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]     

Moral Horizons of Land and Place

ABSTRACT

A recent ‘moral turn’ in anthropology has cast new light on morality as a subject of ethnographic inquiry, and on the making of moral meaning and judgment. This article, and the special issue it prefaces, contribute to this emergent literature through foregrounding and examining the moral dimensions of land and place. Taking up Didier Fassin’s injunction for a critical moral anthropology – rather than an anthropology of morality – we look to land and place as groundings for moral challenges and practices that are nevertheless not place-bound. A critical moral anthropology of land and place should be directed, we argue, to the interplay of mobility and emplacement, to the dynamics of landscape and ‘dwelling’, and to the multiplicities of expectation and meaning that surround the making and exploitation of resources. In contexts of global and local change, land and place offer productive grounds from which to consider the moral horizons – both spatial and temporal – of our world and our discipline.     

Utilization of Standardized Mental Health Assessments in Anthropological Research: Possibilities and Pitfalls

In the past decade anthropologists working the boundary of culture, medicine, and psychiatry have drawn from ethnographic and epidemiological methods to interdigitate data and provide more depth in understanding critical health problems. But rarely do these studies incorporate psychiatric inventories with ethnographic analysis. This article shows how triangulation of research methods strengthens scholars’ ability (1) to draw conclusions from smaller data sets and facilitate comparisons of what suffering means across contexts; (2) to unpack the complexities of ethnographic and narrative data by way of interdigitating narratives with standardized evaluations of psychological distress; and (3) to enhance the translatability of narrative data to interventionists and to make anthropological research more accessible to policymakers. The crux of this argument is based on two discrete case studies, one community sample of Nicaraguan grandmothers in urban Nicaragua, and another clinic-based study of Mexican immigrant women in urban United States, which represent different populations, methodologies, and instruments. Yet, both authors critically examine narrative data and then use the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale to further unpack meaning of psychological suffering by analyzing symptomatology. Such integrative methodologies illustrate how incorporating results from standardized mental health assessments can corroborate meaning-making in anthropology while advancing anthropological contributions to mental health treatment and policy.     

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.     

Everyday attentiveness: understanding diabetes in Vietnam through literary displacement

World-wide, diabetes is taking on epidemic proportions. This is a debilitating disease that damages and destroys bodily systems unless blood sugar levels are kept close to normal, and patients are therefore urged to practise attentive self-management. Among people with type II diabetes in Vietnam, such everyday attentiveness seems to far exceed clinical recommendations, suffusing daily lives in pervasive and yet elusive ways. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in northern Vietnam, this article aims to depict the lifeworlds in which diabetes attentiveness unfolds. Seeking to capture the inchoate ways in which diabetes alters everyday lives, the article develops literary displacement as an experimental mode of writing-cum-inquiry that combines standard ethnography with ethnographic fiction. Taking diabetes in Vietnam as its case, the article shows how literary displacement can contribute to cultivating ethnographic as well as analytical sensibilities, strengthening the capacity of anthropology to capture subtle and subdued layers of life.     

The Natives Are Gazing and Talking Back: Reviewing the Problematics of Positionality, Voice, and Accountability among "Native" Anthropologists

In this article, a linguistic anthropologist reviews the growing literature on the possibilities and problematics of understanding "native" anthropology and its implications for the construction of ethnographic knowledge. The author examines the centrality of language for "native" scholars in negotiating their legitimacy in the field. Confessions of failure by native scholars and their dilemmas with translation illuminate the dialogic and political nature of ethnographic inquiry, particularly when research is conducted in "home" communities. Moreover, native ethnographers' critical reflexivity regarding their subject positionings and "voice" may constitute a counterhegemonic rhetorical strategy for negotiating multiple accountabilities. Self-identification as a native scholar is seldom a means through which researchers "play the native card" via a noncritical privileging of their "insider" status. Instead, claiming native status may act tactically as both a normalizing and an exclusivizing endeavor, as well as a signif ier of the decolonization of anthropological thought and practice. The author considers these and other critical implications of native anthropological research in relation to her own multisited research on African American linguistic and cultural practices focused on hair care. [Keywords: "native" anthropology, language, representation, reflexivity, translation]     

