'She Wasn't Tall Enough and Breasts Get in the Way': Why Would a Woman Bullfighter Retire?

In 1999, the first Spanish woman bullfighter, Cristina Sanchez, retired after performing as a full-fledged torero for only three years. In this article, I examine the circumstances of her success and of the curtailment of her short career as a case study in how an emergent feminine identity can be created and established through the conscious actions of a woman in the public sphere. Through an analysis of ethnographic and media materials, I will demonstrate how in this context of changing Spanish gender Cristina Sanchez's career and retirement made the Spanish gender debate public and explicit through a performative and media manifestation of women's agency. This work is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Spain from 1992-1994, media analysis, and a series of return visits since that time.     

“A Message on Life to the Young”—Perceiving a Senior Volunteer Activity in Japan from an Intergenerational Perspective

Abstract

Intergenerational programming has gained more recognition in Japan in the last decade or so, as research and reports on the status and case studies of intergenerational programs become available since mid-1990s. This paper examines the case study of a volunteer narrative group called G-117 formed primarily by seniors who are survivors of the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji earthquake as an example of an emerging intergenerational program. The research was carried out mainly during fieldwork among senior volunteer groups in Kobe from late 2001 to early 2002, primarily through qualitative approaches of interviews and participant observation. I propose that besides observational research, a more in-depth engagement through ethnographic case study, although much less common in intergenerational program research, is also important in providing rich, contextualized understanding of the development of an intergenerational program, particularly in a cross-cultural setting.     

Making Tarefero Pride: The Collaborative Construction of Portable Photomurals for Farmworker Empowerment in Misiones,Argentina

ABSTRACT

This article draws on years of multisited ethnographic fieldwork in Misiones, Argentina to recount the collaborative construction of portable photomurals for farmworker empowerment. The murals depict work, life, and the fight for justice of the farmworkers, called tareferos, who harvest yerba mate, the tea that is Argentina’s most commonly consumed beverage. By making history and the culture of oppression a central focus, this study demonstrates how ethnographic research can support community organizing efforts through building the relationships necessary to forge collaborative, strength-based interventions. Such collaborations can bolster struggles against structural inequality and work to heal community psyches marred by historical trauma.     

Revisiting ethnography by proxy

Abstract

Prompted by discovering a paper written in 1980 which described a process of ‘ethnography by proxy’, I revisit this concept in the light of two research projects: a workplace study of an electronics company conducted in the early 1990s and a later home-based study of young children’s encounters with toys and technology. The paper defines ethnography by proxy as the process of delegating some of the ethnographer’s activities to participants in the research setting. It discusses a pragmatic response to some of the challenges of conducting fieldwork and considers the implications of delegating non-academic proxies to fulfil aspects of the ethnographer’s role, the different guises that may be taken by the ethnographer and what this shift in research relationships might mean for the interpretation of data. The concept of proxy has implications for some of the tenets of ethnographic research as it requires a re-examination of our roles and the relationship between researcher and researched.     

Before, during and after: realism, reflexivity and ethnography

In this paper we argue that what is missing from many ethnographic accounts is a recognition that dilemmas inevitably emerge for the researcher before they make contact with the research setting, during the process of ethnographic research, and subsequently in the lengthy time taken to unravel the theoretical importance of the research after the fieldwork has ended. Using a comparison of two ethnographies as case studies, and by recourse to a realist methodology, such dilemmas are, we argue, overdetermined by many non‐observable social structures that influence the everyday research process. We argue that specific mechanisms determine both the process and the outcome of the ethnographic journey in the before, during and after stages of research. For example we demonstrate how biography and the wider process of institutional knowledge production are two key resources that influence research practice. We use the term pragmatic realism as a means to reflect upon some of the connections between the dilemmas of research and real structures in these three stages.     

