Ethnographic boundaries: Culture,class, and sexuality in Tokyo

For those engaged in participant-observation, the first few months in the field are usually extremely difficult. By taking a reflexive turn, however, the events recorded during entrée are invaluable for revealing the social and cultural dimensions of the new life a researcher creates for him or herself. The following is an account of one researcher's attempt to enter a community in contemporary Tokyo. This account reveals the boundaries of culture, class and sexuality between the researcher and the community. The complex set of highly personal ramifications resulting from crossing those boundaries are also discussed.Many people have read various versions of this paper, but I would especially like to thank the following for taking the time to provide me with thought provoking comments: Beverly Eliasoph, Steven Brint, Deborah Davis-Friedmann, Ezra Vogel, Robert J. Smith, Shulamit Reinharz, and Lee Rainwater. I am especially indebted to Dorinne Kondo, whose insights and warm support proved to be invaluable. Of course, all of the usual disclaimers apply.     

The Pitfalls and Potential of Participant-Observation: Ethnographic Enquiry in Volunteering

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Ethical issues of ethnographic research are long-debated, but the context of volunteering and voluntary organisations...     

Father's Blessing: Ethnographic Drama,Poetry, and Prose

This article consists of ethnographic drama, poetry, and prose. Following interpretivist traditions focusing on how individuals make sense of and make meaning from their lived experience, the author, a heterosexual woman, travels with a gay male friend/participant to visit his estranged father, a retired Air Force pilot and elder in the Mormon Church. The work attempts to show the dialogic construction, negotiation, and transformation of identities and relationships.     

Censoring the Sexual Self: Reflections from an Ethnographic Study of Gay Filipinos on Mobile Dating Apps in Manila

This paper reflects upon Evelyn Blackwood's 1995 ‘Falling in Love with An-Other Lesbian’ essay on love and desire during fieldwork research as it intersects with the figure of the ‘virtual anthropologist’ in Kath Weston's 1997 essay of the same name. My multiple subjectivities (specifically those nativised) enabled and restricted what I considered bonds and differences between me and others during ethnographic research among gay Filipino men using mobile dating apps. I revisit an experience from four weeks of preliminary data collection between May and June 2015 in Manila, Philippines, where I decided not to include a sexual encounter with a research participant named Wesley. Moving forward with my study, my reflections on censoring sexual encounters with research participants helped me to acknowledge several sources of moral anxieties and ethical considerations that influence how this specific testimony took its shape and to consider how to construct and apply a malleable ethic of honesty for current and future projects especially when intimacies themselves are the focus.     

Gendering the Research Self: Social Practice and Corporeal Multiplicity in the Writing of Organizational Research

This article examines the problems inherent in taking a reflexively gendered position in writing research accounts. Such socially constructed accounts typically require researchers to do one of two things: to suppress the feminine and write implicitly as male, or to adopt a textual position as ‘woman’ that fails to do justice to the complex and unstable multiplicity that underpins the research self. It is argued that this shifting multiplicity is stabilized by the relationship between self and research text being corporeally grounded and gendered in practice. Three possible approaches to gender are considered: the discursive/textual approach (as developed by Foucault); the performance/social practice approach (as developed by Judith Butler) and the corporeal multiplicity approach (as developed by Elizabeth Grosz and Dorothea Olkowski). The article concludes by suggesting a tripartite approach to writing self‐multiplicity in research to extend the possibilities opened up by the social practice approach: re‐citing (redeploying discursive resources in intertextuality); re‐siting (changing the positioning of the self in power relations by reinscribing) and re‐sighting (opening up new, virtual visions of possibility).     

The Authenticity of Self: Conceptualization,Personal Experience,and Practice

Scholars across the social sciences often use the concept of authenticity to refer to such different things as sincerity, truthfulness, originality, and the feeling and practice of being true to one's self or others. Whereas the concept of authenticity refers to all of these things, a careful employment of this concept requires a clear understanding of it. By reviewing theory and empirical research on authenticity, we aim at a more precise conceptualization of authenticity. We argue that authenticity is about being true to one's self. When one is true to one's self, one experiences authenticity. This conceptualization views authenticity as a self‐reflective and emotional experience. In order to understand authenticity, a researcher must then take into consideration at least two things: people's emotional experiences of being true or untrue to one's self and people's ideas about what their true self is.     

Inferences About Sexual Orientation: The Roles of Stereotypes,Faces, and The Gaydar Myth

In the present work, we investigated the pop cultural idea that people have a sixth sense, called “gaydar,” to detect who is gay. We propose that “gaydar” is an alternate label for using stereotypes to infer orientation (e.g., inferring that fashionable men are gay). Another account, however, argues that people possess a facial perception process that enables them to identify sexual orientation from facial structure. We report five experiments testing these accounts. Participants made gay-or-straight judgments about fictional targets that were constructed using experimentally manipulated stereotypic cues and real gay/straight people's face cues. These studies revealed that orientation is not visible from the face—purportedly “face-based” gaydar arises from a third-variable confound. People do, however, readily infer orientation from stereotypic attributes (e.g., fashion, career). Furthermore, the folk concept of gaydar serves as a legitimizing myth: Compared to a control group, people stereotyped more often when led to believe in gaydar, whereas people stereotyped less when told gaydar is an alternate label for stereotyping. Discussion focuses on the implications of the gaydar myth and why, contrary to some prior claims, stereotyping is highly unlikely to result in accurate judgments about orientation.     

