting inmates’ kin and kith. Instead, a loved one’s incarceration reverberates in less straightforward and more paradoxical ways by recalibrating gender dynamics, complicating the meanings of “home” and “family,” and drawing people not legally sentenced to confinement into close contact with correctional authorities. Returning to the classic theories of Donald Clemmer’s prisonization and Gresham Sykes’ pains of imprisonment, I argue that the relatives and intimates of inmates undergo “secondary prisonization,” a less virulent but still potent form of socialization to carceral norms that ultimately extends the reach and intensity of the transformative effects of the carceral apparatus. Related works: 2007: Doing Time Together: Love and Romance in the Shadow of the Prison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Michael Herzfeld The politics of gesture: ethnographic reflections on the embodiment of globalization This paper is an exploration, through an eclectic stroll through ethnographic experiences in three countries (Greece, Italy, and Thailand), of how the ethnographer's bodily stance and associated habitus affect the reception of intended social interactions and research projects. I particularly argue that there is considerable temporal displacement between the learning of a language and the acquisition of a partially local habitus. One key difficulty lies in the irreducibility of gesture to language, but this can be turned to advantage with the advent of current techniques in visual anthropology. If anthropologists often end up, willy-nilly, as cultural mediators, any serious commitment to reflexivity demands a more systematic treatment of gestural patterns and changes than has usually been the case so far. Miguel Chaves As relações subjectivas com o trabalho no quadro das novas classes médias: um ponto de partida para a análise etnográfica Esta comunicação pretende, em primeiro lugar, contribuir para reforçar o tema das relações subjectivas com o trabalho no âmbito da agenda etnográfica; em segundo, pretende identificar uma questão precisa – ou, se se preferir, uma porta de entrada – que a etnografia pode utilizar para aceder ao que consideramos ser um aspecto central desta problemática. Referimo-nos ao estudo do confronto entre os aspectos (aspirações) que as pessoas procuram realizar através do trabalho remunerado e aqueles que elas conseguem concretizar na posição profissional em que se encontram. Argumentamos também que do modo como decorre esse confronto depende, por sua vez, a avaliação que realizam da sua situação profissional e, em parte, de si-mesmos, em virtude do lugar central que o trabalho (e, por vezes, a falta dele) ocupa na vida dos indivíduos nas sociedades produtivistas contemporâneas. Related works: 2007: M. Chaves, “Conclusão” in Jovens Advogados de Lisboa: uma Inserção Profissional Díspar (Miguel Chaves, FCSH-UNL 2007) (PhD thesis). Miguel Vale de Almeida Webbing Ring. On Fieldwork Blogging, Ethnography, and the Public Sphere Taking as a starting point my own experience of keeping an ethnographic weblog during fieldwork in Barcelona (research on the public debate about same-sex marriage, models of kinship and models of civil society), I will survey several experiments of posting ethnography that are available on the Web. I will try to characterize these as constitutive of a hyperspace for the production of knowledge, somewhere between/beyond written academic work, civic engagement, and interpersonal conversations on ethnography and fieldwork. Related works: 2006: M. Vale de Almeida, "On 'Strange and Distant People' in a 'Decent Society'. Debating Marriage in Barcelona, 2005. Unpublished conference, Monday Seminar Series, Dept of Anthropology, University of Chicago. Links to books in english: Nina Eliasoph Publicizing and Measuring “The Volunteer Spirit:” This talk will be based on a five-year ethnographic study of US youth civic engagement projects. The projects scramble together governmental, non-governmental, and for-profit organizations; they use adult volunteers; they aim to be family-like, and to promote “cultural diversity.” The first question is how, if at all, all of this institutional blending matters for everyday life in these places. The second is based on the first; having found that it matters mostly by making comfort, nature, fun, voluntary action and spontaneity into quantities that have to be measured in order to communicate them to distant audiences (funders, voters, legislators, other publics), the second question then, is how this near constant need for public justification transforms these everyday familiar activities. Finally, the paper will illustrate a way of observing organizations, as layers and layers of stages and audiences. Related works: 2003: N. Eliasoph, “Culture in Interaction,” equally co-authored with Paul Lichterman, 2003, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 18, #4735-794. Pedro Vasconcelos Philippe Bourgois Neoliberal Lumpen Abuse in the 2000s: A 25 Year Ethnographic