Fieldwork in South Asia is a valuable attempt to listen and learn from the memories and significant moments of fieldwork done by anthropologists, sociologists, and even historians from South Asia. ...The essays lead towards a deeper understanding of concerns of fieldwork located in various field sites across South Asia without assuming or applying fixed normative rules for the whole region. In the process, the volume allows the reader to have an option to locate or relocate ethnographic or other forms of texts in the context of growing methodological contours and dilemmas in the social science.Above all, this is a book about relationships—multi-layered relationships among people encountered in the field, the ethnographic relationship itself, with all its personal raw edges, and relationship with the land and even non-human realms.
Fieldwork Connections tells the story of the intertwined research histories of three anthropologists working in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, China in the late twentieth century. ...Chapters are written alternately by a male American anthropologist, a male researcher raised in a village in Liangshan, and a highly educated woman from an elite Nuosu/Chinese family. As decades of mutual ethnographic research unfold, the authors enter one another's narratives and challenge the reader to ponder the nature of ethnographic truth.
The book begins with short accounts of the process by which each of the authors became involved in anthropological field research. It then proceeds to describe the research itself, and the stories begin to connect as they become active collaborators. The scene shifts in the course of the narrative from China to America, and the relationship between the authors shifts from distant, wary, and somewhat hierarchical to close, egalitarian, and reciprocal.
The authors share their histories through personal stories, not technical analyses; their aim is to entertain while addressing the process of ethnography and the dynamics of international and intercultural communication.
INTRODUCTION: This article highlights the importance of ethnographic observations of human-animal bonds (HAB) to inform social work practice and applied social research. It explores the relationship ...between the author and Bruno, a rescue dog, through conventional ideas on attachment theory, connectedness and containment.
METHODS: These perspectives are applied to the author's experiences of undertaking a PhD on the protective factors that promote LGBTI+ youth wellbeing. This emphasises reflexivity as an integral component of practitioner research, with the potential to explore the complexities and subjectivities of our emotional lives.
FINDINGS: Through recognition of the dynamics of attachment, our roles as companion-carers prompt help-seeking to ensure reflective practice and effective caregiving. Our relationships with companion-animals resonate with the process of undertaking a PhD, through prioritising self-care and seeking work-life balance. These ideas are also relevant for collaborative studies underpinned by an iterative research process, described by a Consulting, Conducting, Collaborating and Checking cycle.
CONCLUSION: The article concludes with an appeal to social work practitioners and practitioner researchers to discover ways in which concepts of HAB, and our interconnectedness with all living beings, can be applied to policy, practice and research with those whom we work with, their families and within our broader communities.
L'ethnologue jésuite Germain Lemieux (1914-2008) refait le chemin qui l'a mené de sa Gaspésie natale, contrée maritime, au pays des mines de Sudbury. À travers son témoignage, recueilli par ...l'auteur pour la radio en 1995 et livré sur le ton de la confidence, l'octogénaire soupèse les aléas d'une carrière entreprise un demi-siècle plus tôt. Il balise son récit d'éléments inédits, notamment sur ses origines et sa formation, qui éclairent les dessous de l'oeuvre et révèlent les traits de sa personnalité. Volontaire, il a su tracer sa voie et développer une expertise originale en dépit de moyens limités et des contraintes de son état. Ce document à l'allure intime constitue une source féconde, autant pour la compréhension de l'Ontario français et de son histoire au XX e siècle que pour l'institution du patrimoine oral que l'ethnologie a incarnée presque seul avant les années 1980. En faisant le bilan de son activité incomparable, Germain Lemieux y mêle un peu de son testament intellectuel.
Dorothea Bleek (1873–1948) devoted her life to completing the ‘bushman researches’ that her father and aunt had begun in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. This research was partly a ...labour of familial loyalty to Wilhelm, the acclaimed linguist and language scholar of nineteenth-century Germany and later of the Cape Colony, and to Lucy Lloyd, a self-taught linguist and scholar of bushman languages and folklore; but it was also an expression of Dorothea’s commitment to a particular kind of scholarship and an intellectual milieu that saw her spending her entire adult life in the study of the people she called‘bushmen’.
