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.     

The opposite of witchcraft: Evans‐Pritchard and the problem of the person

The principal legacy of Evans‐Pritchard's 1937 ethnography Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande has been to associate debates over the rationality of witchcraft with its social categorization as a facet of misfortune and enmity. In combination with Evans‐Pritchard's own scepticism regarding witches, this allowed the rationality debate to isolate witchcraft as a distinctive special case. This logical exceptionalism was at odds with Evans‐Pritchard's own assertion of witchcraft's ordinariness, and is not supported by comparable ethnography from the Ladakh region of the Himalayas or by the unabridged versions of Oracles, both of which point towards an indigenous understanding of witchcraft as one variation on a spectrum of everyday action and craft. Instead, a revised reading of Oracles suggests that even the most basic quotidian representations of personal agency raise larger questions as to anthropology's understanding of how humans ascribe action and personhood, a debate which stands at the heart of its status as a science.     

Wild-ing the Ethnography of Conservation: Writing Nature’s Value and Agency In

When reading ethnographic literature on nature conservation, one may wonder: where has nature gone? Social anthropologists have written nuanced ethnographies of how the environmental projects of governments and transnational NGOs encounter, dispossess, clash culturally with, and try to govern native people across the world. Yet, these diverse ethnographies often say little about what motivates those encounters firstly: local and global nature, especially wildlife, plants, and the planet’s ecological crisis. Thus, this paper seeks ways how ethnographic writing on conservation practice could better reflect that the planet’s many self-willed, struggling, and valued non-humans, too, enter conservation’s encounters. To find paths toward such a ‘wild-ing’ of ethnography, the paper locates and reviews disparate materials from across the social-anthropological literature on biodiversity conservation. The review is structured through three questions: How does and could the ethnography of conservation represent nature’s value? How can it show that animals, plants, and other nature make and meet worlds? How can it incorporate natural science data about non-human worlds and ecological crisis? Altogether, we understand nature conservation clearer through the interdisciplinary and more-than-human ethnography of world-making encounters. Such wilder ethnography may also better connect people’s suffering and nature’s vanishing – as problems both for anthropology and conservation science.     

Cruising: ‘Moral Panic’ and the Cronulla Riot

In this paper I draw on ethnography I undertook amongst locals in the Cronulla area after the riot of December 2005. A number of the young beach goers I came across had been on a P&O ‘schoolies cruise’ at the time of the riot. For two weeks the students depended on the media for information about what was going on in their suburbs. Sailing back, I was told, a pumped‐up chorus of ‘Shi‐ire!’ and ‘White Pride!’ rang out over Sydney Heads, as expectations climbed high of the ship being met by gangs of Middle Eastern youths, ready for the fight. Back on the beach, months later, bodies baking in the sun try to reconcile the thought of riot with what they know about Australia, and Cronulla, as a place of laid back, leisurely, lazily tolerant people. How can the two scenes of bodily excess be brought together? What are the limits of the ‘moral panic’ idea, in relation to the Cronulla riot? How do the competing truths of major discourses on Cronulla misrepresent the community in question?     

Conklin, Joyce, and the Wannaknów

Verbal play among the Hanunóo of Mindoro is surprisingly similar to that practiced by the Dubliners of Ireland. The similarity invites a comparison of the work habits of their scribes: the ethnographer Harold Conklin and the novelist James Joyce. A Joycean version of an ethnography of the Wannaknow is presented as a textual focus for the comparison.     

"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]     

How does visual thinking work in the mind of a person with autism? A personal account

My mind is similar to an Internet search engine that searches for photographs. I use language to narrate the photo-realistic pictures that pop up in my imagination. When I design equipment for the cattle industry, I can test run it in my imagination similar to a virtual reality computer program. All my thinking is associative and not linear. To form concepts, I sort pictures into categories similar to computer files. To form the concept of orange, I see many different orange objects, such as oranges, pumpkins, orange juice and marmalade. I have observed that there are three different specialized autistic/Asperger cognitive types. They are: (i) visual thinkers such as I who are often poor at algebra, (ii) pattern thinkers such as Daniel Tammet who excel in math and music but may have problems with reading or writing composition, and (iii) verbal specialists who are good at talking and writing but they lack visual skills.     

Human‐horse sensory engagement through horse archery

The Mongol horse stems from ancient stock, similar to the first horses ridden on the Central Asian grassland steppe. Mongol horses subsequently migrated with their human counterparts throughout Eurasia, as far to the east as Japan. During archery festivals in Japan, horses gallop along a narrow runway within a temple complex in the heavily populated city of Kyoto. In Mongolia, with the recent re‐emergence of the ancient practice, horse and rider still gallop across the expansive grassland steppe. The euphoria one feels in riding fast on horseback with the wind against one's face can be symbolised by the concept of khii mor’ in Mongolia, which is connected with the vitality between human and horse in the practice of horse archery. Through sensory ethnography, in combination with multi‐species ethnography, this article explores embodiment between horse and rider in two quite different socio‐ecological contexts.     

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.     

