Critical Design Ethnography: Designing for Change

This article describes critical design ethnography, an ethnographic process involving participatory design work aimed at transforming a local context while producing an instructional design that can be used in multiple contexts. Here, we reflect on the opportunities and challenges that emerged as we built local critiques then reified them into a designed artifact that has been implemented in classrooms all over the world.     

Stone Men of Malekula on Malakula: An Ethnography of an Ethnography

This article examines the resonances of the voluminous ethnography, ‘Stone Men of Malekula’ (SMM) in contemporary Vanuatu. Anthropological research is politically charged in Vanuatu, in part because of how the weighty materiality of archival forms exercise significant local authority. However, alongside respect for this ‘evidential’ material is a healthy scepticism of anthropological authority. SMM, written by the maverick anthropologist John Layard in 1942 (based on fieldwork in 1914–15), has returned to Vanuatu in many guises over the years. It is used as formal evidence in land disputes and as a bone of contention within competing claims. Tracing the ways in which culture is written, read and materialized, exposes the paradoxes of knowledge and politics not only within anthropological critique but in Vanuatu villages.     

Ethnomusicology: From Ethnography to Cultural Studies

Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India . Peter Manuel
The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey . Martin Stokes
Moving Away from Silence: Music of the Peruvian Altiplano and the Experience of Urban Migration . Thomas Turino     

An Ethnography of Dementia

Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry - The experiences of dementia sufferers have rarely been examined in sociological literature. This article seeks to describe the experiences of one Alzheimer's...     

Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology

Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology . Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2004. 496 pp.     

Anthropology and Cultural Studies: Difference,Ethnography and Theory

This paper critiques the theorisation of culture as difference that dominates Australian cultural studies and cultural anthropology. It argues that a perspective on culture that gets beyond current preoccupations with difference has more to be said for it than practitioners in either discipline have hitherto recognised. Ethnography has long been recognised as crucial to the study of culture—which suggests that we might best appreciate what it is that is being ignored and neglected (not to say demeaned) in contemporary studies of culture if we turn our attention to the way we study it. This paper reconsiders what we mean by the assertion that ethnography constitutes an experiential mode of knowledge which constitutes the most sustained and rigorous application of the principle of verstehen available. In contesting the stress on difference that now dominates the study of culture, a case is made for cultures conceived of as ensembles of mystery and meaning. Whether born into a culture or researching it, as observers and participants we struggle to make sense of what the world is about. As ethnographers, we seek to do this empathically; this paper argues that to do it effectively we must fashion a sensibility adequate to it. An appreciation of the significance of sensibility, it is suggested, provides a much needed alternative to the reduction of culture to difference.     

Sentient Beings and Wildlife Resources: Inuit,Beluga Whales and Management Regimes in the Canadian Arctic

Beluga whale hunting is one of the most social subsistence hunting activities to take place in the Canadian Arctic. Through the harvest, distribution and consumption of beluga whales, Inuit identity and social relationships are affirmed. The whale-hunting complex is influenced by beliefs that beluga whales are sentient beings who inhabit a shared social space with humans. Yet, across the region beluga whales are perceived by wildlife managers as scarce resources and as such require protection through the imposition of management plans. There is currently no management of whales on the west coast of Hudson Bay, in Nunavut. In 2002, Inuit there were requested to sell part of their whale harvest to Inuit in Nunavik, northern Quebec, where hunting quotas exist. The outcome of this event was concern in Nunavut for the future of the whale hunt, and a deepening sense of powerlessness in Nunavik due to the management of the whale harvest.

Active viewing: An Ethnography of the Indian film audience

Audiences of popular Hindi cinema¹ present a strategic site for study of the active audience as they adopt a viewing style that is participatory and interactive. In cinema theaters viewers applaud and whistle loudly, sing along with the soundtrack, shout out comments and throw coins at the screen. Viewers transform the meaning of the film and shape the collective experience of viewing. Plural audiences encounter varying interpretations of the film arising from a diversity of world views and from life‐worlds different from their own. Rather than homogenising viewers, mass produced Hindi films appear to differentiate them. The intersubjectivity of the viewing experience becomes an achievement, rather than a taken‐for‐granted. The film is seen to become a resource both for the formation of community and for the generation of conflict and the theater, a public forum and arena for situated culture wars.     

The Trading Crowd: An Ethnography of the Shanghai Stock Market

The Trading Crowd: An Ethnography of the Shanghai Stock Market. Ellen Hertz. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 238 pp.     

Japanese Workers in Protest: An Ethnography of Consciousness and Experience

Japanese Workers in Protest: An Ethnography of Consciousness and Experience. Christena L. Turner. Berkeley. University of California Press, 1995. 268 pp.