Beneath the master narrative: human trafficking, myths of sexual slavery and ethnographic realities

This paper explores the disconnections between anti-trafficking discourse and the local experience of responding to human trafficking as indicated in ethnographic data from Bosnia and Kazakhstan. Using the concept of “uptake,” I examine how anti-trafficking discourse operates as a master narrative, drawing on techniques of emotion and logic, as well as a specific type of victim story. I also consider how, despite an emerging counter discourse that questions the data and challenges current policy, human trafficking discourse continues to be retold in media and reproduced in popular culture, often in ways that actually diverge from the current version of the grand narrative. In contrast to these uncritical representations, ethnographic data from Bosnia suggest that the master narrative is selective in how it represents the history of the problem and that it does not “take up” important details about the context that fosters sexual exploitation, despite Bosnia’s compliance with US policy. Conversely, Kazakhstan suffers a liminal status regardless of local efforts to prevent the problem from happening within its borders as well as evidence that the crime is not widespread. While perhaps not mythical, I suggest that the master narrative contains the stuff of legend as it occupies the critical spaces of policy, activism and development, leaving open the question of how to address the nuances and needs of responding to victims of gender violence.     

Transnationalism and the Karen wrist‐tying ceremony: An ethnographic account of Karen settlement practice in Brisbane

When settling, people often use cultural schema from their original homeland to build familiarity in unfamiliar surrounds. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the first author in Brisbane, with the Karen community from Burma, during which participant observation and interview methods were used. We present an ethnographic account of the Brisbane Karen wrist‐tying ceremony. The ceremony acts as an insight into the challenges for Karen whilst settling into Australia. It reflects multiple accounts of history and tradition, but simultaneously speaks to emerging, contemporary Karen contexts. This research contributes to richer understandings of settlement: it frames transnational cultural practice as a flexible mode of integration, rather than an exclusionary mode of othering. We propose that the integrative discourse of the ceremony creates familiarity and social connection in local and diasporic spaces. This acts as a counter to the challenges of Karen settlement including the negotiations of local/global identity politics.     

The Dialogics of Southern Quechua Narrative

Southern Quechua conversational narratives are dialogical in four senses. First, at the formal level, the narrative is produced between interlocutors; second, narrative embeds discourse within discourse by means of quotations or indirect discourse; third, implicit or hidden dialogue between texts is brought out through the intertextual reference to other coexisting narratives; and, fourth, there is a complex pattern of participation through which dialogue takes place not only between actual speaking individuals but between distinct, intersecting participant roles that evoke multiple interactional frameworks. Rigorous attention to each level allows us to integrate narrative analysis more closely into ethnographic study, in terms of both the social tactics of specific narrative events and the broader discursive frameworks that they illuminate.     

Emphasizing 'Others': the emergence of Hindu nationalism in a central Indian tribal community

This article is an ethnographic account of the rise of Hindu nationalism in a central Indian 'tribal' ( adivasi ) community. It is a response to the lack of ethnographic attention within wider nationalist discourse to the kinds of social conditions and processes that have contributed to the manifestation of nationalism at the grass-roots level. It is argued that the successful spread of Hindu nationalism in specifically tribal areas is due to the instrumentalist involvement of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a militant Hindu nationalist organization, in local affairs. The outcome of such involvement is the promotion of the threatening 'Other' and the attachment of ethnic group loyalties to a wider nationalist agenda.     

This Bed of Roses Has Thorns: Cultural Assumptions and Community in an Elementary School

Educational reformers and social observers call for increasing community in our schools and neighborhoods. In that discourse, community appears as a catch phrase that has become meaningless in its ubiquity. Through an ethnographic study of a small elementary school in which community is regularly invoked, the author identifies community's negative as well as beneficial aspects and discusses the implications for schools.     

Sensuous Ethnography: A Visual Dialogue with Iranian Transmigrants

Focusing on the growing trend of skilled emigration in Iran, which is often examined using a conventional textual discourse, I aim to develop a model that is multilingual and interdisciplinary to create a context that allows a deeper understanding of the sensorial implications of the notion of “transmigration.” This visual ethnographic research is thus conducted through implementation of visual multi-narrative perspectives produced in collaboration with Iranian transmigrants.     

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.     

