‘Team ethnography visual maps’: Methods for identifying the ethnographic object in multiple sites of fieldwork

Team ethnography is becoming more popular in research. However, there is currently limited understanding of how multiple ethnographers working together actually share their experiences of conducting team ethnography. There is also an associated lack of explanation regarding how evidence and conclusions are drawn from such collective endeavour. This article attempts to address this absence of detail regarding the practice and conduct of team ethnography. In the following account, the authors present details of the design, development and application of ‘team ethnography visual maps’ and the collaborative reflexivity that took place within ‘team ethnography data sessions’ that were each embedded within a mixed methods study of frontline services located in six different National Health Service Trusts throughout England (UK). After a presentation of the ethnographic methods and analyses that occurred as part of team ethnography, they are then discussed in terms of their applied and academic value from a methodological perspective.

Bolognina gym

This article describes the social organization of the ‘Tranvieri’ boxing gym in Bolognina, a working class Bologna neighbourhood that has seen rapid change over the last 20 years due to the closure of factories and arrival of immigrants, especially from the Maghreb. The population of the gym has changed accordingly: currently, about two-thirds of those attending the gym as a leisure centre are children of immigrants. I have studied the practices of everyday life, the ‘techniques of the body’ of these young boxers born in Italy but without citizenship, who frequent the gym daily after vocational school or work and attending to family responsibilities. For these young men, boxing is not a solution to the frustrations inflicted by a social world they perceive as indifferent, if not hostile, towards them; rather, it offers them a chance to be represented within that world as something other than merely excluded. As scholars have shown, boxing is a male world: women are perceived as extraneous to the gym and, although two or three women practise boxing at Tranvieri, female boxing is generally met with disapproval. The tension between the boxing world and the world of women is also exhibited in the conflict between trainers, who wish to strictly control the athletes in terms of diet, schedules and sexual practices, and the boxers’ mothers, wives and girlfriends.

The antifascist boxing body: Political somatics in boxe popolare

Palestre popolari (‘people’s gyms’) are flourishing in contemporary Italy. These gyms are run by leftist grassroots organizations (ANTIFA), which promote an alternative boxing style: boxe popolare (‘people’s boxing’). Drawing on a three-year ethnography, this article focuses on body usages in boxe popolare. Connecting Mauss with Bourdieu, the study elucidates that the ways in which bodies are deployed in boxe popolare shape a scheme of dispositions – mutualism, combat, engagement and conviviality – forming an antifascist pugilistic habitus. A leftist physicality is hence incorporated as an interpolation of political dispositions with virtues of prowess, self-control and toughness, instilled in boxe popolare bodies regardless of their gender identity. This emergent leftist physicality becomes bodily hexis as soon as it is displayed publicly by the fighters, both men and women, as the legitimate representation of the political community to which they belong. The study ends highlighting implications for research about political somatics.

Gendered encounters in mobility: Women researching migrant construction workers

Writing about sexism and sexual harassment in the field is still generally discouraged outside gender ethnography, despite a growing gender reflexivity in research. This is mostly due to certain established norms and expectations about ethnographic work that tend to ignore how these issues contribute to women’s fieldwork experiences and subsequent ethnographic accounts. In this article, we go against this tendency by setting out our gendered experiences as female ethnographers conducting research on labor mobility in the male-dominated construction industry among Brazilian internal migrants in Rio de Janeiro and among Polish migrant workers in Europe. We foreground how gendered dynamics affected our fieldwork experience and how they generated a degree of self-doubt and self-blame about our methodological choices. Our hope is that writing about our experiences will help female ethnographers to better prepare for and consider the different kinds of sexism that will inevitably shape their knowledge production.