(Ap)parent Boundaries: Parents' Boundary Work at Cultural Events for Families with Children Adopted from China

Abstract

The adoption of children from China by American families represents a rich case study for an expanding sociological literature on boundaries: it brings to life many of our most salient borders and highlights their very permeability. This paper represents one aspect of a larger research project on parents' efforts to bridge perceived ethnocultural boundaries within the China adoptive family. Through ethnographic fieldwork and semistructured, in-depth interviews, I examine parents' interpretations of and participation in Chinese cultural events organized by and for China adoptive families. These events are significant sites for social research on boundaries because they: (1) appear to assume permeable ethnocultural borders; and (2) bring previously incoherent individuals together as a bounded group. Drawing on classic and contemporary theories of ethnic identification and collective identity, I reveal how parents activate existing symbolic and social boundaries and create new symbolic and social boundaries in their efforts to construct community. In particular, I demonstrate how previously incoherent parents cohere as a bounded community by actively distinguishing themselves from “authentic” Chinese/Chinese American referents and the “imagined community” of biological families. Likewise, I reveal how the community's boundaries and cultural events both mask and alienate a growing percentage of the China adoption contingent: African American and Asian American China adoptive parents, lower-middle-class and working-class China adoptive parents, and the adoptive parents of Chinese sons. Through this case-based analysis, I add general theoretical and methodological contributions to the diffuse boundaries literature.     

New ways of working (NWW): work space and cultural change in virtualizing organizations

ABSTRACT

This study offers a grounded theory of ‘new ways of working’ (NWW), an organizational design concept of Dutch origin with a global relevance. NWW concern business solutions for flexible workspaces enabled by digital network technologies. Theoretically, NWW are analysed with reference to Lefebvre’s theory on the ‘production of space’ and are defined along three dimensions: the spatiotemporal ‘flexibilization’ of work practices, the ‘virtualization’ of the technologically pre-defined organization, and the ‘interfacialization’ of meaning making in the lifeworld of workers. Empirically, NWW are explored in a case study of an insurance company which in 2007 radically implemented NWW. The case study consists of a longitudinal – before and after implementation – research based on ethnographic fieldwork, conducted in 2007 and 2010. The article contributes with a conceptual framework for the analysis and management of NWW, and highlights contradictions and ambiguities in the implementation and appropriation of this innovative organizational design.     

EVERYDAY AFTERLIFE

In this paper I draw on Walter Benjamin's understanding of the flâneur, memory and history to discuss my recent ethnographic fieldwork on the cultural history of abandoned spaces and places in rural Saskatchewan, Canada. By utilizing Benjamin's notion of historical accumulation that is based in individual perception, I ask how abandoned spaces can create reflexive textual meaning through the process of historical accumulation in space. Additionally, I work to develop a conflux of Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope and Benjamin's theories of time, history and memory to create an understanding of abandoned space that sees isolation and depopulated locations as fertile grounds for cultural critique.

I also invoke Benjamin's writing on the figure of the flâneur in my methodological approach to anthropological fieldwork by transferring the image of the urban wanderer (the flâneur) into the context of an 1000 kilometre driving trip through Saskatchewan, Canada that I undertook in search of abandoned spaces and objects to document in writing, photography and video. Here, I discuss the ways in which Benjamin's notions of the flâneur and history/memory can be effectively integrated into the practice and theory of contemporary ethnographic inquiry.     

'Touch talk': the problems and paradoxes of embodied research

Drawing upon research with therapeutic bodywork practitioners in which the researcher's naked or semi-clad body was deployed as a 'touch tool' in order to access the field and generate grounded theory, this paper explores the various meanings that inhere in producing embodied research. Through unpicking a number of problems and paradoxes, a plethora of (dis)embodied bodies/selves are identified. This allows for a more nuanced exploration of the researching body since although the body is very present and visible in therapeutic body/fieldwork, it is simultaneously constituted as ephemeral, permeable and unstable; in effect, the ultimate 'disappearing act'. It is also argued that such erasure of the researching body creates tensions in terms of securing and maintaining an analytical, cerebral and sceptical researcher-self. The paper explores these problems and paradoxes in terms of seeking to achieve detachment without dissolution, and further contextualizes the discussion by drawing upon holistic, feminist and postmodern approaches to the body. Finally, the paper concludes that therapeutic bodywork gives rise to productive possibilities for embodied research endeavours and highlights the epistemological and methodological protocols that might be employed in attempting to 'bring the body back in'.     

