Ethnografisches Schreiben und die Schweigsamkeit des Sozialen / Ethnographic Writing and the Silence of the Social

2001 ◽  
Vol 30 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Hirschauer
Keyword(s):  
Ethnographic Writing ◽  
The Social

ZusammenfassungDer Aufsatz behandelt ein zentrales Problem der Methodologie der Ethnografie. Er expliziert die Beschreibung als eine elementare soziologische Kulturtechnik. Im Vordergrund steht dabei, deren zentrales Bezugsproblem herauszuarbeiten: die Versprachlichung der ‚schweigsamen‘ Dimension des Sozialen. Das ethnografische Schreiben wird zunächst als ein Dokumentationsverfahren eingeführt, das durch avanciertere Aufzeichnungstechniken der qualitativen Sozialforschung entwertet wurde. Diese setzten einen naturalistischen Standard in Bezug auf die Reifikation und Dekontextualisierung von ‚Daten‘. Nach einer wissenssoziologischen Relativierung dieses Standards werden jene Bezugsprobleme herausgearbeitet, die alle Verfahren unbearbeitet lassen, die mit Aufzeichnungen an eine primordiale Verbalisierung des Sozialen durch Informanten anschließen: Interviews, Diskurs- und Gesprächsanalysen. Es sind die Probleme des Stimmlosen, Stummen, Unaussprechlichen, Vorsprachlichen und Unbeschreiblichen, die das ethnografische Schreiben zuallererst zu lösen hat. In ihm wird etwas zur Sprache gebracht, das vorher nicht Sprache war. Für diese Aufgabe einer Verschiebung der Artikulationsgrenze muss sich die Beschreibung von der Logik der Aufzeichnung abwenden und zu einer theorieorientierten Forschungspraxis werden, die nicht nach ihrer Dokumentationsleistung, sondern nach ihren analytischen Leistungen zu bewerten ist.

Writing Educational Ethnography

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Delamont
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Qualitative Methods ◽  
Educational Research ◽  
Social Anthropology ◽  
Educational Settings ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Ethnographic Writing ◽  
The Social ◽  
Educational Ethnography

Researchers who use qualitative methods, especially ethnography in educational settings, have to make conscious decisions about how to write about their results, their methods, and their experiences as investigators. Since the 1980s, initially in the discipline of social anthropology, but later across all the social sciences, there have been vigorous debates about how texts should be written and also about how they should be read. Before that, qualitative and quantitative educational research was written up in a similar way: reported in a passive or anonymous style designed to create an authoritative account. Over the course of 40 years, ethnographic writing has developed new literary forms, polyvocal texts, and authors have become visible and individual in their own texts. A wider range of texting genres is now published, and reflexivity is central to writing and reading. The causes and consequences of those changes are analyzed.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 123-136
Author(s):  
Ahmed Kanna ◽  
Amélie Le Renard ◽  
Neha Vora
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
Field Site ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Ethnographic Writing ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender

This concluding chapter explores the question of what decolonized ethnography and academia can look like. It argues that de-exceptionalizing the Arabian Peninsula as a field site requires deconstructing an idealized vision of Western academia as a presumed site of democracy and liberalism. The projects of anthropology and sociology, as they have been invested in anticolonial and antiracist justice and breaking down binary understandings between East and West, self and other, civilized and savage, are implicated in the continuing use of the exceptional and spectacular as tropes in ethnographic writing, revealing just how much work is yet to be done within their disciplines. Within these disciplines, some have questioned the various hierarchies that are realized through the production of knowledge, not only between the social scientists and their “objects” or “fields,” but also among social scientists themselves, particularly the ways in which power relations in terms of status, racialized identification, class, and gender shape perceptions of their expertise or lack thereof. The chapter then assesses how centering not only the Arabian Peninsula but gender, sexuality, race, household, and other topics that have until now been seen as marginal might provide better information about the societies social scientists study as well as transnational processes, globalization, and the contemporary world.

scholarly journals Wild-ing the Ethnography of Conservation: Writing Nature's Value and Agency In

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laur Kiik
Keyword(s):  
Nature Conservation ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Native People ◽  
Science Data ◽  
Conservation Practice ◽  
Ethnographic Writing ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Nature ◽  
Anthropological Literature

