When the phone stops ringing: on the meanings and causes of disruptions in communication between Eritrean refugees and their families back home

In recent years, a growing number of studies have highlighted the role of technology in facilitating the circulation of the information and images that underpin migrants' journeys and aspirations. However, less attention has been paid to the social circumstances that obstruct these communication flows. Based on ethnographic work in Italy and Eritrea, in this article I show that, despite the technological possibilities that are available, contacts between Eritrean refugees in Italy and their families back home are often extremely limited. This is not the result of infrastructural under‐development, but of a bundle of social and family expectations that my informants perceive as overwhelming. My respondents in Italy maintained many transnational relationships with friends and acquaintances around the world, but generally not with their parents in Eritrea. While revisiting the literature on the moral economy of transnational families, I show that my informants' attempts to move onwards from Italy emerge from their wish to reconnect with their left‐behind kin. Only by reaching the final destination of their geographical and moral journey can they support their families back home. Only this can give them respect in the eyes of their community and restore transnational communication with their families.     

The ethics of deception in social research: A case study

Using data from a study on courtship through personal advertisements, I argue that Kai Erikson's classic case against disguised observation is flawed. Certain kinds of deception are necessary to gather certain data in certain settings. I placed bogus ads in a personal column to obtain and analyze responses. The data would have remained inaccessible—indeed, many of the responses would not have existed in the first place—without some measure of deception. While deception was used, no risk whatsoever was posed to respondents. I further argue that several of Erikson's criteria of risk do not separate ethical from empirical questions; informants use very different criteria in evaluating the risk of harm to them posed by social research that sociologists use. The question of exploitation is more complex, since it has to be weighed against how much of an effort my respondents made and hence, what it is exactly that I took from them. A “panel of judges” decided that most of my male (but not my female) respondents would not have gotten dates with my hypothetical ad placers, and that the research method I used was not especially unethical.     

Transparency and Unmasking Issues in Ethnographic Crime Research: Methodological Considerations

A transparency movement has begun urging researchers to publicize their data in order to ease replication and accountability. Some ethnographers have also begun arguing that researchers should unmask, or fully disclose, field sites and participant identities in order to replicate studies, verify accounts, and monitor social phenomena over time. However, for ethnographers studying violence and crime, full transparency or unmasking can get an ethnographer harmed. Thus, I broaden the unmasking/masking discussion by arguing for partial disclosures in dangerous research. To do so, I provide examples from my previous drug market ethnography and my ongoing gang research. I then propose safer ways to disclose field sites and participants, mainly through the following: semibiographical disclosure, where the ethnographer strategically omits some data in otherwise rich biographical portraits; through partial spatial disclosures, where the ethnographer reveals the field site's general area; and through invitational disclosure, where the ethnographer invites outsiders to meet participants in the field.     

Bureaucracy,Democracy and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Ex</Emphasis>clusion: Why Indigenous Knowledge Holders Have a Hard Time Being Taken Seriously

This paper explores inherent tensions between two democratic ideals: citizen representation and accountability of the state. Specifically, I argue that the method by which state officials make themselves accountable—through their creation of the appearance of transparency—results in the exclusion of alternative, non-scientific ways of knowing, including those that are gendered, local and indigenous, because these ways of knowing often employ non-standardized methods which are not “transparent” in the same way as science and therefore easily dismissed by state officials as indefensible to citizens’ questioning. I explore this tension by drawing on examples from ethnographic work I completed with two groups of knowledge practitioners, Kwakwaka’wakw First Nations (Native American) traditional marine harvesters and government biologists, both of whom work with clams.     

“Life at Lake Home”: An ethnographic performance in six voices; an essay on method,in two

Debates about representational forms in qualitative research have tended either to celebrate or to condemn particular forms. Such an approach reifies the differences between various means of expression and diverts attention from the interpretive, political and pedagogic issues which, in my view, lend importance to representational choices. Here, I offer an experiential account of performing ethnography, based on my own field work. I discuss performance both as process and product, and find points of convergence between my goals as an ethnographer and the resources of performance. As process, performance encourages participants — performers and audience members alike — to articulate and reflect critically on cultural contexts and meanings; as product, performance models (in ways more difficult through writing) episodes of social life which, often, are the object of naturalistic inquiry.     

