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Anthropological Account (anthropological + account)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Varieties of Javanese Religion: An Anthropological Account

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 4 2001
Eldar Bråten
Varieties of Javanese Religion: An Anthropological Account. Andrew Beatty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. x + 272 pp., glossary, map, notes, references, index. [source]

An Ethnographic Consideration of Rule-Following

THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 3 2003
Jack Sidnell
Rules are an essential feature of social life and anthropologists have long debated the role they play in human forms of organization and activity. But what does it mean to follow a rule? The article addresses this issue by examining particular, ethnographically specified, cases drawn from fieldwork in an Indo-Guyanese village. In doing so, it argues that an anthropological account of rule-following might profitably draw on the writings of Garfinkel and the later Wittgenstein. [source]

The Magic of the Populace: An Ethnography of Illegibility in the South African Immigration Bureaucracy

POLAR: POLITICAL AND LEGAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW, Issue 1 2010
Colin Hoag
Recent anthropological accounts of the state have demonstrated the potential for danger or illegibility in the public's encounter with the state. Much of this work has taken the perspective of the public, however, and less has been said about how functionaries of the state perceive their interactions with the public. This perspectival bias needs to be overcome through ethnographies of the state and of state bureaucracies in everyday practice. This article examines the Immigration Services Branch of the South African Department of Home Affairs, a state bureaucracy widely deemed "illegible" by South Africans and non-South Africans alike. It documents some of the factors that inform the actions of street-level bureaucrats, illustrating how bureaucrats develop systems of meaning to help them mitigate the challenges posed by an unpredictable populace and management hierarchy. These systems serve to stabilize these two unstable entities, but they also enable officials to act in ways that might run counter to official discourse while simultaneously upholding its legitimacy. Their stabilization efforts therefore incite a destabilization of the state, leading it to appear as "magical" or "illegible" to the public. [source]