Cultural resilience through change: Finding the theme for tales from Arab Detroit

In this essay, I will discuss issues that guided me throughout the making of the documentary video, Tales From Arab Detroit. (1) Problems of re‐presentation of individuals from an Arab American community of great diversity, with reference to race/ethnicity, social values, class, age, religion, differences in national background and generational presence in the U.S. (2) Attempts to reconcile the divergent expectations of funders, co‐producer, sponsors, participants and audiences in producing this documentary. (3) How to effectively challenge racist notions of Arabs propagated in popular media and educational texts, and which have probably influenced audience preconceptions of the community.     

Cool and Crazy: Anthropological Film at the Point of Convergence between Humanities and Social Science

ABSTRACT

The use of film as a tool in anthropological fieldwork is a challenge to traditional ways of thinking about scientific research. Nevertheless, documentary filming of the informants in their own context has proved to be an interesting supplement in the exploration of what the anthropological research field actually covers. Furthermore, film work confronts the researchers with aesthetic aspects of mediation that have not been epistemically well attended to within social science. This article highlights pivotal problems in the professional no-man's-land where visual culture studies take place, as exemplified by the film Cool and Crazy.     

Orientalism in the Documentary Representation of Culture

Structured around the idea that there is a non-linguistic and cross-cultural, possibly biological, basis on which the understanding of pictures rests, this essay looks at the ways whereby images in documentary films challenge the notion of cultural difference. Drawing on Said's Orientalism [1978] and its impact on the basic assumptions of anthropologists, the essay stresses Said's relevance to documentary film theorists, and discusses the work of visual anthropologists and filmmakers influenced by Merleau-Ponty's ideas about the phenomenology of perception. Discussion suggests that the kind of knowledge disclosed by revelatory films represents an important answer to one of the fundamental epistemological issues that Said does not take up in Orientalism, namely the question of the materialization of an “authentic human encounter” not subjugated to the dead book. The essay implies that we should have no objection in principle to the self/other dichotomy when it is used intelligently.     

Psychospiritual ecoscience: The Ju/'hoansi and cultural tourism

The relation between knowledge and the visual, on the one hand, and knowledge about peoples on the other, is a prime concern in visual anthropology. The impact of the visual on the everyday life of the Ju/'hoansi is my concern here. This paper is offered in two parts: this article and the one which follows.

The results of a field‐trip in July 1996 to Otjozondjupa (previously known as Bush‐manland) in Namibia are discussed in terms of the question: How do subjects make sense of the anthropological?¹ Our “subject community” was the Ju/'hoansi of Nyae Nyae. The “texts” we interrogated through Ju/'hoansi popular memory were those made of them by the documentary filmmaker John Marshall, a South African feature‐film director, Jamie Uys, and one by the Discovery Channel.     

When the lights go down in Cairo: Cinema as secular ritual

Can habits of spectatorship contribute to social transformation? This essay looks at moviegoing in downtown Cairo as a secular ritual that can potentially enable kinds of social change not necessarily envisioned by the state, approved by normative society, or engineered through films themselves. Although filmwatching in Cairene cinemas does, in some cases, verge on the carnivalesque, spectatorship in this context is important primarily as a zone of ambiguity in which middle‐class identity is defined by a tension between establishment visions of order and youthful experimentation.     

Mainstreaming Arabs: Filmmaking as image making in tales from Arab Detroit

The documentary video, Tales from Arab Detroit, is enjoying a rare blend of critical and popular success. This essay is an attempt to explain why the video is so popular with American audiences (Arab and non‐Arab alike). Special attention is given to (1) the representational strategies the makers of Tales used to shape their video; (2) the identity politics underlying these strategies; and (3) how interpretive differences among the filmmakers culminated in a video that resembles, in unforeseen ways, the Arab community it depicts. The essay doubles as a critique of “main‐streaming,” a representational technique that dominates sympathetic portrayals of Others in American popular media. Tales, it is argued, possesses all the strengths and weaknesses of this technique.     

Textualizing the san “past”: Dancing with development

The anthropology of conservation and the way that visual media, especially documentary film, contribute to mythical Tourist perceptions of the San, are discussed in relation to categories of conservancy, living museums, cultural ecology and the marketing of ecological legitimacy. The central metaphor of dance as a mythical tourist image of Africa is the vehicle through which the analysis is undertaken.     

