Kontaktzonen und der Körper des Anthropologen. Zu den Tagebuchaufzeichnungen und Briefen von Franz Boas und Bronislaw Malinowski

Paragrana ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-119
Author(s):  
Mario Bührmann
Keyword(s):  
Contact Zone ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Franz Boas ◽  
Bronislaw Malinowski ◽  
Mary Louise Pratt ◽  
Anthropological Fieldwork ◽  
Physical Resistance ◽  
Bronisław Malinowski

AbstractThis paper explores how the concept of the 'contact zone′ (conceived by Mary Louise Pratt) can be extended by means of an issue which she does not mention: the physical shape and specific corporeal reactions of those acting in cultural encounters. By means of two case studies it will be questioned if and how ethnographers regard their body as an important constituent of 'contact zones′ generated by anthropological fieldwork ‒ and how concepts of performativity may serve to shed light on these particular interactions between the ethnographer′s body and its social environment. Therefore I will pay attention to the records in the diaries and letters of Franz Boas (1858–1942) und Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), since both scholars are wedded with the methodological scheme of 'participant observation′, which specifically claims the physical presence of the ethnographer by means of long standing fieldwork. With a 'performative′ view to their 'fieldwork performances′ it becomes clear that they, certainly without using the term, even regard and utilize their skin as a 'contact zone′: through the corporeal surface and its physical resistance they detect the haptic, olfactory and gustatory qualities of social life. Moreover, a performative′ view to the concept of the 'contact zone′, particularly against the background of this ethnological context, exposes the problem of the seminal methodological scheme of 'participant observation′.

Introduction to Ethnography

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Kwame Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Research Methods ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Research Tradition ◽  
Primary Qualities ◽  
Bronislaw Malinowski ◽  
Bronisław Malinowski ◽  
Oriented Research

This introductory chapter introduces ethnography as a distinct research and writing tradition. The author begins by historically contextualizing ethnography’s professionalization within the fields of anthropology and sociology. While highlighting the formidable influences of, for example, Bronislaw Malinowski and the Chicago school, the author complicates existing understandings by bringing significant, but less-recognized, influences and contributions to light. The chapter next outlines three principal research methods that most ethnographers utilize—namely, participant-observation, fieldnote writing, and ethnographic interviewing. The discussion then shifts from method to methodology to explain the primary qualities that separate ethnography from other forms of participant-observation-oriented research. This includes introducing a research disposition called ethnographic comportment, which serves as a standard for gauging ethnography throughout the remainder of the book. The author presents ethnographic comportment as reflecting both ethnographers’ awarenesses of and their accountabilities to the research tradition in which they participate.

Philosophical Contributions to the Birth of Linguistics and Anthropology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael N. Forster
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Friedrich Schlegel ◽  
Wilhelm Von Humboldt ◽  
Franz Boas ◽  
Bronislaw Malinowski ◽  
Bronisław Malinowski ◽  
Better Than

This chapter argues that Herder contributed the fundamental philosophical principles that enabled the birth of two major new academic disciplines that we today take for granted: linguistics and cultural anthropology. In linguistics his principles were especially taken over and developed by Friedrich Schlegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt. In anthropology they were especially taken over and developed by Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski, the founders of American and British anthropology, respectively. Moreover, as in some other areas (such as hermeneutics), his principles not only enabled the birth of these two new disciplines but were also in important respects even better than the versions of them that the disciplines went on to develop.