Sexual Harassment and the Construction of Ethnographic Knowledge

It is not uncommon for women researchers to experience sexualized interactions, sexual objectification, and harassment as they conduct fieldwork. Nevertheless, these experiences are often left out of ethnographers’ “tales from the field” and remain unaddressed within our discipline. In this article, we use women's experiences with harassment in the field to interrogate the epistemological foundations of ethnographic methodology within the discipline of sociology. Based on more than 50 qualitative interviews, we examine three “fixations” of contemporary ethnography that inform women ethnographers’ understandings of and reactions to harassment in the field. These fixations are solitude, danger, and intimacy. Our data show that these fixations not only put researchers in danger but also have implications for the construction of ethnographic knowledge. They contribute to silence surrounding sexual harassment, and are motivated by and reproduce androcentric norms that valorize certain types of fieldwork. We argue that acknowledging and analyzing experiences with harassment and other unwanted sexual attention in the field is part of a more fully developed understanding of ethnographic research itself.     

Understanding Latino Family Attitudes in Relation to Latino Gang Members' Substance Abuse

Abstract

This paper presents a content analysis of ethnographic interviews from long-term Latino gang members whose families have recently immigrated to the United States. Positive relationships within the family, parental support, a consistent and constructive parental discipline style and adult supervision tend to be related negatively to adolescents' deviant behaviors and their association with deviant peers. An expected positive relationship between the parent-child constructs, adolescents' deviant behaviors, and association with deviant peers was not found. Positive family attitudes toward deviance were associated with the number of drug type transactions and greater levels of drug use. This association has been overlooked in previous research.

Our study expands the examination of the influence a family's positive attitudes toward deviance has on the apparent progression of drug use in a sample of Latino gang members with histories of drug use. An analysis of structured interview content differentiated family attitudes toward deviance as: encouragement and tolerance, imitation, and defining norms.     

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.     

Managing everyday (in)securities: Normative values,emotional security and symbolic recognition in the lives of Russian rural elders

Qualitative studies of ageing have called for attention to be paid to the diverse experiences of older people and to their agency in negotiating opportunities and constraints. A lack of research into the experiences and subjectivities of rural elders has been noted. Yet, the majority of research concerning elderly people in contemporary Russia continues to treat old age as a category and focus on particular practical and material forms of assistance available to pensioners. This article, aims to contribute to the small but growing body of ethnographic studies which shed light on the lives of elderly people in Russia as subjects in their own right. Based on ethnographic fieldwork from rural Siberia, the article explores the ways in which elderly people experience and interpret day-to-day (in)securities, forms of care and social support. In doing so the article explores three key questions: Firstly, how do lived realities, both past and present, and normative values of rural life intersect in elderly people's experiences of (in)security in post-socialist contexts?; Secondly, what forms of assistance do older people view as legitimate in their everyday lives? In particular, how are emotional exchanges and interpersonal connections interpreted and what securities do they bring?; Thirdly, what is the significance of symbolic support and recognition for elderly people and how do these draw on practices and frameworks from the socialist past?     

Local identity and the reception of refugees: the example of Riace

ABSTRACT

A strong local community identity often goes together with the rejection of refugees and other migrants. However, there is also the possibility that such a local identity actually stimulates the reception of refugees. Based on the social identity perspective and our ethnographic fieldwork we examine this possibility in the context of the small town of Riace in Southern Italy. The analysis demonstrates that there is a local identity of hospitality that is construed as a continuation of the town’s past. This identity of local hospitality is enacted and maintained in various ways in the life of the town in which the mayor as an entrepreneur of the local identity plays a critical role. However, there are also some challenges to the future of the local identity of hospitality that relates to available financial resources and competition over local opportunities.     

