When the Curtain Falls on a Fieldwork Project: The Last Chapter of a Gay Synagogue Study

Ethnographic texts preserve the historicity and losses of both the people observed and their observer. However, anthropologists rarely inform their readers about the circumstances of their departure from a fieldwork project. Without formally indicating the completion of their research goals, they usually move on to a new field and cease publishing on their former site. This procedure seemed natural enough when anthropologists conducted their studies in remote Third World locations. The constraints of distance, time, and budget made that abrupt separation seemingly inevitable and self-explanatory. But when anthropologists choose fieldwork sites that are close to home or easy to revisit, or conduct long-term research, their relationships with their subjects change radically, both during fieldwork and during the stages of writing and publishing the ethnographic text. Consequently, their eventual exit from the field involves a different process. Based on the experience of a fifteenyear engagement in the study of a gay synagogue in New York, this paper explores the latter process. The issue of exiting presents a methodological, emotional, and ethical problem meriting serious professional consideration.     

Psychologische grundlagen der tibetischen kulturgeschichte

This article examines the special biases, social ambiguities and methodological problems characterizing ethnographic research among fieldworkers with cultural orientations vaguely or partially congruent with their hosts. Information for this discussion derives from a recent field study of agrarian adaptations in northeastern Finland conducted by an anthropologist of third‐generation immigrant Finnish‐American background. This context is used to address broad issues regarding detachment and objectivity, limits upon shared experience and meaning, and interpretive dilemmas facing the ethnographic enterprise generally.     

Stigma, community, ethnography: Joan Ablon's contribution to the anthropology of impairment-disability

Joan Ablon has helped establish the anthropology of impairment-disability and significantly contributed to the role of anthropology in disability studies. In this article, we review the development of and situate Ablon's ethnographic research in the anthropology of impairment-disability. We then address various methodological issues in her work including her ethnographic approach, her grounding in action anthropology and her support for the development of the academic study of disability in anthropology and the careers of disabled anthropologists. The next section of the article examines Ablon's use of the notion of stigma, her understanding of community, and her engagement with disability rights. As examples of themes important to disability studies, we present her discussion of the implications of the ideal of the body beautiful, and gender differences in negotiating intimacy for people with physical differences. We close with a discussion of the future of an anthropology of impairment-disability. [disability, impairment, Ablon, genetics, ethnography]     

Social discounting: The effect of outcome uncertainty

The purpose of the study was to determine the lowest hypothetical amount a participant would keep for himself/herself, preferring it over a reward that he/she would have shared with another individual representing various levels of past reciprocation. Other manipulated aspects were: emotional closeness of the receiver (close vs. distant person), procedure for deciding on how to share the reward (mutual decision vs. decision made by partner) and amount of reward to be shared (PLN 494 vs. PLN 49,400). It was found that preference for the reward to be shared increased as a function of reciprocity, and that it is higher when sharing with an emotionally close person, when the decision does not depend entirely on the partner, and when sharing a small reward. The effect of the level of reciprocity was the smallest when the reward was shared with an emotionally close person and the decision was mutual.     

“You're Really Gonna Kick Us All Out?” Sustaining Safe Spaces for Community-Based HIV Prevention and Control among Black Men Who Have Sex with Men

Black men who have sex with men (BMSM) experience among the highest rates of HIV infection in the United States. We conducted a community-based ethnography in New York City to identify the structural and environmental factors that influence BMSMs vulnerability to HIV and their engagement with HIV prevention services. Methods included participant observation at community-based organizations (CBOs) in New York City, in-depth interviews with 31 BMSM, and 17 key informant interviews. Our conceptual framework shows how creating and sustaining safe spaces could be a critical environmental approach to reduce vulnerability to HIV among BMSM. Participant observation, in-depth and key informant interviews revealed that fear and mistrust characterized men’s relation to social and public institutions, such as churches, schools, and the police. This fear and mistrust created HIV vulnerability among the BMSM in our sample by challenging engagement with services. Our findings suggest that to be successful, HIV prevention efforts must address these structural and environmental vulnerabilities. Among the CBOs that we studied, “safe spaces” emerged as an important tool for addressing these environmental vulnerabilities. CBOs used safe spaces to provide social support, to address stigma, to prepare men for the workforce, and to foster a sense of community among BMSM. In addition, safe spaces were used for HIV and STI testing and treatment campaigns. Our ethnographic findings suggest that safe spaces represent a promising but so far under-utilized part of HIV prevention infrastructure. Safe spaces seem integral to high impact comprehensive HIV prevention efforts, and may be considered more appropriately as part of HIV capacity-building rather than being nested within program-specific funding structures.     

