Anthropological Epochés: Phenomenology and the Ontological Turn

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (6) ◽  
pp. 610-646 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morten Axel Pedersen
Keyword(s):  
Phenomenological Anthropology ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
Anthropological Literature ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Critical Overview

This article has two objectives. In the first part, I present a critical overview of the extensive anthropological literature that may be deemed “phenomenological.” Following this critique, which is built up around a classification into four different varieties of phenomenological anthropology, I discuss the relationship between phenomenological anthropology and the ontological turn (OT). Contrary to received wisdom within the anthropological discipline, I suggest that OT has several things in common with the phenomenological project. For the same reason, I argue, it is not accurate to posit OT and phenomenology as opposing or antagonistic projects, as they are often depicted among critics and advocates of OT alike. On the contrary, I go as far as suggesting, OT may be understood as one of the most concerted attempts anthropology has produced to realize a distinctly anthropological version of Husserl’s method of phenomenological bracketing, namely what could be called the ontological epoché.

scholarly journals Reply to Doing Indigenous Epistemology: Internal Debates About Inside Knowledge in Māori Society’, by Toon Van Meilj

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Sissons
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Indigenous Epistemology ◽  
The World ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Ways Of Being

Van Meijl is right to insist that epistemology must be about active, socially contested ‘ways of knowing’ and that understanding the relationship between such ways and their products is as much an ethnographic problem as it is a philosophical one. Ways of knowing, as social practices, are also, more generally, ways of being or becoming and so are not, in my view, radically distinct from the ontologies they produce and reproduce. Phillipe Descola argues strongly that his four ‘ontologies’ are also schemas of practice, fundamental ways that people know, experience and inhabit the world. I think Van Meijl is mistaken, therefore, when he characterises the ontological turn in anthropology as being about different relations between mind and matter. For me, it is most significantly about the different ways that personhood or subjectivity can be understood and embodied.<br>

Historicity, Peoplehood, and Politics: Holocaust Talk in Twenty-First-Century France

2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 968-997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly A. Arkin
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
North African ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Anthropological Literature ◽  
French National Identity ◽  
Holocaust Narratives ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractDrawing on ethnographic data from the mid-2000s as well as accounts from French Jewish newspapers and magazines from the 1980s onward, this paper traces the emergence of new French Jewish institutional narratives linking North African Jews to the “European” Holocaust. I argue that these new narratives emerged as a response to the social and political impasses produced by intra-Jewish disagreements over whether and how North African Jews could talk about the Holocaust, which divided French Jews and threatened the relationship between Jewishness and French national identity. These new pedagogical narratives relied on a very different historicity, or way of reckoning time and causality, than those used in more divisive everyday French Jewish Holocaust narratives. By reworking the ways that French Jews reckoned time and causality, they offered an expansive and homogenously “European” Jewishness. This argument works against a growing postcolonial sociological and anthropological literature on religious minorities in France and Europe by emphasizing the contingency, difficulty, and even ambivalence around constructing “Jewishness” as transparently either “European” or “French.” It also highlights the role played by historicity—not just history—in producing what counts as group “identity.”

Guardianship and Informal Social Control

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle M. Reynald
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Social Ties ◽  
Informal Social Control ◽  
Unique Contribution ◽  
Key Points ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Critical Overview ◽  
Neighborhood Level

This article provides a critical overview of the concepts of guardianship and informal social control. The discussion compares these fundamental criminological concepts and highlights areas where there is overlap, as well as key points of departure. The relationship between these concepts is scrutinized to illustrate their distinct origins as well as the distinctive ways each of these concepts have developed within the criminological literature. This article focuses on informal social control as a multi-level community process, and on guardianship as a multi-dimensional situational concept comprising, in its most fundamental form, the presence or availability of guardians, inadvertent and/or purposive supervision and direct or indirect intervention. In doing so it showcases the dimensions of guardianship which bear close resemblance to aspects of informal social control, while simultaneously emphasizing that there are important distinctions to consider when comparing some of these dimensions and the levels at which they operate. One core distinction is that informal social control is dependent on neighborhood social ties and collectively shared expectations. On the other hand, while guardianship can be strengthened by social ties at the street-block or neighborhood level, it does not necessarily require such ties to function effectively at the microlevel. Although these concepts do coincide the discussion stresses that theoretical and empirical clarification about what makes them distinct is important. In conclusion, this article shows how each concept makes a unique contribution to criminological understanding about the role of informal citizens in crime control at places.

