Practices and Flows of Digital Photography: An Ethnographic Framework

This article develops a methodological framework for undertaking empirical studies of practices and flows, of doings and circulations, of digital tourist photography. The article outlines what might be termed a non‐representational approach to photography concerned with affordances, actor‐networks, hybridized practices and networked flows of photographs. The article falls in three parts. It begins with rethinking photography theory. Traditional dualisms between affordance and practice are challenged, and photography is conceptualized as a hybridized, embodied performance. How digital photography changes photography's traditional affordances is then discussed. The third part discusses various methods to describe how affordances of digital tourist photography are used, twisted and resisted in concrete hybridized practices. I suggest undertaking multi‐sided ethnographies with ‘busy photographers’ to craft non‐representational accounts of mobile practices of photographing and flows of photographic images across various sites and actor‐networks. In a broader sense, this article is a methodological contribution to ‘the new mobilities paradigm’.     

A feminist revisiting of the insider/outsider debate: The “outsider phenomenon” in rural Iowa

This article draws upon findings from an ethnographic study of two towns in rural Iowa to examine the adequacy of the insider/outsider distinction as a guideline for evaluating and conducting ethnographic research. Utilizing feminist standpoint and materialist feminist theories, I start with the assumption that, rather than one “insider” or “outsider” position, we all begin our work with different relationships to shifting aspects of social life and to particular knowers in the community and this contributes to numerous dimensions through which we can relate to residents in various communities. “Outsiderness” and “insiderness” are not fixed or static positions, rather they are ever-shifting and permeable social locations illustrated in this case study by the “outsider phenomenon.” Community processes that reorganize and resituate race-ethnicity, gender and class relations form some of the most salient aspects of the “outsider phenomenon.” These dynamic processes shaped our relationships with residents as ethnographic identities were repositioned by shifts in constructions of “community” that accompanied ongoing social, demographic, and political changes.     

Sex and Gender in the 1970s

The late 1960s through the early 1970s was a time of profound social change both in American society and in sociology. Sociological attention shifted from social pathology to deviant subcultures and to labeling processes, shifting again by the 1990s to the study of social control. Many ethnographic studies of homosexuality were undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s in the tradition of labeling and stigma, including Laud Humphreys' Tearoom Trade (1970) and my Identity and Community in the Gay World (Warren 1974). Male ethnographers in particular were often stigmatized along with the deviants they studied, while the women (including me) were sometimes discouraged from doing graduate-level sociology at all. Thirty years later, the terrains of gender, sexuality and stigma have changed, yet pockets of pro-stigma resistance remain. Even in the 2000s, the stigma of homosexuality has not entirely disappeared. And, above all, the essentializing categories of homosexual, bisexual and heterosexual remain firmly entrenched in public discourse, sociological analysis, homophobia and gay activism.     

The interpreter as institutional gatekeeper: The social-linguistic role of interpreters in Spanish-English medical discourse

Increases in immigration have led to an enormous growth in the number of cross-linguistic medical encounters taking place throughout the United States. In this article the role of hospital-based interpreters in cross-linguistic, internal medicine ‘medical interviews’ is examined. The interpreter's actions are analyzed against the historical and institutional context within which she is working, and also with an eye to the institutional goals that frame the patient-physician discourse. Interpreters are found not to be acting as ‘neutral’ machines of semantic conversion, but are rather shown to be active participants in the process of diagnosis. Since this process hinges on the evaluation of social and medical relevance of patient contributions to the discourse, the interpreter can be seen as an additional institutional gatekeeper for the recent immigrants for whom she is interpreting. Cross-linguistic medical interviews may also be viewed as a form of cross-cultural interaction; in this light, the larger political ramifications of the interpreters' actions are explored. ‘Interpreters are the most powerful people in a medical conversation.’ Head of Interpreting Services at a major private U.S. hospital, May 1999.     

