Time to move: winds and the political economy of space in Andamanese culture

Seasons, or temporal duration, for Andamanese are created by the flow of winds through the Andamanese cultural construct of space, which is neither fixed nor constant. In order to organize the space for society, Andaman islanders have to move constantly out from the place where the winds are. Winds associated with temperamental spirits are powerful aspects of nature that culture has to negotiate. Within this worldview where winds affect individual body condition and the capacity to continue hunting and gathering, Andaman islanders negotiate space by creating conditions that invite winds to structure and sustain life. For this purpose, smells are ritualized and wind movements are manipulated. As a result, seasons are distinguished either by winds that are spirit-given, or by a lack of winds caused by islanders' actions. Based on ethnographic data from the Ongees and Jarwas, this analysis will focus on how various forms of movement in Andamanese culture are negotiated according to a political economy of winds and smells. The worldview of the Andaman islanders, within which winds are so central, has major implications for government authorities, who are keen to confine the translocating Jarwas to a specific and permanent location. But is this possible for the Andamanese, for whom space, like time, changes by the presence and absence of winds?     

Inalienable ethnography: keeping-while-giving and the Trobriand case

In Inalienable possessions , Annette Weiner (1992) focuses on the paradox of 'keeping-while-giving' rather than the 'norm of reciprocity' as the central issue of social life, drawing heavily on Trobriand examples. In this article, key elements of Weiner's theory are contrasted with prevailing views of Melanesian personhood and agency and with canonical Western notions of exchange, and her use of the Trobriand materials is juxtaposed with previously published ethnographic accounts of the same practices. It is argued that Weiner's ethnographic illustrations do not lend support to her theory of inalienable possessions; that her conceptual framework is at considerable variance with well-founded understandings of Melanesian sociality; and that the paradox of keeping-while-giving is more appropriately seen as deriving from Western presuppositions of individual boundedness, subjectivity, possession, ownership, and hierarchy, and the need to establish permanence in an entropic world.     

On trusting ethnography: serendipity and the reflexive return to the fields of Gujarat

We draw on David Pocock's fieldwork of the 1950s in central Gujarat, India, as a comparative resource to think about social change and anthropological knowledge. Revisiting where Pocock had been through new fieldwork, we were encouraged to think about the ways in which places are accessed and subsequently understood. Against our conscious will, the pathways we were able to take through the field strongly resembled those Pocock took sixty years earlier. The coincidence is such that the material casts shadows of doubt over the potency of terms such as ‘serendipity’ and ‘chance’ to characterize key moments of ethnographic fieldwork. Against the primacy given to the self in much reflexive anthropology, we demonstrate that the personal attributes of the anthropologist might influence the production of ethnographic research less than is generally assumed. The double bind of our ‘reflexive return’ comes from revisiting an anthropological field and experiencing the agency of that field in making what we can know.     

Visual anthropology and multivocal ethnography: A dialogical approach to Japanese preschool class size

Joseph Jay Tobin is Assistant Professor of Family Studies at The University of New Hampshire     

The delicacy of ethnography: A review article

Minou Fuglesang. 1994. Veils and Videos: Female Youth Culture on the Kenyan Coast. Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology, 32. Stockholm: Stockholm University. 322 pp.     