The impact of sociological orientation on pedagogy: A reconsideration of teacher training in sociology Ph.D. Departments

The emphasis in sociology Ph.D. programs continues to be on training researchers rather than teachers. This is a serious mistake, given the overwhelming proportion of students who go on to academic careers that require at least some time in the classroom. Departments that offer some type of graduate training in teaching focus almost exclusively on the students’ mastery of pedagogical strategies—tools, tips, and techniques for improving their instruction. But this approach neglects students’ assumptions about sociology as a discipline—or their sociological orientations—that underlie and inform their pedagogical choices. This paper explicates the relationship between sociological orientation and pedagogical practice, and asserts that graduate students need to consider their orientation to the discipline before stepping inside a classroom. This may be effectively accomplished through a required year-long seminar to be taken during the second year of graduate study. The first semester would be devoted to the issues, debates, and questions that currently characterize the discipline. The second would consider the “nuts and bolts” of teaching, and how pedagogical practice derives from sociological orientation. Students would also work as teaching assistants before, during, and after completing the seminar. They would then be required to teach at least one course of their choice before graduating. During this first teaching experience, each graduate student would work closely with a faculty mentor. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2003 annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society. I wish to thank Michael Lewis, Joya Misra, Afshan Jafar, Brian Kapitulik, and the editor of the American Sociologist for their help in improving this paper.     

My Father,His Psychiatrists,and Me

My father is at an age when the body breaks down beyond repair. This essay describes my attempts to sustain what little sense of autonomy is left to him within the constraints of his physical limitations and to contain the anger generated by them. As I negotiate with a host of medical authorities, the most vexing of whom is the all-important psychopharmacologist, I am reminded of earlier interactions between my father's psychiatrists and me. These memories allow me to tell the story of our fraught, if loving, relationship. For a gay man, this telling is marked by the homophobic attitudes that funded many of my ostensibly therapeutic interactions with psychiatrists, as well as by a celebration of the queer genealogies through which I feel at home in the world.     

Home is Another Country: Ethnic Identification in Philippine Homeland Tours

Using data based mainly on 29 in-depth interviews with participants from three Philippine homeland tours, I conceptualize the process of ethnic identification through homeland tourism more precisely as the adoption of strategies aimed at symbolically demarcating grounds for informants’ belonging in the Philippines as Americans. This conceptualization highlights ethnic identification as a problem, one that must be “worked on” insofar as claims to ethnic identity must be substantiated. It is also a problem insofar as this work of belonging is displaced and misrecognized. In working to establish a connection with the homeland, I argue that my informants are working out their belonging in America within the terms of distinction set by multiculturalism.     

Paying Forward and Paying Back

Twenty years after the conclusion of a fieldwork study, a member of the family that once served as my informant came to live with me. This reflexive account of Ari's stay in our home juxtaposes his socialist kibbutz life with that of my own hypercommodified individualistic urban life. His experiences of working in the illegal economy raise questions about my own hiring practices. In short, we confront ourselves through our respondents' cultural vision. Ultimately, in revisiting a study I had thought complete, this account raises the question of what we owe those people who help us to gain knowledge about their culture, the currency of our careers.     

Paradigms Lost

“Paradigms Lost” is a socionarrative which can be read or performed. Through a variety of literary techniques (e.g., the flashback, dialogue, rhythm, enjambment, etc.), I detail the wide-ranging consequences to my life and my family of a body-trauma and coma. Through the tacit sociological framework, I concretely show how a self reconstructs itself through language; how conceptually separable social institutions permeate each other; and how the mind and body split does not work as a meaning-making paradigm. I intend the article to work on multiple levels and to reach diverse audiences, including those who have experienced similar trauma. The debt immense of endless gratitude. John Milton     

