Aesthetics, Intuition, and Reference in Fijian Ritual Communication: Modularity in and out of Language

The ethnographic interpretation of "meaningless" ritual—ritual in which participants are not able to give verbal accounts of the symbolic meanings involved—poses basic questions about the relationships among language, culture, and meaning. Along with verbal meaning expressible in language, rituals are often observed to have important practical meaning outside of language. Aside from basic how-to, facilitating dimensions, practical meaning systems can also constitute metaphor and accomplish reference in ways that are parallel to, yet distinct from, verbal and gestural language functions. Techniques of language analysis are useful in interpreting practical meaning in ritual if language meaning is viewed from the perspective of Wittgensteinian use-based semantics and language is seen in context of a more general multidomain meaning system module that supports the communicative aspects of culture. [Keywords: ritual, aesthetics, communication, ethnography, Fiji]     

Political rationale,aims, and outcomes of health-related high-level meetings and special sessions at the UN General Assembly: A policy research observational study

BackgroundRecognising the substantial political weight of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), a UN General Assembly special session (UNGASS) and high-level meetings (HLMs) have been pursued and held for 5 health-related topics thus far. They have focused on human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS, 2001), non-communicable diseases (NCDs, 2011), antimicrobial resistance (AMR, 2016), tuberculosis (TB, 2018), and universal health coverage (UHC, 2019). This observational study presents a comprehensive analysis of the political and policy background that prompted the events, as well as an assessment of aims, approaches, and ultimate outcomes.Methods and findingsWe investigated relevant agencies’ official documents, performed a literature search, and accessed international institutions’ websites for the period 1990–2020. Knowledgeable diplomatic staff and experts provided additional information. Outcomes were evaluated from a United Nations perspective based on national and international commitments, and funding trends. Eliciting an effective governmental response through UNGASSs/HLMs is a challenge. However, increased international commitment was evident after the HIV/AIDS (2001), NCDs (2011), and AMR (2016) meetings. The more recent TB (2018) and UHC (2019) HLMs have received general endorsements internationally, although concrete commitments are not yet documented. Although attribution can only be hypothesized, financial investments for HIV/AIDS following the UNGASS were remarkable, whereas following HLMs for NCDs, AMR, and TB, the financial investments remained insufficient to face the burden of these threats. Thus far, the HIV/AIDS UNGASS was the only one followed by a level of commitment that has likely contributed to the reversal of the previous burden trend. Limitations of this study include its global perspective and aerial view that cannot discern the effects at the country level. Additionally, possible peculiarities that modified the response to the meetings were not looked at in detail. Finally, we assessed a small sample of events; thus, the list of strategic characteristics for success is not exhaustive.ConclusionsOverall, UNGASSs and HLMs have the potential to lay better foundations and boldly address key health challenges. However, to succeed, they need to (i) be backed by large consensus; (ii) engage UN authorities and high-level bodies; (iii) emphasise implications for international security and the world economy; (iv) be supported by the civil society, activists, and champions; and (v) produce a political declaration containing specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) targets. Therefore, to ensure impact on health challenges, in addition to working with the World Health Assembly and health ministries, engaging the higher political level represented by the UNGA and heads of state and government is critical.

Paolo Rodi and colleagues analyze the political and policy response to UN General Assembly and high-level meetings focused on HIV/AIDS, non-communicable diseases, antimicrobial resistance, tuberculosis and universal health coverage.     

Future societal issues in industrial biotechnology

Three international stakeholder meetings were organized by The Netherlands-based "Kluyver Center for Genomics of Industrial Fermentation" with the objective to identify the future societal issues in the field of industrial biotechnology and to develop a coordinated strategy for public dialogue. The meetings resulted in five unanimous recommendations: (i) that science, industry and the European Commission in conjunction with other stakeholders create a comprehensive roadmap towards a bio-based economy; (ii) that the European Commission initiate a series of round-table meetings to further articulate the views, interests and responsibilities of the relevant stakeholders and to define policy; (iii) that the development of new innovative communication activities is stimulated to increase public engagement and to discuss the ways that we do or do not want technologies to shape our common future; (iv) that further social studies are undertaken on public attitudes and behaviors to the bio-based economy and that novel methods are developed to assess public views of future technological developments; and (v) that the concept of sustainability is further operationalized and taken as a core value driving research and development and policy making.     

Partial Stories: Repeat Photography,Narratives and Environmental Change in Tanzania

Repeat photography has emerged as a popular tool for visualizing climate change yet has been employed relatively little by visual and environmental anthropologists. Based on research in Tanzania’s South Pare Mountains, this article shows how repeat photography can be a powerful method for environmental anthropologists both practically and epistemologically: repeat photography as a practice integrates well with ethnography, while the contradictions emerging through multimodal research help us reflect on the narratives about environmental change that we encounter and write ourselves. At the same time, detailed ethnography is crucial for understanding the lived experience and wider politico-economic dimensions of landscape change that are not visible through repeat photography alone.     

