The Social Anti-Mafia in Western Sicily: An Experiment in Visual Ethnography

Frustrated by the constraints imposed on visual ethnography by any one film, Toni de Bromhead has been filming around the subject of the Sicilian mafia for a quarter-century, building up a body of visual ethnography with eleven different films so far. In this paper she aims to demonstrate how these films “talk to each other” and, together, build up different themes. Each film has its own principle subject, but inevitably “trespasses” onto subjects found in other films, so adding to the viewers’ understanding and knowledge. These subjects range from values of masculinity among Sicilian criminals in Florence, and the work of the social anti-mafia in Sicily, to a group of young people contesting the local elections in their small Mafia-infested Sicilian town. Viewers are invited to make their own journey through the films, according to the theme that interests them. Here a journey is made through the films that reveal what the Mafia may mean to ordinary Sicilians, described so as to give an idea of how this might work.     

Primitivising Anorexia: The Irresistible Spectacle of Not Eating

This article explores the complexities of disseminating ethnographic research within a field that is already saturated by pervasive cultural systems of representation. People with anorexia are inescapably enmeshed in a whole range of fields that define and represent them, including academic writings, psychiatry and popular imaginings. Although these fields are wide (ranging from discursive constructions and to a much lesser extent ethnography), this analysis argues that there is one dominant trope that underpins popular representations of anorexia. It is through the detailed analysis of the public dissemination of this research, of the meeting between ethnography and the print media, that I demonstrate how people with anorexia come to be known through images and words associated with primitivism. Such a reductionist account reproduces the visual spectacle associated with emaciation, and ignores the profound embodied sensations of power and suffering that are central to experiences of anorexia.     

The intimate arctic: An early anthropologist's diary in the strict sense of the term

A lively debate has taken place in anthropology in recent years on field‐work and its representation in ethnographic accounts. At the same time, historians and cultural critics have dissected the ideology and rhetoric of early explorations. Here I examine the writings of the anthropologist and explorer Vilhjalmur Stefans‐son (1879–1962) in the light of current debates about textual representation, drawing upon recent discussions of ethnography, gender, and the power relations of early twentieth‐century explorations. Stefansson went on lengthy expeditions into the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic and wrote extensively on his encounters with indigenous groups, I argue that while Stefansson was a perceptive ethnographer and explorer, he was silent in both his publications and his diaries about important aspects pertaining to his fieldwork, in particular the ethnographic contributions of his Inuit companions and his intimate relations with a native woman named Pannigabluk. This silence, I suggest, contradicts the narrative trope Stefansson generally adopted, summed up in his concept of the friendly Arctic’     

Introduction: Comparative Perspectives on the Indigenous Rights Movement in Africa and the Americas

Using ethnographic case studies, these "In Focus" articles explore the indigenous rights movements in two regions, Africa and the Americas, where the histories, agendas, and dynamics of the movements are at once similar and different. They consider a range of relevant questions about the politics of representation, recognition, resources, and rights as these movements engage shifting political and economic landscapes; transnational discourses, alliances, and organizations; and the complicated cultural politics of inclusion and exclusion invoked by the term indigenous. As such, they offer a critical, comparative perspective on the issues of culture, power, representation, and difference inherent in the complicated alliances, articulations, and tensions that have produced and transformed the transnational indigenous rights movement. This introduction provides a brief history of the movement, highlights some major themes in previous anthropological work, reviews the insights of the section articles, and explores some of the ways in which anthropologists have engaged with the movement. [Keywords: indigenous peoples, social movements, cultural politics, ethnography]     

Beyond Malinowski and After Writing Culture: On the Future of Cultural Anthropology and the Predicament of Ethnography

Following out certain implications of the 1980s Writing Culture critique, this paper envisions a future for anthropology that remains focused on innovations in the ethnographic research process. A sense of change in the world, conceived in the 1980s as postmodernity and now widely discussed as globalisation, suggests the need for an alternative paradigm of ethnographic practice, different in significant ways from that which shaped social‐cultural anthropology over the previous eighty years. Based on working through the implications for the norms and forms of both fieldwork and ethnographic writing of the multi‐sited design of many current research projects, this paper outlines such an alternative paradigm. Further, the paper argues that the explicit disciplinary dynamic driving such innovation in ethnography is, in contrast to the so‐called crisis of representation of the 1980s, a more urgent crisis of reception for anthropology.     

