As economic crisis deepens across Europe people are forced to find innovative strategies to accommodate circumstances of chronic uncertainty. Even with a second multi-billion euro bailout package ...secured for Greece, the prospects of a sustainable recovery in the near future look bleak. However, crisis has also created dynamic spaces for entrepreneurial opportunism and diversification resulting in social mobility, relocation, shifts in livelihood strategy and a burgeoning informal economy. Although economic systems are currently undergoing radical reassessment, social demands such as competitive consumption remain. Opportunities for investment in renewable energy programmes, especially photovoltaics, are also pervasive. By considering cases of business opportunism and livelihood diversification in relation to Max Weber's concept of wertrational and notions of uncertainty, this article brings new perspectives to strategies of negotiating the worst economic crisis in living memory.
The authors take on a problem that many departments in Sweden, not least in the humanities, are dealing with right now: language. They show how social status in academia is decoupled from linguistic ...integration, at least if we understand status in terms of academic titles. Feelings of insufficiency and incompleteness are, however, prevalent, even among those whose Swedish proficiency is objectively very high. The authors underline the value of language, how competence in English, Swedish, and other languages is crucial for academics’ possibilities to work and build careers.
This article highlights the importance of humour and laughter in analyses of ethnicity and race in everyday life, and contributes to the growing anthropological engagement with the role of the ludic ...in social life. Focusing on pupil interaction in an ethnically and racially diverse London school, it argues that while peer classification practices can lead to reification of ethnic and racial differences, ludic interactions have cross-cutting, counter-balancing or liquefying effects. In interactions of humour, ethnic and racial differences can become the very material from which banter and laughter are created, constituting a convivial sociality that manifests closeness at the same time as difference. Such interactions enable peers to address their racial and ethnic differences, and a wider context of prejudice and racism, lightly, 'making fun out of' what could potentially divide and distance them.
This ethnographic study explores and compares the relationships that locals in Rossfjord, North Norway, have to the oystercatcher and the sea-going Arctic char respectively. Both these animals are ...highly valued locally, while the valuations at first look very different. The oystercatcher is protected by building bin-cases for its nesting, while the Arctic char is killed and eaten. Discussing these valuations against the value theory of David Graeber, I argue that they both connect to an underlying perception of the freedom and autonomy of wild animals, where what is not fully understood enhances an experience of wonder and appreciation of what I call the wild.
Gå julaspög Bringéus, Nils Arvid
Rig,
2015, Letnik:
98, Številka:
2-3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In Skånska årsfester in 1973, I described a few Christmas pranks from the Scanian Recording Collections. The best covered research, "go Christmas ghost" remained untreated. The custom was known since ...at least the mid-18th century and appeared in most of Scania and a few parishes in Blekinge until the 1930s. Young people made themselves unrecognizable by girls being dressed in outmoded male clothing and boys in women's clothing. Faces were sooted and stained. So dressed "ghosts" went around the villages in small groups. Making themselves as old and ugly as possible were the main things. The Christmas ghosts knocked at the door shouting "Merry Christmas" in chorus. Some made music, others danced or acted in other ways. Food and liquors were offered so they wouldn't drive out Christmas. Only those homes were visited, where they were sure to be received and invited. The visits continued over Christmas, and sometimes even to Lent.
Clifford Geertz, one of the most influential thinkers of our time, here discusses some of the most urgent issues facing intellectuals today. In this collection of personal and revealing essays, he ...explores the nature of his anthropological work in relation to a broader public, serving as the foremost spokesperson of his generation of scholars, those who came of age after World War II. His reflections are written in a style that both entertains and disconcerts, as they engage us in topics ranging from moral relativism to the relationship between cultural and psychological differences, from the diversity and tension among activist faiths to "ethnic conflict" in today's politics.
The turn in migration studies to broaden its scope beyond migrants themselves to also include prospective migrants – and even the society they live in – opens for a better understanding of migration. ...Despite mobile students from the Global South being a key feature of the globalisation of higher education, their voices are underrepresented and undertheorized in migration literature. Student narratives from the Global South can therefore offer new and valuable perspectives. This study contextualizes students’ migration aspirations within a critical view of migration studies and global knowledge production and methodologically centres the students and their narratives. Students at two universities in Ghana were interviewed in focus groups about migration. Findings reveal diversity and contradictions: students speak about migration in simple and even ambiguous terminology suggesting a quotidian quality of the conversation, and the undeniably uncertain and ambiguous future. Students also harbour distinct views on migration connected to class and identity, including various reservations or even counter-narratives to migration such as concerns about racism and discrimination abroad, and the draw of family and culture at home. Additionally, the students in this study, similar to well-researched student migration narratives in the Global North, connect mobility to cultural exposure, enjoyment, and adventure.
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