Understanding the Rise of Consumer Ethnography: Branding Technomethodologies in the New Economy

ABSTRACT   In this article, I aim to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the changing public role of anthropology by exploring the rise of branded ethnographic practices in consumer research. I argue that a juncture in the "New Economy"—the conjoining of corporate interest in branding, technology, and consumers, with vast social changes—may explain the rapid growth of ethnography for consumer research and predict its future direction. An analysis of branded propaganda from ethnographic vendors that claim their technology-enhanced methods innovate "classic" anthropological practices discloses the way corporations employ technologically mediated means to focus on the reflexive self in consumer research. In this analysis, I reveal that technological methodologies are central to the production of branded ethnographic practices, as forms of branding and technology legitimate consumer–corporate flows of interaction. The conclusion raises awareness to the ways in which modern branding practices reconstruct anthropology in public discourse. [Keywords: branding, consumer research, ethnography, reflexivity, technology]     

Through the Eyes of the Institution: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Decision Making in Two Special Education Meetings

In this article, I present a critical discourse analysis of two Committee on Special Education meetings for one adolescent girl. Drawing on two years of ethnographic data, I look across the two meetings and demonstrate that the second-year CSE meeting is wrought with three contradictions. This article suggests the need to look to institutional discourses and cases of subjective experiences in order to understand the process of social reproduction in the anthropology of disability.     

Das totenritual einer ewe‐gruppe des südöstlichen ghana

This paper addresses some of the complexities surrounding the endeavour to create a protected space for children. Based on an ethnographic account of a kindergarten in a small town in the north of Israel during 2001, it explores notions of vulnerability and danger, protection and exposure, as these found expression in daily life at the kindergarten. The paper describes, and links, two sets of ethnographic data: first, the routine ways in which the teacher constructed the children's bodies as ever vulnerable to harm of all sorts, unless well taken care of; and second, the way in which a suicide bomb attack was presented, and mediated, by the teacher to the children. The paper argues that a close look at these two different stances on death and danger reveals a ‘discourse of vulnerability’ at the kindergarten.     

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.     

Why Doesn't the Creed Read "Always Be Critical"? An Examination of a Liberal Curriculum

Using ethnographic data collected in a second grade classroom over the course of a school year, this paper describes the ways in which one school's discourse of liberalism is deleteriously deployed. We view the school's discipline creed as emblematic of the school's liberal curriculum, and interrogate the effects on four African American boys in the classroom when the school enacts this creed. Despite the agency that these boys obviously had, they were unable to control the ways in which they were placed at a structural disadvantage and manipulated by a system far more powerful than they were. The results were that these four boys suffered. Not only did the intended liberal curriculum fail to be translated fully into the enacted curriculum, the liberal underpinnings of this curriculum precluded teachers and students from taking any critical stance.     

For my wellness, not just my illness: North Americans’ use of dietary supplements

Passage of the DSHEA in 1994 created a new “liminal” category for the FDA: dietary supplements are regulated as neither food nor drugs. However, there appears to be a significant disconnect between the “official” discourse surrounding dietary supplements and supplement users’ actual practices. Despite this discrepancy, and the inadequacy of surveys to capture the dynamics of pharmaceutical practice, there is little ethnographic information available on the ways that Americans think about or use dietary supplements. We offer some preliminary observations from a pilot ethnographic study of Americans’ use of dietary supplements in which we consider not only the reasons why people are using supplements, but how they are using them, and how their experimentation has been influenced by the information they seek and receive from a variety of sources. We illustrate how anthropological studies of supplement related practice can help us better understand Americans’ attraction to and use of dietary supplements, and suggest that anthropology can contribute to a more balanced perspective on supplement use—one that moves the study of supplements beyond surveys and randomized controlled studies of efficacy to considerations of patterns of use in context, user expectations, and measures of perceived effectiveness.     

Biography,Authenticity and Personalised Post-Mortem Practices in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Current thanatology discourse details a new ethos of openness transforming death-related practices, accentuating a shift to personalised rituals, authenticity and expressive grief. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with mourners and funeral professionals, this article explores these putative post-mortem changes and critically assesses the claims and counterclaims concerning funerary arrangements in New Zealand. While underscoring the complexity of mortuary practices, this study explicates the varying notions of authenticity that pervade the funeral discourse. Although funeral professionals emphasised the significance of grief and bereavement processes characterised by a need for honesty and transparency, bereaved participants proffered an alternative interpretation of authenticity that privileged biographical coherence and the need to confer transcendence to the dead. These findings not only emphasise the inadequacies of the aforementioned representations of post-mortem change, but elucidate the context-specific conceptualisations of authenticity and the continuing relationships between the living and the dead in Aotearoa/New Zealand.     

