Corporate social responsibility research has burgeoned in the past several decades. Despite significant advances, our review of the literature reveals a problematic gap: We know little about how culture, practices, and interactions shape CSR. On further investigation, we discover that limited research utilizes ethnography to understand CSR, which may provide some explanation for this gap. Thus, the purpose of this article is to illustrate the utility of ethnography for advancing business and society research via a multistage framework that demonstrates how (...) three different types of ethnography may be applied to the exploration of CSR. We specifically focus on the alignment between stages in the research process, or methodological fit, as a key criterion of high-quality research. In doing so, we provide researchers embracing different worldviews a tool they may utilize to conduct and evaluate ethnographies in business and society research. (shrink)

This book primarily tries to bring out the analogy between the conceptual and methodological discourses on the theme of the other. The term 'Other' here refers to the oppressed sections of the society. It may be dalits, women, indigenous or ethnic communities. Since we are living in a multicultural and multilingual society, we should share our views with others on a platform where issues of the marginalized people are addressed by different scholars following different methods and techniques. Though there are (...) various policies and plans for the welfare of the downtrodden, hardly any change can be seen at the micro-level structure of the society. There are studies which highlighted the problems and ethos of the downtrodden sections, but a majority of those studies neglected the marginalized groups. Hence, we felt the need to highlight the issues and concerns of these groups in a wider context and started thinking on the theme 'Ethnographic Discourse of the Other: Conceptual and Methodological Issues'. This volume attempts to discuss and theorize the pragmatic concepts and issues related to the marginalized groups in contemporary societies in South Asia. This book is interdisciplinary in nature and will be useful to scholars and students of Anthropology, Sociology, Linguistics, Social Work, Culture Studies, Gender Studies and Philosophy. It is widely applicable to all sections of the oppressed socially, economically, culturally, academically, politically and other wise. (shrink)

A common theme in social science studies of algorithms is that they are profoundly opaque and function as “black boxes.” Scholars have developed several methodological approaches in order to address algorithmic opacity. Here I argue that we can explicitly enroll algorithms in ethnographic research, which can shed light on unexpected aspects of algorithmic systems—including their opacity. I delineate three meso-level strategies for algorithmic ethnography. The first, algorithmic refraction, examines the reconfigurations that take place when computational software, people, and institutions (...) interact. The second strategy, algorithmic comparison, relies on a similarity-and-difference approach to identify the instruments’ unique features. The third strategy, algorithmic triangulation, enrolls algorithms to help gather rich qualitative data. I conclude by discussing the implications of this toolkit for the study of algorithms and future of ethnographic fieldwork. (shrink)

If completeness is going to be upheld as a standard of ethical journalism, then journalists cannot continue to systematically exclude certain groups of people from coverage. Using ethnographic methodology, this study looks at the experiences of a group of Hispanic television journalists in 1 market. These journalists identify problem areas, including the idea that news values are still infused with White maleness, which may impact not only news coverage but also the career progress of Hispanic journalists.

Recent years have seen a rise in the engagement with empirical methods in philosophy. However, explicit discussion of the method and methodology behind such approaches is scarce, in particular for engagement with qualitative ethnographic styles of empirical research. This entry gathers debates from various philosophical subfields where ethnography has found a philosophical use. First, I introduce ethnography and highlight different versions through examples from phenomenology, political philosophy, ethics and philosophy of science. Then, I address three common challenges raised (...) against the relevance and legitimacy of ethnographic philosophy, some specific to ethnography, others shared with experimental philosophy and integrated history and philosophy of science. The entry ends by suggesting some benefits of ethnographic philosophy, including a potential for genuine surprise, the opportunity to fine-tune and enrichen concepts and a better grasp at philosophical significance in human lives. In addition, I note that ethnography encourages more thoroughgoing philosophical self-reflection about contextual and situational features of philosophical theories and about the particularities of the philosophers developing them, introducing the idea of ‘naturalising the philosopher’. (shrink)

The article defines a new referential problem of ethnographic description: the verbalization of the “silent” dimension of the social. As a documentary procedure, description has been devalued by more advanced recording techniques that set a naturalistic standard concerning the reification of qualitative “data.” I discuss this standard from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge and replace it by a challenge unknown to all empirical procedures relying on primary verbalizations of informants. Descriptions have to solve the problems of the (...) voiceless, the silent, the unspeakable, the pre-linguistic, and the indescribable. Ethnography puts something into words, which did not exist in language before. To respond to this task, descriptions have to turn away from the logic of recording and develop into a theory-oriented research practice. (shrink)