How has history treated Dorothea Bleek? Has she been recognised as a scholar in her own right, or as someone who merely followed in the footsteps of her famous father and aunt? Was she an adventurer, a woman who travelled across southern Africa driven by intellectual curiosity to learn all she could about the bushmen? Or was she conservative, a researcher who belittled the people she studied and dismissed them as lazy and improvident?
These are some of the questions with which Jill Weintroub starts her thoughtful biography of Dorothea Bleek. The book examines Dorothea Bleek’s life story and family legacy, her rock art research and her fieldwork in southern Africa, and, in light of these, evaluates her scholarship and contribution to the history of ideas in South Africa. The compelling and surprising narrative reveals an intellectual inheritance intertwined with the story of a woman’s life, and argues that Dorothea’s life work – her study of the bushmen – was also a sometimes surprising emotional quest.
The article analyzes the historical preconditions for the formation of the West Podillya region on the basis of ancient sources and modern literature. The historical and political factors that ...influenced ethno-regional consciousness of the population residing in the region, especially in the border areas, are outlined as being the reinforcing factor for ethnic self-preservation and identity. Due to the analysis of the ancient chronicles, as well as the works of well-known ethnologists, the ethnographic term ,,Podillya” was defined as well as its origin, etymology and peculiarities of interpretation. There are three parallel interpretations of the term ,,Podillya” giving geographical, administrative and ethnographic views in scientific discourse. The most legitimate in this case is geographic interpretation, because it is devoid of political background and regulated by historiography. The article postulates that an important factor in identifying the characteristic features of the West-Podillya region is the peculiarities in certain customs and rituals, their terminological specifics, regional consciousness, being almost completely lost in the region under study, although in the late XIXth and early XXth centuries they were inherent to many inhabitants of Podillya, as well as a number of other specific features that give grounds for a specific regionalism and localization of the territory.
Ernő Tárkány Szücs (1921–1984) was a researcher who created a synthesis of Hungarian legal ethnography, a mediator of his results for European legal ethnographic research, and his scientific work is ...still an essential part of Hungarian research history. During the most intensive period (1939–1948) of Hungarian legal folklore research — which was delayed compared to European legal customs research — he became a lawyer and a researcher of Hungarian legal ethnography along with legal history professor György Bónis from Kolozsvár (nowdays Cluj-Napoca). Although in the next phase of his life (1950–1975), during the decades of socialism in Hungary, as a practicing lawyer, he could not professionally engage in legal ethnographic research, when he finally had the opportunity to do so in 1975 in the Ethnographic Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, he presented a series of results of Hungarian legal ethnography. One of the most important of these was the publication of a monograph (Tárkány Szücs 1981), which is still considered to be the fundamental work of Hungarian legal ethnography, the conceptual and methodological foundation of the research field, the summary of research findings and at the same time its legitimation. Although the institutionalization of legal ethnographic research had not yet taken place at that time, Hungarian ethnography recognized Ernő Tárkány Szücs's research on legal folk customs as a “one-man” research field. During his research career, Tárkány Szücs continued to take an active role in international scientific life. He always considered it his task to make the findings of European legal ethnography known throughout Hungary, as well as to publish the findings of Hungarian legal ethnographic research in international scientific forums. The 2021 jubilee professional programs and publications of the Tárkány Szücs Ernő Legal Cultural Historical and Legal Ethnographical Research Group — an interdisciplinary research workshop established in 2011 with the aim of processing and enriching his research legacy and publications — were an opportunity to publish new research findings and formulate the ongoing tasks of Hungarian legal ethnography, beyond the evaluation of his research career and Hungarian legal ethnography from the dogmatic and methodological perspective.
