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Ethnographic Practice (ethnographic + practice)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Informed Consent: Documenting the Intersection of Bureaucratic Regulation and Ethnographic Practice

POLAR: POLITICAL AND LEGAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW, Issue 2 2007
Jennifer Shannon
Standardized institutional review board (IRB) procedures suggest that informed consent can be enacted in the same way everywhere,across disciplines and across different cultural communities. With attention to documents as artifacts and embedding ethics, I consider consent documents to be located at a productive site for anthropological analysis the intersection of bureaucratic and ethnographic practice. Through fieldwork that engaged both American Indians in Chicago and museum professionals in Washington, D.C., I was able to view these procedures in a variety of contexts. Unlike the joking references to IRB scripts when interviewing museum professionals, American Indians were wary of such procedures. The particular meaning attached to signing documents varied in these communities and in one case prompted people to challenge and change the consent protocol that I would use in my fieldwork practice. This comparative approach shows how different institutions are represented by and transact through documents in ways that significantly impact the nature of fieldwork relations. [source]

Due Diligence and "Reasonable Man," Offshore

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 4 2005
Bill Maurer
In the wake of an international crackdown against preferential tax regimes, Caribbean tax havens and other jurisdictions have adopted "due diligence" procedures to manage financial and reputational risk. Due diligence relies on qualitative forms of evaluation and defers grounded and definitive knowledge claims through continuous peer review. In doing so, it mirrors certain forms of ethnographic practice at a number of levels of scale. This article tracks the shifts in financial regulation from crime to harm and from certainty to scrutiny and reflects on their implications for ethnography,as a limited and open-ended process of evaluation warranted by qualitative forms of judgment. It seeks to complicate our picture of contemporary capitalisms by drawing attention to the nonquantifiable and the ethical that lie "inside" them. Where conventional forms of ethnographic critique might look to expose the political or economic interests behind actions, symbols, or social relationships, this article has a more modest goal: to try to understand the similarity of form between due diligence and anthropology. [source]

Informed Consent: Documenting the Intersection of Bureaucratic Regulation and Ethnographic Practice

POLAR: POLITICAL AND LEGAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW, Issue 2 2007
Jennifer Shannon
Standardized institutional review board (IRB) procedures suggest that informed consent can be enacted in the same way everywhere,across disciplines and across different cultural communities. With attention to documents as artifacts and embedding ethics, I consider consent documents to be located at a productive site for anthropological analysis the intersection of bureaucratic and ethnographic practice. Through fieldwork that engaged both American Indians in Chicago and museum professionals in Washington, D.C., I was able to view these procedures in a variety of contexts. Unlike the joking references to IRB scripts when interviewing museum professionals, American Indians were wary of such procedures. The particular meaning attached to signing documents varied in these communities and in one case prompted people to challenge and change the consent protocol that I would use in my fieldwork practice. This comparative approach shows how different institutions are represented by and transact through documents in ways that significantly impact the nature of fieldwork relations. [source]

Understanding the Rise of Consumer Ethnography: Branding Technomethodologies in the New Economy

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 2 2009
Timothy de Waal Malefyt
ABSTRACT In this article, I aim to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the changing public role of anthropology by exploring the rise of branded ethnographic practices in consumer research. I argue that a juncture in the "New Economy",the conjoining of corporate interest in branding, technology, and consumers, with vast social changes,may explain the rapid growth of ethnography for consumer research and predict its future direction. An analysis of branded propaganda from ethnographic vendors that claim their technology-enhanced methods innovate "classic" anthropological practices discloses the way corporations employ technologically mediated means to focus on the reflexive self in consumer research. In this analysis, I reveal that technological methodologies are central to the production of branded ethnographic practices, as forms of branding and technology legitimate consumer,corporate flows of interaction. The conclusion raises awareness to the ways in which modern branding practices reconstruct anthropology in public discourse. [Keywords: branding, consumer research, ethnography, reflexivity, technology] [source]

"A Boggy, Soggy, Squitchy Picture, Truly": Notes on Image Making in Anthropology and Elsewhere

ANTHROPOLOGY & HUMANISM, Issue 2 2000
Dale Pesmen
In order to raise questions about coherence and about aspects of ethnographic practices, this essay moves between thoughts on a passage from Melville's Moby Dick, anthropology based onfieldwork in Russia in the 1990s, and descriptions of a couple of experiments in painting. [source]