Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

As a young Jewish boy during the Holocaust, Jerry Rawicki was a courier for the Polish Underground in the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazis murdered his father Abram, mother Sophie, and sister Stephanie. Passing as a Gentile, his surviving sister Fela worked in a coffee shop in Warsaw. Under the cover of groups leaving for hard labor outside the Ghetto, Jerry was able to surreptitiously steal away and attend to his assignments on the Polish side. Within the Ghetto, people were dying from dysentery, typhus, and starvation. Deportations were rampant and ominous rumors that death camps were the destinations, no matter how unbelievable, in time became a horrific reality. In January 1943, the Germans staged an action on a scale that foretold a total destruction of Jews in the Ghetto. The inhabitants’ refusal to obey orders to vacate their apartments stunned the Germans. Armed resistance, mostly skirmishes, forced the Germans to back off, but the euphoria of prevailing over the Germans did not last long. On the night of April 18, 1943, during Passover, the Germans came back with fury. The armed resistance, this time more organized, held off the onslaught for over a week. But the fighters could not match the German firepower that turned the Warsaw Ghetto into a burning inferno. This story describes Jerry’s actions on that night, at the age of fifteen, and afterwards, when he found hope in the midst of despair.

Ethnographers shape a research self as they work through a series of existential choices. Self-defining choices must be made on: the genre or overall narrative logic of the text to be produced, how to handle experiences of awkwardness when interacting with subjects, how to understand one’s difficulties in understanding subjects, whether to be drawn into debates in popular culture, whether to assess progress in relation to improvements made or in relation to abstract standards defining perfect knowledge, and whether to understand evidentiary questions within a reflection or a pragmatist logic of truth. These are existential challenges in that, while alternative responses can be equally productive, in each project practical limits press the researcher to choose among inconsistent paths; the alternatives are as consequential when ignored as when reflectively weighed; the choices made implicate the researcher’s personality as a whole; and over time the choices shape the researcher’s working sensibility. The freedom of ethnographic fieldwork makes it at once an especially democratic methodology, immediately open to all who would advance knowledge of society, and an especially fateful crucible for defining the adult self.

Drawing on a seven-year ethnography, we illuminate how unpublished romance writers employed emotional capital to negotiate the competitive publishing industry. To legitimate themselves as “real” writers, aspirants constructed occupational calling narratives, which they then drew upon to manage their emotions when publication was elusive. We call this process “aspirational emotion work” to illustrate how writers made use of their emotional capital to manage their feelings and sustain their identities without knowing if they would realize their dreams. We posit that aspirational emotion work is particularly prevalent among those seeking work in the creative industries, where potential for self-actualization is high but opportunity for secure employment is low.

Prison ethnography has long touched on the central role of prison officers’ discretion. Nowadays, a large number of sociologists and criminologists share the assumption that prison officers have de facto to resort to discretional decisions continuously to be able to translate the law into practice as they go about their job. This paper addresses the topic of prison officers’ discretion differently by adopting analytic autoethnography and Carolyn Ellis’ emotional recall. It outlines four officers’ “good reasons” for cooperating with mafiosi in custody—treating them with good manner—rather than showing neutrality as they would do with “ordinary” prisoners. The main good reasons that ground mafiosi–officers relationships are (1) reciprocal institutional recognition that Italian criminal justice and high-ranking mafia prisoners recognize one another; (2) mafioso capacity to help officers to “govern” fellow prisoners in practice; (3) the social embeddedness of the mafia both inside and outside prison; and, lastly, (4) prison officers’ fear of retaliation.

Professional women’s groups and conferences aim to improve women’s status in the workplace through networking and the exchange of resources. This article applies a critical feminist lens to one women’s conference, illustrating how the collective space paradoxically individualizes women’s career experiences. Drawing upon participant observation at the Innovative Women in Business Conference, I explore how the conference’s goal to connect businesswomen is replaced by a focus on women’s empowerment through individual control and wellness. The conference encourages women to engage in wellness practices such as egg freezing to improve their personal market value. By focusing on strategies to “have it all,” the conference reconfigures the feminist value of empowerment to convert gender inequality to an individual affair. While most women embrace the neoliberal feminism of the conference, I find that many women attendees employ tactics to resist the wellness demands, or what one attendee refers to as “‘Eat, Pray, Love’ bullshit.” This women-only conference represents a neoliberal, entrepreneurial intervention contributing to the (re)production of a self-regulating, feminist subject.

The taxi is a widespread mode of public transportation. In this everyday-life urban setting total strangers, a driver and his fare, interact and co-operate. In Israel, taxi passengers must choose whether to sit in the front seat, near the stranger-driver, or in the backseat, behind him. This choice pre-structures the incoming interaction and sets its general “tone.” Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a taxi in Tel Aviv, as well as on interviews and street observations, this article examines shifting sitting patterns in Tel Aviv taxis. These shifting proxemic patterns reveal homophilous tendencies and reflect, in a nutshell, wider structural, socioeconomic, and ideological changes undergone by Israeli society.