It has been a year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine started. It is clear that the impact of this war goes far beyond Ukraine. We already know that it will have long-lasting consequences for the ...regional and global economy, in particular for energy and food security. The war is reshuffling old geo-political arrangements and alliances. It is also shaping the political landscapes of European states: international relations, inflation and migration are increasingly becoming key topics in national elections.
« Quelle est la part de la ville, des institutions urbaines et des consommateurs citadins dans la distinction de productions localisées dont l’origine, proche ou lointaine, peut être considérée comme ...un signe de qualité ? » Pour répondre à cette question, l’ouvrage rassemble quinze contributions dans une perspective diachronique (du xvie siècle à nos jours), internationale (France, Italie, États-Unis, Suisse) et pluridisciplinaire (histoire, géographie, anthropologie, sociologie). La première...
This article explores the world making capabilities of travel writing (Goodman 1978; Youngs 2013). The premise is that literary products are key elements in the configuration of the world itself and ...that specifically authors of travel accounts mediate the world to their readership at home (Archetti 1994).
By highlighting three different examples of travel writing, the article discusses the persistent notion of the tropical island as an actually existing paradise on earth. More specifically, the discussion focus around the notion that happiness exists in places to which one can travel to.
The examples at hand are two eighteenth century travel logs one French and one English; Louise-Antoine de Bougainville’s from 1772 and William Bligh’s from 1792, while the third and final example is a contemporary Swedish travel piece written by Anders Mathlein and first published in 2001.
The domains of computational social anthropology and computational ethnography refer to the computational processing or computational modelling of data for anthropological or ethnographic research. ...In this context, the article surveys the use of computational methods regarding the production and the representation of knowledge. The ultimate goal of the study is to highlight the significance of modelling ethnographic data and anthropological knowledge by harnessing the potential of the semantic web. The first objective was to review the use of computational methods in anthropological research focusing on the last 25 years, while the second objective was to explore the potential of the semantic web focusing on existing technologies for ontological representation. For these purposes, the study explores the use of computers in anthropology regarding data processing and data modelling for more effective data processing. The survey reveals that there is an ongoing transition from the instrumentalisation of computers as tools for calculations, to the implementation of information science methodologies for analysis, deduction, knowledge representation, and reasoning, as part of the research process in social anthropology. Finally, it is highlighted that the ecosystem of the semantic web does not subserve quantification and metrics but introduces a new conceptualisation for addressing and meeting research questions in anthropology.
Background The debilitating effects of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and the accompanying chronic inflammation represent a significant obstacle for the sustainability of our development, with ...efforts spreading worldwide to counteract the diffusion of NCDs, as per the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 3). In fact, despite efforts of varied intensity in numerous directions (from innovations in biotechnology to lifestyle modifications), the incidence of NCDs remains pandemic. The present work wants to contribute to addressing this major concern, with a specific focus on the fragmentation of medical approaches, via an interdisciplinary analysis of the medical discourse , i.e. the heterogenous reporting that biomedical scientific literature uses to describe the anti-inflammatory therapeutic landscape in NCDs. The aim is to better capture the roots of this compartmentalization and the power relations existing among three segregated pharmacological , experimental and unstandardized biomedical approaches to ultimately empower collaboration beyond medical specialties and possibly tap into a more ample and effective reservoir of integrated therapeutic opportunities. Method Using rheumatoid arthritis (RA) as an exemplar disease, twenty-eight articles were manually translated into a nine-dimensional categorical variable of medical socio-anthropological relevance, relating in particular (but not only) to legitimacy , temporality and spatialization . This digitalized picture (9 x 28 table) of the medical discourse was further analyzed by simple automated learning approaches to identify differences and highlight commonalities among the biomedical categories. Results Interpretation of these results provides original insights, including suggestions to: empower scientific communication between unstandardized approaches and basic biology; promote the repurposing of non-pharmacological therapies to enhance robustness of experimental approaches; and align the spatial representation of diseases and therapies in pharmacology to effectively embrace the systemic approach promoted by modern personalized and preventive medicines. We hope this original work can expand and foster interdisciplinarity among public health stakeholders, ultimately contributing to the achievement of SDG3.
Reflexivity is a hallmark of good ethnography and many consider it a defining characteristic of anthropology. It is thus surprising that anthropologists have not paid more attention to how we teach ...students to be reflexive. Many of us learn reflexivity by making mistakes in the field, yet discussions of anthropological faux pas and their potential contributions to reflexive learning are typically limited to informal settings and occluded or heavily curated within our research outputs. In this article we employ analytic tools from the theory of sociocultural viability, in particular the notions of clumsiness, elegance, and uncomfortable knowledge, to contribute to developing a more explicit pedagogy of reflexivity. Since reading ethnographies plays a major role in how we teach anthropology, we argue that anthropologists should do more in their publications to highlight how awkward moments can deepen reflexivity. To advance this agenda, we provide cases of uncomfortable knowledge drawn from our own field experiences, highlighting how the social, emotional and embodied awkwardness of each situation contributed to acquiring reflexive insights. This article is thus a call to initiate prospective researchers earlier into the messy backstage of anthropological research, including by clarifying how the embodied and affective aspects of our interactions offer potential for deepening reflexive knowledge. In the hopes of facilitating the development of our pedagogies of reflexivity, we conclude the text with four recommendations that we feel will encourage reflexive learning from awkward fieldwork encounters.
Social anthropologists have acted as expert witnesses in legal proceedings for many decades, however there has persisted a tension between social anthropologists’ readiness to accept the assignation ...of ‘expertise’, and the typical manner in which courts and legally empowered bodies characterise such expertise as the forensic specialization of an established scientific field. This paper presents a model for the distinction between forensic social anthropology and expert social anthropology, both of which play important probative roles in a range of legal processes. The key variable in this proposed distinction is the relative degree of independent causal modelling permitted to social anthropologists engaged by courts and other legally empowered bodies. In forensic applications, social anthropologists are called upon to independently detect and explain causal processes that link culturally specific ideas to real-world instances human social interaction. By contrast, in expert applications, social anthropologists are called upon to advise on whether causal models defined by the terms of a given legal process have been substantiated. This distinction brings forensic and expert social anthropology into line with similar distinctions made between forensic and expert applications of physical anthropology in legal proceedings, and offers a useful contribution to the reconciliation of social and physical anthropology as two fields of a single parent discipline.
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