The Care Work of Balance

Inner Asia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-254
Author(s):  
Alex Oehler
Keyword(s):  
Species Diversity ◽  
Ethic Of Care ◽  
Domestic Animals ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Hybrid Breeding ◽  
Breeding Practices ◽  
Anthropological Literature ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This paper explores the relationship between herding and hunting practices in the mountainous environment of Indigenous Soyots of Okinskii Raion (Oka), Buryatia. It traces an animistic approach to the concept of balance among sentient entities, including landscapes, identifying it as an underlying ethic governing the relationships of domestic and non-domestic animals with humans. Drawing on this ethic of care, the paper identifies practices directed at achieving balance as a form of resistance to assertions of outright control over living beings. The author begins by problematising the concept of care, pointing to basic ontological differences identified in anthropological literature, before addressing how care and balance are related. Here care is understood as a matter of attentiveness: a skill that links herding and hunting practices. The paper then delves into three concrete areas of care: the care of creating life in living and calving spaces; the care of holding life together through material implements and invocation of intangible protective forces; and, finally, care for species diversity in local yak and hybrid breeding practices.

scholarly journals Methodological and conceptual challenges in rare and severe event forecast-verification

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Alexander Ebert ◽  
Peter Milne
Keyword(s):  
Skill Score ◽  
Forecast Verification ◽  
Avalanche Forecasting ◽  
Severe Event ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Critical Overview ◽  
Practical Implications ◽  
Do So

Abstract. There are distinctive methodological and conceptual challenges in rare and severe event (RSE) forecast-verification, that is, in the assessment of the quality of forecasts involving natural hazards such as avalanches or tornadoes. While some of these challenges have been discussed since the inception of the discipline in the 1880s, there is no consensus about how to assess RSE forecasts. This article offers a comprehensive and critical overview of the many different measures used to capture the quality of an RSE forecast and argues that there is only one proper skill score for RSE forecast-verification. We do so by first focusing on the relationship between accuracy and skill and show why skill is more important than accuracy in the case of RSE forecast-verification. Subsequently, we motivate three adequacy constraints for a proper measure of skill in RSE forecasting. We argue that the Peirce Skill Score is the only score that meets all three adequacy constraints. We then show how our theoretical investigation has important practical implications for avalanche forecasting by discussing a recent study in avalanche forecast-verification using the nearest neighbour method. Lastly, we raise what we call the “scope challenge" that affects all forms of RSE forecasting and highlight how and why the proper skill measure is important not only for local binary RSE forecasts but also for the assessment of different diagnostic tests widely used in avalanche risk management and related operations. Finally, our discussion is also of relevance to the thriving research project of designing methods to assess the quality of regional multi-categorical avalanche forecasts.

Sociolinguistics

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enam Al-Wer
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Linguistic Variation ◽  
Relevant Research ◽  
Research Practices ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
The Past ◽  
Variationist Sociolinguistics ◽  
Arabic Speaking ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Critical Overview

This article provides a critical overview of the application of sociolinguistic principles, methods, and analysis to Arabic data with reference to research conducted over the past three decades or so in various Arabic-speaking societies. It focuses on linguistic variation and change, the major concerns of (variationist) sociolinguistics. The article begins with an outline of the relationship between traditional dialectology and sociolinguistics, the ways dialectological data are incorporated into sociolinguistic analysis, and the benefits of maintaining the link between the two disciplines. Then an outline is presented of the basic principles of the variationist paradigm, which are intricately bound up with sociolinguistic methodology and theory; where relevant, research practices in studies on Arabic are cited. The article then critically reviews the “diglossia” model as an approach to analyzing variation in Arabic. Finally, an alternative and up-to-date model of analysis is given, with case studies from recent research used as illustration.