The sensing eye: Intimate vision in couple dancing

Vision tends to be associated with the mind and theorized as the least bodily sense. Notably, the eye often symbolizes distance. Foregrounding the fleshy embeddedness of the gaze through an analysis of jitterbug, the present article stresses the bodily and intimate significance of vision in dancing. Analyzing ethnographic observation and interview data, we develop a phenomenological approach to dance and gaze that stresses the need to address multi-sensoriality, adding vision to the perspective of tactile-kinesthetic touch. However, the article develops a more-than-optic perspective on “dancing as vision.” The “sensing eye” is analyzed, first, as a body technique central to couple dancing and, second, as the use and meaning of vision across spatial distance, as between dancers and bystanders. Throughout the article, the dance floor unveils connections between eye and body, self and other, and passive and active and thus pushes notions of emplacement and embodiment.

‘A Punch Has No Paternity!’: techniques, belonging and the Mexicanidad of Xilam

This article combines ethnographic and netnographic data to explore the relationships between body techniques and a sense of belonging through the contemporary Mexican martial art of Xilam. This art, founded by a female Mexican martial arts veteran, is slowly developing as a hand-to-hand sport, and has attracted critics for its supposed use of East Asian fighting techniques. Netnographic data reveal online debates on the origins and ‘true belonging’ of specific techniques while ethnographic fieldwork in a Xilam school demonstrates how the art is made ‘Mexican’ through specific accompanying practices and philosophy surrounding the movements. The movements of sitting, punching and standing are selected as key examples as understood through Mauss’s classic thesis. I conclude that Xilam follows a philosophical pedagogy that associates these techniques with a sense of Mexicanness – Mexicanidad.

“La racaille,” a performed figure in French contemporary youth

In France, la racaille is a stereotyped figure of a young (usually identified as Arab or Black) man who lives in a suburban cité (social housing estate) . I have repeatedly met la racaille during my ethnographic studies on heterosexual romantic relationships among 15- to 20-year-old youngsters from three different social backgrounds—working class in cités (2002–2005), working class in villages (2008–2011), and bourgeoisie in Paris (2016–2020). I encountered it in the form of a performed figure—object of speech, clothing choices, gestures, movements, and ways of speaking. This presence reveals a collective fascination in which various negative judgments are mixed with shared admiration for its high social visibility. Stylish and powerful, la racaille is fascinating, at any rate because it embodies an exaggerated masculinity that is untroubled and unquestionable.

“We take responsibility!”: Governing the neighborhood—governing the self

This ethnographic study of a neighborhood association focuses on the process of organizing residents to collective action. Situated in the post-industrial city of Buffalo, New York, the Urban Community Collaborative (UCC) employs two main governing techniques: (1) “taking responsibility” and (2)“working collaboratively” that emphasizes the rationality of “active citizenship” and the formation of horizontally linked collaborative partnerships to address perceived urban social problems. Similar to previous studies, we view this political rationality as a discursive constitution that shapes the actions of the members of the UCC (Atkinson, 1999; Schofield, 20002). This political rationality invokes neoliberal discourses of individual responsibility, entrepreneurship, and community partnership in place of a dependency on the government. We find residents utilizing moral techniques of responsibilization which entails calling on their neighbors to “take responsibility” and to “work collaboratively” with one another and paradoxically, with the government itself in revitalization efforts.

Yokozuna Hakuhō—Japanese Mongolian hero

Yokozuna Hakuhō, a prominent Sumo wrestler, is a Mongolian-born Japanese national hero. However, he, as other Mongolian wrestlers, presents Sumo with tensions between worldviews, which are battled both within the hierarchical setting of the Sumo association, and in public opinion. Those concern questions of etiquette and ethical behavior, between what is understood the “real Japanese” spirit, and the Mongolian attitude. Moreover, the Mongolian attitude also coincided with modern tendencies and the culture of celebrities so that those tensions are also a case of a Japanese way of dealing with the external influences of globalization. Moreover, since both Japanese and Mongolian cosmos are “inclusive,” namely, tend toward the non-dual, the tensions are not resolved but rather create a cultural enclave of shifting assemblages yielding both new regulations and popular opinions. And while those tensions are negotiated, the common belief as to what constitutes true Japanese traits is also forged and inculcated.