Theoretical and methodological discussions of ethnography and ethics have appeared regularly in the Journal of Religious Ethics for at least the past 13 years. Many of these conversations have been preoccupied by the relationship between “normative” work in religious ethics and “descriptive” work on moral worlds and patterns of reasoning. However, there has often been a perceived impasse when it comes to drawing “normative” ethical arguments from fine-grained ethnographic study. This paper begins by assessing significant contributions to religious ethics (...) made by ethnographers of Islam, focusing on the way they render a stark descriptive/normative binary irrelevant. I then turn to an example from my own fieldwork that expands our understanding of the relationship between ethnography and ethics. Through this example, I argue that ethical thinkers working outside the academy—theologians, activists, and cultural producers—also draw on an “ethnographic imagination” to make moral arguments. I end by reflecting on how the “ethnographic imagination” situates religious ethics as part of broader humanistic inquiry, showing that careful accounts of how people do live are always enmeshed with visions of how we should live. (shrink)

George Marcus’s methodology for multi-sited ethnography is widely discussed and applied in anthropology and the strategy of ‘following the conflict’ has been a fruitful approach to studying controversies and conflicts. Drawing on my shifting methodology in the initial stages of a digital ethnography project on vaccination-related online community forums, I explore ‘the war’ on vaccines using a broadened strategy that includes following agreements and silences within the controversy. By examining the debate in conjunction with medical anthropology research, I (...) discuss how both vaccine-cautious and vaccine-confident forum members challenge conventional debate divisions, such as scientific–unscientific, evidential–anecdotal and genetic–environmental, while still adhering to medico-scientific discourses as zones of agreement. Whereas an agreement-oriented methodology contributes to research on liminal zones and reconfigured forms of bio-citizenship and literacy, the strategy of ‘following silences’ highlights the limits to liminality in a debate underpinned by adultism that silences the views of young people. (shrink)

Scientists are developing a technique called in vitro gametogenesis or IVG to generate synthetic gametes for research and, potentially, for treating infertility. What would it mean for feminist concerns over the future of reproductive practice and biotechnological development if egg and sperm cells could be produced in laboratory conditions? In this article, I take on the question by discussing the emerging technique of IVG through the speculative feminist analysis of ambiguous reproductive futures. Feminist cultural and science studies scholars have explored (...) the transformative effects of biomedicine on reproduction through science fiction novels and other cultural products. I theorise the speculative and visionary in biomedicine in the context of ethnographic methodology by drawing on ‘thought experiments’ conducted with stem cell scientists as shared acts of future-oriented contemplation. I develop the figure of SF proposed by Donna Haraway to investigate how science facts and speculative fabulation together shape futurities of reproduction. I propose including shifting frontiers in feminist thinking of the SFs in bioscience. Biomedical research aims to shift the borders between what is known and not known in reproductive biology, subsequently raising new technical, ethical and political issues in terms of stratified reproduction. The article shows that synthetic gametes are anticipated to intensify selective procreation. Simultaneously, IVG is seen to forge new biogenetic relationships and possibilities for non-normative reproduction and kin-making. Following Haraway, I argue that by ‘staying with the trouble’ of these biotechnological visions, feminist speculative analytics on technoscience offers a valuable tool to envision more hopeful and equal futures together with scientists. (shrink)

This article presents an argument on the application of theoretical and methodological frameworks to the study of identity from an autoethnographic perspective. In order to guide the analysis process, the author employed social constructionism as the main theoretical foundation, whereas thematic analysis and positioning theory were deployed as the methodological frameworks. Further, in the process of using ethnographic methods to study the identity of Russian immigrants to New Zealand, the author found herself also needing to use autoethnography to interrogate (...) and understand her own journey. The insider/outsider position of the author who belongs to the same minority group became the most vital tool in her identity construction. In this regard, it is impossible to engage fully with the autoethnographic research practice without understanding the impact of others on identity construction of self, and a strong theoretical and methodological scholarship can provide a valuable foundation for this process. (shrink)

A recent qualitative study published in Neuroethics by Schembs and colleagues explores how functional neurodiagnostics of consciousness inform surrogate decision making in cases of disorders of consciousness. In this commentary, we argue that the chosen methodology significantly limits the scope of the potential conclusions and suggest an embedded ethnographic approach of co-presence as an alternative.