The epistemic logic of asylum screening: (dis)embodiment and the production of asylum knowledge in Brazil

The current era demands our thoughtful attention to how states process asylum seeker claims for safe haven, yet we know little about the practices through which asylum officials carry out that work. Building from literature on the body and knowledge production, this paper illuminates the workings of (dis)embodiment in the asylum process. I use the term (dis)embodiment to refer to an arrangement of separate yet interdependent practices of disembodying and embodying knowledge. These practices of knowledge production together form an integral part of what I call the “epistemic logic” of asylum – the techniques and processes of reasoning used to produce and analyse information to determine if an asylum seeker qualifies for refugee status. Through an ethnography of the asylum process in Brazil, I document how officials produce and privilege disembodied knowledge, while they contrastingly constrain the knowledge of asylum seekers to their bodies and lived experiences.     

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.     

Ethnography,Advocacy and Feminism: A Volatile Mix. A View from a Reading of Diane Bell's Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin

Ethnography may lie at the heart of anthropological methodology but its claims are contested. Feminist anthropologists in particular have debated the challenges a critical academic discipline poses for a consciously politicised positioning of the ethnographer, examining the constraints this might impose on the ethnographic project. Such dilemmas are compounded in the context of advocacy work. This critique of a feminist ethnography (Diane Bell's Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin), which emerged from advocacy work in a litigious Australian context, suggests that the truth demands of advocacy work sit uneasily with both the partiality of critical ethnography and the politics of the feminist project.     

Teasing Apart the Details: How Social Learning can Affect Collective Action in the Bolivian Amazon

Social learning is hypothesized to result in shared knowledge and skills, trust, self-efficacy, and democratic decision-making for collective action. This paper uses a multi-method approach, including ethnography and nonparametric and multivariate statistics, to test this hypothesis and describe what specific process characteristics can predict social learning outcomes. Data are based on two communities, each with a subset of members participating in social learning processes for communal timber management and collective Brazil nut marketing in the Bolivian Amazon. Those who participated in the social learning process had significantly more knowledge about communal forest management, gained more skills, were more active in specific management activities, and had more intentions to work collectively than those who did not. The development of trust during the process, the equal involvement of all who participated, and the presentation of various ideas were most predictive of these outcome variables.     

Torres Strait Islanders Stories from an Exhibition

Preparations for a centenary exhibition to mark the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait incorporated cross-cultural collaborative work, reflecting the changing roles of museums as sites for contact and research combining curatorial expertise and indigenous knowledge. Specific objects in the collections of the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology continue to be active intermediaries in the relationship between museum staff and Torres Strait Islanders and the museum itself has become an important field site. This paper provides an ethnography of the process of creating the exhibition and explores different ways that many of the objects displayed have resonance for Islanders today.     

Driven to sanity: An ethnographic critique of the senses in automobilities

This article reviews critically approaches to embodiment and the senses in contemporary automobilities research, highlighting particularly their critical representation of sensory disengagement in driving. In contrast, through passenger‐seat ethnography conducted in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the article explores the roles of sensory engagement in driving in ameliorating post‐socialist and post‐war unease concerning namely identification, mistrust, insecurity and estrangement. Globally cars are the largest single item of consumer expenditure after housing, and the consequences of this are manifold and devastating. In this context it becomes pressingly important to understand why people drive as much as they do and, as part of this, how driving makes us feel. In order to achieve this automobilities research must, I argue, stand back from its disposition of critique and develop a more thoroughgoing ethnography of driving. Anthropology is beginning to provide this, albeit sparsely and belatedly. This article represents a contribution.     

Reconciling neuronal representations of schema,abstract task structure,and categorization under cognitive maps in the entorhinal-hippocampal-frontal circuits

Learning leads to a neuronal representation of acquired knowledge. This idea of knowledge representation was traditionally developed as a “cognitive map” of spatial memory represented in the hippocampus. The framework of cognitive mapping has been extended in the past decade to include not only spatial memory, but also non-spatial factual and temporal memory. Following this conceptual advancement, a line of recent neurophysiological research discovered such knowledge representations not only in the hippocampus, but also in the entorhinal cortex and frontal cortex. Although the distinct terms “cognitive map,” “schema,” “abstract task structure” or “categorization” were used in these studies, it is likely that these terms can be reconciled as a common mechanism of learned knowledge representations. Future experimental work will be required to differentiate the parametric nature of knowledge representations across brain areas.     

Transforming Signs. Iconicity and Indexicality in Russian Healing and Magic

In this article, the ethnography of magic and healing in contemporary Russia is analyzed using the basic concepts of Peircian semiotics. Indigenous terms of affliction used in magical diagnostics of misfortunes, as well as pantomimic gestures in hand healing are regarded as iconic and indexical signs. Their mode of signification is pragmatic presentation rather than textual representation, which underlies their capacity to effect transformations in consciousness. It is shown, however, that it is cultural conventions of their symbolic meanings that form these signs as icons and indexes.     

