“These Are Kids’ Lives!”: Dilemmas and Adaptations of Juvenile Aftercare Workers

Despite a growing literature on best practices, the details of how aftercare workers help young people transition into the community after incarceration remain unexplored. This ethnographic study examines the daily practices of direct care workers within a large juvenile aftercare organization, focusing on the dilemmas that they face as street level bureaucrats. Although aftercare workers face tremendous organizational constraints, they do not always exhibit the bureaucratic responses that some scholars describe. Using care work and public administration theory as a lens, we explore how juvenile aftercare workers draw upon intrinsic motivation to provide meaningful services for returning youth.     

Restoring the justified order: Emotions,Injustice, and the role of culture

Barrington Moore's formulation: why people so often put up with being the victim of their societies and why at other times they become very angry and try with passion and forcefulness to do something about their situation, provides the general problematic. Attention is paid to two societies, the Chewong and Semai Senoi of peninsular Malaysia, where putative (and negative) experiences of injustice are (arguably) transformed by culturally provided beliefs. The outcome is that emotional responses become part of the order of how things should be. Rather than expressing anger and attempting to restore the just order (where the bad are punished), those who have been wronged by being neglected in the sharing process are exposed to the threat of punishment. Fear (an aspect of the justified order), not anger, is the order of the day. Analysis draws on both Western psychological theory and indigenous emotion talk, and concludes with some broader, comparative issues.     

从他的帐篷的门口:田野工作者与审讯者

埃文思-普理查德的《努尔人》是最重要的科学的民族志代表作之一。埃马纽埃尔·勒华拉杜里在《蒙塔尤》中借用民族志文体,把14世纪的一个法国社区的宗教裁判所对农民的审讯记录转换成对那个时期法国南部乡村生活的纪录片式的叙述。通过对《蒙塔尤》和《努尔人》这两部民族志著作的细读和比照,可以发现其中包含着同样的权威与表述的关系模式,从而揭示出一直习以为常的人类学话语实践所隐含的权力和修辞问题。区分撰写著作的个人、行文中的叙述者的角色、行文中田野调查者的角色,对于探索权力与知识的相互影响颇有益处。     

Child sexual victimisation: ethnographic stories of stranger and acquaintance grooming

Abstract

In recent years research into child sexual offending has highlighted “grooming” as an important part of the offence chain. Topics that have come to dominate the research agenda have focused on the offenders' perspectives, psychological models of offending behaviour and how child sex offenders (CSOs) are managed and treated in local communities (for example through Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements). Whilst these studies are extremely important, one area that has suffered from a lack of research and visible debate is how victims, their families and local communities experience grooming in situ and on a day-to-day basis. Using observational, interview and document data collected from an ethnography of a south-east coast community that houses a number of CSOs, this article examines the strategies used by strangers and acquaintances when grooming the local environment, significant others and children. Importantly, these grooming experiences are articulated from the perspective of the victims and their families. In doing so, the article discusses the implications that these experiences have for understanding offender–victim behaviours.     

Whiteness and shades of grey: erasure,amnesia and the ethnography of Zimbabwe's whites

A growing number of scholarly studies have been published about Zimbabwe's white population, especially since the highly publicised state-driven land takeovers which began in 2000. Much as these studies have produced useful insights into the histories, attitudes, experiences and lives of white Zimbabweans, aspects of these representations also raise important questions and concerns. Looking critically, particularly at recent ethnographic works on white Zimbabweans by anthropologists, this review essay discusses some of the social and historical amnesia and certain erasures apparent in these works. These have often produced homogenised and essentialised, or unfair, representations of white Zimbabweans. This essay suggests that an uncritical use and perpetuation of certain myths and discourses that have powerfully come to the fore in the political, social and economic crisis of the last 15 years has led to the problems evident with these ethnographies.