Retrospective on Violence. A retrospective re-examination of my fieldwork sites in the Americas—from the Miskitu and FMLN guerrilla fighters in the 1980s to crack dealers, gang members and homeless heroin injectors in the U.S. inner during the 1990s and 2000s--reveals the importance for ethngraphers to theorize violence in our current moment in history. The transition from the Cold War to an era of U.S. economic domination and military intervention requires a critical theoretical understanding of the directionality of the overlapping flows of violence in what can be called the continuum of violence. The transition era allows us to document the links between military/revolutionary, structural, interpersonal/intimate and symbolic violence under neo-liberalism. Related works: Ramon Sarró Rayna Rapp Making the Invisible Visible: an anthropological perspective on learning disabilities Fifty years ago, the social terrain of education, occupation, and family forms excluded “public intimacy” with disabled members in the USA. Now, children and young adults with disabilities are far more publicly visible, and “special education” has become an expansive terrain of public debate, consciousness, and innovation. “Learning disabilities” is the fastest growing (and arguably, the most controversial) diagnostic category within special education. This rapid social change engages subjects as intimate as family responses to diagnoses; as philosophical as the diversity of thinking styles which lie behind “All Kinds of Minds” (title of a best-selling book on the subject); as sociological and biomedical as the existence of NICUs that save the low birth-weight babies of the poor and the privileged alike, both at substantial risk for subsequent learning problems; as culturally mainstreamed as the Hallmark Hall of Fame and Disney Channel TV movies featuring heroes with disabling conditions. The rise in “Learning Disabilities” is centered in the realm of US education. But it also builds upon contributions from diverse social domains --civil rights struggles and legislation; the growth of the biomedical and neurosciences; the rise of school psychology; media activism; kinship changes in all their racial-ethnic, class and religious diversity in the US context-- all play a part in growing public awareness of special education and the role of children and young adults with “special needs”. Based on fieldwork with scientists, educational and media innovators, legal and parental activists, this paper examines claims of universalism (notably: in the biomedical and cognitive sciences and in pedagogy) in relation to the US cultural context within which this highly mediated and stratified transformation is taking place. It also queries how learning disabilities have become publicly visible, reflecting on the methodological traditions and limitations we as ethnographers bring to our chosen projects. Related works: Forthcoming: R. Rapp, “Enlarging Reproduction, Screening Disability” in Marcia Inhorn, ed. Disrupted Reproduction. BergenHahn. (with Faye Ginsburg). Susana de Matos Viegas Ethnography as mediation: Public categories and the anthropological study of a ‘land traditionally occupied by Indians’ (Brazil) This paper addresses ethnographical ways of constructing knowledge in the identification of “indigenous territories” (terra indígena) in Brazil, considering the intertwining of: a) the legislative process; b) indigenous fight for land rights; c) “lived experiences” of the territory resulting both from localized and larger regionalist ethnographies. The debate raised in this paper is partially sustained on the arguments I developed in the Report for the Identification of the Indigenous Territory of the Tupinambá of Olivença I have been apointed to do by the Tupinambá and the Brazilian government (Viegas 2005), after finishing an academic ethnography in 2003. In this study ethnographic and scientific arguments are sustained by the 231 Article of the 1988 Constitution of Brazil that defines “indigenous territory” as “land traditionally occupied by Indians”. What is meant by “traditional occupation” has resulted from a debate by national organizations of Indigenous peoples in the 1980s, together with Brazilian anthropologists and jurists. Considering the anthropological making of ethnography as a procedure of mediation and not of translation, the paper argues for the opportunities posed by the intertwining between public and research categories of analysis, considering what is meant by “traditional occupation” as memory, lived experience, ideology, ecology, and also territorial belonging from the viewpoint of the Americanist debate. Related works: 2005: S. M. Viegas, Relatório Circunstanciado de Identificação da Terra Indígena Tupinambá de Olivença (Report for the Identification of the Indigenous Land of the Tupinambá of Olivença). Departamento de Assuntos Fundiários da Fundação Nacional do Índio (Department of Indigenous Affairs for Land Issues). Brasília. Susana Durão The path of