The persistence of race: continuity and change in Germany from the Wilhelmine empire to National Socialism

This article examines Greek-Cypriot teachers' constructions of Turkish-speaking children's identities in the Greek-Cypriot educational system. Drawing on interviews and classroom observations from a two-year ethnographic study conducted in three primary schools in the Republic of Cyprus, the author explores how Turkish-speaking children enrolled in these schools are racialized, ethnicized and classed within the dominant discourse of Greek-Cypriot teachers. The article discusses how the homogenized perceptions expressed by the majority of participating teachers in this study are illustrative of structural racism that reinforces these constructions in teaching practices. Yet, at the same time, resistance is present in the discourse and practice of a few teachers; this resistance is expressed through a counter-positioning of the ‘normal/ized’ identities of Turkish-speaking children. The author argues that without structural transformation, the fact and practice of racism/nationalism/classism will go unaltered in schools.     

The Tempering of Medical Anthropology: Troubling Natural Categories

This article reviews an approach in medical anthropology that commenced in the early 1980s and that continues to the present day in which biomedical knowledge and practices are systematically incorporated into anthropological analyses. Discussion then focuses on contributions made by feminists and medical anthropologists to the literature on medicalization and resistance, illustrating how the ethnographic approach has been crucial in critically reconceptualizing and situating these concepts historically and cross-culturally. The concept of local biologies is introduced in the third section of the article in creating the argument that the coproduction of biologies and cultures contributes to embodied experience, which, in turn, shapes discourse about the body. Subjective reporting at menopause provides an illustrative case study of local biologies in action. The final part of the article takes up the question of the moral economy of scientific knowledge. Comparative ethnographic work in intensive care units in Japan and North America reveals how a moral economy is put into practice in connection with brain-dead bodies and the procurement of organs from them. Medical anthropological contributions to policy making about biomedical technologies is briefly considered in closing.     

Agency,intimacy, and rape jokes: an ethnographic study of young women and sexual risk in Chennai

In this article, I examine the circulation of jokes about sexual violence among young middle‐class women in the South Indian city of Chennai. Drawing on ethnographic research with undergraduate students in this city, I locate the rape joke in an ambivalent discourse of risk that conflates the possibility of sexual assault with the perceived ‘risks’ of women's sexual autonomy. In this context, I argue that humour about sexual violence functions as a form of lateral agency, facilitating a break from the task of reproducing middle‐class respectability.     

Analysis of some Filipino perspectives on ethical issues in multi-country collaborative research: a case of deep listening

The discussion on ethical issues, it is said, should not be confined to experts but should be extended to patients and local communities, because of the real need to engage stakeholders and non-stakeholders alike not only in carrying out any biomedical research project, but also in the drafting and legislation of bioethics instruments. Several local and inter-country consultations have already been conducted in furtherance of this goal, but there is much left to be desired in them. The consultations may have helped in articulating local principles, but not in making the instruments embody these principles. As such, instruments turn incompossible, i.e. the principles and actions they legitimate are not performable. In an ethnographic study conducted in the Philippines, for example, paragraphs 29 and 30 of the Declaration of Helsinki and CIOMS guidelines 8 and 15 are construed as not only contradictory to one another but also to local principles. This problem can be solved by taking deliberate steps to ensure that consultations are grounded in ethnographic data about local principles, which the instruments would embody. A steering committee can be of help in gathering ethnographic data, in conducting consultations at the local level, and in providing a venue for discourse on various bioethical issues.     

Reconfiguring the Empty Center: Drinking,Sobriety, and Identity in Native American Women’s Narratives

Although anthropologists have paid little attention to popular American psychological discourse about addiction and recovery, the cultural politics of its engagement by Native North American communities warrant closer examination. By ethnographically contextualizing personal narratives, this paper describes how addiction/recovery discourse has been selectively engaged by younger generations of women in a northern Plains reservation community. Sobriety is not only a therapeutic transformation but also a socially negotiated identity change in this community and, therefore, engages ongoing local identity politics. Many community members evaluate the legitimacy of claims to Native identity by essentializing boundaries between Native and non-Native, as well as between past and present-a discursive convention that O'Nell has called "the rhetoric of the empty center" (Disciplined Hearts: History, Identity and Depression in an American Indian Community. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, p. 55). Yet by selectively appropriating elements of addiction/recovery discourse, younger women in the 1990s increasingly positioned emotional experience and expression as central arbiters of the legitimacy of Native identity. In so doing, they reconfigured the rhetoric of the empty center, eliciting both controversy and support from the larger community. This analysis highlights new dimensions of the social life of addiction/recovery discourse in contemporary Native North America, and calls for increased ethnographic attention to how localized cultural politics can orient the ways in which communities engage therapeutic discourses.