Bronisław Malinowski

Anthropology ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Holdsworth
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Social Anthropology ◽  
World War ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
The People ◽  
Real People ◽  
Bronislaw Malinowski ◽  
Bronisław Malinowski

Bronisław Malinowski (b. 1884–d. 1942) is arguably the most influential anthropologist of the 20th century, certainly for British social anthropology. The list of his students is a who’s who of the most important British anthropologists of the 1930s through to the 1970s and includes, among others, Raymond Firth, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Audrey Richards, Edmund Leach, Ashley Montagu, Meyer Fortes, and Isaac Schapera. Malinowski saw himself as effecting a revolution in anthropology by rejecting the evolutionary paradigm of his predecessors and introducing functionalism, whereby institutions satisfied human biological needs, as the way to understand other cultures. His lasting legacy, however, is methodological rather than theoretical. It was by exhorting anthropologists to give up their comfortable position on the veranda of the missionary compound or government station and to go and live and work with the people they studied that he effected his real innovation: fieldwork. Although not the first to conduct fieldwork, his lengthy stay among the Trobriand Islanders during World War I established, as Edmund Leach (in Singer 2011, cited under Documentaries) has remarked, how to “do” anthropology. Living with the people he studied, getting to know them personally, participating in their activities, and conducting his research in the vernacular has since become known as participant observation. His collection of monographs and numerous articles on the Trobriand Islanders is perhaps the most extensive ethnography of any people written to date. His magnum opus, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, published in 1922, in which he describes the Kula ring (a complex interisland exchange of arm shell bracelets and necklaces), is one of the first modern ethnographies. Unlike earlier monographs, which were dry catalogues of facts, Malinowski’s ethnographies painted a romantic picture of native life, had an institutional focus, and provided a vivid narrative where the ethnographer is seen to interact with real people. A prolific writer, Malinowski tackled some of the most important and controversial topics of his day: economics, religion, family, sex, psychology, colonialism, and war. He insisted that a proper understanding of culture required viewing these various aspects in context. Malinowski was instrumental in transforming British social anthropology from an ethnocentric discipline concerned with historical origins and based on the writings of travelers, missionaries, and colonial administrators to one concerned with understanding the interconnections between various institutions and based on fieldwork, where the goal was to “grasp the native’s point of view” (Malinowski 1984, p. 25, cited under Fieldwork and Ethnography).

Lectures de Mauss

2010 ◽  
Vol 65 (6) ◽  
pp. 1303-1320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlo Ginzburg
Keyword(s):  
Franz Boas ◽  
Alexandre Kojeve ◽  
Claude Lefort ◽  
Bronislaw Malinowski ◽  
Bronisław Malinowski

RésuméLe titre de l’essai a deux significations: il fait allusion, d’un côté, à des lectures qui ont joué un rôle important dans le travail de Marcel Mauss sur le don (notamment, Bronislaw Malinowski et Franz Boas); de l’autre, à quelques lectures importantes qui ont été données de l’Essai sur le don. Les deux niveaux sont liés: l’un clarifie l’autre. Plus spécifiquement, l’essai montre que la réflexion sur le lien impliqué par l’obligation de rendre le don (thème qui est au centre de l’essai de Mauss) a été déclenchée par une lecture très originale de certains passages de l’Émile de Rousseau. Il suit les traces, directes et indirectes, de ce noyau rousseauiste dans la postérité de l’essai de Mauss: de l’interprétation de Hegel donnée par Alexandre Kojève aux lectures divergentes de Mauss données par Claude Lévi-Strauss et Claude Lefort – fondées sur, respectivement, une image non conflictuelle et une image conflictuelle de la société.

Ethnography, Introspection, and Reflexive Culture Studies

Prospects ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 115-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Caughey
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Science Methods ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Ethnographic Approach ◽  
Anthropological Fieldwork ◽  
Tribal Cultures ◽  
Depth Interviews

In recent years American Studies scholars have shown a growing interest in combining social-science methods with humanistic concerns. One aspect of this development has been an increased interest in anthropological-style fieldwork or ethnography. “Ethnography” can be broadly defined as the “work of describing a culture,” but in anthropology it usually consists of an attempt to describe the existing culture of a particular group or institution through the use of firsthand participant observation in its social life and intensive in-depth interviews with individual members. Traditionally, anthropological fieldwork has also connoted description of “other cultures”—often non-Western tribal cultures. But the ethnographic approach has long been used to study modern Western society, and over the last fifteen years it has been widely used to study subcultures in contemporary America. During the same period it has come into increasing use in American Studies as well.

