Ethnographic Methods

For migrant urban ethnographers who study their city of settlement, ethnography may have a double meaning, serving not only as an approach to understanding a city academically but also a pathway to connecting with a community more broadly and personally, a type of personal place making. This chapter uses the experiences of the author – an American working and living in Shanghai and Tokyo for over 20 years – to show how his evolving practice of the ethnography of the city relates to a slow process of coming to live purposefully in it. The chapter also details a migrant’s perspective on the ethnography of sexuality, nightlife and foodways in urban Asia. The insider-outsider relationship that the migrant ethnographer brings to the city may be viewed as both burden and asset. As transnational migrants, migrant ethnographers can perform as institutional mediaries who connect researchers across borders and as educational facilitators who help migrant students discover means of associating with an unfamiliar environment. In short, ethnography may be a way of living as well as learning.

This project is an investigation into the experience of intangible phenomena in a built space, and if that experience, or the phenomena themselves, have an effect on creativity and creative motivation. It explores what might constitute such phenomena and how they might be experienced. In describing the phenomena, and the research process, reference is made to a number of theoretical concepts from philosophy, architecture, visual arts, theatrical production and social science. The theory is combined with ethnographic and sensorial data gathered from a specific site in Melbourne’s north-west – an Edwardian school building that has been re-purposed into creative arts studios and community workshop spaces – to describe the phenomena in a built space used for creative purposes. The final chapter discusses some implications and applications for this study within contemporary community cultural development practice.

Данная статья - об этнофильме «По берегам и островам Баренцева моря» (1929) одного из первопроходцев этнографического кино, профессионального исследователя Л. Л. Капицы как многослойном визуально-антропологическом документе.

This article, based on textual and visual materials, is intended to introduce into the scientific circulation information about the ethnofilm «On the coast and islands of the Barents Sea» (1929) of one of the pioneers of ethnographic cinema, professional researcher L.L. Kapitsa as a multi-layered visual anthropological document.

This is an account of bacterial flagellar motors and the social labor they perform. Since Karl Marx, labor studies has asserted that the social character of labor is distinctive to humans, in contrast to "natural" activities of nonhumans. Flagellar motors, though, produce their social labor in specific cultures of agar cultivated on petri dishes. Building off this cultural basis for bacterial social activity, I take a recursive approach here, articulating a series of iterations of key terms--"motor," "labor," and "culture"--scaling their connotations between the two poles, human and bacterial. My aim is to scale down social analysis (as we know it with humans) to apply it to bacteria, while scaling up biologists' use of culture so it models a form of analysis applicable by cultural anthropologists. The basic technique here involves recursively orienting the core terms to a different set of connotations by loosening their association with a human referent, creating a feedback loop through which the results can be brought back to transform the starting point of cultural analysis assumed by anthropologists. This entails loosening both culture and labor from an equation with what makes humans unique; disrupting the parallel association of nonhumans with nature allows us, then, to recognize manifold forms of sociality and laboring collectives beyond the human.

The article reflects on contemporary theatre’s representational practice of victimisation, occasionally reserved for refugees and previously immigrants, and examines the ethical and political implications entailed in these practices. It argues that the representation of a vulnerable, suffering ‘other’ depoliticizes the refugee issue, confining refugees to a disempowered category that depends on our empathy and support. Without underrating the essential role of theatre – and the arts in general – to highlight and denounce instances of injustice, discrimination or violence, this article poses the question whether a victimhood-oriented repertoire manages to go beyond short-lived compassion. How can contemporary theatre produce an aesthetic of critical, politicized encounter, while simultaneously acknowledging the agency, expertise and multifaceted identities of people with a refugee experience? The article proposes a documentary theatre approach that can challenge the aforementioned representational patterns of vulnerability and trauma by turning the stage into a self-reflective, inclusive space for critical creativity and re-invented identity placements. The proposed approach is informed by the ethical inquiries and methodological tools of contemporary ethnographic practice. It was developed in the workshop series From Field to Stage: Dramaturgies of the Other, which explores the new directions that the encounter of documentary theatre with ethnography opens in regard to the dramatisation of the ‘other’.

This  article  develops  the  notion  of  polyphonic  silence  as  a  means  for 
thinking  through  the  ethical  and  political  ramifications  of ethnographically encountering and writing about silenced violent pasts. To do so, it analyses and  contrasts  the  silence  surrounding  two  periods  of  extreme  violence in  northern  Uganda:  1)  the  northern  Ugandan  war  (1986–2006),  which is  contemporarily  often  shrouded  by  silence,  and  2)  the  early  decades  of  colonial and missionary expansion, which the Catholic Church silences in its commemoration of the death of two Acholi catechists in 1918. Employing the notion of polyphony, the article describes how neither of these silences is a mere absence of narration. Instead, polyphonic silences consist of multiple, at  times  discordant  and contradictory  sounds,  and  cannot  be  consigned  to  single-cause explanations  such  as  ‘trauma’  or  ‘recovery’.  Reflecting  on my own experience of writing about and thereby amplifying such silences, I show how writing can serve either to shield or break silence. The choice between  these  modes  of  amplification  calls  for  reflection  on  the  temporal distance of silence, of the relations of power amid which silence is woven, and of the researchers’ ethical commitments and normative preconceptions.

