Dream Content and Personality: Thick vs. Thin Boundaries

Using dream diary procedures and statistically controlling for age and gender, the present study investigated the relationship between Hartmann's (1991) boundary concept and various aspects of dreaming. Results with a sample of young adults confirmed earlier findings that persons with thin boundaries recall dreams (including nightmares) more often, report dreams that are more negative and emotionally intense, regard their dreams more favorably (i.e., as more meaningful and creative), and dream more frequently of verbal interaction with others.     

Journeys through Ethnography: Realistic Accounts of Fieldwork

Journeys through Ethnography: Realistic Accounts of Fieldwork. Annette Lareau and Jeffrey Shultz, eds. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. 260 pp.     

Creating Coalitions and Causing Conflicts: Confronting Race and Gender through Partnered Ethnography

Responding to cultural anthropology's shift from the major paradigm of culture-as-meaning to one that includes the politics as well as the poetics of culture, this article urges experimentation with field methods. To that end, it recounts one such experiment, an attempt at partnered ethnography. Envisioned as a palliative to the dilemmas faced while conducting research in a Black millenarian community, I attempted a partnership with a fellow anthropologist whose race and gender positionings identify and place him differently from my own. Aiming to transcend the partiality of knowledge that necessarily derives from the standpoint of a lone researcher, as well as to find a way out of the researcher-researched imbalance of power, it was our hope that this coalition would produce multi-layered, multiply-positioned ethnography and do justice to the host community. The case illustrates, however, that this utopian vision of complementary research can, and did, spawn the very same problems of identity and authority claims that it was intended to solve. The essay concludes, nonetheless, by encouraging further experimentation with partnerships, for although risky, these can provide fruitful areas of empirical and theoretical illumination and ultimately enrich the project of ethnography.     

Thin Histological Sections Prepared from Large Thick Sections: a New Technique

A method is described for obtaining thin (1 μm) sections for light microscopy from large area thick (100 μm) sections of low viscosity nitrocellulose embedded specimens of human spinal osteoligamentous material.     

Ethnography as storytelling

In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. But if today “having counsel” is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence we have no counsel either for ourselves or for others. After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding. To seek counsel one would first have to be able to tell the story. (Quite apart from the fact that a man is receptive to counsel only to the extent that he allows his situation to speak.) Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom. The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out. This, however, is a process that has been going on for a long time. And nothing would be more fatuous than to want to see in it merely a “symptom of decay,” let alone a “modern” symptom. It is, rather, only a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller; Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” (1936) in Illuminations (New York; Schocken 1969) p. 86; also see “Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian,” (1937) in One-Way Street (London: New Left Books), pp. 351–352. .     

Stone Men of Malekula on Malakula: An Ethnography of an Ethnography

This article examines the resonances of the voluminous ethnography, ‘Stone Men of Malekula’ (SMM) in contemporary Vanuatu. Anthropological research is politically charged in Vanuatu, in part because of how the weighty materiality of archival forms exercise significant local authority. However, alongside respect for this ‘evidential’ material is a healthy scepticism of anthropological authority. SMM, written by the maverick anthropologist John Layard in 1942 (based on fieldwork in 1914–15), has returned to Vanuatu in many guises over the years. It is used as formal evidence in land disputes and as a bone of contention within competing claims. Tracing the ways in which culture is written, read and materialized, exposes the paradoxes of knowledge and politics not only within anthropological critique but in Vanuatu villages.     

Ethnography and the Meta-Narratives of Modernity

Current attempts to increase the relevance of sociocultural anthropology encourage anthropologists to engage in the study of modernity. In this discourse dominated by sociologists, the contribution of anthropology is often to reveal cultural diversity in globalization, leading to the notion of multiple modernities. Yet such ethnographic accounts draw upon familiar sociological abstractions such as time-space compression, commodification, individualization, disenchantment, and reenchantment. This article shows how an underlying meta-narrative preempts social scientific argument by making shifts in analytical scales look natural, as in the alleged need to "situate" the particular in "wider" contexts. This analytical procedure undermines what is unique in the ethnographic method-its reflexivity, which gives subjects authority in determining the contexts of their beliefs and practices. Two ethnographic case studies are presented to support this argument, one from Melanesia on current interests in white people, money, and consumption and the other from Africa on born-again Christianity and individuality. The article ends by reflecting not only on the limits of metropolitan meta-narratives in returning relevance to anthropology but also on the contemporary conditions of academic work that undermine the knowledge practices of ethnography and render such meta-narratives plausible.     

Ethnography in Colonial Mexico

Utopia and History in Mexico: Tfie First Chronicles of Mexican Civilization, 1520-1569. Georges Baudot. Bernard R. Ortiz de Monte llano and Thelma Ortiz de Montellano, trans. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1995.566 pp.
His toria cronológira de la noble ciudad de Tlaxcala: Transcripción paleogr´fica, traduccion presentación. notas. Juan Buenaventura Zapata. Mendoza. Luis Reyes     

Animals and the Limits of Ethnography

Is ethnography (as constituted in the social sciences) a reliable method with which to understand interspecies intersubjectivity? Can a method that has become a cornerstone approach to a qualitative understanding of humans for more than a century interrogate the social ties between humans and animals? Will it illuminate the similarities and differences between humans and their animal familiars? Using a programmatic approach to ethnography, and drawing on lessons from cyber ethnography, this article examines the challenges facing an ethnography that takes animals seriously as social beings and ethnographic subjects. The ability of ethnography to deliver a faithful portrait of being relies in large part on the communicative trust developed between ethnographers and their participants and interlocutors; it lies in the quality of the intersubjective exchange. Communicative intersubjective trust is both the paragon quality one wants in ethnographic social exchange and the most ill-defined and difficult to ascertain. So much ethnographic authority is underpinned by the hope that ethnographers have understood the people they work with in their terms and can faithfully re-present and interpret that world view. This article argues that the tricky and ambiguous business of intersubjective exchange poses important methodological questions for anthrozoology.     

An Ethnography of Dementia

Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry - The experiences of dementia sufferers have rarely been examined in sociological literature. This article seeks to describe the experiences of one Alzheimer's...