Maternal Reminiscing Style and Children’s Developing Understanding of Self and Emotion

Individual differences in how mothers structure reminiscing about shared past experiences with their preschool children are related to children’s developing autobiographical memory skills and understanding of self and emotion. More specifically, mothers who engage in highly elaborative reminiscing have children who come to tell more coherent and emotionally expressive autobiographical narratives, and these children also show better understanding of self and are better able to regulate emotion than children of less elaborative mothers. This body of research is reviewed and relations between maternal reminiscing style and children’s developing self and emotional understanding are explicated. This paper was written while the first author was a senior fellow in the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion at Emory University, sponsored by a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts. The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Pew Charitable trusts.     

The Shaping of the Self: Patterns and Pathways in Bowlby,Kohut, and Bowen

This article offers a heuristic framework that links several key aspects of the psychological models of John Bowlby, Heinz Kohut, and Murray Bowen, generating insight into an underlying set of isomorphic patterns in the shaping and reshaping of the self. This theoretical matrix of interlocking perspectives can facilitate our understanding of the formation – and promote the transformation – of selves as they engage within their familial and social worlds. The first section introduces some of these three authors’ key theoretical and therapeutic contributions and provides our rationale for linking some of their ideas and intervention strategies. The second section offers a brief review of earlier attempts at partial integration of these theories and describes the distinctiveness of our proposal. The third section outlines our proposed heuristic framework, which identifies some of the underlying structural similarities in the formation of the self, described in different ways and with varying emphases by these three scholars. Finally, we briefly explore some of the implications of the model for producing clinical insights into distinctive pathways for the transformation of the self.     

The Myth of Management: Direction and Failure in Contemporary Organizations

Life in organizations and society appears tomany social commentators as increasingly more demandingand insensitive to the needs of people. In this paper,the Myth of Management is explored to investigate some of the key beliefs and images throughwhich contemporary management is practiced. Myth, inthis context, is understood as consisting of beliefs andvalues which serves to provide meaning for human action. The adoption of a particular mythicframe is argued to direct the management oforganizations to particular ends and purposes. Centralto a Myth of Management are the doctrines of SocialDarwinism and Function Rationality, and these are brieflyevaluated in their impact on organizational life. Anarchetypal approach, with particular reference to thearchetype of the hero, is employed to explore the depth dimensions which underpin the formulationand exercise of the Myth of Management. The conclusionreached is that the myth of management exacts a criticalcost on people and society which can only be addressed through a reflectiveconsciousness.     

Poverty,Consent, and Choice in Early Marriage: Ethnographic Perspectives from Urban Tanzania

The assumed inability of adolescents to voluntarily consent to marriage is a key definition of child marriage. Using ethnography, this study approaches consent, self-determination, and fulfillment as dependent on the ability to make choices, not only between actual alternatives but also between perceived alternatives. In contexts of severe poverty, more attention is needed to the lack of viable alternatives open to families, and their motives in this context. In this study, 171 persons were interviewed in two majority-Muslim neighborhoods in Dar es Salaam. Some girls reported wanting to marry early, since poverty forces them to become adults capable of supporting themselves at roughly age 15–16, regardless of the personal wishes of their parents or guardians. Prior research tends to assume that early marriage prevents girls from continuing their education. This study suggests that educational opportunities are often closed off to girls before marriage. Policy recommendations given here are that organizations can more effectively address early marriage by (1) shifting the focus from legislation to urban poverty alleviation, (2) creating more employment opportunities for the poorest women in the city, (3) campaigning for more gender-equal attitudes in the informal employment sector, and (4) reducing financial costs of secondary schooling for adolescents.     

Deconstructing Categories: The Exposure of Silent Racism

Although racism remains an enduring social problem in the United States, few white people see themselves as racist. In an effort to study this paradox, the research discussed here explores racism among those in the “not racist” category. Eight focus groups were conducted in which twenty‐five well‐meaning white women talked openly about racism; subsequently, the women kept journals to record their thoughts on racism. Findings indicate that silent racism pervades the “not racist” category. “Silent racism” refers to negative thoughts and attitudes regarding African Americans and other people of color on the part of white people, including those who see themselves and are generally seen by others as not racist. An apparent implication of silent racism inhabiting the “not racist” category is that the historical construction racist/not racist is no longer meaningful. Moreover, data show that the “not racist” category itself produces latent effects that serve to maintain the racial status quo. I propose replacing the oppositional either/or categories with a continuum that accurately reflects racism in the United States today.     

Ethnographic Cartographies: Social Movements,Alternative Media and the Spaces of Networks

Research on social movement networks has been defined by an emphasis on structural determinism and quantitative methodologies, and has often overlooked the spatial dimension of networking practices. This article argues that scholars have much to gain if (1) they move beyond the understanding of networks as organisational and communication structures, and analyse them as everyday social processes of human negotiation and construction, and (2) they pay attention to how networks between different organisations create multiple and overlapping spaces of action and meaning that define the everyday contexts of social movements. Drawing on ethnographic research within the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, this article explores the everyday dimension of political and communication networks. It shows that everyday networking practices are embedded in processes of identification and meaning construction, and are defined by a politics of inclusion and exclusion; introducing the concept of ethnographic cartography, it demonstrates that social movement networks are incorporated into everyday practices and narratives of place-making.