Imaging process as ethnographic inquiry

This paper considers the predicament of ethnographic photography in the current period of paradigm transition. The dominant mode of ethnographic imaging has remained severely constrained by the genre conventions of documentary, and so the practice was relegated to the poetic margins of social science discourse. But, as this paper argues, the paradox of visual representation is not inherent in the medium, rather it stems from the imaging process as formalist aesthetic. An alternative formulation involves foregrounding the process itself as a system of communication, thereby severing the photograph's ontological commitment to reality.     

Shame,reputation and Egypt's lovers: A controversy over the nation's image

This paper addresses aspects of contemporary Egyptian nationalism by focusing on reactions within Egypt to a BBC‐produced documentary dealing with the life of a lower class Cairene woman. In particular, it explores how the notions of honor, shame and reputation are central to the construction and expression of this nationalistic voice, and how the concern over “Egypt's image” involves a contest over who is to represent the nation. This article argues that the contemporary nationalistic voice, championed by the urban middle classes, expresses an ambivalent attitude to both “the West” and “the Egyptian people”, and that it necessarily involves the hiding and undermining of subordinate social groups.     

Shamanism,Tourism, and Secrecy: Revelation and Concealment in Siberut,Western Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This essay attempts to explain why international backpacker tourists in Indonesia are so interested in indigenous religion and especially in shamanism. It articulates the indigenous mode of analysis or reverse anthropology of the people whom the tourists visit: in this case, the Sakaliou clan on the island of Siberut, the largest of the Mentawai Islands off the west coast of Sumatra. According to Sakaliou, tourists seem to be looking for something they have lost, a kind of secret knowledge that is possessed by the shaman. Unlike other people, who keep their secrets in isolation, the shaman must skilfully reveal some of his secret knowledge as part of a public performance. It is this secret knowledge, indicated by the skilled revelation of skilled concealment, for which tourists seem to be searching among the members of the Sakaliou clan and their shamans.     

Hollywood and the Travelogue

Although documentary films, in formats such as the travelogue-expedition film, are rarely considered as a basis for insight into the Hollywood cinema, the early 1930s provide one historical period during which travelogues produced by independent filmmakers achieved such public popularity that the Hollywood studios were forced to respond. Studios produced some feature-length documentaries themselves, began distributing others, and generated "hybrid" films, such as M-G-M's Trader Horn [1931], that demonstrate a surprising willingness to give up the priority of narrative for the advantage of providing audiences with digressive documentary interludes devoted to the spectacle of exotic cultures, landscapes and wildlife.     

Race,ethnicity and social science

The contours and complexities of race and racism continue to confound the social sciences. This problem originates in the historical complicity of the social science disciplines with the establishment and maintenance of the systems of racial predation, injustice and indeed genocide upon which the modern world was built. All the social sciences originate in raciology and race management, a fact that is rarely acknowledged. A critical reappraisal of ‘mainstream’ social science’s theoretical and methodological approach to race is therefore overdue. The Ethnic and Racial Studies Review is the right venue for this rethinking. Andreas Wimmer’s distinguished oeuvre provides an appropriate ‘case’ of the tendency that this editorial essay seeks to revise. Concentrating on Wimmer’s 2013 Ethnic Boundary Making, whose publication was the subject of a highly laudatory 2014 issue of ERS Review, this essay criticizes the book as an instance of the problematic social science approaches mentioned.     

Barriers to Social Participation among Lonely Older Adults: The Influence of Social Fears and Identity

IntroductionLoneliness among older adults is a major public health problem that may be associated with processes of social participation and identity. This study therefore sought to examine the relationship between social participation and identity in a sample of lonely older adults living independently in London, England.MethodAn inductive qualitative approach, based on semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis, was employed.ResultsParticipants commonly spoke of barriers to social participation that have been reported elsewhere, including illness/disability, loss of contact with friends/relatives, lack of a supportive community, and lack of acceptable social opportunities. However, novel findings were also derived. In particular, participants commonly minimised the difficulties they faced alone, and described attempts to avoid social opportunities. These behaviours were linked to fears about engaging in social participation opportunities, including fears of social rejection and/or exploitation, and fears of losing valued aspects of identity.DiscussionIt is concluded that social participation amongst lonely older people will not improve through the removal of previously reported barriers alone; instead, older peoples’ beliefs, fears and identities must be addressed. Suggestions for implementing these findings within community organisations are provided.     