Equivocal locations: being ‘red’ in ‘Red Bologna’

This article addresses a classic ethnographic problem in the study of Italy: how is it that people can subscribe simultaneously to seemingly contradictory ideologies, such as Catholicism and Communism? It does so by describing examples from Italy's ‘showcase city’ of the left, ‘Red Bologna’, in which to be ‘red’ is ubiquitous but each person's ‘red’ is a different thing: being ‘red’ (differently) is the idiom in which real political distinctions are expressed over issues like religion or immigration. In parallel, I discuss the relationship between the ‘field’ as a location and the ‘field’ as a conceptual topic. My account replicates internal ethnographic differences at the analytical level by highlighting the differences between being left‐wing in Bologna and its meaning as a concept in anthropology. Hence the ‘equivocal location’: a field‐site that is productively different, from what an inexperienced ethnographer expected from it, from conceptual discussions in anthropology, and from itself.     

God,Fatherland, Home: revealing the dark side of our anthropological virtue

The article uses ethnographic research on right-wing anti-government movements in Bolivia conducted at the height of social conflict and cultural violence in 2008 and 2009 to reflect more generally on the relationship between anthropological research, ethical commitment, and the politics of knowledge. The article first describes the relevant epistemological and political contexts in which engaged anthropology emerged as an important disciplinary current. It then goes on to consider how and why the author's research on right-wing political practice in Bolivia diverged from the disciplinary expectations of engaged anthropology. After reflecting on the implications of this shift, the article concludes by arguing for a methodological recalibration that allows anthropologists to take seriously the ideologies and cultural logics of contemporary right-wing mobilization, particularly social and political movements that are animated by what Edmund Burke described as ‘just prejudice’.     

The First Boasian: Alfred Kroeber and Franz Boas, 1896-1905

This article reviews the interplay of the personal, institutional, and intellectual factors in the relationship between Franz Boas and Alfred Kroeber, his first important student. It focuses on their first decade, 1896-1905, a critical transitional period in the formation of American anthropology. After a consideration of their personal and familial contexts, it reviews Boas's role as a graduate professor to Kroeber, the beginning of an academic anthropology program at the University of California, Boas and Kroeber's collaborative and competitive relationship as museum curators, their diverging ethnographic strategies, Boas's editing of Kroeber's professional writings, and their disagreements over the organization of national professional societies (primarily the American Anthropological Association and the American Folklore Society). This article is a case study of the construction of anthropological traditions. [Keywords: Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber, history of anthropology]     

The anthropologist as photographer: The visual construction of ethnographic authority

“The Anthropologist as Author"—Clifford Geertz's formulation is emblematic of a theme of anthropology in the 1980s, ethnographic writing. Ethnographic photography, however, was barely a subject of consideration. Reviewing Evans‐Pritchard's The Nuer, a book widely re‐read in the writing culture debate, this article investigates not only the author's visual construction of ethnographic authority. It also reveals ethnographic photography as a medium, which can undermine this authority in a subtle yet compelling manner. Thus concentrating on the medium itself this paper investigates the uneasy relationship between photography and anthropology, and proposes an approach to ethnographic photography that goes beyond the questions of representation.¹     

To be Makiran is to see like Mr Parrot: the anthropology of wonder in Solomon Islands

This article lays out a general thesis for the development of a comparative ethnographic approach to the anthropology of wonder. It suggests that wonder is both an index and a mode of challenge to existing ontological premises. Through analytical engagement with the theme of wonder in Western philosophy and the anthropology of ontology, it extends this thesis to include the corollary that different ontological premises give rise to different wonders. Ethnographically, the article supports these claims via analysis of wonder discourses among the Arosi of Solomon Islands. These discourses, it is argued, both respond to and promote ontological transformations in a context where the premises at stake are neither those of the Cartesian dualism commonly ascribed to modernity nor of the relational non‐dualism commonly ascribe to anthropology's ethnographic ‘others’, but of a non‐Cartesian pluralism termed poly‐ontology.     

