Experience of Ethnographic Fieldwork in an English Benedictine Monastery

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Irvine
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Fieldwork Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
Peripheral Participation

What is the role of imitation in ethnographic fieldwork, and what are its limits? This article explores what it means to participate in a particular fieldsite; a Catholic English Benedictine monastery. A discussion of the importance of hospitality in the life of the monastery shows how the guest becomes a point of contact between the community and the wider society within which that community exists. The peripheral participation of the ethnographer as monastic guest is not about becoming incorporated, but about creating a space within which knowledge can be communicated. By focusing on the process of re-learning in the monastery – in particular, relearning how to experience silence and work – I discuss some of the ways in which the fieldwork experience helped me to reassess the social world to which I would return.

The role of pathos: from argumentative responses to feeling and emotions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Short Distance ◽  
Social World ◽  
Legal Rhetoric ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
First Time

Chapter 10 is devoted to the role of emotions or pathos. Pathos was the term ordinarily used to denote the notion of audience. For the first time since Aristotle, emotions receive a full role in a treatise on rhetoric. The responses of the audience are modulated by its emotions. What is their nature and how precisely do they operate? The areas of political and legal rhetoric are examined here in the light of an original view of the theory of distance: values at greater distance become passions at short distance, and this is one of the features which demarcates politics from law. Law and politics are not merely argumentative, nor are they entirely emotional. The norms they codify are often implicit in their shaping of our mutual expectations and behavior in the social world.

A collective ethnographer: fieldwork experience in the Brazilian Northeast

2008 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lygia Sigaud
Keyword(s):  
Research Group ◽  
Seasonal Variations ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Fieldwork Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
Brazilian Northeast ◽  
The Relationship

The article examines a 30-year experience of collective ethnography in the sugarcane plantations of Brazil's Northeast. Over this period, the research group has worked in different temporal and spatial contexts, continually exchanging its findings. The author draws on her experience as part of the research group in order to focus on the conditions of entering the field, the seasonal variations and geographic displacements, the research group's morphology and the overall implications for anthropological knowledge. Debates over ethnography have neglected the relationship between the social conditions in which anthropologists carry out their work and what they are able to write about the social world. This article sets out to fill this gap.

Voorbij navelstaren en narcisme

KWALON ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thaddeus Müller
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social World ◽  
Qualitative Studies ◽  
Added Value ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Cultural Understanding ◽  
The Social ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Auto Ethnography

Beyond navel-gazing and narcissism.Ferrell’s auto-ethnography as part of ethnography Beyond navel-gazing and narcissism.Ferrell’s auto-ethnography as part of ethnography The labeling of auto-ethnography as navel-gazing does not do justice to the variety with which auto-ethnography is applied. A distinction should be made between emotional and analytical auto-ethnography. In the first form the central person of the researcher plays the central role, in the second auto-ethnography is applied to get a better understanding of the social world which is being studied. In this article the author discusses the second approach by using the work of Jeff Ferrell. Ferrell is a well-known cultural criminologist, who focuses critically on the cultural understanding of social life. By looking at how Ferrell applies auto-ethnography, insight is gained into the added value of this method for qualitative studies: (1) the integration of the personal experiences of researchers in texts in order to achieve a richer description of the social worlds they explore, (2) making explicit the role of the researcher in publications, and (3) developing new (more appealing) forms of representation.

Dislocation as method

2019 ◽  
pp. 7-14
Author(s):  
David MacDougall
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Data ◽  
Visual Anthropology ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
Research Questions

Research in the sciences, including the social sciences, is usually supposed to be conducted in a systematic way, working from research questions to the gathering of empirical data, to conclusions. But in an analogy drawn from the art of fencing, the author argues for an alternative approach in visual anthropology. Films look at the world differently from the ways we conventionally see, and these differences have optical, social, and structural origins. To overcome these differences, filmmakers may have to voluntarily ‘dislocate’ themselves in order to put themselves in a position to view their subject from a different perspective, and so uncover new knowledge. The argument is supported by a discussion of the realities of ethnographic fieldwork, the processes of filmmaking, and the role of play and improvisation in the arts and other human endeavours.

scholarly journals Digital Survivance: Mediatization and the Sacred in the Tribal Digital Activism of the #NoDAPL Movement

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Schofield Clark ◽  
Angel Hinzo
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Communication Media ◽  
Visual Methods ◽  
Digital Activism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
Media Systems ◽  
Further Development

To explore the role of contestation in mediatization processes, this article utilizes digital and visual methods to analyze instances of Indigenous digital survivance. Focusing on recent examples at the heart of the #NoDAPL movement allows us to flesh out and argue for a decolonizing approach to the study of mediatization, which we define, following Clark (2011), as the process by which collective uses of communication media (1) extend the development of independent media industries and their circulation of narratives, (2) contribute to new forms of action and interaction in the social world, and (3) give shape to how we think of humanity and our place in the world. The article therefore concludes with suggestions regarding the further development of methodological approaches to studying processes of mediatization in relation to contestations over normative claims and pragmatic concerns regarding the role of media systems in our collective future.

