Ethnography

In this article I reflect upon my experience as an ethnographer within the informal African city, which I describe as a borderland. In the contemporary African city informality prohibits peripheral men from achieving manhood, predicated on marriage, which requires steady work. As perpetual social juniors they fantasize about an elsewhere to which an ever-porous world exposes them but which stands in stark contrast to their lived experiences. Black urbanism (Simone, 2010) situates this mediated experience of elsewhere, an imagined global conceived simultaneously as a space of creativity, possibility and disillusionment through its linkages with members of the black diaspora glorified through not productive but consumption-oriented identities. Positing that we are both borderland figures, I discuss my interactions/intersections with peripheral men in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. I consider how my identity as a woman from the African diaspora entailed a direct encounter with this elsewhere, and how this influenced their lives.

Through an examination of a Midwestern professional comedy club, this article theorizes stand-up comedy as part of the broader affective-cultural assemblage that is nightlife entertainment. Using the Deleuzian notion of assemblage, this analysis builds on poststructural accounts of the dynamic and transient properties of culture, and the relationship between space, culture, and affect. As a specific affective-cultural assemblage, stand-up comedy operates as both constrainer and enabler of racial and heteronormative order through the bringing together of a variety of diverse logics and practices. I argue that stand-up comedy should no longer be thought of strictly in discursive or symbolic-interactionist terms that over-determine the roles of particular agents (i.e. comics). Instead, when described as emergent, transient, and fundamentally affective, stand-up comedy and other cultural forms can be seen for their openness and multiplicity, both contributing to racial and heteronormative order as well as upending it.

Besides being known for population overcrowding, prison staff strikes, and prisoner suicides or escapes, which are frequently reported by the press, prison might also be a place for rare innovative projects. One such project can be seen in a penitentiary policy initiated in Belgium in 2000 aimed at re-shaping the culture of detention towards a culture of ‘restorative justice’. What can be said of this attempt at introducing the concepts of victim, restoration, responsibilization, sensitizing and awareness within prison walls? The present article proposes an illustrative and interpretive account of this prison policy. Rather than restoring the broken victim-offender relationship, its implementation has something to do with detainees working on their ‘self’.

Brazil is a highly unequal and socially segregated society. Within this context, Brazilians’ everyday lives are marked by the constant reading of bodies: Who is/could be/looks dangerous? Who should be avoided? Poor working-class people are painfully aware of readings merging poverty and criminality. Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork among middle-class and lower-income persons in southeastern Brazil, this photo essay investigates some visual mechanisms at play in processes of social categorization. With a point of departure in the rhetorical question ‘Have you ever seen a thief wearing a uniform?’ uttered by unskilled workers at moments when their moral status is questioned, this essay examines the dynamic tensions linking physical appearance, morality and social hierarchies in contemporary Brazil. It highlights some of the ways through which unskilled workers’ uniforms can be a marker of both marginality and morality as they provide a visual basis for classism in everyday interaction and signal, in other situations, group affiliation, honesty and worker pride.

This article presents episodes of gay sex in the daily lives of people from a Brazilian shantytown (favela). It does so through a writing genre I call ‘ethnographic striptease’, which offers a picture of sexuality that is less ‘clinical’ and more similar to the form of an ‘erotic art’. This is based on the Foucauldian proposed distinction between two forms of knowledge discussed in History of Sexuality, Volume I: ‘scientia sexualis’ and ‘ars erotica’. I ask what an understanding of sexuality based more on the latter would look like. The result is presented in six concrete examples of this ethnographic form, which are provided in the article. These are followed by some personal commentaries, rather than by a ‘scientific analysis’ of them. By disrupting the boundaries of established narrative genres, the article offers a contribution towards the expansion of the ways in which human sexuality can be addressed and communicated. In a game of hiding and revealing, an ethnographic striptease offers a different look at queer sex life emerging from a large favela in Rio de Janeiro.

This article outlines the project of a ‘monadic ethnography’ based on Gabriel Tarde’s monadology. Tarde’s key contention is that ‘everything is a society’, i.e. that the world is made up of composite and relational entities of infinitesimal complexity called monads. These assemblages of heterogeneous elements engaged in relations of mutual possession constitute the object of study of ‘monadic ethnography’. Their analysis, in turn, has a series of methodological and formal implications, including a transformation of concepts of scale, spatiality and temporality and the need to find representational strategies suitable for conveying the monads’ dynamic qualities. A fieldwork example which discusses the making of a car part in a small workshop based in the Can Ricart factory in Barcelona is provided. Throughout the article, the idea of ‘monadic ethnography’ is discussed in relation to the recent rediscovery of Tarde’s work, the work of Bruno Latour and Gilles Deleuze, and the so-called ‘ontological turn’ in the social sciences.

Over the last decade, ethnographic studies of the creative industries have emerged as a thriving area of interdisciplinary research. Yet studies dealing with the micro-processes of relations between management and creativity are still relatively rare. Based on 12 months of fieldwork in the Japanese animation industry, this article offers a detailed analysis of workplace relations between entry-level manager, or ‘production operators’, and two classes of key creative workers, animators and directors, at the shop-floor level. Elaborating analytical concepts of emotional labour and creative hierarchy, it shows how directors’ and animators’ capacity to create and manipulate animation drawings routinely subordinate the production operators in the workplace hierarchy. It argues that the structure of domination in commercial cultural production between management and creativity is more multi-dimensional and contingent than a one-sided subordination of artists by managers.