The Ethical Challenges of Field Research in Conflict Zones

Drawing on 26 months of field research in El Salvador during the civil war, I analyze some ethical challenges that confront field researchers working in conflict zones. After briefly summarizing the purpose and general methodology of my research, I discuss in detail the research procedures I followed to implement the “do no harm” ethic of empirical research. I first analyze the particular conditions of the Salvadoran civil war during the period of research. I then discuss the procedures meant to ensure that my interviews with people took place with their fully informed consent—what I understood that to mean and how I implemented it. I then turn to the procedures whereby the anonymity of those interviewed and the confidentiality of the data gathered were ensured to the extent possible. Throughout I discuss particular ethical dilemmas that I confronted, including issues of self-presentation and mistaken identity, the emotional challenges of field work in highly polarized settings (which if not well understood may lead to lapse in judgment), and my evolving questions concerning the researcher role and its limitations. I also discuss the dilemmas that arise in the dissemination of research findings and the repatriation of data.

Underground Markets as Fields in Transition: Sex Work in New York City

Most ethnographers visualize their fieldwork study vis‐à‐vis their long‐term commitment to a bounded sociospatial context—an “ecology.” In this manner, the majority of ethnographic studies are presented as studies not only of practices but also of recognizable physical ecologies that breathe life into the practices—for example, homes, ghettos, firms, schools, and so on. In the pages that follow, I consider the ways in which the status of place has shifted in urban sex work. The shifting commerce of sexual services in New York enables me to open up a set of methodological issues about the role of space in ethnographic work. One in particular is at the core of this paper: namely, because so many ethnographic labors begin with the selection of a field site, what conceptual issues arise that fieldworkers must pay attention to vis‐à‐vis that decision? For example, the field site may change, the field site may itself be shaped by wider societal forces, and it may be simply dissolve over time. How does any of this impact a technique that is premised on the dependability of “sitting” so that others may be dependably followed? I draw on the notion of “strategic action fields” to present an alternative analytic framework, one more useful for the challenges ethnographers face.     

Is the U.S. unique in the decline of private sector unionism?

The U.S. is not unique in the decline of private sector unionism. Contrary to assertions of the “unique school,” unionism in the private sectors of Canada and Western Europe has also declined and for the same reason, structural changes in the labor market. “It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.” Sherlock Holmes. I acknowledge in particular the critique of my colleague, Neil Sheflin. I thank, too, for their useful comments, Larry Adams of the U.S. Department of Labor, Noah Meltz, of the University of Toronto, Alexander Troy, and my colleagues Jack Cullity, Stanley Kaish, and Peter Loeb. I appreciate the research support received from the Research Council, the International Program, and the Dean of the Graduate School — Newark of Rutgers University.     

THE MYTH OF THE GRINGO CHIEF: AMAZONIAN MESSIAHS AND THE POWER OF IMMEDIACY

In this article, I investigate the sociocultural grounding and sociopolitical position of Randy Borman, the “gringo chief” of the indigenous Cofán people of Amazonian Ecuador. Born to North American missionary-linguists, Borman grew up in Cofán communities, attended school in urban Ecuador and the United States, and developed into the most important Cofán activist on the global stage. I consider him alongside other ethnically ambiguous leaders of Amazonian political movements, whom anthropologists have described as “messianic” figures. The historians and ethnographers who write about Amazonian messianism debate the relationship between myth and reason in indigenous political action. Using their discussion as a starting point, I propose the concept of “mythical politics,” a type of transformative action that concentrates enabling forms of socio-temporal mediation in the shape of individual actors and instantaneous events. I develop my approach through a discussion of the work of Georges Sorel, Georg Lukács, and Antonio Gramsci, three theorists who debate the role of myth in political mobilization. By applying their insights to the case of Borman, I explore the relationship between myth, mediation, and rationality in Cofán politics and political movements more generally.     