In 1967, Ernő Tárkány Szücs published his article summarizing the results and tasks of European legal ethnography in the columns of Ethnologica Europeana in Paris (under the title Results and Task of ...Legal Ethnology in Europe). With this, he revived an important tradition of Hungarian legal ethnography: Károly Tagányi published his summary of international research history in German in 1922 (Lebende Rechtsgewohnheiten und ihre Sammlung in Ungarn. Ungarische Bibliothek. Für das Ungarische Institut an der Universität Berlin. Erste Reihe. Vereinigung wissenschaftlicher Verleger. Berlin und Leipzig). At the time of the publication of Ernő Tárkány Szücs's article, he was working as a ministerial official, but in Hungarian academic life he took a backseat. At the same time, however, he was in constant contact with several European representatives of legal folklore. As soon as he had the opportunity, Tárkány Szücs opened up to international scholarship, and became not only an active participant but also a prime mover of the international discourse on legal folk custom research. His recognition was indicated by the fact that throughout Europe, not only his studies published in various world languages but also his papers exclusively in Hungarian were often cited. Although the science policy in his country was not able to integrate the specifically interdisciplinary scientific research of Ernő Tárkány Szücs, or only haltingly, his international recognition was unquestionable all along.
Ancient Greek ethnographies-descriptions of other peoples-provide unique resources for understanding ancient environmental thought and assumptions, as well as anxieties, about how humans relate to ...nature as a whole. InOther Natures, Clara Bosak-Schroeder examines the works of seminal authors such as Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus to persuasively demonstrate how non-Greek communities affected and were in turn deeply affected by their local animals, plants, climate, and landscape. She shows that these authors used ethnographies of non-Greek peoples to explore, question, and challenge how Greeks ate, procreated, nurtured, collaborated, accumulated, and consumed. In recuperating this important strain of ancient thought, Bosak-Schroeder makes it newly relevant to vital questions and ideas being posed in the environmental humanities today, arguing that human life and well-being are inextricable from the life and well-being of the nonhuman world. By turning to such ancient ethnographies, we can uncover important models for confronting environmental crisis.
eFieldnotes Roger Sanjek, Susan W. Tratner / Roger Sanjek, Susan W. Tratner
2015, 2016-06-20
eBook
In this volume, sixteen distinguished scholars address the impact of digital technologies on how anthropologists do fieldwork and on what they study. With nearly three billion Internet users and more ...than four and a half billion mobile phone owners today, and with an ever-growing array of electronic devices and information sources, ethnographers confront a vastly different world from just decades ago, when fieldnotes produced by hand and typewriter were the professional norm.Reflecting on fieldwork experiences both off- and online, the contributors survey changes and continuities since the classic volume Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology, edited by Roger Sanjek, was published in 1990. They also confront ethical issues in online fieldwork, the strictures of institutional review boards affecting contemporary research, new forms of digital data and mediated collaboration, shifting boundaries between home and field, and practical and moral aspects of fieldnote recording, curating, sharing, and archiving.The essays draw upon fieldwork in locales ranging from Japan, Liberia, Germany, India, Jamaica, Zambia, to Iraqi Kurdistan, and with diaspora groups of Brazilians in Belgium and Indonesians of Hadhrami Arab descent. In the United States, fieldwork populations include urban mothers of toddlers and young children, teen tech users, Bitcoin traders, World of Warcraft gamers, online texters and bloggers, and anthropologists themselves.With growing interest in both traditional and digital ethnographic methods, scholars and students in anthropology and sociology, as well as in computer and information sciences, linguistics, social work, communications, media studies, design, management, and policy fields, will find much of value in this engaging and accessibly written volume. Contributors: Jenna Burrell, Lisa Cliggett, Heather A. Horst, Jean E. Jackson, Graham M. Jones, William W. Kelly, Diane E. King, Jordan Kraemer, Rena Lederman, Mary H. Moran, Bonnie A. Nardi, Roger Sanjek, Bambi B. Schieffelin, Mieke Schrooten, Martin Slama, Susan W. Tratner.
