Grounded Theory and Serendipity. Natural history of a Research

The paper deals with the issue of “serendipity” (which constitutes the context of discovery) in field research and the analysis of data by using the grounded theory methodology. The thesis of the paper is: the methodology of grounded theory is naturally associated with serendipity. We describe two aspects of serendipity in grounded theory: 1. substantive, and 2. theoretical. We present in the paper serendipity phenomenon by using the case of research on the “social world of pet owners”. We show how the research is developed by a sequence of decisions being made by researchers. The process of emergence of the main analytical category, subcategories and the whole theoretical construction during the long time of the field research and theoretical group analysis is presented, as well as the procedure of coming to unanticipated theoretical conclusions. It was all possible because of the interactional character of serendipity happening during the research in grounded theory style of investigation.

Labour, Efficiency, Critique: writing the plantation into the technological present-future

In this commentary, we call upon critical labour scholars, including labour geographers, to feature what sociologist Palmer called the ‘thrust of efficiency’ more centrally in their work. We put forth that the push for efficiency, as made possible by digital technology, needs to be analysed in terms of its historical lineage as well as in terms of its geographical scope. Centreing efficiency in critical labour studies, necessitates three scholarly moves. These are particularly relevant for labour geography, a field that has so far tended to circumvent questions of coloniality/labour, digital Taylorism, and the politics of (re-)writing economic geographies, in by-passing the literatures that deal with them. The plantation, an analytical category and ontic reality that stretches across several yet often unconnected bodies of literature – literary studies, Black Geographies, Caribbean studies, and the Black Radical Tradition, as well as in Global History – is central to our effort. Eventually, writing the plantation into the technological present-future can be the starting point for a larger and historico-geographically informed critique, in economic geography and beyond, of efficiency, a mode of thinking-cum-praxis based on input–output calculations, objectifying practices, violent value extraction and the removal of undesired ‘social frictions’ for the sake of capital accumulation.

Colonial Modernity and Diffusion of Power: Identity and Community Formation among Mappilas of Malabar

This paper explores colonial modernity and the knowledge system’s role in constituting community formation among the Mappilas of Malabar. Colonial modernity, such as the introduction of printing, made this transformation more advanced and communitarian in structure. It also discusses colonialism as a force to reshape and bring socio-cultural changes in Malabar during the time. It argues that the existence of a clearly defined community is not a predetermined social fact; it looks at how the Mappilas were represented in an analytical category. In Malabar, the press and literature have played an essential role in framing community consciousness among Mappila society. Print media has brought a revolution in the transmission of knowledge. This paper will encompass the coming of the printing press and the moulding of community consciousness among the Mappilas of Malabar. It discusses the discursive and non-discursive practices of the colonial state for constructing various identities in Malabar.

Culture, Gender and Inequality: Narratives from a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group in Odisha, India

This ethnographic paper explores gender inequality in tribal societies vis-à-vis customary practices and challenges the notion of egalitarianism of tribal society by taking Chuktia Bhunjia tribe of Odisha, India as an analytical category. In the light of a discussion on women specific taboos and restrictions, captured through formal interview, narrative and lived experience approach, the paper explicates the deeply embedded nature of the taboos in Chuktia Bhunjia society and unravels how prohibiting women from socio-economic and religious space, backed by purity-pollution philosophy, perpetuate the gender inequality among them. It was found that although economic division of labour is indistinct; women are perceived being portrayal of misfortunes during perceived pollution periods and are prohibited to enter into sacred places – kitchen room, cowshed, sacred groves and forest – and take part in community festivals and other auspicious occasions. The existing material culture, especially kitchen room, alongside economic structure, self-notion of ‘outsiders’ and apparently fixed customary laws have direct influence on the position of women in this society. It is found that the customary laws are not mere symbolic expressions in perpetuating the gender asymmetry, but have become a powerful tool to patriarchal controls not only over women’s education, health, properties and knowledge, but also over individual’s choice, freedom, decision-making and sexuality. However, internal challenges are reported against customary laws and taboos, the fear of social ostracism, the obligation to restore the purity of cultural entity and anxiety reinforce people to be always submissive to those practices. Therefore, unless there is transformation alongside their culture, it is fruitless to think of gender equality.