Distance education and international social work education

As a result of the development of new communication technology, distance education has become a rapidly growing area over the last few decades. Market and commercial pressures are major factors in its developing impact. Distance education has also been applied to social work education. Because it is a small field it may be both positively and negatively affected. Social work education requires face-to-face communication training. Educators need to respond to the limitations of distance education technologies and processes to provide for cultural and linguistic diversity, through openness to joint work across different cultures, anti-standardisation and -discrimination, reflexivity, user control and resources, and cultural and language translation.     

批判与反思：民族志求真的历程

20世纪后半叶以来,人类学内部出现了学术反思潮流,传统民族志进入了一个实验性的时代。相应地,民族志求真历程也随着时代转换而彰显出来。在民族志的求真历程中,需要以批判与反思作为其走向科学道路的武器和方法,并有一个科学的民族志理论范式来解决民族志品质问题。     

研究社会环境中的语言--从徐大明等人的《当代社会语言学》说起

研究社会环境中的语言,从而将社会纳入到语言研究的范畴,是社会语言学的主要特征。从语言学发展进程来看,社会语言学的这一研究模式是对现代语言学的一次冲击、一个新的提高。徐大明等人的《当代社会语言学》对源于西方的社会语言学进行了较为系统的介绍,同时也结合我国最新的社会语言学研究成果对现有的社会语言学理论进行了启发性的阐述,这对于我们全面、深入地了解这一学科及其在中国的应用无疑是有益而必需的。     

The shtetl in the museum: representing Jews in the eras of Stalin and Putin

This article considers the representation of the shtetl in two museum narratives devoted to Jews in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The first, the state-funded 1939 exhibit “The Jews in Tsarist Russia and the USSR” was organized by the Jewish Section of the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad and remained on display to the Soviet public until the Nazi invasion in June 1941. The second is the privately funded Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, which opened in 2012. Though conceived under radically different ideological and political circumstances, each exhibition conveys a significant message about the place of Jews in Soviet and post-Soviet society, respectively, and each positions the shtetl as a formative arena for Jewish civic identity vis-à-vis the Russian homeland. Across the chasm of over seventy years, these two museum projects raise strikingly similar questions about how and why cultural institutions are mobilized to define the relationship of Ashkenazi Jews and the state. In both cases, the shtetl plays a significant role in narrating this unequal relationship.     

Globalisation, memory and welfare regimes in transition: towards an anthropology of transnational policy transfers

Processes of transnational policy transfers are of immense importance in understanding new forms of the reproduction of relations and discourses of power, and of memory and forgetfulness, within particular social welfare regimes. Transnational advice and policy transfers appear particularly unsuited to the need to address the complexities of the ways in which welfare subjects interact with welfare regimes which seek to organise their lives, a theme which touches complex issues of culture, identity and resistance, at the interface of local, national, regional and global social relations. Utilising ethnographic material from post–Yugoslav countries, particularly Bosnia–Herzegovina, this article addresses international consultancy, transnational policy advice, and project and programme documents as a specific 'genre' with its own language and power, including the power of silence. The article is based on an explicit erosion of the border between 'research' and 'consultancy'. Theoretically and empirically, a literature on 'global social policy' has paid too little attention to an emerging 'cultural' perspective on welfare which focuses much more on the social relations of welfare; the role of biographies, subjectivities and memories; and the need for forms of reflexivity and attention to the minutiae of everyday life constructed within, and itself constructive of, 'welfare' as a lived experience. Rendering the practice of policy–making as a subject for ethnographic or anthropological research may be the basis for a new action research, and for policy agendas for a democratic welfare, envisioning forms of access, voice, and empowerment, which much current transnational policy advice militates against.     

语言适应论的本体论意蕴

语言适应论指出,适应性在语用学中居于核心地位,而且与变异性、商讨性等概念在研究语言使用过程中具有本体论意义。变异性体现了语言使用的生成性;商讨性表征了选择的不确定性;适应性展开为语言使用的本质核心。语言适应论的本体论意蕴展现为：语言对人类生存贡献何以可能、适应性何以可能、意义生成何以可能等方面。