Family Expressed Emotion in a Javanese Cultural Context

This study aims at understanding the emotional milieu of families of psychotic patients, focusing on the concept of expressed emotion (EE). A combination of ethnographic and clinical methodology was employed. During the fieldwork in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, nine participants diagnosed as having first episode psychosis and their families were followed closely over the course of 1 year in their natural home setting. Through ongoing engagement with families, the researcher was able to gather data on the diversity of family responses to illness. Despite the fact that most families in this research could be considered to have low EE, ethnographic observation provided a more complex and nuanced picture of family relationships. This article discusses four issues concerning EE in relation to Javanese culture: the role of interpretation, the coexistence of criticism and warmth, the interpretation of boundary transgression, and the cultural concept of warmth and positive remark.     

The discursive detachment of race from gentrification in Cartagena de Indias,Colombia

In this article, I provide an ethnographic account of the gentrification process and its relationship to race and racism in the community of Getsemaní in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. I introduce Racial Attachment Processes as a conceptual framework for understanding how individuals reconcile Latin American discourses that suggest that race is not a primary stratifying principle with the material spatial realities of racial hierarchies that counter such discourses. Drawing on ethnographic participant observation and semi-structured interviews, including those employing photo-elicitation, I demonstrate how people discursively mobilize race in everyday life, yet selectively detach race in ways that allow them to interpret processes of gentrification as untethered to their racial underpinnings. This paper ultimately demonstrates how the discursive detachment of race from understandings of Colombian socio-spatial, political and economic relations obscures the relationship between racial domination and social inequality.     

Women with an avoidant attachment style show attenuated estradiol responses to emotionally intimate stimuli

The current study examined neuroendocrine processes associated with emotional intimacy in humans. Despite the importance of this aspect of close relationships, emotional intimacy has received much less attention in neuroendocrine research compared to other aspects of close relationships. In this study, participants viewed movie clips depicting an emotionally intimate parent-child interaction or other, non-intimate themes, and we assessed whether depictions of emotional intimacy increased levels of estradiol, a steroid hormone associated with attachment and caregiving processes. We also examined whether estradiol responses were moderated by individual differences in attachment avoidance, or people's discomfort with closeness and intimacy. Our findings revealed that, among single participants, estradiol levels increased in response to the emotionally intimate clip, but this effect was not observed among currently partnered participants. Moreover, the effects of emotional intimacy were moderated by gender and attachment avoidance, such that highly avoidant women showed smaller increases in estradiol after watching the emotionally intimate clip. Women's avoidance was unrelated to estradiol responses in the non-intimate control conditions, however, suggesting that the effects of avoidance were specific to intimate contexts. Taken together, the current findings contribute to our understanding of the biological bases of attachment and caregiving processes. They also highlight the potential role of estradiol in avoidant individuals' regulation of closeness and intimacy.     

What is love? The complex relation between values and practice in Vanuatu

The past decade has seen a renewed anthropological interest in values, morality, and ethics. This article engages with this field by demonstrating how values can be strategies as well as ideals, prone to destabilize social order and divide people precisely because they are thought to be shared. The concept of ‘love’, referring to everyday practices of concern and care for others, is a core value for living on Ahamb Island in Vanuatu. However, adherence to the same core value does not necessarily create an ordered social world. Analysing three ethnographic cases, one of them a dispute with fatal consequences, I propose a model for studying values that accommodates ambiguity by uniting the notion of shared social values with individual experience and strategy. A methodological argument is that it is crucial for anthropological studies of values to assess the context for people's shifting interpretations and articulations of value in practice.     

