The poetics of race in 1890s Ireland: an ethnography of the Aran Islands

By the end of the nineteenth century the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland had become sites of both cultural and scientific attention. Ashley examines how an ethnographical survey of the islands, based on the scientific claims of craniometry and anthropometry, engaged with and was influenced by the romantic traditions of writing about Aran. He suggests ways in which the work of the ethnographers, Haddon and Browne, should be seen as a development of the poetics of the islands, and placed alongside the literary work of Samuel Ferguson or J. M. Synge, rather than in opposition to them.     

Evaluation of Practice Frameworks for Social Work with Children and Families: Exploring the Challenges

Implementing a practice framework with a clear theoretical and practical approach to working with children and families seems a self-evident way to improve practice, but there is a paucity of evaluative research about their impact on outcomes for children and families. One reason for this lack of research may be that it is challenging. In this article, these challenges are explored in relation to fidelity, impact, attribution, and the positioning of the researcher. To generate ideas about how to conduct evaluative research, research about solution-based casework is explored, with additional insights from research about other frameworks.     

‘The Right to Live with Dignity’: Politicising Experiences of Precarity through ‘Popular Economy’ in Argentina

This article takes an ethnographic perspective to analyse the ways in which social movements in Buenos Aires, Argentina, politicise experiences of precarity through the creation of popular economy initiatives. I argue that we cannot understand these organising processes exclusively in relation to the pursuit of ‘formalisation’ or the improvement of working conditions. In the context of new forms of State intervention, the notions of ‘rights’—to labour and to the city—that these movements put forward, express ways of envisioning full inclusion in society that encompass notions of worthiness and ‘dignified life’, forged over the course of grassroots political action.     

‘Genre Blurring’ and Public Administration: What Can We Learn from Ethnography?

This article seeks to broaden the craft of public administration by ‘blurring genres’. First, I explain the phrase ‘blurring genres’. Second, I provide some examples of early work in administrative ethnography. Third, I compare this early, modernist‐empiricist ethnography with interpretive ethnography, suggesting researchers confront three choices: naturalism vs. anti‐naturalism; intensive vs. hit‐and‐run fieldwork; and generalisation vs. local knowledge. After this general discussion, and fourth, I discuss the more prosaic issues that confront anyone seeking to use ethnography to study public administration and look at fieldwork roles, relevance, time, evidence and fieldwork relationships. Fifth, I describe and illustrate the several tools students of public administration can use as well as observation and interviews; namely, focus groups, para‐ethnography, visual ethnography, and storytelling. Finally, I conclude that ethnographic fieldwork provides texture, depth and nuance, and lets interviewees explain the meaning of their actions. It is an indispensable tool and a graphic example of how to enrich public administration by drawing on the theories and methods of the humanities.     

Fieldwork in a conflicted society: A contemporary researcher's ethical dilemma

Abstract

Ethnographers in Kenya have, in the past, grappled with methodological concerns in fieldwork. This is evidenced in the rich literature on methods of data collection, data analysis and dissemination. The discourses have been based on the assumptions that fieldworkers in oral literature are guided by a code of ethics in their fieldwork. This article argues that a number of folklore researchers operate in an ethical void and are unprepared in mitigating various ethical dilemmas that they encounter before, during and after fieldwork. Relying heavily on the personal experiences of the writer, this article discusses dilemmas a fieldworker faces when conducting research in a violence-prone environment, and the ethical considerations thereof.     