As has recently been highlighted, despite the prevalence of methodological “confessional tales” in ethnography generally, the challenges of undertaking ethnographic research specifically in institutional sports settings remain underexplored. Drawing on data from a 3-year ethnographic study of competitive swimming in the United Kingdom (UK), here we explore some of the practical challenges of balancing different elements of the researcher’s role when undertaking ethnographic “insider” research in familiar settings. In particular, we consider the difficulties of balancing the role (...) of a doctoral researcher and the chosen research role of a volunteer coach with a competitive swimming program. Employing the anthropological concept of liminality, we also analyze the lived challenges of leaving a highly familiar field and entering a state of liminality, where the researcher was caught on the threshold betwixt and between a return to full-time employment in the former “known” role of coach, and a move forward to embrace a new “unknown” role as a full-time member of academic staff. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Assuming that withdrawal is ontological, no method of inquiry will breach the “essence” of an object. As such, this article raises a question of onto-epistemological access to complicate the development of recent rhetorical theories and rhetorical method/ologies informed by object-oriented ontologies and new materialisms. This article wonders about the drive to know and to feel forwarded in these rhetorical method/ologies without discussing how things hide from other things and from themselves, how things elude critics, and how scholars access others (...) through ethnographic and embodied methodologies. Explicating epistemist and anti-epistemist approaches to the question of onto-epistemological access, this article makes a modest proposal for rhetoric scholars to conjure rhetorics of unavailable diversities to remake the gap between knowledge and reality again and again. (shrink)

This paper sets out from the hypothesis that the embodied competences and expertise which characterise dance and sports activities have the potential to constructively challenge and inform phenomenological thinking. While pathological cases present experiences connected to tangible bodily deviations, the specialised movement practices of dancers and athletes present experiences which put our everyday experiences of being a moving body into perspective in a slightly different sense. These specialised experiences present factual variations of how moving, sensing and interacting can be like (...) for us as body-subjects. To use of these sources inevitably demands that qualitative research methodologies – especially short-term ethnographical fieldwork – form part of the research strategy and qualify the way the researcher involves a second-person perspective when interviewing dancers and athletes about their experiences. In the subsequent phases analysing the data generated, I argue that researchers first strive to achieve internal consistency of empirical themes identified in the case of movement practices in question thus keeping to a contextualised and lived perspective, also denoted as an emic perspective. In subsequent phases phenomenological insights are then actively engaged in the exploration and discussion of the possible transcendental structures making the described subjective experiences possible. The specialised and context-defined experiences of ‘what a moving body can be like’ are accordingly involved as factual variations to constructively add to and potentially challenge phenomenological descriptions. Lastly, I exemplify how actual research strategies have been enacted in a variety of projects involving professional dancers’, golfers’ and sports dancers’ practices and experiences, respectively. (shrink)

Dahlbäck, Forsblad and Hydén argue that conversational remembering in the real‐world must be acknowledged as an interactional practice grounded in and bound to the communicative actions produced by the interlocutors. They illustrate the complexity of those processes by referring to their own fieldwork examining older adults’ prospective memory within their homes (Dahlbäck, Kristiansson, & Stjernberg, 2013) and propose alternative methodologies (e.g., scenarios design) to increase collaborations between ethnographic and experimental memory researchers.

The traditional religious studies program, which focuses primarily on the history of religion and the church, finding out the features of religion as a spiritual phenomenon and a cultural phenomenon does not always provide an opportunity to fully realize the teaching and educational tasks of the subject. Students will soon master the philosophical and methodological principles of discipline rather than mastering material that would meet the needs of the modern national revival of the Ukrainian people. It is known that the (...) impudent sources of the history of our people by the political will of the uninvited people both from the East and from the West continue to distort the ethnogenesis of Ukrainian society, the origins of its spirituality, the identity of Kyiv Christianity, the idea of ​​a national Church, and others. (shrink)

We describe our efforts to address theoretical opportunities and methodological challenges that arose in the context of our ethnographic investigation of research labs in four different fields of bioengineering science. The multiyear study compared the common and specific features of four sites of interdisciplinary practice and aimed to analyze personal and collective goals, problem formulations, methods, technologies, and social organization within each lab. In the second phase of the study we sought to inform curriculum development for biomedical engineering from (...) the ethnographic study, with the broader goal of positioning students to engage in the kind of thinking scientists actually do. Evaluating thinking in action posed considerable challenges, and required us to develop an approach to assessing the extent to which students enrolled in the new course were “thinking like a biomedical engineer.” Our principal point of emphasis for this chapter is that honest confrontation of the challenges of ethnographic study of science practice must lead to caution, yet that ethnographic study of science enables innovative adaptations of methods and can yield vital insights into psychological dimensions of science, including interdisciplinary science. (shrink)

