Ethnography

Despite the importance of both gender and elites in contemporary social life, few empirical works examine gender among the elite. With a focus on embodiment, we develop a gendered theory of elite display, grounded in ethnographic observations of two elite spaces in which women are prominent: VIP clubs and philanthropy galas in the U.S. and Europe. Using a Goffmanian perspective, we examine the micro-dynamics through which elite bodies express status, in particular for women. We argue that, in elite social spaces, women’s bodies signify wealth, and their bodily rituals and displays concretize status distinctions. To do so, we analyze the management of bodies backstage, frontstage, and off-stage, showing that a hallmark of elite display is the careful obfuscation of differences and gaps between backstage and frontstage spaces, which serves to naturalize the status superiority of elites.

This article discusses how migrant businesses actively contribute to the negotiation of everyday coexistence in a Finnish provincial city. It focuses on oriental barbershops to unpack the interplay between place, power, and social imagination. Against the trope of the ethnic business that reproduces assumptions framing migrant activities in terms of community formation, looking at these salons from the perspective of people’s existential need for emplacement reveals how the dynamics of belonging and marginalization are experienced, navigated, and contested by the barbers of Tampere. While the identity-centredness in the definition of diversity and the social hierarchies implied by the discourses of integration force them to negotiate their presence from the margins, the barbers also compose counter-narratives of coexistence. Grounded in an aspiration for recognition, their stories cast a social imaginary that, without ignoring difference, shifts its emphasis towards an ethics of mutuality, thus unlocking a pathway to challenge essentialization and inequalities.

Borrowing from scholarship on emotional labor, emotion management and symbolic power, this article highlights emotions’ symbolic role in sustaining the vital correspondence between the reality of social life and the official classification system. Through the concept of the ‘desired state of mind’ and empirical data from 3 years’ ethnographic fieldwork in an urban 911 dispatch center in New England, this research shows what the ‘desired state of mind’ of this context is, how the link between the folk and the bureaucratic is made though ‘controlled empathy’, and how the cost and consequence of this process is shaped by the status disparity prevalent in 911 emergency community.

This study examines the classroom interactions and agentive practices of a cohort of Chinese teachers when teaching Myanmar students under the Gaokao policy at a borderland high school in China. The complexities of teaching Myanmar students of diverse backgrounds are manifested in the context of the constraints of professional accountability and working conditions. The study reveals these teachers’ classroom norms and interactions are an outcome of negotiations between their agency and structural power. The teachers’ expectations of the international students’ abilities and prospects are constrained by the limitations of the current curriculum. The paper argues that internal and external conditions contribute to restricting the students’ access to educational resources and employment prospects. This paper draws attention to tensions and dilemmas of pedagogic practice in a borderland setting and calls for setting up a hybrid, inclusive third space for students and teachers in international education.

Since the ‘performative turn’ in social sciences, ethnographers have extensively studied how performances both constitute the subject and method of social theory but rarely understood the political potential that lies in it for research participants. This article looks at how young urban activists in the city of Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo (hereafter Congo) politically appropriated performances that were initially meant as a research tool. Using audiovisual methods, this article analyzes three musical performances that were part of collaborative ethnographic research with a political youth group in Goma’s urban periphery. The members of this group used songs produced during the research process to create new identities and subvert political labels applied to them by outsiders. While this political storytelling of the self is an imperfect process, it signifies how ethnographic knowledge is not simply representational but always (co-)produced and performative.

This article aims to interrogate the construction of normality with a view to a squatter metropolitan setting in İzmir, Turkey. In doing so, I focus on the everyday experiences of the inhabitants in Limontepe and frame them in the context of place-making. I read the concept of ‘normal’ through Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and refer to women’s micro-practices in drawing its contours. Women, living within the boundaries of normality use tactics to cope with the existing normal and related interventions to their bodies, movements, and thoughts. Ethnographic research is the key to understanding inhabitants’ gendered experiences with space.