Transformative Education: Chronicling a Pedagogy for Social Change

This article chronicles the work of the Llano Grande Center for Research and Development, an educational nonprofit organization in South Texas, by following the narrative of one of its students and two of the authors, who are also founders of Llano Grande. Through the use of ethnography, visuals, and storytelling, they present an emerging theory of practice and a hybrid methodology that has contributed to the development of the work, the school, and the community. An activist agenda informed by practice and supported with theory is woven through the text in biographical form. The text also documents the cornerstones of the work: building strong relationships; work originating from self, place, and community; and engaging in meaningful work. When integrated into a seamless practice, this combination of guiding principles yields a certain power that youth and adults alike begin to negotiate within and between their peers, teachers, and community for change. This sense of self, efficacy, and power then informs much of their work as adults.  [Latino epistemology and education, activist ethnography, Llano Grande Center, storytelling, community as text, pedagogy of hope]     

Knowledge, Power, and the Individual in Subarctic Hunting Societies

Northern Athapaskan and Algonquian hunting people balance individual autonomy and the interdependence of community living. For many, knowledge and personal autonomy represent personal power. This article argues that culturally constructed knowledge both empowers and informs subarctic people. Their knowledge may be viewed as a form of social theory. A survey of the literature on subarctic ethnography suggests that social scientists have informed and empowered their own theoretical understanding through an understanding of the native thoughtworld.     

Knowledge extraction: a comparison between symbolic and connectionist methods

The use of a linguistic representation for expressing knowledge acquired by learning systems is an important issue as regards to user understanding. Under this assumption, and to make sure that these systems will be welcome and used, several techniques have been developed by the artificial intelligence community, under both the symbolic and the connectionist approaches. This work discusses and investigates three knowledge extraction techniques based on these approaches. The first two techniques, the C4.5 and CN2 symbolic learning algorithms, extract knowledge directly from the data set. The last technique, the TREPAN algorithm extracts knowledge from a previously trained neural network. The CN2 algorithm induces if...then rules from a given data set. The C4.5 algorithm extracts decision trees, although it can also extract ordered rules, from the data set. Decision trees are also the knowledge representation used by the TREPAN algorithm.     

The Ethnographic Use of Facebook in Everyday Life

New social media have become indispensable to people all over the world as platforms for communication, with Facebook being the most popular. Hence, platforms such as Facebook are also becoming crucial tools for ethnographers because much social life now exists ‘online’. What types of field relations stem from such social media-driven ethnography? And what kinds of data do these relations present to the ethnographer? These questions must be considered in order to understand the challenges Facebook and other social media pose to ethnographic methodology. This article focuses on how Facebook may play an important role even in ethnographic work concerned with questions other than how Facebook works as a social medium. Most importantly it allows the ethnographer to keep up-to-date with the field. I argue that ethnography is already in possession of the methodological tools critically to assess the validity and value of data gathered or produced via Facebook including issues such as authenticity which are also pertinent to digital ethnography.     

A Mutual Interest? Ethnography in Anthropology and Cultural Studies

Anthropology and cultural studies share a concern with ethnographic method. Cultural studies increasingly uses ethnography in its analyses of popular culture as it seeks to balance earlier preoccupations with text. Where cultural studies diverges from anthropology is in its encompassment within an oppositional paradigm which embeds a political agenda deep in its ethnographic work. This paper uses the area of media to explore the ways in which ethnography has been adopted and developed in cultural studies. Ethnographic focus has shifted interest in media from the text to the reception of media products. At the same time, the oppositional legacy from cultural studies' earliest days has tended to produce rather romanticised findings of a subaltern audience using media products to resist dominant cultural and political structures. It is suggested that anthropology should pay attention to cultural studies use of ethnographic method, first taking seriously the ground of popular culture as a challenge for anthropologists' more extended use of ethnography. But second, we should pay attention to the problem silences in cultural studies' ethnographies—silences like racism in audiences—since these may well have at least part of their basis in the method itself.     

Troubled landscapes,troubling anthropology: co‐presence,necessity, and the making of ethnographic knowledge

If ‘co‐presence is a condition of [anthropological] inquiry’ (Fabian), what sort of knowledge does it produce? I explore this question through an ethnography of a ‘troubled landscape’ in Malaysian Borneo: a lush, hilly region that has been the site of a dam construction and resettlement project since the late 2000s. My article uses the notion of co‐presence as both a lens through which to explore the predicaments of the four small communities affected by the scheme and a reflexive device that underscores the embeddedness of the ethnographic encounter in a larger relational field – one characterized as much by chance and necessity as it is by anthropologists’ intellectual agendas. In the process, I seek to trouble some of the methodological and ethical issues posed by anthropology's recent ‘ontological turn’, notably the long‐standing questions of what it means to ‘take seriously’ and how ethnography and the ethnographer are implicated in this project.