As a 52-year-old academic and mother of three, this research explores the ethics of the question ‘do I have time to go skateboarding?’ Using the themes of time, injury, ageing and learning, it explores the question in relation to Simone de Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity. The approach employs autoethnographic and sensory methods to document the authors own experience of learning to skateboard in her late forties and uses learning to skateboard as a vehicle from which to consider time and productivity. (...) Embracing Beauvoir’s ethics of transcendence in navigating the psychological burden of ageing and informing the ongoing methodological approach required for making time to play, the author subverts ideas of progression and knowledge acquisition from childhood to adulthood and explores instead the converse transition from adult to child. The article draws conclusions about the value of lifelong learning and what expanded ideas about productivity mean for our ethical positioning in the world. How being in the skatepark together requires an ethical contract between skateboarders, an unambiguous ethics of being together where adhering to a system of unwritten rules means that everyone has enough space to stay safe. Risk and the time implications of injury are explored throughout in terms of the choices we make at different stages of our lives as we navigate a balance between personal desire and social good. (shrink)

Interspecies intimacy defines an inescapable reality of lab animal research. This essay is an effort to disentangle this reality’s consequences—both in and outside the lab—as framed by the quandaries of ethnographic engagement. Encounters with lab staff and, in turn, with audiences unfamiliar with laboratory life, together provide crucial entry points for considering how the “messiness of the moral” might facilitate an “unbounded” approach to lab animal worlds. Within the lab, one encounters specialized ethical principles—often codified as law—that delimit strict (...) boundaries of in/appropriate human thought and action. Such principles determine quotidian practices of welfare and care that, in peculiar ways, privilege animal health (as key to reliable data) while obscuring, erasing, or denying human forms of self care. As such, they presuppose a regulatory ability to formulate, shape, and (re)direct human action. Yet attentiveness to the “messiness of the moral” of lab work exposes other realities: indeed, lab personnel regularly engage in a host of subversive responses that test or cross the boundaries of mandated behavior that (re)invigorate the meaning of moral acts of care as interspecies responsibility. The ethnographer’s ability to witness, record, and write about these actions within the lab rests comfortably on the relativist principle of suspended judgment. Once one moves outside the lab, however, I ask, wherein lies ethnographic responsibility, when one's accounts of the moral messiness of quotidian lab practices become unbounded and go public? I argue that a dialectical inter- and intraspecies framework—inspired by the existential anthropologist Michael Jackson—offers the ethnographer (and still other scholars) possibilities for forging a productively “unbounded” methodological analytic in and beyond domains of animal science. (shrink)

The purpose of this review is to bring to the attention to a wider, specialised audience a special issue of the UK journal, Ethnographic Studies. The special issue, compiled and edited by Andrew Carlin and Roger Slack, is a Festschrift in honour of Egon Bittner (1921–2011). The readership of Human Studies might be aware of Egon Bittner as one of the circle surrounding Harold Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks in the early and preparatory days of ethnomethodology between 1955 and 1965.This (...) collection of papers can be divided into three sets. The introduction, biographical, and “contribution pieces,” give an account of parts of Bittner’s life, his work with others and the contribution he made within the various collaborations and seminars which he attended and where his contributions were recorded. The second set, probably most valuable to the ethnomethodological reader, are the papers which could be described as Bittner’s contributions to sociological method and methodology. Contained within th .. (shrink)

In an attempt to promote in-depth dialogue amongst bioethicists coming from distinct disciplinary and religious backgrounds this essay offers a critical analysis of a number of the leading methods of addressing pluralism in bioethics and. Exploring the critiques and methodological proposals coming from the social sciences, the contract theorists, and the pragmatists, this study describes the problems which arise when confronting moral diversity in a bioethical context and examines the ability of these various methodologies to adequately resolve these matters. Finally, (...) the foundations of a new conceptual framework for bioethical methodology will be developed. It will be argued that these new methodological insights are able to overcome the problems facing other methodologies and may provide a viable means for adequately addressing issues of pluralism in bioethics. (shrink)

I am grateful to the authors for their comments, and for the opportunity to respond. To clarify my approach, I sought to discuss the centrality of ‘set and setting’ at descriptive and normative levels in the Psychedelic Renaissance by focusing on the language of containment prevalent during my ethnographic research. Inspired by the study of material culture, I took up certain questions that can be asked of any container—how they are constructed and maintained, how leaks and overflows are dealt (...) with, the work done by their boundaries, and relationship of these containers to their contents. There are undoubtedly more questions but these are the ones I found fruitful to think with. My goal was to explore how the... (shrink)