Prologue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Didier Fassin
Keyword(s):  
Legal Anthropology ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Bronislaw Malinowski ◽  
Bronisław Malinowski

In his 1926 essay, “Primitive Crime and Its Punishment,” often considered the foundational text of legal anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski recounts an episode that occurred during his fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands and profoundly influenced his views on law and order in “savage society,” as he calls it....

scholarly journals The idea of community and its practice: Tensions, disruptions and hope in Glasgow’s urban growing projects

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 484-499
Author(s):  
Helen Traill
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Community Gardening ◽  
Conceptual Approach ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Community Theory ◽  
Communal Space ◽  
Work Done ◽  
Do So

The question of what community comes to mean has taken on increasing significance in sociological debates and beyond, as an increasingly politicised term and the focus of new theorisations. In this context, it is increasingly necessary to ask what is meant when community is invoked. Building on recent work that positions community as a practice and an ever-present facet of human sociality, this article argues that it is necessary to consider the powerful work that community as an idea does in shaping everyday communal practices, through designating collective space and creating behavioural expectations. To do so, the article draws on participant observation and interviews from a community gardening site in Glasgow that was part of a broader research project investigating the everyday life of communality within growing spaces. This demonstrates the successes but also the difficulties of carving out communal space, and the work done by community organisations to enact it. The article draws on contemporary community theory, but also on ideas from Davina Cooper about the role of ideation in social life. It argues for a conceptual approach to communality that does not situate it as a social form or seek it in everyday practice, but instead considers the vacillation between the ideation and practices of community: illustrated here in a designated community place. In so doing, this approach calls into focus the frictions and boundaries produced in that process, and questions the limits of organisational inclusivity.

L’hypothèse de Firth

2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Béatrice Godart-Wendling
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Bronislaw Malinowski ◽  
Mode D’Action ◽  
Bronisław Malinowski

Résumé Le but de cet article est d’évaluer l’hypothèse de John Rupert Firth (1890–1960) énonçant que l’article de l’anthropologue Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages” (1923), constituerait une des sources d’inspiration ayant conduit Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) à élaborer une nouvelle conception de la signification en termes d’‘usage’. S’appuyant sur certains passages des Philosophical Investigations (1953), Firth établit ainsi une filiation entre les deux grandes idées phares de Malinowski, à savoir l’importance de la notion de ‘contexte de situation’ et l’idée que le langage serait un ‘mode d’action’ et les principales thèses (la signification comme usage, l’acquisition du langage, le langage comme un ensemble de jeux) que développera Wittgenstein. L’examen du bien fondé de cette hypothèse conduira à préciser la synergie des idées qui eut lieu en matière de pragmatique dans l’Angleterre de la première moitié du XXe siècle.

The Kula: A Bronislaw Malinowski Centennial Exhibition.

Man ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 786
Author(s):  
B. A. L. Cranstone ◽  
William A. Shack
Keyword(s):  
Bronislaw Malinowski ◽  
Centennial Exhibition ◽  
Bronisław Malinowski

Richang: An Affect-Inflected Ethnography of Chinese Livestreams

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 15-42
Author(s):  
Ge Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Contact Zone ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Video On Demand ◽  
Television Studies ◽  
On Demand ◽  
Ethnographic Writing ◽  
Affective Events ◽  
Mass Entertainment

Abstract I tracked one Chinese livestreaming platform Douyu from its emergence as experimental subsidiary of a Video on Demand platform in 2013 to its status as an ordinary medium of mass entertainment in 2018. This affect-inflected ethnography is written based on participant observation of three channels on Douyu as I exhibit the microcontexts of each channel in chronicles of affective events, long pauses of silence, repetitive and incoherent dialogues, asymmetrical debates, and sporadic moments of emotional meltdown. This ethnographic writing is a contact zone, a provocation, and, by proxy, a dialogue between academic theories (especially from television studies), user practices, and my informants’ own attempts at theorising how and what livestream feels and means for them.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document