This article proposes a systematization of the within, between and beyond sites through which ethnographic field-making takes shape. It draws on fieldwork in Brazil, Greece, Nigeria, the UK and the social media among congregations affiliated with postcolonial Nigeria’s denominations of Pentecostal orientation. The main argument builds upon the conceptual continuum local–translocal–postlocal. Whereas the local exists through familiarity, the translocal emerges at the overlapping of familiarities, and the postlocal as a gesture of familiarity’s reconfiguration. This systematization advances epistemological and ethical extents of multi-sited ethnography, as it is premised upon the revision of designations identifying the research subject(s) as a ‘Nigerian Pentecostal diaspora’. While introducing a knowing of locals, translocals and postlocals over nationally, denominationally and diasporically bounded individuals, the continuum re-theorizes multi-sited-ness under local, translocal and postlocal affordances. In questioning identity designations, the paper foregrounds nuanced positionalities of ‘field’ constitutors to destabilize subtle conventions of totalization and the alterity-ipseity divide.

This article was prompted by a question: how can one be anthropologist when access to the field is denied? Drawing on the experiences of the author, who experienced a number of losses including access to the field during the COVID-19 pandemic, it shines a light on how, in a context of anthropology at home, intimate knowledge and memory fragments can be used to draw the field nearer when physical access is denied. In doing so, it reflects on how senses of home often go deeper than usually acknowledged. It suggests that knowledges produced at the hearths of homes become embodied aspects of ourselves that come into play especially in anthropology at home but that are always part and parcel of our engagement with the worlds around us. This in turn prompts the question of whether the old argument that fieldwork at home may preclude necessary analytical distance, still holds value.

In France today, an increasing number of people consider themselves to be “survivalists.” Presuming an inevitable crisis, they are organizing themselves to acquire and develop the skills, techniques, and knowledge they believe are necessary to survive the potential dissipation of mainstream ways of life. Based on ethnographic data collected in the Southwest of France, this article aims at understanding the motivations surrounding “preparedness”—as well as the discourses it generates and the practices it engenders—by repositioning them within the political and social context in which they emerge. For the most part, French survivalists develop traditional anti-liberal discourses, values, and practices, wherein notions of disaster or collapse are used as vehicles to promote a conservative political agenda. However, for some, prepping may also be a way to confront a feeling of the degradation of their lives, transforming survivalism into a paradoxical way of re/affirming one’s place in the world.

Batswana (People of Botswana) traditionally celebrate the end of seasons with dikopelo musical performances. This paper discusses Bakgatla-ba-Kgafela’s dikopelo festive celebrations, an annual return of choirs to their performance grounds through the duality of home and away. The author, a performer, interrogates through participant observation in four performances from December 2015 to January 2019, the seventeen-hour performance from midnight until the following day at sunset. Her experience is conceptually framed on Van Manen’s four lifeworld existentials of lived space (grounds), lived body (performs), lived time (seventeen hours) and lived human relations (performers, family, supporters). In conclusion, she takes a reflexive position of the subjectivity of her experience in relation to her fellow performers’; the blurred boundaries of her academic/performer roles and fieldwork/post-fieldwork spaces as her dikopelo lived experience is beyond this study’s timeframe. Her reality as an ethnographer at home, is the constant negotiation of her multiple unending identities.

This paper offers a glimpse into the affective work inherent in the practices, objects, and institutional design of the Dutch procedure for seeking and granting asylum. In doing so, I develop the concept of suspicious compassion to make sense of the productive tensions and affects generated in the process of subjecting applicants to a meticulously designed procedural itinerary. Along this itinerary, applicants must ‘open up’ to different immigration officers, who gather and interrogate distressing and intimate information, and inscribe such information in the reports that travel to the next stop on the itinerary. While applicants wait, their accounts are scrutinized by officers in the quiet of ‘objective’ decision-making. By following the procedural itinerary and analyzing the affective complex of suspicious compassion, I contribute to scholarship on asylum and suspicion, and to the study of intimacy and affect in state bureaucracies, moving beyond a focus on single emotions and individual feelings.

