scholarly journals Re-envisioning the local: spatiality, land and law in Botswana

2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Griffiths
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Specific Site ◽  
The Past ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
The Future

AbstractBased on an ethnographic study located in Botswana, I move beyond conceptions of the local as physically or territorially grounded to one that examines how it is constituted through links between persons and land derived from life histories extended over several generations. This not only takes account of a specific site in which social relations are bounded and locally constituted but also of how perceptions of locality are discursively and historically constructed. Viewing land as both a tangible and intangible universe constructed through social relationships, I highlight ways in which individuals, as part of a ‘local’ community, find their life courses shaped by wider transnational and global processes, including law, that have an impact on their everyday lives. For some, this provides opportunities for upward mobility and future gains, while others find scope for action severely curtailed. In documenting these uneven, diverse effects of globalisation, what emerges are processes of ‘internalisation’ and ‘relocalisation’ of global conditions, allowing for the emergence of new identities, alliances and struggles for space and power within specific populations. Thus what exists in the here and now as a form of temporality is constantly remade, drawing on the past while fashioning new prospects for the future.

scholarly journals Altered Islands: Young Faroe Islanders’ Future Landscapes

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-18
Author(s):  
Firouz Gaini
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Macro Level ◽  
The Past ◽  
Dynamic Relationship ◽  
The Future ◽  
Strong Commitment ◽  
Cultural Shifts ◽  
Future Landscape

This paper explores scenarios created by young Faroe Islanders reflecting on the future of their local community and islands. The main objective is to outline and analyse the dynamic relationship between young people’s future images and present-day realities. Based on data from an ethnographic study from 2014, the paper discusses young people’s future-oriented essays in relation to their islands’ history, culture, and values. The essays, as methodological schemes, encourage the youth to draw a ‘future landscape’ without necessarily linking it directly to their personal (intimate) perspectives. They offer an opportunity to discuss the relation between micro- and macro-level events and between material and cultural shifts. In these narratives, we notice a strong commitment to connect the future to the past in a collective Faroese project. The future is often drawn as altered islands—a mesmerizing breakaway from present-day realities. The opportunity to dream and to imagine tomorrow is an important part of young people’s everyday life practices and identities.

Differences in temporal reasoning

Focaal ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 (66) ◽  
pp. 25-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Ringel
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Temporal Reasoning ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Temporal Complexity ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Temporal Flexibility ◽  
Shrinking City

Hoyerswerda, Germany's fastest-shrinking city, faces problems with the future that seem initially unrelated to the past and yet excite manifold conflicting accounts of it. The multiple and conflicting temporal references employed by Hoyerswerdians indicate that the temporal regime of postsocialism is accompanied, if not overcome, by the temporal framework of shrinkage. By reintroducing the analytical domain of the future, I show that local temporal knowledge practices are not historically predetermined by a homogenous postsocialist culture or by particular generational experiences. Rather, they exhibit what I call temporal complexity and temporal flexibility-creative uses of a variety of coexisting temporal references. My ethnographic material illustrates how such expressions of different forms of temporal reasoning structure social relations within and between different generations. Corresponding social groups are not simply divided by age, but are united through shared and heavily disputed negotiations of the post-Cold War era's contemporary crisis.

scholarly journals Client or Volunteer? Understanding Neoliberalism and Neocolonialism Within International Volunteer Health Work

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 233339361879295
Author(s):  
Oona St-Amant ◽  
Catherine Ward-Griffin ◽  
Helene Berman ◽  
Arja Vainio-Mattila
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Health Work ◽  
Social Organizations ◽  
The Social ◽  
International Volunteer

As international volunteer health work increases globally, research pertaining to the social organizations that coordinate the volunteer experience in the Global South has severely lagged. The purpose of this ethnographic study was to critically examine the social organizations within Canadian NGOs in the provision of health work in Tanzania. Multiple, concurrent data collection methods, including text analysis, participant observation and in-depth interviews were utilized. Data collection occurred in Tanzania and Canada. Neoliberalism and neocolonialism were pervasive in international volunteer health work. In this study, the social relations—“volunteer as client,” “experience as commodity,” and “free market evaluation”—coordinated the volunteer experience, whereby the volunteers became “the client” over the local community and resulting in an asymmetrical relationship. These findings illuminate the need to generate additional awareness and response related to social inequities embedded in international volunteer health work.

