Urban anthropology and sociology

This research forms part of the project titled: ‘Aesthetic quality research of three Valencian schools’, that analyses the effects in detail that images displayed in schools have, as a variable in evaluating educational quality. Through applying Arts Based Educational Research, images displayed on 29 classroom walls in three schools were photographed and analysed based upon their function; they were subsequently classified as educational images, academic images, and comfort-generating images. The results of this research show quantitative, qualitative, and aesthetic values of this visual heritage by using photographic series that are laid out in a chart-like manner, creating a visual message for each classroom. Upon observing these typologies, one perceives: the predominate utilisation of the image and its aesthetics; the differences in visible occurrences between subject matters displayed on the walls; the teacher’s intentions when displaying the images. In the conclusions, alternatives are proposed for improving the schools’ aesthetical qualities.     

Parallel play in medical anthropology and medical sociology

In recent years, the disciplinary emphasis in the social sciences has been challenged, but barriers remain to multidisciplinary discourse. Scholars may examine similar problems or even use the same concepts, and neglect or overlook the work in sister disciplines. Developmental psychologists have identified a stage in child development called parallel play, characterized by children playing side-by-side but not interacting with one another. This article employs parallel play as a metaphor to describe the relationship between medical anthropology and medical sociology. Using recent Medical Anthropology Quarterly articles on “medicalization” and “the experience of illness” as illustrations, this article analyzes the causes and consequences of this disciplinary parallelism and suggests a rationale and mechanism of moving beyond this stage.     

Social anthropology of the central Eskimo

The study of social organization has moved from a peripheral to a central position in the burgeoning literature of the Eskimo. Presentations of Eskimo kinship systems have had an important impact on attempts at classifying kinship terminologies and kinship has become a major preoccupation of field workers in the Central Eskimo regions in recent years.
Less well explored but still significantly represented in the recent literature are such topics as family and local organization, authority structure, alliance mechanisms, and cultural ecological explorations of features of society.
Future work in the social anthropology of the area will be affected strongly and limited by conditions of change and the study of social change itself is rapidly becoming the focus of the social anthropology of the Central Eskimo.     

Towards a sociology of social anthropology

Theory and Society - The framework that I have used, I suggest, provides insights into how the paradigms in our discipline, or any discipline for that matter, are generated, become dominant and,...     

Applying visual anthropology: Ethnographic video and policy ethnography

This research is part of a larger project that examines the working lives of South African women prisoners. The data gathered represent one of the occupational sectors inside a women's prison in the Western Capearea where lace‐making and embroidery represent key working activity for the day. Lace‐making is a symbolic link between European and colonial heritage and is associated with hegemonic relations. Women who are involved in lace‐making must bring eye, hand and mind into creative dialogue. The sociologist as photographer attempts to draw the observer in, through the eyes of the worker and to indicate the intricacy of physical involvement and sense of necessary patience that must take place with work of this detail. (The wrong placing or direction of fine thread can raise moral, psychological and pedagogical questions to the working whole.) Lace making may be interpreted as an ‘engaging’ pedagogical vehicle and/or as a futile, oppressive vestige of colonialism.     

Reflections on Sapir's anthropology in Canada*

The years 1910 to 1925 cover Sapir's residence in Ottawa; they were significant for his personal development, for his participation in the professionalization of Canadian anthropology, and for his substantial and original contributions to anthropology as a cosmopolitan discipline. These three perspectives - personal, professional and disciplinary - are used in this paper to depict schematically some important aspects of his genius and his career. His envisioned ‘psychiatric science’ was taking shape during the period; his article, ‘the unconscious patterning of behaviour in society’ which poses still unanswered questions is herein discussed. Les années de 1910 à 1925 entourent le séjour à Ottawa de Sapir, et elles étaient significatives en ce qui conceme son développment personnel, sa participation à la création du charactére professionel de l'anthropo-logie canadienne, et sa contribution solide et originelle à l'anthropologie come discipline cosmopolite. Ces trois aspects, personnel, professionel, et celui du discipline, sont les approches complémentaires, prises dans cet essai pour piendre schkmatiquement des éléments importants de son génie et sa carriére. Sa ‘science psychiatrique’ qu'il a prévue était en train de se former pendant cette époque, et son article ‘The unconscious patterning of behaviour in society,’ est ici discuté, ce qui pose des questions encore sans résponse, lequelles Sapir essay ait de formuler à ce temps-là.     

The rise of network thinking in anthropology

The encyclopedic inventory of the first half of the twentieth century, “Anthropology Today”, published in 1953, gave little inkling that within a few decades developing trends in social theory, in field experience, in electronic data processing, and in mathematics would combine to bring to prominence a distinctive theoretical approach using a quite formal network model for social systems. Now, sophisticated mathematics and computer programming permit sophisticated network models — networks seen as sets of links, networks seen as generated structures, and networks seen as flow processes. Although network thinking has shown a dramatic rise from the “Anthropology Today” of 1953 to the current anthropology of 1978, it is predicted to soar in the next quarter century, much of the weighty burden of network analysis having been lifted from us by ever more rapid electronic data processing.     

Encountering the postmodern: new directions in cultural anthropology

Faisant appel à la littérature d'études culturelles, cet article suggère que la condition de post-modernité crée de nouveaux challenges pour le domaine d'anthropologie culturelle qui vont au delà du problème pourtant significatif de la représentation ethnographique. Explorant le projet post-moderniste comme l'un de ceux qui impliquent une approche particuliere des phénomènes culturels dans une économie globale, l'article pousse les anthropologues à reconcevoir le concept de culture et à explorer les politiques culturelles de la vie quotidienne dans le contexte d'une representation globale du capitalisme.
Drawing upon cultural studies literature, this article suggests that the condition of postmodernity poses new challenges to the field of cultural anthropology that go beyond the (still significant) problem of ethnographic representation. Exploring the postmodernist project as one that involves a particular approach to cultural phenomena in a multinational global economy, the article urges anthropologists to reconceive the concept of culture and explore the cultural politics of everyday life in the context of the global restructuring of capitalism.