近20年来台湾少数民族题材文学中的历史叙事研究

本文在探讨近20年来台湾少数民族题材文学创作风貌的基础上,发掘从台湾少数民族主体这一相对边缘视角言说历史的再现与批判潜能,并从知识社会学的角度考察相关文学创作与诠释所折射出的台湾政治文化变迁。台湾少数民族与非台湾少数民族作家在处理台湾少数民族题材时的切入视角与美学策略有显著差异：台湾少数民族作家致力于追溯被汉文化入侵、改造和收编的历史,反思部落文化在现代文明冲击下的溃败命运,并通过召唤部落文化传统来重建族群认同;非台湾少数民族作家侧重于以历史事件为扭结呈现创伤记忆,一方面流露出某种赎罪心理,另一方面也有淡化历史上台湾少数民族与汉民族冲突的倾向,以共构入史的策略将台湾少数民族的悲情转化为“台湾人”的悲情。本文认为,对台湾少数民族文学的分析应与对20世纪90年代以来多元文化论的兴起与本土化论述策略转型的社会背景的考察相结合,才能还原台湾少数民族议题在当代台湾的兴起与质变过程,进而把握近20年来文学领域对台湾少数民族题材的关注所呈现的历史眼光与意识形态心理变迁轨迹。     

Fiction and reality of mobility in Africa

This article draws on rich ethnographies and ethnographic fiction depicting mobile Africans and their relationships to the places and people they encounter to argue that mobility is more appropriately studied as an emotional, relational and social phenomenon as reflected in the complexities, contradictions and messiness of the everyday realities of encounters informed by physical and social mobility. The current dominant approach to studying and relating to mobile Africans is problematic. Nationals, citizens and locals in communities targeted by African mobility are instinctively expected to close ranks and fight off the influx of barbarians who do not quite belong and must be ‘exorcised’ so that ‘insiders’ do not lose out to this particular breed of ‘strangers’, ‘outsiders’ or ‘demons’, perceived to bode little but inconvenience and savagery. If and when allowed in, emphasis is on the needs, priorities and convenience of their reluctant hosts, who tend to go for the wealthy, the highly professionally skilled, the culturally bleached and Hottentot Venuses of the academy, even at the risk of accusations of capital flight and brain drain. The article demonstrates how to marry ethnography and fiction to study African mobility not only as a ‘collection of logical bones and flesh’ but also as ‘emotional beings’. It calls for conceptual flexibility and ethnographic empirical substantiation, and challenges social scientists to look beyond academic sources for ethnographies and accounts of how a deep, flexible and nuanced understanding of mobility and interconnections in Africa play out in different communities, states and regions of a world permanently on the move.     

民族志的科学范式的奠定及其反思

一般认为,民族志的科学范式是由马林诺斯基出版于1922年的民族志代表作《西太平洋的航海者》所奠定的,它体现了功能主义人类学/科学人类学对田野作业、理论或主题、民族志三要素的结合。近年来进行学科反思的学者指出,过于强调马林诺斯基的贡献其实抹煞了民族志方法早在1922年以前的一个时期就逐渐发展起来的事实;更重要地,对马林诺斯基的文本和学术背景的研究表明,他所谓的"科学"民族志既包含了诗学也包含了政治成分。     

Making the ‘empowered woman’: exploring contradictions in gender and development programming in Kyrgyzstan

This article examines the complexities of women’s increasing participation in international development programming for gender equality. Taking a specific setting in rural Kyrgyzstan where one such project has been operating, the researchers discover adverse effects on the local women’s livelihoods, status and health. Women’s contradictions are attributed to the women’s own failures and lacks, creating confusion and frustration among them. Adopting Smith’s institutional-ethnography approach, we explicate and map out the hidden processes which must be held accountable for these reactionary outcomes, taking women’s experiences as entry points to inquiry. We find that the reactionary effects are not accidental but organized, powerfully, systematically but invisibly, by taken-for-granted institutional practices serving the purposes of global development institutions, where women are seen as instruments of global economic growth. The analysis provokes critical discussion of ‘how’ and ‘what’ it takes to transform Central Asian women into ‘empowered’ people.     

管窥女性主义人类学及其对教育研究的启示

社会性别一直是西方传统人类学的一个重要领域 ,伴随着女性主义的发展 ,女性主义人类学在2 0世纪 6 0— 70年代发展成为人类学的一门分支学科 ,并且形成了其丰富的研究领域 ;我国的女性主义人类学研究刚刚起步 ,处于萌芽阶段 ,但是其独特的研究领域和方法将对教育研究具有重要的启示意义。