scholarly journals Srebrenica is not a Metaphor

2021 ◽  
pp. 54-64
Author(s):  
Sarina Bakić
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Temporal Dimensions ◽  
Further Development

The author will emphasize the importance of both the existence and the further development of the Srebrenica - Potočari Memorial Center, in the context of the continued need to understand the genocide that took place in and around Srebrenica, from the aspect of building a culture of remembrance throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H). This is necessary in order to continue fighting the ongoing genocide denial. At first glance, a culture of remembrance presupposes immobility and focus on the past to some, but it is essentially dynamic, and connects three temporal dimensions: it evokes the present, refers to the past but always deliberates over the future. In this paper, the emphasis is placed on the concept of the place of remembrance, the lieu de memoire as introduced by the historian Pierre Nora. In this sense, a place of remembrance such as the Srebrenica - Potočari Memorial Center is an expression of a process in which people are no longer just immersed in their past but read and analyze it in the present. Furthermore, looking to the future, they also become mediators of relations between people and communities, which in sociological theory is an important issue of social relations. The author of this paper emphasizes that collective memory in the specific case of genocide in and around Srebrenica is only possible when the social relations around the building (Srebrenica - Potočari Memorial Center) crystallize, which is then much more than just the content of the culture of remembrance.

The Everyday Archaeologist Matters

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Price ◽  
Philip J. Carr
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Southeastern Archaeology ◽  
The Past ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Future

Archaeology has many goals, and those goals may differ depending on your theoretical paradigm. These aims vary from bringing order to an incomplete and imperfect record of people in the past, to distilling the actions of the past in order to understand not only cultural changes but also the reasons those change occurred, to synthesizing this information to predict human behavior through laws, and to using the past to better the future of humanity. Thinking about the everyday broadens perspectives, posits new questions, presents testable hypotheses, and, perhaps because it is measured on a shared scale, brings some level of consilience to southeastern archaeology. In this chapter, the authors discuss three opportunities for making archaeology relevant: writing palatably, scaling interactions, and engaging people with their past by bringing archaeology into their everyday lives.

scholarly journals Dominasi Medis Modern Atas Medis Tradisional Suku Sumuri, Teluk Bintuni, Papua Barat

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 174
Author(s):  
Atik Triratnawati
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Infant Mortality ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Health Centers ◽  
Infant Mortality Rate ◽  
Community Leader

Declaration 1990-2015 MDG's 4 and 5 points in Indonesia fail due to a decrease in maternal and infant mortality rate is not reached until three quarters. Sumuri District, in West Papua is one of the area that maternal and infant mortality rates high, althought free health care for its residents. This paper wants to explore how the interaction between modern medicine and local medicine so the dominant health care in the community will be identified. Ethnographic study by living together with the local community to make the observation of the patient's health centers, community leader interviews, adult population, health workers and mini Focus Group Discussion among 4 mothers who has under 5 years old children conducted in June 2014. Government, oil and gas companies are aggressively introducing modern medical to the residents of SumuriDistrict, as a result communities have high interest to visit the health center for treatment and natural healing tends to disappear. New health institutions such as health centers, integrated health, midwives, nurses, physicians are able to shift the role of traditional birth attendants, traditional healer or traditional medicine. As a result of social relations within the extended family was replaced by a stronger role of midwives, nurses and doctors. However, the older generation tends to be more suitable with traditional healing compare to modern medicine.

scholarly journals Alteridad y Poder en una Fábrica Recuperada Argentina

ILUMINURAS ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (30) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carina Balladares
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Daily Practice ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Self Management ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
The Past ◽  
Palabras Clave ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
A Company