In the anthropology of Christianity, and more broadly in the anthropology of religion, methodological atheism has foreclosed ethnographic description of God as a social actor. This prohibition is the product of certain ontological presumptions regarding agency, an absence of autonomy of human creations, and a truncated conception of what can be said to exist. Reading Tanya Luhrmann's recent ethnography, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (2012), in light of both the ontological postulates of Object (...) Orientated Ontology and the work of Bruno Latour, this article proposes an ontological framework that makes it is possible to ethnographically describe God as a social actor without adopting methodological theism. This article also notes, however, that the ethnographic description of religious practice, found in studies of the Vineyard denomination such as Luhrmann's, challenge Latour's own account of the difference between science and religions as distinguishable enterprises. (shrink)

Calling for an expanded framework of EuroAmerican science's methodology whose perspective acknowledges both quantitative/etic and qualitative/emic orientations is the broad focus of this article. More specifically this article argues that our understanding of shamanic and/or other related states of consciousness has been greatly enhanced through ethnographic methods, yet in their present form these methods fail to provide the means to fully comprehend these states. They fail, or are limited, because this approach is only a “cognitive interpretation” or “metanarrative” (...) of the actual experience and not the experience itself. Consequently this perspective is also limited because the researcher continues to assess his or her data through the lens of their symbolic constructs, thereby preventing them from truly experiencing shamanic and psi/spirit approaches to knowing since the data collection process does not “in and of itself” affect the observer. We, therefore, need expanded ethnographic methods that include within their approaches an understanding of methods and techniques to experientially encounter these states of consciousness—and become transformed by them. Our becoming transformed and then recollecting our ethnoautobiographical experiences is the means toward a new kind of science and its methods of inquiry that this article seeks to encourage. (shrink)

Empirical studies in bioethics, as well asclinical experience, demonstrate the existenceof inter- and intra-cultural diversity invalues and perspectives on end-of-life issues. This paper argues that while survey researchcan describe such diversity, explaining itrequires ethnographic methodology that allowsordinary people to frame the discussion intheir own terms. This study of attitudestoward euthanasia in Japan found that peopleface conflicts between deeply held values suchas life versus pain, self versus other, andburden versus self-reliance that make itdifficult to rely on a ``rational person''''approach (...) to decision-making. An inductiveethnographic approach grounded in people''s lifeexperiences can indicate the reasons forvariation in responses to surveys, and canclarify the nature of ethical conflict in aparticular cultural setting. (shrink)

Taking the phenomena of “workplace spirituality” as its case, Shape-Shifting Capital argues that “spirituality” is constitutive of contemporary capitalism and outlines a methodology for tracking broad sociological shifts in the nature of Western religion and economy at the level of lived experience.

Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- What is "feminist" in feminist ethnography? -- Historicizing feminist ethnography -- Debates in feminist ethnography -- How does one do feminist ethnography? -- Challenges for feminist ethnographers -- Producing feminist ethnography -- Feminist activist ethnography -- Thinking through the future of feminist ethnography : a conversation -- Glossary -- References -- About the authors -- Index.

Consumption is essentially an institutional action. While both the formal institutional environment and cultural embeddedness shape consumption, individuals may reciprocally amend the institutional setting through consumption choices that challenge the prevalent institutional constraints. This paper reconciles theoretical and conceptual premises from institutional and practice theory literature to study the sustainability of consumption. Using institutional ethnography as a methodological approach, the study explores the pendulum between embeddedness and agency in shaping the sustainability of day-to-day consumption of necessary goods; and further, how (...) the external institutional environment may interact with human behaviour to contribute towards sustainability. The study finds a hierarchy of informal institutions, each level of which interacts differently with external changes. For example, sustainability is found to be more widespread the more it is embedded in practices, and this is a result of overall institutional development beyond regulation and choice editing. The results also highlight the importance of understanding unintentional sustainability in consumption practices. (shrink)

In the media and communications field, research investigating the digital media engagements of very young children at home has largely been restricted to survey methods relying on parental self-reports. Recognizing that qualitative approaches can provide insights in families’ practices, values, and attitudes, we argue for the fruitfulness of an ethnographic perspective, drawing on three cases from the project “A Day in the Digital Lives of children 0–3;” two in Sweden and one in England. Using the concept of methodological responsibility, (...) we argue that methodology and ethics are intrinsically entwined. We offer reflections on dilemmas and challenges involved in our participatory work with children under three and their families, bringing attention to such issues as ensuring initial and ongoing consent, using a video camera in the home and data sharing and dissemination. Building trust in such sensitive work is a complex process but the rewards are considerable. (shrink)