Paperwork,rotas, words and posters: an anthropological account of some inner London childminders' encounters with professionalisation

An association with mothering is viewed as the greatest stumbling block in the path to raising the quality and status of childminding. As a broadly conceived rite de passage, this article suggests, professionalisation offers childminders a symbolic route out. It is a ritual process which demands the production of ‘fabrications’; particular artefacts, special words and appropriate modes of behaviour which are produced specifically to meet the regulatory gaze. When childminders engage in performative professionalism, it is proposed, they gain recognition as bona fide members of the children's workforce, but their work is changed in ways which make it less meaningful for them. Presenting a phenomenology of their encounter with a widely diffused ‘technology of quality’, the paper reveals how childminders' collective identity is both endangered and engendered in struggles over particular cultural forms. Interpreting data gathered through ethnographic fieldwork with childminders in inner London, the article draws on and extends work focused on audit culture and performativity in secondary schools by synthesising it with feminist work on women's knowledge and the ethics of care.     

Coping with Conflict,Confronting Resistance: Fieldwork Emotions and Identity Management in a South Korean Evangelical Community

Methodological difficulties attendant to ethnographic fieldwork—such as gaining access, maintaining fieldwork relations, objectivity, and fieldwork stresses—are intensified for researchers working with “absolutist” religious group, groups that hold an exclusivist or totalistic definition of truth. Based on my fieldwork in a conservative South Korean evangelical community, I explore in this article two central and related methodological dilemmas pertaining to studying absolutist religious groups: identity negotiation and emotional management during fieldwork. Writing from my complex location as a feminist and a cultural/religious insider/outsider in relation to the South Korean evangelical community, I explore in particular the challenges posed by identity/role management in the field and its emotional dimensions, including the issue of the researcher’s power and vulnerability, the quandary of “conformity,” and the emotional costs of self-repression arising from the researcher’s fundamental value conflicts with the group. I conclude with a reflection on the implications of these experiences for ethnographic methodology, most centrally, how we manage our emotional responses in the field, including “inappropriate” ones, and how we can relate them to the research process.

The Cultural Shadows of Cross Cultural Research: Images of Culture

This paper argues that cross-cultural management research is dominated by a restricted structural-functionalist orthodoxy, which is a consequence of Western culture. Such research is trapped by favoured ways of thinking, metaphorically shackled within 'Plato's cave' to the wall of a realist rationalism by the webs of its own imagination. Plato's cave and other metaphors are employed to explore the limits of cross-cultural research with particular reference to understanding Chinese culture and management and to examine possible routes to a less restrictive and more pluralistic direction for future study. In particular, the dialectical change conception is identified as promising in furthering understanding of Chinese culture and management because of its consonance with Taoist philosophy. This enables exposing contradiction and paradox as legitimate in examining culture and promotes a metaphorical 'binocular' vision aimed at transcending the current monocled myopia pervasive and dominant in objectivist studies of culture and management.     

From Rights to Responsibilities: Identity Politics and Ethnographic Methodology,Dialogues with South African Musicians

Abstract

The ethnographic endeavour is often riven by a tension between two claims to the ‘right’ to research asserted either on the basis of identity claims or professional expertise. A closely associated debate within the academy is characterised by an oscillation between concern about uneven power relations and the desire to maintain effective research practice. Attempting to address the absence of voices of ‘subjects’ in this debate, I discuss the issue with musicians who critique both notions of identity and academic expertise as providing ethnographic authority, and propose a shift in discourse from rights to responsibility. This progresses beyond essentialism but insists that structural power inequalities between researchers and researched be accounted for, thus moving towards more situated, responsible ethnographic theory and practice.