Gendered discipline,gendered space: an ethnographic approach to gendered violence in India

ABSTRACT

Why are Indian women’s lives at fatal risk in the public sphere, when Indian democracy is inclusive in terms of gender? Addressing this question reveals a methodological and theoretical blind spot in political science scholarship – a blind spot which results in the reproduction and legitimization of gender-blindness. To understand how and why political science reproduces and legitimizes gender-blindness I reflect on a particularly horrific case of sexual and gender-based violence, the 2012 Delhi gang rape. This analysis is significant because it provides insight into the difficulty of understanding gendered violence in political science and achieving gender equality within democratic societies.     

Community Narratives of Disaster Risk and Resilience: Implications for Government Policy

The paper explores how subjective risk perception intersects with government disaster management policy that is premised on an objective approach to risk assessment and mitigation. It finds that the presumption of objective risk management underpinning government policy is fundamentally at odds with community risk perceptions. This paper applies the techniques of ethnographic study to explore how communities understand and frame risk narratives. Using qualitative methods, the paper constructs the risk narratives of residents of Rocklea, Brisbane, following their experience with the 2011 Brisbane Flood. These risk narratives are considered in light of the Australian National Strategy for Disaster Resilience and recommendations are accordingly made for government disaster management policy.     

“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.     

Farming is easy,becoming Brazilian is hard: North American soy farmers’ social values of production,work and land in Soylandia

Since the late 1980s, North American farmers have been migrating to Brazil to produce soybeans and escape a general farm crisis in the United States. This paper analyzes their work, values, social relations and relations with the land in order to understand transnational farming and agrarian change from the perspective of transnational farmers. North Americans’ migration to Brazil and soy production in Brazil can inform our understanding of the mechanisms of the soy boom and unpack the relative significance of social values at play in intensive, technified and financialized agriculture. It also provides an evocative perspective of the soy boom as it engages with issues of transnationalism, crisis, migration and change in business and farming practices. Using ethnographic data, this paper explores the intimate and emerging realities of agrarian change by detailing four elements of transnational farming – migration, farm management, land use and work – through the narration of three farmers’ career histories. These cases address the transformation of social values of work, land and social relations through the processes of migration and agrarian change. Farmers’ work, it is found, emerges out of an entanglement of regulations, expertise, meanings of work and land, worker relations and the political economy of Brazil and the United States.     

Genetically modified soybeans,agrochemical exposure,and everyday forms of peasant collaboration in Argentina

Since the 2000s, both the production of genetically modified (GM) soybeans and the cases of agrochemical exposure have grown exponentially in Argentina. Drawing on ethnographic research, I analyze how peasant social movements understand the socio-environmental problems caused by the expansion of GM soybeans. I argue that at national, provincial, and local scales, the institutional recognition of peasant social movements and the performative actions of authorities discourage contentious collective action through subtle yet powerful mechanisms. The article contributes to social movement research and to the literature on peasant resistance by analyzing the cultural dynamics that constrain contention and shape processes of peasant collaboration, which are arguably as important as peasant resistance, although much less studied.     

Lacan, Science, and Law: Is the Ethnography of Scientism Psychoanalytic?

By adopting an idealized conception of the scientific enterprise, mirroring scientists' own self-conception, courts minimize the social and rhetorical aspects of science as ornamental, contingent, and eliminable. Lacan's reflections on science, and on the question of whether (or in what sense) psychoanalysis is scientific, parallel and enrich the efforts in science studies to show that the social and rhetorical aspects of science are co-productive, constitutive, and inevitable. Specifically, Lacan's identification of science as a discourse in denial of its subjectivity leads to a psychoanalytic re-orientation of ethnomethodology - an anthropological approach now favored in science studies. In the context of litigation involving scientific expertise, attorneys already assume, in their depositions and cross-examination, the role of ethnographers on foreign ground, but to the extent that the discourse of science replaces or dominates the discourse of law, legal ethnographers should also assume the role of analysts exploring the unconscious of science. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

写文化之争--人类学中的后现代话语及研究转向

20世纪 6 0年代以来兴起的后现代主义掀起了一股质疑权威和结构的思潮。在人类学领域 ,后现代主义的批评精神得到极大的扩展和延伸 ,与人类学内部业已存在的理论趋势一拍即合 ,推动形成了 2 0世纪 80年代一场声势浩大的“写文化”大论争。探讨人类学在“写文化”论争后所能扮演的理论和实践角色。其理论基调都带有明显的后现代的阐释和质疑 ,对整体论的质疑甚至抛弃的影响更是致命的。这种怀疑和批评体现了后现代主义对宏大叙事的批判 ,是后殖民主义对西方文化霸权的批判在人类学领域中的一种呼应     

Shining light into dark shadows of violence and learned helplessness: peace education in South Korean schools

The paper illustrates how a culture of violence is perpetuated and reproduced in South Korea through schooling and argues that peace education could help transform a culture of violence to a culture of peace. Critical ethnographic methods and a framework of peace education were applied to a sample of secondary schools in South Korea to argue that a disturbing culture of violence and learned helplessness were present; this comprises themes of direct and indirect violence through iljin (a group of students who are considered key perpetrators of school violence); a colonized false ideology and resistance to social justice. More positively, findings are also used to generate possibilities for pedagogical change based on peace education – an approach that proves useful both as an analytical frame for examining peace-violence relations in education and society and as an essential pedagogy for progressing towards peace in South Korean schools.     

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。