reception. Responses to an ethnography about the police force. I spent the year of 2004 in a Lisbon’s patrol station, tracking down the police officers material and symbolic work practices and routines. The goal was to write a PhD thesis about the police mandate, focusing on the ways this mandate takes form in patrol and community police activities. I had regular contacts with several police chief constables and high officials from the national direction of PSP (Polícia de Segurança Pública) since 2000. While I was writing the thesis I felt as the several experts with whom I dealt with were constantly looking over my shoulder. But I also felt the look from the ones that although placed in different fields of power and knowledge would certainly take some interest in this ethnographic work. Since the beginning my point was to produce a clear but dense discourse, to be shared by the social sciences but also by the general and undefined Portuguese public, for people “who are paid to read” and for people “who pay to read” (MacClancy & McDonaugh, 1996). Knowledge about the police force was scarce and till now absent from the social sciences agenda. In 2006 I finished and defended the text in the academy. I then decided to deepen the problem of reception to this particular ethnography. I selected a range of policemen, high state officials, judges, politicians, unionists and journalists. I have sent them the thesis, asking for comments. My aim was to analyse that responses to the work, text and discourse. This way I would have “material for thought” and could finally reflect about the choices I have been making, measuring the efficiency of this particular “tale of the field” (Van Maanen, 1988). But the main goal was a more political one: to equate the limits and advantages of ethnographic writings in a public and national debate about the Portuguese police force. Related works: 2007: S. Durão, “A rua dos polícias. Visão itinerante”, in Cordeiro, Graça Índias & Frédéric Vidal (orgs), O Lugar da Rua, Lisboa, Livros Horizonte (no prelo). Susana Narotzky Sylvie Fainzang Between ethnology and the public sphere: a pas de deux Using the example of research carried out on information and lying in doctor-patient relationships, we will explore the part played by public discussion on these issues in the preparation of the research project, particularly emphasizing the distinctive process of ethnological inquiry. We will look at how the research project developed, both echoing public debate on the subject, and taking a different perspective. We will show that the role of the ethnologist, in order to develop an ethnographic approach, is to take distance from the public debate by transforming the research object through the gradual construction of the problem to be studied. In other words, while ethnology may grasp an important social question at a given moment in the public debate, ethnology must still reformulate and redefine the problem, taking distance from the formulation put forward in the public sphere. [download full text > english Related works: 2002: S. Fainzang, Lying, Secrecy and Power within the Doctor-Patient Relationship", Anthropology & Medicine, Vol. 9, n°2: 118-133. Vincent Dubois Le dévoilement ethnographique des transformations structurelles de l’Etat social. À propos du traitement bureaucratique des « mauvais pauvres » Activation des dépenses sociales dites « passives », individualisation du traitement des problèmes sociaux et culpabilisation (au nom de leur « responsabilisation ») des assistés constituent parmi les principaux traits des transformations contemporaines de l’Etat social un peu partout en Europe. S’y combine la remise en cause croissante des catégories collectives d’appréhension de la question sociale (comme le chômage dont le « halo » brouille de plus en plus les contours) qui conduit entre autres à transférer aux agents directement en contact avec les populations concernées la responsabilité de statuer sur des situations et comportements individuels. Cette dissémination (indissociablement symbolique et pratique) de la question sociale doit être prise en compte dans le choix des outils d’analyse : non pour opérer dans la sociologie un « retour de l’individu » bien fait pour légitimer les visions du monde portées par l’Etat social « modernisé », mais pour rendre compte de cette caractéristique structurelle qu’est l’atomisation du traitement des problèmes sociaux. C’est ainsi selon nous que doit être conçue l’observation ethnographique des pratiques des agents de terrain, notamment dans leurs interactions avec les assistés sociaux. Nous tenterons de montrer les apports d’une telle posture en revenant sur deux enquêtes sur les dispositifs de contrôle et de lutte contre la fraude aux aides sociales et aux allocations de chômage en France. Vincent Planel Related works: |
Organizers:
Centro de Estudos de Antropologia Social (ISCTE, Portugal) / Journal Ethnography / University of California-Berkeley
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