When reading ethnographic literature on nature conservation, one may wonder: where has nature gone? Social anthropologists have written nuanced ethnographies of how the environmental projects of governments and transnational NGOs encounter, dispossess, clash culturally with, and try to govern native people across the world. Yet, these diverse ethnographies often say little about what motivates those encounters firstly: local and global nature, especially wildlife, plants, and the planet’s ecological crisis. Thus, this paper seeks ways how ethnographic writing on conservation practice could better reflect that the planet’s many self-willed, struggling, and valued non-humans, too, enter conservation’s encounters. To find paths toward such a ‘wild-ing’ of ethnography, the paper locates and reviews disparate materials from across the social-anthropological literature on biodiversity conservation. The review is structured through three questions: How does and could the ethnography of conservation represent nature’s value? How can it show that animals, plants, and other nature make and meet worlds? How can it incorporate natural science data about non-human worlds and ecological crisis? Altogether, we understand nature conservation clearer through the interdisciplinary and more-than-human ethnography of world-making encounters. Such wilder ethnography may also better connect people’s suffering and nature’s vanishing – as problems both for anthropology and conservation science.

scholarly journals Interpretation out of Contradiction: A World of Music in the West Indies

2013 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Jocelyne Guilbault
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
Simple Fact ◽  
Types Of Knowledge ◽  
Ethnographic Writing ◽  
The Social ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
The One ◽  
Great Complexity

This paper addresses the researcher's double challenge: to acknowledge and situate contrasting experiences of the same phenomenon and yet to integrate them into a personal rendition of that phenomenon. An examination of the various strategies employed in ethnographic writing, from the copious use of quotations to dialogical or polyphonic writing, shows how contradictory viewpoints have been given more attention in ethnographic literature, as the politics of representation have developed into an important debate in the social sciences. While these various approaches have undeniably allowed more voices to be heard, they have nevertheless left unanswered the problem of interpretation in the case of contested appropriations or contradictory versions of the same phenomenon. The simple fact of integrating various voices in an ethnography does not indeed constitute in an by itself an explanation of what is being said and why. This paper examines possible uses and treatments of diverging voices in ethnographic writing. By way of illustration, I emphasize the great complexity of the responses and interpretations generated by zouk, a mass-distributed popular music from the West Indies, by presenting contrasting voices and viewpoints from the islands of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Domenica, and Haiti. By doing so, I show, on the one hand, how each viewpoint can provide distinct types of knowledge. On the other hand, I argue that while there can be no analysis which can provide final answers to the questions raised by controversial phenomenon such as zouk, not all the points of view should be accorded the same importance.

scholarly journals The Intradisciplinary Affinities of Postmodern Anthropology Part I. The Consequences of Merging Ethics, Politics and Methodology in 1960s Critical Anthropology

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 103-115
Author(s):  
Miloš Milenković
Keyword(s):  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Alternative Interpretation ◽  
Ethnographic Writing ◽  
The Social ◽  
Methodological Problems ◽  
Critical Anthropology ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Political Interpretation ◽  
The 1960S

The paper offers an alternative interpretation of the genesis of the literary turn in anthropology, as an "interim solution" in the context of the ideological incorrectness of radical anti-colonial theories in a liberal democracy. Critical anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s drew considerable inspiration from reformational currents in neo-Marxist sociology and social philosophy, arousing ideological opposition among the numerous participants of methodological debates. This opposition would prove crucial for their subsequent modest development. This activistic ideological ballast actually slowed down the development of potent externalist analyses of the social determination of anthropology and academe in general, leaving room for studies of ethnographic writing. Anticipating, in terms of themes and trends, "nonmethodological" solutions to methodological problems, it had a direct effect on the substitution of poetics and contextual reflection for methodological regulation. Thus, paradoxically, extremely externalistically oriented analyses, which attempted to merge ethical, political and methodological debates, reduced the methodological focus of the disciplinary community from issues of research objectivity and the reliability of ethnographic records to issues concerning style and the writing of anthropology. In this context, debates on relativism, realism, representation, authority and reflexivity, typical of 1980s postmodern anthropology, have become a socially acceptable alternative to the critical and neo-Marxist anthropology of Afro-Americans, feminists or of the otherwise oppressed/studied when they in turn become nativistic anthropologists. The "literary turn" in postmodern anthropology is generally interpreted as an externalist critique of traditional ethnographic realism, offering an ethical and political interpretation of reflexivity as per se more correct than traditional positivist ethnography.