From empathy to caring: defining the ideal approach to a healing relationship

In recent years, “empathy” has been identified as a form of emotional engagement beneficial to patient care. Although usage varies, the term refers to sharing the feelings of another as a means of coming to a direct appreciation of the other. Defined this way, however, empathy may lead to mistaken assumptions and an absence of corrective curiosity: Once we think we understand what another is experiencing, we perceive less need to ask, listen, and learn. We propose the process of “caring” in place of “empathy” to embody the ideal emotional and behavioral approach to patient care. Caring refers to both an emotional reaction to another and the expression of that reaction in action, independent of the sharing of the other’s emotion or experience. The expression of caring in the clinical context is close observation, precise listening, and responsive questioning, in concert with committed engagement and actions directly addressing the patient’s problem, stripped of any assumptions about what the other might or might not be experiencing.     

Empirical research in clinical ethics: The ‘committed researcher’ approach

After the ‘empirical turn’ in bioethics, few specific approaches have been developed for doing clinical ethics research in close connection with clinical decision-making on a daily basis. In this paper we describe the ‘committed researcher’ approach to research in clinical ethics that we have developed over the years. After comparing it to two similar research methodological approaches, the ‘embedded researcher’ and ‘deliberative engagement’, we highlight its main features: it is patient-oriented, it is implemented by collegial and multidisciplinary teams, it uses an ethical grid to build the interview guide, and it is geared towards bringing the results to bear on the public debate surrounding the issue at stake. Finally, we position our methodological approach with respect to the ‘is vs. ought’ distinction. We argue that our ‘commitment researcher’ approach to clinical ethics research takes concerned people’s life-building values as the main data, and compares them to the larger normative framework underlying the medical practice at stake.     

Can research align with service? Lessons learned from the Big Experiment and National Biomechanics Day

Public engagement is an important role for the university academic, but is often neglected due to perceived lack of time and prioritized commitments in research and teaching. Yet, public engagement events offer an untapped opportunity for researchers to collect data from members of the general public who arrive on site at university labs. These engagement events could allow for data collection as part of didactic and demonstrative outreach events to be used in research and science. In this proof of concept study, a collaborative group of international researchers investigated the feasibility of embedding research quality assessment into events surrounding National Biomechanics Day. The Big Experiment collected data on 501 secondary school students (age range: 13 to 18 years) across 9 university sites within a 24-hour period. Data included maximal vertical jump height and self-reported physical activity levels. Vertical jump height was positively correlated to participant height, but not age or body mass. Very physically active students had significantly higher vertical jump heights than individuals who reported being somewhat or not physically active. This feasibility project demonstrates that with substantial preparation and a simple research design, focused research questions can be incorporated into educational outreach initiatives and ultimately provide a rich data source.     

Preserving quantifiable ethnographic records of disappearing human lifeways

The human evolutionary sciences place high value on quantitative data from traditional small‐scale societies that are rapidly modernizing. These data often stem from the sustained ethnographic work of anthropologists who are today nearing the end of their careers. Yet many quantitative ethnographic data are preserved only in summary formats that do not reflect the rich and variable ethnographic reality often described in unpublished field notes, nor the deep knowledge of their collectors. In raw disaggregated formats, such data have tremendous scientific value when used in conjunction with modern statistical techniques and as part of comparative analyses. Through a personal example of longitudinal research with Batek hunter‐gatherers that involved collaboration across generations of researchers, we argue that quantifiable ethnographic records, just like material artifacts, deserve high‐priority preservation efforts. We discuss the benefits, challenges, and possible avenues forward for digitizing, preserving, and archiving ethnographic data before it is too late.     

Anthropology and emotion

The centrality of emotion in thought and action is increasingly recognized in the human sciences, though basic questions of definition and scope remain unresolved. Where do emotions begin and end? How should we identify and analyse them? How should we write about them? Ethnographic fieldwork, as pioneered by Malinowski, offers powerful insights into the place of emotion in social life; but emotions are peculiarly difficult to capture in the generalizing format of case study and ethnographic summary. In this article I argue that semantic, structural, and discourse‐based approaches tend to miss what is most important – what counts for the persons concerned and therefore what makes the emotion. I review the conceptual and methodological issues and conclude that only a narrative approach can capture both the particularity and the temporal dimension of emotion, restoring verisimilitude and fidelity to experience.     