Bedamini Male Initiation and Marriage as Transformation Sequences

ABSTRACT

This essay focuses on how certain social relations among the Bedamini in Papua New Guinea are given their form through ritual at selected moments of the life cycle when relational transformations occur. Ritualised moments in Bedamini male initiation and symbolic bride capture are described as a dynamic agency that changes the existential conditions of persons in non-ritual reality. At those important ritual moments, the direct presence of the agents is required, while relations between them are mediated by acts, objects and moods. The effect intended is the formation, or reformation, of a relational field. Male initiation and marriage are consecutive parts of a sequence of transformations beyond its constituent moments, as initiation functions as a prerequisite to marriage.     

Social life cycle assessment: in pursuit of a framework for assessing wood-based products from bioeconomy regions in Germany

Purpose

With many policies in Germany steering towards a bioeconomy, there is a need for analytical tools that assess not only the environmental and economic implications but also the social implications of a transition to a bioeconomy. Wood is expected to become a major biomass resource in bioeconomy regions. Therefore, this paper develops a social life cycle assessment (sLCA) framework that can be applied specifically to a wood-based production system in one of Germany’s bioeconomy regions.

Methods

This paper reviews and analyses existing sLCA approaches, in terms of how applicable they are for assessing a wood-based production system in a German bioeconomy regional context. The analysis is structured according to the standard phases of environmental life cycle assessment (LCA). However, we use the term social effects rather than social impacts, to acknowledge the unknown cause–effect relationship between an organisation’s activities and its social impacts. We also consider the establishment of regional system boundaries, as well as the relationship between the social effects and the product being assessed. Additionally, an approach for the development and selection of social indicators and indices is outlined. Furthermore, we discuss data requirements and present an approach for a social life cycle impact assessment method.

Results and discussion

A new conceptual framework for a context-specific sLCA to assess wood-based products manufactured in a bioeconomy region was developed. It enables sLCA practitioners to identify “social hotspots” and “social opportunities” from a regional perspective. The location and characteristics of these social hotspots and opportunities can be analysed, in particular, for major production activities in a bioeconomy region in Germany. Therefore, according to this framework, the development of social indices and indicators, the collection of data and the approach used for characterising social effects need to relate to the geographical context of the product being assessed. The proposed framework can, thus, help to identify, monitor and evaluate the social sustainability of wood-based bioeconomy chains in a regional context.

Conclusions

This framework requires a high level of detail in the social inventory and impact assessment phase, in order to assess the regional foreground activities in a German wood-based bioeconomy region. It enables sLCA studies to identify which social hotspots and social opportunities occur and where they are located in the wood-based production system of a regional bioeconomy.

     

The Virtues of Theory: How Some Academics Succeeded – Big Time – in Reaching Non-Academic Audiences

ABSTRACT

This is a short essay stimulated by Why Anthropologists Don’t Reach the Public: A Rumination on Books of Thomas Hylland Eriksen, by Gordon Mathews (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00664677.2018.1502074).     

Historical biogeography: Geography as evolution,evolution as geography

Abstract

Despite a number of advances in method in recent years, biogeography remains a field with a poorly developed philosophical core. As a result, its historical and ecological sides remain as isolated from one another as ever. In this essay I argue that a more unified approach to biogeographic studies will become possible only when workers realise that it is necessary to reject absolute space, “geography as handmaiden” approaches to distribution problems in favour of structuralist models compatible with both probabilistic spatial interaction and deterministic phylogenetic kinds of thinking. Pros and cons of regionalist, vicariance, and panbiogeographic approaches are weighed in this regard; it is shown that the primary objections of the latter schools to the approach of the former are vitiated when one dwells on second-order, rather than first-order, interpretations of regional faunal structure. This approach makes it possible to construct joint taxonomic/spatial models conducive to pattern analysis; the latter permits the genesis of hypotheses that can be tested through independently conceived theories of process (such as vicariance). An example of the kind of pattern study envisioned, involving generalised track depiction, is briefly described. A suggested cycle of research is thus laid out in which systematic revision becomes a function of a joint “natural” spatial and phylogenetic/historical approach to the subject.     

Labour's ‘strange blindness’ and the end of Jubilee

ABSTRACT

This essay responds to David Roediger's Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All. After a brief examination of the central themes of the book, I turn to the author's emphasis upon political agency. I argue that this emphasis is necessary, given the political and scholarly aims of the book. At the same time, I suggest that the agency depicted in Seizing Freedom was simultaneously constrained by the cultural, political, and social forces discussed in Roediger's earlier companion volume, The Wages of Whiteness. I end the essay with a short discussion of the labour leader William Sylvis that attempts to synthesize insights from Seizing Freedom and The Wages of Whiteness in order to explain the ‘strange blindness’ that led white labour to systematically ignore and repress the activity of black workers.