Constructivist Models of Mind, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and the Development of Culture Theory

Researchers in a number of fields, including contemporary psychoanalysis, are contributing to the development of a dynamic model of mind that acknowledges the contributions of biology and social experience to the construction of human consciousness and subjectivity. In this paper, I examine this emerging model of mind and I discuss its implications for the development of Culture theory. I argue that theories of culture must reflect the fluidity and complexity of the psychological states that underlie the culture process, and I suggest that even highly conventional models of action, thought, and feeling are rarely, if ever, internalized, appropriated, or reproduced without some degree of modification, refashioning, and personalization. I propose person-centered ethnography as one of the methods by which we can explore the complex relations among culture, mind, and behavior, [constructivist models of mind, contemporary psychoanalysis, culture theory, self and subjectivity, person-centered ethnography]     

Why Governments That Fund Elective Abortion Are Obligated to Attempt a Reduction in the Elective Abortion Rate

If elective abortion is publicly funded, then the government is obligated to take active measures designed to reduce its prevalence. I present two arguments for that conclusion. The first argument is directed at those pro-choice thinkers who hold that while some or all elective abortions are morally wrong, they still ought to be legally permitted and publicly subsidized. The second argument is directed at pro-choice thinkers who hold that there is nothing morally wrong with elective abortion and that it should be both legally permitted and publicly subsidized. The second argument employs premises that generalize beyond the abortion debate and that may serve to shed light on broader questions concerning conscience and the requirements of political compromise in a democracy.     

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.     

Creating Coalitions and Causing Conflicts: Confronting Race and Gender through Partnered Ethnography

Responding to cultural anthropology's shift from the major paradigm of culture-as-meaning to one that includes the politics as well as the poetics of culture, this article urges experimentation with field methods. To that end, it recounts one such experiment, an attempt at partnered ethnography. Envisioned as a palliative to the dilemmas faced while conducting research in a Black millenarian community, I attempted a partnership with a fellow anthropologist whose race and gender positionings identify and place him differently from my own. Aiming to transcend the partiality of knowledge that necessarily derives from the standpoint of a lone researcher, as well as to find a way out of the researcher-researched imbalance of power, it was our hope that this coalition would produce multi-layered, multiply-positioned ethnography and do justice to the host community. The case illustrates, however, that this utopian vision of complementary research can, and did, spawn the very same problems of identity and authority claims that it was intended to solve. The essay concludes, nonetheless, by encouraging further experimentation with partnerships, for although risky, these can provide fruitful areas of empirical and theoretical illumination and ultimately enrich the project of ethnography.     

Bride‐service and the absent gift

Building on a previous experiment to apply Strathern's discussions of Melanesian gift exchange to ethnography relating to Tukanoan societies in Northwest Amazonia, this essay asks why other authors should repeatedly affirm that the gift has no relevance in the Amazonian context. Two answers are proposed. Firstly, the authors concerned tend to assume that a particular type of social formation is characteristic of Amazonia as a whole. The Tukanoans, who engage in ceremonial exchange of food and goods, do not fit this rubric. Secondly, despite their differences, these authors assume that Amazonian societies are bride‐service societies where, axiomatically, there can be no gift. The Tukanoans are not bride‐service societies and, if anything, tend towards the bride‐wealth alternative. This Tukanoan exception serves to re‐emphasize the diversity of Amazonian social formations, one that would have been even greater in the archaeological past. It also warns against the dangers of over‐hasty theoretical closure.     

An Experimental Ninth-Grade Anthropology Course

A ninth-grade course in anthropology was taught for three years at the North Shore Country Day School in Winnetka, Illinois. Initially, the first quarter concerned ethnography and the principles of cultural and social anthropology; the second centered around evolution, human origins, and the development of civilization; and the third dealt with comparative modern civilizations. However, the first year convinced us that this was too much material, so the third quarter was dropped and the remainder of the material was spread over the entire year. Ninth graders are a good audience for anthropology because they are interested in ethnography, can compare ethnographic situations to their own situations, and most especially are learning and practicing at being adults so that cultural and social techniques are of great immediate interest.     

The Magyar moustache: the faces of Hungarian state formation, 1867-1918

This paper outlines the history of Hungarian ethnography and anthropology and their role in the construction of the nation and Hungarian liberalism in the Dualist period (1867-1918). Affected by the specific socio-political conditions of this ethnically most diverse country of contemporary Europe, the disciplinary trajectories of Hungarian ethnography and anthropology diverge considerably from the models offered by the historiography in the British, French and German contexts. The paper argues that the pluralistic, cultural and strongly integrative ethnographic tradition that prevailed in Hungary in the last decades of the nineteenth century did not notably wane and shift towards a biological, hierarchical and racialist thinking by the end of the First World War. Furthermore, Hungarian liberalism did not simply provide the milieu for these disciplines to flourish, but was itself partly the result of these disciplines' attempts to formulate the very concepts of ethnicity and race.     

Dynamic data replacement and adaptive scheduling policies in spark

Improper data replacement and inappropriate selection of job scheduling policy are important reasons for the degradation of Spark system operation speed, which directly causes the performance degradation of Spark parallel computing. In this paper, we analyze the existing caching mechanism of Spark and find that there is still more room for optimization of the existing caching policy. For the task structure analysis, the key information of Spark tasks is taken out to obtain the data and memory usage during the task runtime, and based on this, an RDD weight calculation method is proposed, which integrates various factors affecting the RDD usage and establishes an RDD weight model. Based on this model, a minimum weight replacement algorithm based on RDD structure analyzing is proposed. The algorithm ensure that the relatively more valuable data in the data replacement process can be cached into memory. In addition, the default job scheduling algorithm of the Spark framework considers a single factor, which cannot form effective scheduling for jobs and causes a waste of cluster resources. In this paper, an adaptive job scheduling policy based on job classification is proposed to solve the above problem. The policy can classify job types and schedule resources more effectively for different types of jobs. The experimental results show that the proposed dynamic data replacement algorithm effectively improves Spark's memory utilization. The proposed job classification-based adaptive job scheduling algorithm effectively improves the system resource utilization and shortens the job completion time.

     

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.