An overview of telemedicine: the virtual gaze of health care in the next century

This article considers the role of telemedicine in the production of biomedical health care using three specific theoretical constructs as lenses through which to examine this phenomenon: (1) Foucault's medical "gaze"; (2) the political economy of health; and (3) deterritorialization and multisite ethnography. This examination focuses first on the changing corporate structure of health care and changing political attitudes toward telemedicine. Second, it documents the current use of telemedicine in prisons, the military, and in cross-cultural settings. Third, it discusses responses to telemedicine of individual physicians, health care staff, and patients, finding that these responses are broadly conditioned by an individual's mode of articulation with biomedical institutions and that they are mediated by personal experience.     

The Influence of Urbanism and Information Consumption on Political Dimensions of Social Capital: Exploratory Study of the Localities Adjacent to the Core City from Bra?ov Metropolitan Area,Romania

Background

The last two decades have seen a growing trend towards the research of voting behavior in post-communist countries. Urban sociology theorists state that not only space structures influence political participation, but also space structures are changing under the influence of global, local, and individual factors. The growing role played by information in the globalised world has accelerated the paradigm shift in urban sociology: from central place model (based on urban-rural distinction and on monocentric metropolitan areas) to network society (based on space of flows and polycentric metropolitan areas). However, recent studies have mainly focused on countries with solid democracies, rather than on former communist countries. The present study aims to analyze the extent to which a new emerging spatial structure can be envisaged within a metropolitan area of Romania and its consequences for the political dimensions of social capital.

Methods

The Transilvania University Ethics Commission approved this study (S1 Aprouval). The research is based upon individual and aggregate empirical data, collected from the areas adjacent to the core city in Brașov metropolitan area. Individual data has been collected during October 2012, using the oral survey technique (S1 Survey), based on a standardized questionnaire (stratified simple random sample, N = 600). The National Institute of Statistics and the Electoral Register provided the aggregate data per locality. Unvaried and multivariate analyses (hierarchical regression method) were conducted based on these data.

Results

Some dimensions of urbanism, identified as predictors of the political dimensions of social capital, suggest that the area under analysis has a predominantly monocentric character, where the rural-urban distinction continues to remain relevant. There are also arguments favoring the dissolution of the rural-urban distinction and the emergence of polycentric spatial structures. The presence of some influences related to the information consumption on all six indicators of the political dimensions of social capital under analysis suggests the occurrence of emerging forms of a space of flows. The identified effects of social problems associated with transport infrastructure and of migration experience on the political dimensions of social capital, also support the emergence of space of flows.

Conclusions

We recommend that, in the urban studies in former communist countries, conceptualization of urbanism as predictor of the political dimensions of social capital should consider both the material dimensions of space, as well as the dimensions of information consumption and migration experience.     

Meeting with Ancestors—Contesting Borders in Indonesian Religion and Politics

Ancestors have often played an important role in the exercise of politics in Indonesia. However, from a situation in which they were highly influential and present in ritual, as well as in the everyday lives of both commoners and kings, ancestors and traditional lifestyles have been increasingly marginalised through the impact of secular politics and Islamist movements. An era of political reformation began after the fall of Indonesia's former political regime, Orde Baru. Reform meant the decentralisation of political power, and this led to a revival of local traditions. This article takes this revival of tradition as a framework to understand meetings that took place with ancestors at local pilgrimage sites on West Java. It is concluded that meetings of this kind are not simply about fulfilling personal goals, but they also show features of resistance and subversion in relation to the dominant political and religious leadership in Indonesia.     

Researching ethnicity,identity, subjectivity: anything but the four-lettered word

This article gives a frank account of how anthropological research on Cape Verdean migrant experiences of parenthood in Portugal developed from avoiding the use of the analytical concept of ‘race’ to encountering ‘race’ as a category of practice in fieldwork and discusses the implications of this for analysing the data. Although the aim of the research was to look beyond categorizations, in order to explore the emotional dimensions of lived experience, the effects of ‘racial automatisms’ upon migrant subjectivities cannot be ignored. Racist effects are nonetheless distinguished from racist intentions. The ethnography elucidates the political potential of ‘race’ to foment critical reflection upon the relationship between an individual's personal and collective identities.     

Editor's column: Symposia and congresses

Symposia and congresses (and similarly named conferences) provide a specific medium for scientific communication that should complement, not duplicate, published or circularized reporting. The total expenditure for presentation of results at a session of the International Geological Congress is at least in the region of 8 million dollars, and there are hundreds of smaller geological meetings every year. Progress in finding rational forms for meetings is slow, and elementary deficiencies in meeting organization are incessantly repeated. The fact that meetings have established themselves as a very viable institution in science provides no excuse for not watching and reviewing their structure and economy as vigilantly as, for example, publications.     

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.     