This paper reflects on the possibilities and limits of a team-based, multi-site, evaluative ethnography. In this study, a team of qualitative researchers deployed participant observation methods to assess the level of standardization and local adaptation in the training curriculum for adult leaders in the Boy Scouts of America. While the umbrella organization remained consistent over the course of the 12-months project, researchers completed intense intervals of observation in 13 different settings across the United States over the course of a year. We reflect on the benefits and challenges that fast-paced, evaluative ethnographic approaches offer for applied settings as well as insight into the complexities of team-based field work with regards to positionality, legitimacy, and relationships between researchers.

In this article, I explore the reflexive tensions of a Muslim Anthropologist who conducted an ethnography of blasphemy in his own backyard exploring the predicament of fellow Christian Pakistanis in the face of growing blasphemy allegations. My authorial voice influenced by fluid emotional and religious frontiers raised certain critical questions such as how to reconcile my faith, personal judgment, and representation and how to keep a distinction between my positionality as a researcher and an advocate for my faith at a significant juncture when Islam and Pakistan became a focus of the world’s anxiety endangering religious freedom and safety of minorities. The article employs case study and narrative inquiry as a merged method to develop a critical narrative perspective on the blasphemy politics in Pakistan. I suggest that although my faith as an epistemological tool allowed me to investigate the intricacies and nuances surrounding the blasphemy accusations and victims’ plight, my ethnographic revelations could be subject to the severe criticism that I think is an inherent feature of postmodern ethnography.

This article offers a methodological reflection on what it means to practise politically engaged ethnography with contemporary alter-European activists. While politically engaged research has a long history in the social sciences, it continues to present methodological and epistemological challenges to ethnographers who want their work not only to be academically rigorous, but also politically relevant. In this article, I build on scholarship conducted in collaboration with activists and social movements and what has come to be known as ‘militant ethnography’ in particular. Reflecting on three years of fieldwork with alter-European activists conducted between the UK’s vote to leave the EU in 2016 and the European Parliament elections in 2019, this article suggests that engaged knowledge production, here, is as an ongoing process of contestation. The article introduces four conceptual pillars along which these epistemic politics may be negotiated, understanding the knowledges produced as contextual, corporeal, contradictory and collective.

The field site is the retail showrooms of a fast-expanding organized retail company selling budget eyewear products across shopping malls and high streets of urban India. Through a thick description of 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork – arriving, forging social relations, recording and writing – this article traces the practical, ethical and epistemological paradoxes in doing ethnography. The article identifies these paradoxes as inherent to ethnography given its radical intent. Not studying them as limitations or failures, the article makes the case for a more honest and critical reckoning with these internal contradictions by making them more present in ethnographic practice and writing. It is argued that in so doing we enrich our understanding of the complex and contradictory social worlds we inhabit and study.

This paper presents a mode of collaboration between a researcher and research assistant for ethnographic data collection. We describe our experience as a researcher, who previously conducted fieldwork in Egypt but is now largely situated in the United States due to having young children, and a Cairo-based research assistant, who conducted participant observation of everyday practices of buying and eating subsidized bread for the researcher’s book project on bread, wheat, and security in Egypt. We position our narratives of this process side-by-side, interspersed by joint reflections, addressing questions regarding power asymmetries, the distribution of benefits, and what makes research collaborations work well. We argue that partnering in observation brings the benefit of more than one way of seeing and thinking through data. Moreover, we propose that this form of collaboration can be an effective strategy for researchers for whom continuous presence in their fieldsite is not possible.

This paper examines the tensions, struggles, and opportunities of doing ethnographies ‘at-home’. For the purpose of his PhD dissertation, the author returned to the city where he grew up, one of the biggest ports in France, with a strong maritime and industrial history. In this paper, the researcher reflexively recounts the social and personal springs of this longitudinal fieldwork among childhood friends and relatives in the working-class background from where he originates. While shedding light on the identity pressures that drove him to/through this research process, the author also addresses the profound emotional component of such investigation, as well as the difficulties of writing about it. Reflecting upon this singular experience, the paper eventually stresses how the researcher’s peculiar position influenced his methodological postures, determined the direction of his research questions and also how it ultimately provided robust original data and results, hereby asserting the strength of fieldwork conducted close to home for the production of critical and scientific social knowledge.