Death,taxes, public opinion,and the Midas touch of Mary Tyler Moore: accounting for promises by politicians to help avert and control diabetes

Anthropologists have begun to publish ethnographic accounts of policy-making, but few have studied medical or health matters, despite broad acceptance in anthropology that "biopower" permeates contemporary societies. This article presents some findings from an ethnographic study of how diabetes gained recognition as a pressing public health problem in Canada. It underlines the importance of statistics for constituting power within and across nation states. Statistics imbricate people and things distributed across vast distances, but they still need to be generated and invoked by individuals to engender effects--as illustrated in this article by the contributions of researchers, aboriginal leaders, and an American actress, Mary Tyler Moore--in this case, the development of Canadian government policies justified in the name of averting and controlling diabetes. To make sense of these findings, subtle differences between two concepts coined by Michel Foucault, "biopower" and "governmentality," seem significant.     

Boas, Foucault, and the "Native Anthropologist": Notes toward a Neo-Boasian Anthropology

This article proposes the possibility of a neo-Boasian anthropology conceived at the intersection of Foucauldian genealogy, Boasian historicism, and the epistemic rethinking of the discipline's Self/Other binary. Shifting from a perspective of posing the ethnographic object as Other toward a Boasian conception of the past as the principal site of inquiry, the piece thus advocates an anthropological project grounded in the history of the present. This conception, it is argued, can overcome several of the dilemmas currently facing the discipline, the awkward status of "native anthropology" foremost among them.     

Beyond Malinowski and After Writing Culture: On the Future of Cultural Anthropology and the Predicament of Ethnography

Following out certain implications of the 1980s Writing Culture critique, this paper envisions a future for anthropology that remains focused on innovations in the ethnographic research process. A sense of change in the world, conceived in the 1980s as postmodernity and now widely discussed as globalisation, suggests the need for an alternative paradigm of ethnographic practice, different in significant ways from that which shaped social‐cultural anthropology over the previous eighty years. Based on working through the implications for the norms and forms of both fieldwork and ethnographic writing of the multi‐sited design of many current research projects, this paper outlines such an alternative paradigm. Further, the paper argues that the explicit disciplinary dynamic driving such innovation in ethnography is, in contrast to the so‐called crisis of representation of the 1980s, a more urgent crisis of reception for anthropology.     

The Law of the Land: A Review Article

This is a review article of the book Native Title Corporations: A Legal and Anthropological Analysis from the point of view of anthropology. I begin by highlighting the development of Anglo‐Australian social anthropology from such figures as Radcliffe‐Brown and Fortes, who were heavily influenced by regulatory and normative models from the domain of legal and judicial scholarship and speculate on the contemporary conditions by which this original social anthropological metaphor has apparently achieved a new literalisation. I criticise the legalistic appropriation of anthropological and ethnographic methodology that this book makes explicit, and finally, I express scepticism for the future success of the prescribed body corporate, as described in the Native Title Act (1993), as a model for the possession, transmission and elaboration of indigenous rights to country.     

Times of debt: heterochrony and bank loans in rural Mongolia

Recent scholarship in economic anthropology examines how the intersection of multiple forms of temporality shapes the time of debt relations. This article builds on and refines these approaches by analysing debt as a social relation that ‘folds’ the time of other relations within itself. It does so through deploying the concept of the ‘fold’ drawn from continental philosophy and anthropological literature on personhood. This approach provides a novel way of illuminating and reflecting upon a temporal tension at the heart of debt relations, in which the timely performance of debtor-creditor relations is contingent on the harnessing of temporalities formally outside their scope. This argument is made in relation to an ethnographic study of malchny zeel (the ‘herder's loan’) issued by commercial banks in a pastoral region of Mongolia.     

Intentionality and Expertise: Learning from Observations of Children at Play in Multilingual, Multicultural Contexts

This article draws from three ethnographic studies of children playing sociodramatically in multilingual, multicultural contexts. Countering a deficit perspective that focuses on what children from nondominant cultures do not know, we use the concept of syncretism to illuminate children's expertise and intentionality as they blend knowledge from multiple worlds to reinvent cultural practices and create new spaces for learning. Findings encourage educators to learn from the syncretic nature of children's teaching and learning through play.