scholarly journals At the Margins of Empire: Feminist-Nationalist Configurations of Burmese Society in the Hindi Public (1917–1920)

2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 1013-1033 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shobna Nijhawan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
Hindu Nationalism ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
Ethnographic Writing ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Feminism ◽  
Woman Reader ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Western Woman

Embedded in early twentieth-century discourses on modernity, feminism, and nationalism, and written for the newly emerging woman reader, Rameshwari Nehru's Hindi account of Burmese women was an experiment in ethnographic writing. Along with the speeches she delivered in Burma (all reprinted in the Hindi women's periodical Stri Darpan), she also used the ethnography to call for the social and political mobilization of Burmese and Indian women. Nehru revisited the relationship between India and Burma in the gendered and elite terms of Indian (mostly Hindu) nationalism and social feminism. In describing a supposed intact social structure found in Burma, her motive was to portray a woman subject that was not modeled on prevalent conceptions of “the Western woman,” but that originated in the neighborhood of the colonial present. In the process, as this paper argues, Nehru appropriated colonial discourses on Indian and Burmese womanhood, while she also absorbed Burma into her vision of Indian nationhood and imagined sisterhood.

The Social Origins and Provenance of the English Bishops during the Reign of Edward II

1959 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 51-79
Author(s):  
K. Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Early Career ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Origins ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Edward Ii ◽  
The Social ◽  
Complete Study ◽  
History Of

During the last twenty or twenty-five years medieval historians have been much interested in the composition of the English episcopate. A number of studies of it have been published on periods ranging from the eleventh to the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A further paper might well seem superfluous. My reason for offering one is that most previous writers have concentrated on analysing the professional circles from which the bishops were drawn, and suggesting the influences which their early careers as royal clerks, university masters and students, secular or regular clergy, may have had on their later work as bishops. They have shown comparatively little interest in their social background and provenance, except for those bishops who belonged to magnate families. Some years ago, when working on the political activities of Edward II's bishops, it seemed to me that social origins, family connexions and provenance might in a number of cases have had at least as much influence on a bishop's attitude to politics as his early career. I there fore collected information about the origins and provenance of these bishops. I now think that a rather more careful and complete study of this subject might throw further light not only on the political history of the reign, but on other problems connected with the character and work of the English episcopate. There is a general impression that in England in the later middle ages the bishops' ties with their dioceses were becoming less close, and that they were normally spending less time in diocesan work than their predecessors in the thirteenth century.

Social transmission bias and the cultural evolution of folk-economic beliefs

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Hirshleifer ◽  
Siew Hong Teoh
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Social Transmission ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
Economic Attitudes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Beliefs ◽  
Over Time

AbstractEvolved dispositions influence, but do not determine, how people think about economic problems. The evolutionary cognitive approach offers important insights but underweights the social transmission of ideas as a level of explanation. The need for asocialexplanation for the evolution of economic attitudes is evidenced, for example, by immense variations in folk-economic beliefs over time and across individuals.

Individual differences, social attention, and the history of the social motivation hypotheses of autism

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter C. Mundy
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Early Development ◽  
Emotional Development ◽  
Social Motivation ◽  
Social Attention ◽  
Social Emotional Development ◽  
Social Emotional ◽  
Precise Understanding ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

Abstract The stereotype of people with autism as unresponsive or uninterested in other people was prominent in the 1980s. However, this view of autism has steadily given way to recognition of important individual differences in the social-emotional development of affected people and a more precise understanding of the possible role social motivation has in their early development.

Challenges to the social motivation theory of autism: The dangers of counteracting an imprecise theory with even more imprecision

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mirko Uljarević ◽  
Giacomo Vivanti ◽  
Susan R. Leekam ◽  
Antonio Y. Hardan
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Social Motivation ◽  
Motivation Theory ◽  
The Social

Abstract The arguments offered by Jaswal & Akhtar to counter the social motivation theory (SMT) do not appear to be directly related to the SMT tenets and predictions, seem to not be empirically testable, and are inconsistent with empirical evidence. To evaluate the merits and shortcomings of the SMT and identify scientifically testable alternatives, advances are needed on the conceptualization and operationalization of social motivation across diagnostic boundaries.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document