The unknown tradition: Continuity and innovation in Soviet ethnography

Conclusion In this article we have not attempted to cover the entire problematic or history of Russian-Soviet ethnography. Instead, we tried to explain the significance of the arguments about social theory and demonstrate why Soviet ethnography must be viewed as part of an intellectual tradition fundamentally different from the Western. At the same time, we believe that the theoretical tradition that took shape in the 1920s and the attempts to revive and further it, inconclusive as they may be, are of great potential significance to Western anthropologists.Among the topics left out of consideration was, for example, the traditional and successful collaboration between ethnography and folklore studies culminating in the structural analysis of Russian fairy tales by Vladimir Ya. Propp. We also did not discuss the study of religion, which in the 1930s–1950s was often disguised as folklore studies, and which in the Soviet context was obviously limited by the doctrine dictating the approach to it as a disappearing form of social consciousness, an embarrassing survival of the past. Another subject left out is the study of material culture and everyday life, which continues the pre-revolutionary Russian tradition. The same may be said about a more recent Soviet revival of interest in ethnicity in so far as it can be traced to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century concern with cultural and ethnic divisions. This interest, of course, has much to do with the practical tasks of integrating over 100 nations, nationalities and various other ethnic groups into one Soviet People.The formation of the Soviet people, which Lenin believed to be an inevitable result of education, and which Stalin spurred using massive violence, is viewed not only as both desirable and inevitable but as an actual reality. The coming into being of the Soviet people was proclaimed by Leonid Brezhnev a decade ago. The theory of ethnicity, as well as the whole problem of interethnic relations are so closely connected to the sensitive issues of nationality policy that even field ethnographers often see and report the desirable rather than the actual situation. The Soviet data, therefore, can be used only with great caution.It is perhaps relevant to note the change that occurred in the Soviet attitude toward psychology. At one time practically banned (along with Freud) in favor of the sociological approach, social psychology, psycholinguistics, and ethnopsychology (a Soviet term) today are legitimate, though often doctrinally limited areas of inquiry. Soviet ethnographers agree that the reflection in people's consciousness of their membership in an ethnos as ethnic self-awareness serves as the final proof of the objective existence of that ethnos.Both in terms of the problems considered to fall within its scope and in terms of the approach to these problems, Soviet ethnography today comes closer to Shternberg's conception than to the view which prevailed after the All-Russian Archaeological-Ethnographic Conference of 1932 described earlier. Bromley claims that the conception of ethnography most widely shared among Soviet scientists today is of a science that deals with the characteristics of the daily life and belief systems of a people which distinguish them ethnically (i.e., culturally), and the origins (ethnogenesis) and history of the ethnic units defined by these characteristics. It embraces the history of culture of all peoples in the past as well as the present. To this end it makes use of data not only of the historical sciences, but of the natural sciences (e.g., biology, ecology, geography) as these relate to formation and functioning of ethnos.Broadly speaking, there are three major characteristics that determine the present status of Soviet ethnography:First, there is an open acknowledgement of the validity of pre-revolutionary Russian tradition. One facet of this is a modest rivival of the Shternberg school that combined rigorous requirements for fieldwork (not unlike Boas) with ethnographers' active participation in the lives of the investigated peoples, and a broadly historical dynamic approach to culture.Second, after a period of isolation, the best work in ethnography, as illustrated in the case of kinship studies, is strongly influenced by Western social anthropology. The language and concerns of these studies can be much easier understood in the West than, perhaps, any other Soviet writings. But one should not lose sight of the fact that basic assumptions, such as the general view of evolution, are not the same as in the West.Third, the main struggle in Soviet ethnography now is not against bourgeois theories. More and more it is centered around the inadequacy of the Soviet theoretical heritage itself.The gains in kinship studies, the tacit return to the forcibly broken tradition of the 1920s in conceptualization of culture (Bogoraz, Bukharin) visible in the work of Markarian, and the possibility to question and reject particular hypotheses advanced by Morgan, Engels, or the early Soviet fundamentalists make Soviet ethnography a rich and exciting field. This impression is not diminished by the fact that the thorough theoretical revision of orthodoxy promised by PIDO Two in 1968 never materialized. The intellectual currents that produced it still exist and now and then surface, waiting for a time when the deological climate improves.An important thing to remember is that many theoretical positions in the Soviet Union are arrived at by thrashing out the issues in oral discussions until consensus is gradually formed, not by boldly proclaiming a new approach in an individual paper. Olderogge's rejection of Morgan's Hawaiian hypothesis, as well as the whole project of PIDO Two are but two examples of consensus formed before they were published. We suspect that some work is being done, of which the short conference resumés (unavailable in the West) are often the only and cryptic witnesses.The administrative control over Soviet ethnography remains in the hands of the fundamentalists, who associate true Marxism with doctrine and whose main task is to defend the hypotheses incorporated in official ideology. They are opposed by a vital group of scholars, who gain their inspiration from a general philosophical approach and method of conceptualization they find in classical Marxism. The division into these two camps is not at all clearcut; many people intermittently align themselves with one or the other. And of course, the strong current of Russian intellectual tradition (never demythologized) with its search for an integral and simultaneously ethical social theory brings many of them together.But the discussions persist, and it appears that for non-fundamentalists Marxism provides only a method (and even this is understood in a variety of ways), a theory of cognition, the most general language of theory. No particular hypothesis is sacred. Since the method is not reducible to ethnographic theory, it does not in itself guarantee success. The theory has to be judged on its own merit, not by appeal to the classics. These seem to be the unspoken points underlying the debate today.What is at stake is not only the right of scientists to develop various perspectives on society, culture, and evolution. Whether or not the participants themselves would put it this way, it affects the very nature of theory in social sciences. The rallying point for the non-fundamentalists, regardless of their areas of research or their views on particular problems, is the tacit rejection of theory as doctrine. The revolt is against theory as quasireligion, as the Absolute which is simultaneously a scientific and an ethical doctrine that pits us who know the Truth against them who do not: and this may be nothing less than the beginning of a fundamental break with the Russian intellectual tradition.Dr. Jovan Howe is working on a book on Soviet archaeology.Vladimir Plotkin is a Visiting Professor in Russian and Eastern European Studies at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington.     

Moving ethnography online: researching Brazilian migrants' online togetherness

Abstract

This article contributes to recent scholarship on the changing nature of fieldwork practices within migration research, focusing on the practice of online ethnography. It makes a case for the significance of the internet and, more specifically, social network sites, in the experience of many migrants. I state that online togetherness is an integral part of the lives of many migrants which also interrelates with ‘offline’ aspects of their social lives. Therefore, I argue that current research on migration would benefit from a more balanced combination of offline and online ethnography, taking into account how online connectivity affects the nature of migration and the conditions of being a migrant. Methodologically, I suggest that ethnography is well suited for generating understandings of the significance of the internet in the experience of migrants, but that a number of adjustments in methods of data collection and analysis must be made.     

Assisted existence: an ethnography of being in Ecuador

In Ecuador, reproductive assistance, whether from God, extended family, or medical technologies, is emphasized and desirable in a precarious and unequal world with a minimal social safety net and chronic economic insecurity. Assistance is the very grounds of being. In better‐resourced realities like parts of the United States, assisted reproductive technologies can trouble the biological and social autonomy of individual heterosexual couples. Juxtaposing assisted reproduction in these divergent sites demonstrates that resources can make autonomy easier to establish and assistance between people and things difficult to perceive. Through an insistence on the material specificity of assisted reproduction itself, this ethnographic contrast contributes to anthropological approaches to ontological questions of being. In particular, ethnographic observation of the material realities of reproductive treatments in Ecuador demonstrates that medical care is one means to instantiate race. Private assisted reproduction makes whiter babies and patients in the face of a crumbling public health care infrastructure whose patients are by definition poor and Indian. The framework of assistance might serve then as a means to ethnographically trace the constitution of racial being in better‐resourced nations, as well as allow for a more comprehensive recognition of the interdependence of existence.