Public Sociology: Working at the Interstices

The article examines recent debates surrounding public sociology in the context of a UK based Department of Applied Social Sciences. Three areas of work within the department form the focus of the article: violence against women and children; community-based oral history projects and health ethics teaching. The article draws on Micheal Burawoy’s typology comprising public, policy, professional and critical sociology, and argues that much of the work described in the case studies more often lies somewhere in between, in the interstices, rather than within one or other of the four types. The result is not without its tensions and dilemmas, some of which are identified and explored, notably those arising from attempts to appeal to diverse audiences and meet the sometimes conflicting expectations of each.     

Mindful Ethics: Comments on Informant-Centered Practices in Sociological Research

In this article, I introduce the concept of “mindful ethics” to describe my experiences as a feminist qualitative researcher who has confronted ethical dilemmas in my sexuality research. Mindful ethics is informed theoretically by mindful inquiry, grounded theory, ethics in practice, and ethically important moments. Mindful ethics has been useful in dealing with ethical considerations throughout all stages of my sexuality research. Shifting my attention to the takenfor-granted social contexts and circumstances surrounding informants’ life experiences has helped me deal with ethical concerns that otherwise may have resulted in harm to informants.     

Analyzing gender in public places: Rethinking Goffman’s vision of everyday life

In this study, I discuss critically some of Goffman’s work on public places, with regard to how that work represents women’s experience in public and how women’s experience changes the notions of public places that Goffman portrayed. I draw on an eighteen-month participant observation of one small city (Santa Fe, NM) and a set of in-depth interviews done with both female and male residents of the city. Here, I concentrate on three areas: the normalized distaste for public places that is encouraged in women by their fear of crime in public and the measures they are informed they must take as crime-conscious pedestrians and shoppers; street remarks that are often difficult to manage and impossible to resolve successfully; and access information—information the woman discloses that can be used as a clue to her identity and home and, potentially at least, as ammunition for further harassment of her. I use these areas to illustrate how gender-conscious appraisal is necessary in order to appreciate the character of public places. Her book,Urban Ritual, is forthcoming from University of California Press.     

Social Movement Audiences1

Audiences are important to social movements, but the relationships between social movements and their audiences are not well understood. This article uses scholarship from performance studies, especially ideas of audiences as constructed, meaningful, and influenced/influential, to explore two issues. First, how do social movements define their audiences? Second, how are social movement actions toward their audiences shaped by these definitions? Analysis of longitudinal data on two social movement groups in Pittsburgh from 2003 to 2007 shows that social movements variously interpret the nature and role of their audiences and that these interpretations affect their strategies and goals, sometimes quite radically. The conclusion explores how attention to audiences can augment scholarship on the relational, iterative, interpretive, and reflexive aspects of social movements.     

Export Performance,Labor Standards and Institutions: Evidence from a Dynamic Panel Data Model

I investigate the role of labor standards in international trade. While the literature has used many different measures of labor standards, I use two: the rate of work injuries and the rate of strikes and lockouts — allowing me to construct both measures for 112 countries from 1980 until 2004. This allows dynamic panel data methods to be used in estimation. Three measures of the quality of institutions are also used for the same period: the number of years the chief executive is in office, the concentration of a country’s legislature measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, and whether the legislature is controlled by a party representing a special interest. The results show that countries with better labor standards and institutions do trade more — their exports to GDP ratio is higher.     

Standpoint Epistemology and the Uses of Self‐Reflection in Feminist Ethnography: Lessons for Rural Sociology*

Abstract We explore how feminist researchers informed by standpoint theoretical frameworks employ the process of self‐reflection to counter the reproduction of inequalities in ethnographic investigation. Although it is not a cure for this dilemma, we argue that researchers can be self‐conscious about the ways in which they reproduce power in the course of their work; furthermore, sustained attention to these dynamics will enrich ethnographic accounts. We begin by outlining the diverse ways in which feminist ethnographers draw on standpoint epistemology to generate strong reflexive methodological strategies. Then we describe challenges posed by postmodern and postcolonial critics, and outline how feminists have contributed to these debates and have responded with innovative methodological strategies, especially in relation to self‐reflexive techniques. In conclusion, we discuss how rural sociologists might incorporate these methodological insights into their ethnographic investigations.