En este texto mostraremos parte de un estudio etnográfico mayor, que se centró en conocer las transformaciones de las relaciones sociales, y de la cultura fabril, de un grupo de trabajadores industriales urbanos que autogestionan, desde fines de 2003, una fábrica recuperada de calzados y ropa deportiva argentina. Este artículo se centrará en describir las relaciones de alteridad y poder que estos trabajadores fueron desplegando luego de organizarse bajo el formato de cooperativa. Veremos cómo, desarmada la relación de alteridad principal de la vieja empresa (sintetizada en el vínculo patrón-empleados), los propios asociados de la cooperativa comenzaron a construir diversas alterizaciones en el nuevo contexto de relacionamiento mutuo, que se superpusieron y enlazaron con otras que provenían del pasado como empresa bajo patrón. Detallaremos ciertos rasgos de sus interacciones sociales y describiremos ciertas categorías de la práctica cotidiana. Se trata de categorías que acompañaron la formación de procesos identificatorios complejos y constelaciones de poder. Palabras clave: Fábrica recuperada. Poder. Alteridad. Autogestión. Igualitarismo.   Otherness and Power in Recovered Factory of Argentina   Abstract  This text will show part of a larger ethnographic study, which focused on knowing the transformation of social relations, and factory culture, of a group of self-managing urban industrial workers who, since late 2003, are in charge of a recovered factory of footwear and sports clothing of Argentina. This article will focus on describing the relationships of otherness and power that these workers developed after organizing under the cooperative format. We'll see how, when the principal relationship of otherness of the old company (synthesized in the employer-employee tie) was dismantled, the members of the cooperative began to build different otherness relationships in the new context, which are overlapped and bonded with others came from the past as a company under a boss. We'll detail some features of their social interactions and describe certain categories of the daily practice. These categories accompanied the formation of complex identification procedures and constellations of power. Keywords: Recovered factory. Power. Otherness. Worker self-management. Egalitarianism.  

scholarly journals Consensus in Opinion Formation Processes in Fully Evolving Environments

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 6022-6029 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Auletta ◽  
Angelo Fanelli ◽  
Diodato Ferraioli
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Weighted Average ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Personal Beliefs ◽  
Opinion Formation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Formation Dynamics ◽  
Previous Round

Friedkin and Johnsen (1990) modeled opinion formation in social networks as a dynamic process which evolves in rounds: at each round each agent updates her expressed opinion to a weighted average of her innate belief and the opinions expressed in the previous round by her social neighbors. The stubbornness level of an agent represents the tendency of the agent to express an opinion close to her innate belief. Motivated by the observation that innate beliefs, stubbornness levels and even social relations can co-evolve together with the expressed opinions, we present a new model of opinion formation where the dynamics runs in a co-evolving environment. We assume that agents’ stubbornness and social relations can vary arbitrarily, while their innate beliefs slowly change as a function of the opinions they expressed in the past. We prove that, in our model, the opinion formation dynamics converges to a consensus if reasonable conditions on the structure of the social relationships and on how the personal beliefs can change are satisfied. Moreover, we discuss how this result applies in several simpler (but realistic) settings.

scholarly journals Collective Forgetting in a Changing Organization: When memories become unusable and uprooted

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-470 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hamid Foroughi ◽  
Ismael Al-Amoudi
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Organizational Changes ◽  
Charitable Organization ◽  
The Past ◽  
Practical Usefulness ◽  
The Social ◽  
Memory Power ◽  
Collective Remembering ◽  
Sense Of Identity

How is collective remembering inhibited by organizational changes which were not intended to manipulate it? And how does collective forgetting affect workers’ power and sense of identity? We rely on an ethnographic study of a charitable organization that went through recent organizational changes to study two processes constitutive of collective forgetting. The first process consists in the past becoming unusable because once-useful memories lost their practical usefulness for participants’ new activities. The second process consists in the past becoming uprooted because the social relations through which memories used to be shared had changed beyond recognition. Our findings provide insights into the organizational processes through which memories cease to circulate. They also help understand the complex relations between memory, power relations and participants’ sense of identity.

Heritage as War

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 729-734 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosie Bsheer
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Creative Destruction ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

The construction of heritage can be a violent process. Authorizing state-sanctioned narratives and the spaces that materialize them are belligerent acts. Crafting and territorializing a singular history out of many entangled ones necessarily relies on the destruction, containment, and/or silencing of the evidentiary terrain—of people, places, and things. In this sense, the construction of the past—to play on Carl von Clausewitz's well-known maxim—is the continuation of war by other means. As networks of knowledge production and transmission, “lieux de mémoire” are everyday sites of violence that embody ongoing social relations and the attendant struggles over power. In times of peace as in war, they are terrains of symbolic and material contestation whose creative destruction can be deployed as political spectacles and projections of power. Examples of such dynamics abound, whether in the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North America or Palmyra, Baghdad, and Mecca in the Middle East. In its varied forms, then, heritage is as much a cause for celebration for some as it is a cause of injury for others. Heritage reflects the power to subjugate the past to the politics of the present and to dictate the future, both of which are intrinsic to state and subject formation.

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