Candi(e)d action: biosocialities of Turkish Berliners living with diabetes

In this article, I explore Turkish migrants' responses to diabetes in Germany. Anthropological studies on health inequalities tend to theorize "social suffering" as passive experiences; those that analyze active social engagement by patient groups as "biosociality" do so solely in the realm of biotechnologies and suggest that social disadvantage prevent active engagement. This article draws on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin from 2006 to 2007. Although Turkish Berliners seem burdened by diabetes, informal diabetes care, for example through a self-help group, is nonetheless collectively negotiated. Increasing incidence and awareness of diabetes in Berlin's Turkish population and their growing political organization and economic entrepreneurship, against the backdrop of experiences of marginality, gives rise to biosociality unanticipated in previous accounts. Addressing the limitations of previous uses of biosociality, this ethnography suggests that social interaction and belonging that formed around altered biologies, here diabetes, are complex and fragmented.     

Being En Route

Through an ethnography of unauthorized migration from El Salvador to the United States, I explore "clandestinity" as a hidden, yet known, dimension of social reality. Unauthorized migrants who are en route to the United States have to make themselves absent from the spaces they occupy. When they become clandestine, such migrants embody illegality; in some cases, they literally "go underground" should they die and be buried en route. Because their presence is prohibited, unauthorized migrants do not fully arrive even when they reach their destinations. There are parallels between the ways that migrants are present in yet absent from nations, and the ways that ethnographers are present in yet absent from the field. This ethnography of migrants en route therefore suggests how anthropological knowledge practices also produce realities that are hidden, yet known.     

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.     

Does French Islam Have Borders? Dilemmas of Domestication in a Global Religious Field

Although many accounts of transnational religious movements emphasize mobility and communication, equally important are efforts by both political actors and religious leaders to carve out distinctive national forms of religion. In this article I examine dilemmas faced by Muslims in France who seek both to remain part of the global Muslimcommunity and to satisfy French demands for conformity to political and cultural norms. I consider the history of immigration and the importance of French notions of laïcité but emphasize the structural problem of articulating a global religious field onto a self-consciously bounded French nation-state. I then draw on recent fieldwork in Paris to analyze two recent public events in which attempts by Muslim public intellectuals to develop an "Islam of France" are frustrated by internal, structural tensions concerning religious authority and political legitimacy, and not simply by a conflict between "Muslims" and "France."     

"Galton's Asset" and "Flower's Problem Cultural Networks and Cultural Units in Cross-Cultural Research Ml (Or, Male Genital Mutilations and Polygyny in Cross-Cultural Perspective)

Edward Tylor had envisioned anthropology to be comprised of ethnology and ethnography in equal parts, but today ethnography dominates the field. In this paper, we examine two reasons for the refugee status of ethnology. First, we look at the notorious "Galton effect." Second, we examine the problem of defining and using cultural units, particularly when positivistic and static theories and methods of culture have been largely discredited by anthropology. We argue against any formulaic solutions to these problems and show that for each research question one needs to reconsider the criteria for how to construct cultural units and how to ensure that the cultures under study are not merely replicas of one another. We show that previous solutions to these issues are limited because they fail to appreciate the contingent and multidimensional nature of culture. We also argue that, instead of a "Galton problem," there is actually a "Galton asset," which can be used to study historical and emergent communicative networks. [Keywords: cross–cultural research, Galton problem, cultural units, methods and theory]     

Reflexivity and countertransference in a psychiatric cultural consultation clinic

A Mexican-American woman who complained of persistent head pain and a bothersome voice was seen by a team consisting of a psychiatrist, social scientists, and spiritualist healers in a Cultural Consultation Clinic of a Psychiatric Consultation Liaison Service. This single case is analyzed to provide an understanding of the interpretive dimensions of psychiatric practice. It is argued that a hermeneutic analysis of clinical phenomena focuses attention on three distinct aspects of interpretation: on the interpretation by clinicians and clients of the discourse of the other in terms of their own clinical models; on the influence of deeply embedded personal meanings on this interpretive process; and on the role of the observer in clinical ethnography. It is argued that to sustain a hermeneutic analysis of psychiatric practice, an account of transference and countertransference in terms of interpretation theory will have to be developed.     

Spot the Trini*

A radio programme which asked how Trinidadians might be spotted wherever they are found unexpectedly highlighted a particular form of anti‐social individualistic behaviour called boldface. This is contrasted with a recent ethnography of its opposite shamefaced behaviour in nearby Guyana. It is suggested that these differences relate partly to differences in the recent history of the two states, but that they also point to a core contradiction in the concept of citizenship as a political ideal.     

Ready or Not …? Teen Sexuality and the Troubling Discourse of Readiness

In this article, I explore how talk about being "ready" or "not ready" for sex shapes teen and adult understandings of sexuality. I argue that this "discourse of readiness" poses serious threats to teens' identity development, sexual decision making, and educators efforts to help them through these processes. To illustrate, I draw from my nine-month ethnography, examining how participants used readiness discourses to make sense of their sexualities. I suggest implications for educators, policy makers, and researchers in anthropology and education.