Does the Historical Epistemology Make the Ontological Turn?

2021 ◽  
pp. 58-69
Author(s):  
Lada V. Shipovalova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Essential Elements ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Historical Epistemology ◽  
Historical Ontology ◽  
Local Coordination ◽  
Historical Series ◽  
Anthropological Research ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
The Relationship

The article deals with the problems of historical epistemology as a topical direc­tion of scientific knowledge research. It focuses on the relationship between his­torical epistemology and historical ontology, on historical event, and on the differ­ence between the work of a historian of science and a historical epistemologist. The author builds a dialogue with the publication of I.T. Kasavin “Knowledge and Reality in the Historical Epistemology”. She puts forward the thesis that epistemology is justifiably called historical if it not only performs the primary epistemological grasp of a historical-scientific event, but also makes an ontologi­cal turn. When interpreting the ontological turn, she uses its understanding in contemporary anthropological research. The essential elements of the ontolog­ical turn are the historical event that sets the direction of the ontological turn and the historical epistemologist as its actor. The author interprets the event as the beginning of more than one causal historical series, an inexhaustible source of scientific knowledge for cognition. The work of the historical epistemologist is revealed as problematization of one’s own position and the local coordination of emerging causal historical series. The author gives the examples of such work of contemporary historical epistemologists from the texts of L. Daston and P. Galison. It is concluded that the relationship between epistemology and onto­logy in historical research of science, as well as interaction between the historian of science and epistemologist, depends on whether these positions are interpreted as stable and rigidly differentiated or whether the movement between them is recognized as necessary.

Becoming Hausa: Ethnic identity change and its implications for the study of ethnic pluralism and stratification

Africa ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 410-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank A. Salamone
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Complex Societies ◽  
Identity Change ◽  
Pluralistic Society ◽  
Ethnic Pluralism ◽  
Interethnic Relationships ◽  
Anthropological Literature ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
North Western

Statement of problemAn interesting problem emerging from recent studies in complex societies is that of the relationship between ethnic identity and the interaction between various ethnic groups in a pluralistic society. In much of the sociological and anthropological literature, writers have treated ethnic groups as isolates and ‘givens’. Such categorization dismisses the potential investigation of factors responsible for permanence and change in ethnic groups. This paper will focus on a specific example of ethnic identity change, that of the Gungawa of Yauri Emirate, North-Western State, Nigeria, who have long had a pattern of ‘becoming’ Hausa. The paper will suggest some ways in which the possibility and mechanism for ethnic identity change functions to structure interethnic relationships and ease tensions resulting from such contact.

7. Crime data and criminal statistics: a critical reflection

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Maguire ◽  
Susan McVie
Keyword(s):  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Crime Statistics ◽  
Crime Data ◽  
The Public ◽  
Competing Demands ◽  
Official Crime ◽  
Changes Over Time ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Critical Overview

This chapter provides a critical reflection on the nature and measurement of crime levels, patterns, and trends. It covers empirical and methodological questions about how much crime there is and how this changes over time and considers the relationship between what crime data are collected and published and changes in perceptions of and responses to the crime problem as a result of developments in the politics of crime control. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first provides a critical overview of the development of the ‘official’ crime statistics in England and Wales, highlighting some of the key decisions that are made about how to present statistics to the public and how to respond to legal changes, new sources of data, and the emergence of new kinds of criminal behaviour. The second section examines, and explores the reasons behind, a rapid growth in demand for new kinds of information about crime which has been evident since the 1970s. The final section summarizes challenges, dilemmas, and recent debates about the future of national crime statistics, including questions about how to maintain public trust and how to balance competing demands of relevance, comprehensiveness, and robust measurement of trends.

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