Long-Term “Ethnicized Silences”, Family Secrets and Nation-Building

This article demonstrates the dynamic relationship between long-term ethnicized silences, family secrets and nation-building in Central and Eastern Europe. How have modern nation-states been imagined and formed on the basis of these long-term silences? In order to illustrate what we believe could be the contribution to anthropology (principally to nationalism studies) enabled by introducing this analytical category of silences, in this research we will focus on a close analysis of the life story and identity journey of a self-identified “Slovak woman with Hungarian-Roma roots” who settled in the Czech Republic in 2009. Through this ethnographic example, and in an attempt to go beyond particularities, some of the themes covered are: what meanings, uses and processes of silences can we find in Slovakia, and what is their relationship to the construction of minorities and to an ethno-cultural model of nation-building (an imagined community)? In which domains and under which power relationships have long-term silences and hidden family secrets prevailed in everyday life? To what extent have those silence frameworks been negotiated and used as intergenerational strategies of family unity and protection? And finally, within the context of migration and the complex processes of Europeanization and globalization, how have those long-term, in this case “shamed”, ethnicized Roma silences been contested and broken, and what is the meaning of this development (at micro and macro levels)? In other words, for nation-states that have long been imagined on the principle of ethno-cultural homogeneity, I ask what can long-term ethnicized silences tell us about the process of nation-building (from the bottom up) and the quality of our EU democracies? Where do we come from, where are we now and, at least in terms of a warning (due to the rise of xenophobic forms of populism and radical nationalism), where are we going?

García Márquez and the Global South

Even when its focus is ostensibly local, Gabriel García Márquez’s literary output registers the global forces—and, specifically, the imbalances of economic, political, and cultural power—that condition those local circumstances. These same forces are the dynamics that define the Global South in the present. Following the most recent work in the field, the Global South is here understood not simply as a place name or post–Cold War substitute for the Third World, but as the resistant political imaginary arising from the mutual recognition of shared or analogous circumstances by marginalized or dispossessed groups throughout the world. This article explores the three principal intersections between García Márquez’s work and the Global South understood as a relational and analytical category. First, it outlines the ways in which his work registers global—and, importantly, South-South—circuits of exchange, opening up new comparative itineraries. Second, it elaborates the ways in which these comparative connections build toward a critique of the global system, such that García Márquez provides both the grounds and a model for what this article calls “Global South thinking.” The final section addresses the circulation and influence of García Márquez’s work in the literatures of the Global South. Much of the existing commentary on this topic (his influence on Third World, postcolonial, or even world literature) has focused on magical realism and One Hundred Years of Solitude. But, the article shows, works such as The Autumn of the Patriarch and Chronicle of a Death Foretold have also had a profound influence, on both individual texts and their reception.

#presidentspartingwords at a Critical Juncture: Reclaiming the Autonomous Subject in Social Media Discourse on Coronavirus in Belarus

This study explores #presidentspartingwords, a viral hashtag that accompanied the eulogy-like posts that social media users created about themselves in spring 2020 by satirically emulating president Alexander Lukashenko’s patronizing remarks about the first coronavirus victims in Belarus, an authoritarian post-Soviet country. The study examines how the online public used these discursive sites to challenge the governmentally sanctioned subject positions, which construct Belarusians as inapt dependents of the state, by articulating themselves as efficacious,autonomous agents. The study argues the coronavirus pandemic served as a “permissive condition” for critical juncture by disrupting thelogic of the official discourse in which Lukashenko is assigned the role of the major, if not the only, rhetor imbued with the legitimacy to speak on behalf of the Belarusian people. I argue that approaching the coronavirus as a potential critical juncture offers critical mediascholars a useful analytical category for theorizing the discursive conditionality of political change.

A Loose Affiliation of Alleluias

This article is written from our perspectives as a performer and a composer, focusing on our violin concerto, “a loose affiliation of alleluias”, which we created and premiered in 2019. Making this concerto was an exercise in excavating the material histories that guide our creative practice. Our purpose in doing so was to work towards a clear and necessarily complex appraisal of how our current practices are motivated by, and reproduce, historically-determined knowledge, authority, and cultural attitudes. We think through our own reproductions of historical knowledge via Ben Spatz’s exegesis of “technique”, and via Edward Said’s notion of “affiliations” as the networks which build up cultural associations and cultural authority. With this theoretical frame, we contextualize some of the musical techniques and tropes engaged in our concerto—for instance polyphony, ornamentation, and the concerto soloist as heroic subject. We contextualize our reflections next to critical positions staked circumscribed by what Ben Piekut calls “elite avantgardism”—an analytical category which we see ourselves as operating within. We discuss, for instance, the critical gestures of musical modernism which (per Adorno’s analysis) conspicuously arrest and negate historical musical grammars and logics – and yet continue to reproduce its structuring values. In our concluding statements we gesture towards some of the pedagogical implications of this work, considering how creative practice can be leveraged to re-appraise the histories shaping our practices of composition, improvisation, and performance.