Séptimo capítulo de la tesis “Desencajes y Bricolajes de la Protección Social: Las Familias Transnacionales Bolivianas en Barcelona y São Paulo”. Este capítulo tuvo como objetivo presentar las principales decisiones, estrategias e instrumentos que marcaron el desarrollo del estudio empírico. De modo que se plantearon las cuestiones que, una vez respondidas, permiten situar los resultados de la etnografía multisituada discutidos en la parte III de esta tesis. La construcción de un modelo interpretativo y de estrategias metodológicas fue atravesada por tres desafíos vinculados a algunas de las características que marcan la protección social transnacional: su dinamismo espacial y temporal; la relevancia de la agencia de actores y la implicación de fenómenos de naturalezas sociales diferenciadas; y la amplitud y diversidad de las prácticas abarcadas. En combinación con estas exigencias propias del objeto en análisis, están los principios que guiaron la propuesta interpretativa hacia un transnacionalismo metodológico, tal como se presentó en el capítulo 6.

Presentation to Chinese graduate students from Taiwan and PRC at the NTHU Anthropology Writing Camp, Summer 2018. Analyzes books in English by Fei Hsiao-Tong, Huang Shu-Min and Liu Shao-Hua using analytic frameworks proposed by Jan Van Maanen and Clifford Geertz.

The encounter between the interdisciplinary field of comic book geographies (Dittmer, 2010; 2014) and the recent ‘creative turn’ (Madge, 2014) suggests that we think about comics not only as finished stories, that enable geographers to encounter migrants’ narratives in an apparently more accessible form, but also as storytelling practices with which to engage as creative methods of research, that can help us let migrants’ stories emerge.
In this paper I will focus on a creative practice in which I am involved in as both a cultural geographer and a comics author myself: with an urban sociologist, Adriano Cancellieri, I am currently curating the anthology Quartieri. Un viaggio al centro delle periferie italiane [Neighborhoods. A travel through Italian peripheries] (Cancellieri and Peterle, 2019) and composing one of the 5 short comics stories collected in it. These short stories will be set in 5 peripheral neighborhoods of 5 Italian cities (Padua, Bologna, Milan, Palermo and Rome), each of which faces issues concerning integration/migration; spatial/social marginality; the perception/narration of identity and of a sense of community. In particular, our short story on the ‘multi-ethnic neighborhood’ of Arcella, in the city of Padua, is a result of ethnographic accounts we collected during fieldwork, interviewing recent migrants and long-term residents, shopkeepers and private citizens, representatives of associations and resident committees. Through its creative composition practice, the comic book emerged as a ‘place of mediation’ between different cultural and geographical perspectives (Hawkins, 2015). Constantly unfolding in the confrontation between authors, stories, and the protagonists of the stories collected during fieldwork, comics build potential ‘spaces of encounter’ for disparate subjectivities and voices to emerge, meet and dialogue.

Throughout my fieldwork on the island of Trinidad, my interlocutors told me "don't study people" because it might lead one to "take on" the thoughts and feelings of others as a kind of weight. In this article I consider how this cautionary adage about the dangers of proximity reframes: 1) the act of studying others through ethnography and 2) Liberal understandings of the person and society. Within academia's critique of the modern West, proximity is generally assumed to be good, while individualism is considered a pernicious (and often-isolating) Western assumption. Shifting focus from binaries to entanglements, individuals to dividuals, distanced observation to vulnerability, or from informants to friends are ethically valued shifts. I suggest that the dangers of "studying people" at my field site in southern Trinidad question the limits of this framework and illustrate the importance of disentanglement for my interlocutors. My interlocutors saw individualism (manifested as stubborn recalcitrance to others' wishes) as a valued characteristic. Yet rather than assuming the individual as a pre-existing entity, my interlocutors saw individualism as a tenuous creation potentially threatened by "studying" others. Liberalism rests on the opposed (yet complementary) visions of the solitary individual and the togetherness of society, with the former figure at the center of Western modernity and the latter image allegedly found in traditional, premodern, or non-Western places. Yet, rather than illustrating Romantic notions of community, togetherness at my fieldsite was a key site of danger. In this way, the milieu of what I call "agonistic egalitarianism" leads me to question two common assumptions structuring ideas about personhood and ethnography: that individualism is a disaggregating Western project and that proximity to others necessarily leads to trust and understanding.

In this paper I lay out a brief overview of the salient critiques of participatory development, followed by a description of a community media program that gave me the opportunity me to be a part of some of its daily activities over a period of eight weeks in 2015. It presents a necessarily brief overview of the origins of participatory filmmaking and some preliminary connections with the form this kind of filmmaking has taken in contemporary India. I refer to conversations I had with co-founders, co-directors and employees of the organization to elicit social and historical connections with a strain of filmmaking particular to the participatory process, complicit in propagandist, anthropological and development activities through the course of a century. These conversations are at the heart of the paper, various strands of which I will situate in literature, broadly conceived, from media studies, documentary studies and development studies.