A Focused Ethnographic Study of Sri Lankan Government Field Veterinarians’ Decision Making about Diagnostic Laboratory Submissions and Perceptions of Surveillance

The global public health community is facing the challenge of emerging infectious diseases. Historically, the majority of these diseases have arisen from animal populations at lower latitudes where many nations experience marked resource constraints. In order to minimize the impact of future events, surveillance of animal populations will need to enable prompt event detection and response. Many surveillance systems targeting animals rely on veterinarians to submit cases to a diagnostic laboratory or input clinical case data. Therefore understanding veterinarians’ decision-making process that guides laboratory case submission and their perceptions of infectious disease surveillance is foundational to interpreting disease patterns reported by laboratories and engaging veterinarians in surveillance initiatives. A focused ethnographic study was conducted with twelve field veterinary surgeons that participated in a mobile phone-based surveillance pilot project in Sri Lanka. Each participant agreed to an individual in-depth interview that was recorded and later transcribed to enable thematic analysis of the interview content. Results found that field veterinarians in Sri Lanka infrequently submit cases to laboratories – so infrequently that common case selection principles could not be described. Field veterinarians in Sri Lanka have a diagnostic process that operates independently of laboratories. Participants indicated a willingness to take part in surveillance initiatives, though they highlighted a need for incentives that satisfy a range of motivations that vary among field veterinarians. This study has implications for the future of animal health surveillance, including interpretation of disease patterns reported, system design and implementation, and engagement of data providers.     

Studying Knowledge, Culture, and Behavior in Applied Medical Anthropology

In this article we argue that the concept of knowledge, as utilized by public health professionals, is best regarded as cultural belief as defined in anthropology. The implications of this position are explored, particularly as it relates to the development of a decision-making approach to the understanding and analysis of health care behavior. The methodological challenges posed by the new theoretical perspective that has emerged from the emphasis on decision making is discussed from the perspective of applied research. The role of focused ethnographic studies is examined and contrasted with ethnomedicine and survey approaches. Some main features of focused ethnographic methods are described and illustrated with a case example of acute respiratory infection (ARI) in Gambia. [knowledge and cultural beliefs, decision-making approaches, health behavior, focused ethnographic studies]     

Pain and Pessimism: Dairy Calves Exhibit Negative Judgement Bias following Hot-Iron Disbudding

Pain is defined as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, but emotional states are difficult to directly assess in animals. Researchers have assessed pain using behavioural and physiological measures, but these approaches are limited to understanding the arousal rather than valence of the emotional experience. Cognitive bias tasks show that depressed humans judge ambiguous events negatively and this technique has been applied to assess emotional states in animals. However, limited research has examined how pain states affect cognitive processes in animals. Here we present the first evidence of cognitive bias in response to pain in any non-human species. In two experiments, dairy calves (n = 17) were trained to respond differentially to red and white video screens and then tested with unreinforced ambiguous colours in two or three test sessions before and two sessions after the routine practice of hot-iron disbudding. After disbudding calves were more likely to judge ambiguous colours as negative. This ‘pessimistic’ bias indicates that post-operative pain following hot-iron disbudding results in a negative change in emotional state.     

Participatie in psychogeriatrische dagbehandeling. Ontwikkeling van een meetinstrument

Participants in psychogeriatric day care differ in their ability to enjoy the activities and to be engaged in the day care program. In order to reveal individual differences in the quality of participant engagement, an 18-item questionnaire was drafted and completed for 126 visitors of a psychogeriatric day care centre. Scalability of the items was tested according to criteria of nonparametric item response theory (IRT). Construct validity was determined by comparing the results with independent behaviour ratings of cognitive impairment and apathy, and scores on the Amsterdam Dementia Screening Test (ADS), a neuropsychological test of multiple cognitive domains. Nine items formed a strong primary Participation Scale with a coefficient H of 0.63. Behaviour ratings of cognitive impairment and apathy were significant predictors of the participation score. The same was true for the subtests Design Copying and Category Fluency of the ADS. Two meaningful small secondary scales were found, representing motivation and emotional stability, which add to the predominantly cognitive content of the primary scale. Total scores of the secondary scales correlated with affective parameters, but not with cognitive indices. The Participation Scale deserves to be expanded with items referring to motivation and emotional experience.