The paper draws its inspiration from the provocation which Merton offered sociology both to engage with empirical data and to perform analyses adequate to guide intervention beyond the particular case. Whilst contemporary STS is very different both in its models of theory and its forms of methodology, this paper suggests Merton's concerns with engagement and adequacy provide a useful way to interrogate current approaches. Specifically, the paper explores some recent anthropological conceptions of ethnographic fieldwork that have provided potent (...) models for the study of scientific and technological cultures. These multi-sited approaches have also provided the opportunity to develop new notions of intervention and explore alternative ways of making contributions to development of theory and practice. In the process of pursuing the goals of engagement and adequacy notions of ethnography have however become stretched. This sense of detachment from methodological canons accentuates the need for methodological debate and skill-sharing in STS. (shrink)

In 2020, the European Union announced the award of the contract for the biometric part of the new database for border control, the Entry Exit System, to two companies: IDEMIA and Sopra Steria. Both companies had been previously involved in the development of databases for border and migration management. While there has been a growing amount of publicly available documents that show what kind of technologies are being implemented, for how much money, and by whom, there has been limited engagement (...) with digital methods in this field. Moreover, critical border and security scholarship has largely focused on qualitative and ethnographic methods. Building on a data feminist approach, we propose a transdisciplinary methodology that goes beyond binaries of qualitative/quantitative and opacity/transparency, examines power asymmetries and makes the labour of coding visible. Empirically, we build and analyse a dataset of the contracts awarded by two European Union agencies key to its border management policies – the European Agency for Large-Scale Information Systems (eu-LISA) and the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex). We supplement the digital analysis and visualisation of networks of companies with close reading of tender documents. In so doing, we show how a transdisciplinary methodology can be a device for making datafication ‘intelligible’ at the European Union borders. (shrink)

Drawing on and extending the Foucaultian philosophical framework that Jeffrey Bishop develops in his masterful book, The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying, we undertake a sociological analysis of the neurological procedure—deep brain stimulation —which implants electrodes in the brain, powered by a pacemaker-like device, for the treatment of movement disorders. Following Bishop’s work, we carry out this analysis through a two-fold strategy. First, we examine how a multidisciplinary team evaluates candidates for this implant at a (...) major medical center. We present excerpts from an ethnographic study of the “case conference” where disease entities are presented, contested, ratified, and made objects for intervention with this technology. The case conference becomes the key site in the transition from “person-with-illness” to “person-with-brain-implant” as a team of health professionals determines a plan of action by interpreting both statistical and “quality of life” data regarding their patients. Second, this article explores these decision-making processes through Bishop’s conceptualization of evidence-based medicine, which relies on statistical approaches as the ultimate authority in knowledge production and medical decisions. We then reflect on Bishop’s critique of the social sciences and the methodological, analytical, and substantive ramifications that The Anticipatory Corpse can offer future sociological work. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to problematize the concept of school culture both as a concept and as a subject of investigation. It deals with the historical roots of this concept and the fact that it is shrinking—a consequence of the managerial imperatives of effectiveness and accountability in education. School culture, in relation to the quality of schools and the quality of education, has become the subject of audits, arrived at through a developed network of standardisation in education, testing (...) and evaluation. The methodology of evaluation currently lending particular substance to school culture, however, generates different methodological perspectives on investigating school culture and thus research is becoming an instrument of political power. In the research it is then necessary to either abandon the concept of school culture or to free it from spinning round the cycle of evaluation/self-evaluation—a change in school culture—improving the “quality of the school”—a new evaluation/self-evaluation. One way to do this is to employ ethnographic approaches in research into schools and to understand school culture as a system of texts. (shrink)

This autobiographically based article aims to consider the practical application of Anderson’s conception of analytic autoethnography under particular circumstances and requirements for its use. It reflects on the friendships that developed between me and my key informants during ethnographic research. In this context I refer to autoethnography as a method that allows researchers to identify aspects of their lives that have relevance beyond the personal and deal analytically with friendships in the field. Moreover, I consider how the researcher can (...) analytically handle friendships in the field using analytic autoethnography, even when he is not a complete member of the community under investigation. (shrink)