scholarly journals Queer utopias and queer criminology

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 510-522
Author(s):  
Lynne Copson ◽  
Avi Boukli
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Forms

Drawing on the concept of utopia to reflect upon the emerging field of queer criminology and José Esteban Muñoz’s account of queer theory as essentially utopian, we draw two conclusions. First, we suggest that queer criminology is currently limited by tinkering at the edges with piecemeal reforms instead of focussing on radical, wholesale changes, and second, that queer theory contains within it the potential for a more holistic reimagining of the social world. In doing so, we question rigid cis/trans binaries and reject accounts of trans/gender that ignore the role of structural harm. We draw on Ernst Bloch’s concepts of ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ utopia to suggest that while queer criminology has succeeded in producing largely ‘abstract’ utopias, it struggles in translating these into ‘concrete’ ones. By introducing examples of trans literary utopias as potential transformative cultural forms, however, we consider the potential of queer theory for realising ‘concrete’ utopia through a more radical rethinking of the social world.

The function of metaphor framing, deliberate or otherwise, in a social world

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Thibodeau
Keyword(s):  
Framing Effects ◽  
Social World ◽  
Target Domain ◽  
Primary Motivation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Metaphor Theory ◽  
Metaphor Processing ◽  
Pragmatic Dimension

Abstract Metaphor frames highlight certain aspects of a target domain and deemphasize others, thereby encouraging specific patterns of inference. A recent series of studies (Reijnierse, Burgers, Krennmayr, & Steen, 2015; Steen, Reijnierse, & Burgers, 2014), however, raises questions about the role of metaphor in communication and reasoning by (a) failing to find metaphor framing effects on a series of policy judgments, (b) critiquing the methods that have been used to test for metaphor framing effects, and (c) arguing that current theories of metaphor processing fail to consider the social-pragmatic dimension of metaphor in communication. Here, I reflect on these concerns and present novel analyses of data collected by Steen and colleagues, which reveal metaphor framing effects in these studies but fail to support a prediction of Deliberate Metaphor Theory (DMT): that extended metaphors are more likely to be remembered. DMT attempts to situate metaphor framing effects more intentionally along a social-pragmatic dimension; developing and testing the theory was a primary motivation of the studies conducted by Steen and colleagues. I discuss the implications of these findings and offer a perspective on how DMT can help grow our knowledge of the function of metaphor in a social world.

From paradise to brand

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-135
Author(s):  
Rainer Hülsse
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Financial Centre ◽  
The Social ◽  
International Image ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Considerable Body

Metaphors construct social reality, including the actors which populate the social world. A considerable body of research has explored this reality-constituting role of metaphors, yet little attention has been paid to the attempts of social actors to influence the metaphorical structure by which they are constituted. The present article conceptualises the relationship between actor and metaphorical structure as one of mutual constitution. Empirically, it analyses how until the late 1990s Liechtenstein was constructed as an attractive financial centre by metaphors such as haven and paradise, how then a metaphorical shift constituted the country more negatively, before Liechtenstein finally fought back: with the help of the new brand-metaphor and also a professional image campaign the country tried to repair its international image.

Colourful psi’s sleep furiously: Depicting emotional states in some African languages

2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 57-83
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Language Structure ◽  
The Social ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Figurative Speech

This study sets out to investigate the “poetry of grammar”, more specifically the role of the body in figurative speech, in African languages mainly belonging to Nilotic and Bantu. Apprehending the semantics and pragmatics of metaphorical and metonymic expressions in these languages presupposes an interaction between a number of cognitive processes, as argued below. Interestingly, these languages seem to use these strategies involving figurative speech in tandem with alternative strategies involving on-record statements. This multivocality only makes sense if we place language and language structure more in the social world in which it is used.

Review Symposium: Interdisciplinary Readings of Ari Z. Bryen's Violence in Roman Egypt: Where Law, Violence, and Culture Collide: A Sociolegal Reading of Violence in Everyday Life

2015 ◽  
Vol 40 (03) ◽  
pp. 802-806
Author(s):  
Jill D. Weinberg
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social World ◽  
Review Symposium ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Law And Society ◽  
Cultural Resource ◽  
The Social ◽  
Roman Egypt

This comment considers Ari Bryen's Violence in Roman Egypt (2013) from sociological and sociolegal perspectives. Although Bryen is a historian, and his site of inquiry is second‐century Roman Egypt, he turns to contemporary sociologists and law and society scholars to highlight the interplay between law and the social world in the construction of violence. In doing so, he finds a new way to analyze the role of law as a cultural resource for nonelites to make sense of their social world but also to change it (albeit with limits) through law.

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