The article considers approaches in order to study large municipal entities and their economic potential. The authors specify that large municipal entities in modern conditions have a multifunctional structure, so they propose an interdisciplinary approach to their study. The article discusses such approaches to analyzing large municipalities as: philosophical; research from the perspective of social sciences and the humanities (political science, sociological, psychological, historiographic and ethnographic approaches). The authors analyze large municipalities from the perspective of the geographical approach; urban (...) theory; urban planning and architecture. The problem of studying large municipalities in the legal sciences is separately investigated. With the help of the economic approach the authors show that at the core of urbanization and the emergence of large municipalities there are three effects: comparative advantage, concentration effect, and localization effect. The authors give classification of large municipalities. The authors propose a systematic approach to analyzing large cities, representing the unity of the functional approach, open systems methodology and the factor approach. Under the latter, it is proposed to understand the economic potential of the city, which presupposes the possibility of efficient use of available resources and their maximum inclusion in social reproduction in order to meet the needs of the municipality population. The authors substantiate the classification of the economic potential of a large municipal formation, which consists of: the resource (basic and used), innovative and infrastructural potentials. (shrink)

Anthropologists who "study" religious practitioners are always confronted with both an ethical and a methodological problem. Our traditional training asks us to remain detached from our "informants" and their beliefs in order to collect "data" whose content will be analyzed according to academic agendas and theoretical trends, translated into anthropological jargon and published in ethnographies that will be accepted, published, and read in the academic world. On the other hand, the purpose of our anthropological research is to gain a deeper (...) understanding of the "other" from the "inside." Experiential anthropology has searched for a deeper understanding of religious practitioners and their beliefs. This includes focusing on native epistemologies and experiences and personal engagement with informants that sometimes involves the ethnographer's apprenticeship and initiation into the religious traditions that are beingstudied. This experience involves our commitment and respect towards those we study. Drawing on my own experience with Mapuche shamans in southern Chile I discuss the ethical and methodological problems anthropologists have in bridging professional interests with the personal commitments made with those whom we study. I discuss the ethical problems in using apprenticeship and initiation solely for professional purposes and the problem of cultural appropriation, the limitations that an exclusively academic model has on what can be written about, how it should be conceptualized, theorized, and represented, and the problems anthropologists undergo in having to simultaneously maintain professional detachment and be committed to those with whom we work. (shrink)

This article discusses our reflections on ethical and methodological challenges when conducting separate interviews with individuals in dyads in the uMkhanyakude district, South Africa. Our work is embedded in an ethnographic study exploring care relationships between adolescents and their older carers in the context of a large-donor funded HIV programme. We use these reflections to discuss some of the challenges and present possible management strategies that may be adopted in conducting dyadic health research in resource-poor settings. Drawing from the (...) relational agency, three rounds of separate interviews and participant observation were undertaken with dyads of adolescents aged between 13 and 19 and their older carers aged 50+ from October 2017 to September 2018. A reflexive journal was kept to record the interviewer's experiences of the whole research process. We identified methodological and ethical challenges from these data during the thematic analysis. A total of 36 separate interviews were conducted with six pairs of adolescent-older carer dyads. Five themes emerged: recruitment of dyads, consenting dyads, confidentiality, conducting separate interviews with adolescents and older carers, and interviewer-dyad interaction. We also illustrated how we dealt with these challenges. Results from this study can guide the recruitment, consenting and collecting data for health studies that employ a similar form of enquiry in LMICs. However, ethical and methodological challenges should be recognised as features of the relationships between cross-generation dyads rather than weaknesses of the method. (shrink)

The article reflects on the use of autoethnography in researching football fan culture. It identifies the benefits and challenges of using autoethnography as a strategy and a research method for understanding football fan culture. Despite numerous examples of the use of autoethnography in football research, including supporter studies, it has yet to be considered from a strictly theoretical perspective on the methodological dilemmas of the researcher–football fan. The article critically analyses the entire process of autoethnographic research, which led to the (...) conceptualisation of a research project on perceptions of football competitions. This paper is the result of a clash between a junior scientist’s original research concept and a more experienced ethnographic researcher’s critical approach and reflects the discussion between them. The authors believe that the conclusions reached may be helpful for researchers in the field of humanities and social sciences considering using autoethnography in their research. (shrink)

For more than 100 years, anthropologists have collected ethnographic research among communities who assert that the spirits, animal allies, and other entities of the unseen world are “really real,” yet we have historically contextualized this information under the umbrella of cultural relativism rather than taking the veracity of these claims seriously. In the last decade, some anthropologists claim that our discipline has finally undergone an ontological turn, which opens a door for anthropologists to finally take claims of nonhuman sentience (...) seriously under the umbrella of ontological, rather than cultural, relativism. This paper takes issue with ontological relativism as just one more frame for explaining away the stories of other-than-human consciousness that ethnographers report and suggests that there is an urgent need to consider the relevance, rather than the relativism, of other-than-human consciousness. It looks to Michael Harner's work as a welcome alternative to ontological relativism and encourages opening our minds to a reconsideration of what is “really real.”. (shrink)

This paper examines Paulin Hountondji's endeavor both to explode what he terms the myth about African philosophy and to elaborate what he deems the reality of African philosophy. Hountondji argues that it is a myth that African philosophy consists in the beliefs collectively held by various ethnic groups. Yet it is this myth that has gained currency in Western circles. Hountondji believes that this myth has been given currency largely by Western ethnographers and ethnophilosophers bent on promoting the idea that (...) Africans are incapable of individual rational thinking. Hountondji challenges this myth and then offers a reconceptualization of African philosophy. I argue in this study that while Hountondji's rejection of ethnophilosophy is plausible, his proposal for reconceptualizing African philosophy is fraught with some very serious problems. I close by suggesting a direction for contemporary African philosophy. (shrink)

A key consequence of globalisation is the integrative approach to reality whereby emphasis is placed on interdependence. Religion being an expression of human culture is equally affected by this cultural revolution. The main objective of this paper is to examine how religious affiliation, among Christians, influences attitudes towards the application of psychological sciences to the assuagement of human suffering. The sociological theory of structural functionalism was deployed to explain attitudinal appraisal. Ethnographic methodology, through quantitative analysis of administered questionnaire, (...) was also used. The study reveals that religious tenets largely shape attitudinal appraisal and redefine the borders of globalisation’s metanarratives. (shrink)

Religion constitutes an important element in every society as regards coping with the demands as well as vicissitudes of life. Mental health issues are becoming a recurrent decimal in societies overwhelmed by stress and other social factors. This paper examines how the presence of religious beliefs affects how some Christians respond to cases that have to do mental health. At the same time, it surveys how a near absence of religious attitude, that is, clinical medicine approach to mental health issues (...) betters the state of those suffering from these psychopathologies. This work sees participatory partnership approach as an effective means of correcting unhealthy biases that prevent a better understanding of mental health care. Sociological theory of structural functionalism will be used in assessing how religion can reinvent itself in areas that are associated with mental health. Ethnographic methodology through quantitative analysis of administered questionnaire is used as a research tool for this research. Three persons were also interviewed. The research findings show that religion is a crucial agent of socialization that can change how religious beliefs impact on mental health and there is need for medical professionals to collaborate with pastoral agents. (shrink)

Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore genetic contributions to disparities in health were developed using in-depth qualitative interviews with editorial staff from nineteen genetics journals, focusing on the methodological and conceptual mechanisms required to make race/ethnicity a genetic variable. As such, these analyses explore how and why race/ethnicity comes to be used in the context of genetic research, set against the background of continuing critiques from anthropology and related human sciences that focus on the social construction, structural (...) correlates and limited genetic validity of racial/ethnic categories. The analyses demonstrate how these critiques have failed to engage geneticists, and how geneticists use a range of essentially cultural devices to protect and separate their use of race/ethnicity as a genetic construct from its use as a societal and social science resource. Given its multidisciplinary, biosocial nature and the cultural gaze of its ethnographic methodologies, anthropology is well placed to explore the cultural separation of science and society, and of natural and social science disciplines. Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore disparities in health suggest that moving beyond genetic explanations of innate difference might benefit from a more even-handed critique of how both the natural and social sciences tend to essentialize selective elements of race/ethnicity. Drawing on the example of HIV/AIDS, this paper demonstrates how public health has been undermined by the use of race/ethnicity as an analytical variable, both as a cipher for innate genetic differences in susceptibility and response to treatment, and in its use to identify at greater risk of becoming infected and infecting others. Clearly, a tendency for biological reductionism can place many biomedical issues beyond the scope of public health interventions, while socio-cultural essentialization has tended to stigmatize and the communities where these are more prevalent. (shrink)

Kinship was one of the key areas of research interest among anthropologists in the nineteenth century, one of the most hotly debated areas of theory in the early and mid-twentieth century, and yet an area of waning interest by the end of the twentieth century. Since then, the study of kinship has experienced a revitalization, with concomitant disputes over how best to proceed. This special issue brings together recent studies of kinship by scientific anthropologists employing evolutionary theory and quantitative methods. (...) We argue that the melding of the evolutionary theoretical perspective with quantitative and ethnographic methodologies has strengthened and reinvigorated the study of kinship by synthesizing and extending existing research via rigorous analyses of evidence. (shrink)