Actor-network theory and ethnography: Sociomaterial approaches to researching medical education

Medical education is a messy tangle of social and material elements. These material entities include tools, like curriculum guides, stethoscopes, cell phones, accreditation standards, and mannequins; natural elements, like weather systems, disease vectors, and human bodies; and, objects, like checklists, internet connections, classrooms, lights, chairs and an endless array of others.We propose that sociomaterial approaches to ethnography can help us explore taken for granted, or under-theorized, elements of a situation under study, thereby enabling us to think differently. In this article, we describe ideas informing Actor-Network Theory approaches, and how these ideas translate into how ethnographic research is designed and conducted. We investigate epistemological (what we can know, and how) positioning of the researcher in an actor-network theory informed ethnography, and describe how we tailor ethnographic methods-document and artefact analysis; observation; and interviews-to align with a sociomaterial worldview.Untangling sociomaterial scenarios can offer a novel perspective on myriad contemporary medical education issues. These issues include examining how novel tools (e.g. accreditation standards, assessment tools, mannequins, videoconferencing technologies) and spaces (e.g. simulation suites, videoconferenced lecture theatres) used in medical education impact how teaching and learning actually happen in these settings.

Impact of Performance Feedback in Family-Centered and Culturally Responsive Interview Instruction

PURPOSE

Conducting culturally responsive and family-centered diagnostic interviews is an important part of speech and language services. However, there is limited information on the effective ways to teach speech-language pathology graduate students to acquire these skills. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of performance feedback on graduate students' use of ethnographic principles, open-ended questions, and restating and summarizing comments in caregiver interviews.

METHOD

A randomized controlled crossover design (n = 26) was used to examine the differential effects of students receiving performance feedback or general feedback on role-play interviews. Ethnographic principles, open-ended questions, and restating and summarizing comments were measured at 3 time points: after class instruction (Groups 1 and 2), after the first feedback type allocation (Group 1: performance feedback; Group 2: general feedback), and after the second feedback type allocation (Group 1: general feedback; Group 2: performance feedback).

RESULTS

Statistically significant increases, with large effect sizes, were found in students' use of ethnographic principles, open-ended questions, and restating and summarizing comments following the performance feedback conditions.

CONCLUSION

These findings suggest that performance feedback is an effective and efficient instructional procedure to increase culturally responsive and family-centered interview skills through an ethnographic interview approach in preservice speech-language pathology students.

Ethnography: principles, practice and potential

Ethnography is a methodology that is gaining popularity in nursing and healthcare research. It is concerned with studying people in their cultural context and how their behaviour, either as individuals or as part of a group, is influenced by this cultural context. Ethnography is a form of social research and has much in common with other forms of qualitative enquiry. While classical ethnography was characteristically concerned with describing 'other' cultures, contemporary ethnography has focused on settings nearer to home. This article outlines some of the underlying principles and practice of ethnography, and its potential for nursing and healthcare practice.

Tracking Porters: Learning the Craft of Techno-Anthropology

Anthropology attempts to gain insight into people's experiential life-worlds through long-term fieldwork. The quality of anthropological knowledge production, however, does not depend solely on the duration of the stay in the field, but also on a particular way of seeing social situations. The anthropological perspective is grounded in socio-cultural theory and forged by a distinct relativist or contextualist epistemological stance. The point is to understand events, concepts and phenomena from the insiders' point of view and to show how this view relates to the particular social and cultural context. In this chapter, we argue that although anthropology has its specific methodology - including a myriad of ethnographic data-gathering tools, techniques, analytical approaches and theories - it must first and foremost be understood as a craft. Anthropology as craft requires a specific 'anthropological sensibility' that differs from the standardized procedures of normal science. To establish our points we use an example of problem-based project work conducted by a group of Techno-Anthropology students at Aalborg University, we focus on key aspects of this craft and how the students began to learn it: For two weeks the students followed the work of a group of porters. Drawing on anthropological concepts and research strategies the students gained crucial insights about the potential effects of using tracking technologies in the hospital.

Food, home and health: the meanings of food amongst Bengali Women in London

BACKGROUND

This paper explores the nature of food and plants and their meanings in a British Bengali urban context. It focuses on the nature of plants and food in terms of their role in home making, transnational connections, generational change and concepts of health.

METHODS

An ethnographic approach to the research was taken, specific methods included participant observation, focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews. Thirty women of Bengali origin were mostly composed of "mother" and "daughter" pairs. The mothers were over 45 years old and had migrated from Bangladesh as adults and their grown-up daughters grew up in the UK.

RESULTS

Food and plants play an important role in the construction of home "here" (London) while continuing to connect people to home "there" (Sylhet). This role, however, changes and is re-defined across generations. Looking at perceptions of "healthy" and "unhealthy" food, particularly in the context of Bengali food, multiple views of what constitutes "healthy" food exist. However, there appeared to be little two-way dialogue about this concept between the research participants and health professionals. This seems to be based on "cultural" and power differences that need to be addressed for a meaningful dialogue to occur.

CONCLUSION

In summary, this paper argues that while food is critical to the familial spaces of home (both locally and globally), it is defined by a complex interplay of actors and wider meanings as illustrated by concepts of health and what constitutes Bengali food. Therefore, we call for greater dialogue between health professionals and those they interact with, to allow for an enhanced appreciation of the dynamic nature of food and plants and the diverse perceptions of the role that they play in promoting health.

Architecture as animate landscape: circular shrines in the ancient Maya lowlands

In this study, I develop a theory of landscape archaeology that incorporates the concept of “animism” as a cognitive approach. Current trends in anthropology are placing greater emphasis on indigenous perspectives, and in recent decades animism has seen a resurgence in anthropological theory. As a means of relating in (not to) one's world, animism is a mode of thought that has direct bearing on landscape archaeology. Yet, Americanist archaeologists have been slow to incorporate this concept as a component of landscape theory. I consider animism and Nurit Bird-David's (1999) theory of “relatedness” and how such perspectives might be expressed archaeologically in Mesoamerica. I examine the distribution of marine shells and cave formations that appear incorporated as architectural elements on ancient Maya circular shrine architecture. More than just “symbols” of sacred geography, I suggest these materials represent living entities that animate shrines through their ongoing relationships with human and other-than-human agents in the world.

Cattle cults of the Arabian Neolithic and early territorial societies

At the cusp of food production, Near Eastern societies adopted new territorial practices, including archaeologically visible sedentism and nonsedentary social defenses more challenging to identify archaeologically. New archaeological and paleoenvironmental evidence for Arabia's earliest-known sacrifices points to territorial maintenance in arid highland southern Yemen. Here sedentism was not an option prior to agriculture. Seasonally mobile pastoralists developed alternate practices to reify cohesive identities, maintain alliances, and defend territories. Archaeological and paleoenvironmental evidence implies cattle sacrifices were commemorated with a ring of more than 42 cattle skulls and a stone platform buried by 6,400-year-old floodplain sediments. Associated with numerous hearths, these cattle rites suggest feasting by a large gathering, with important sociopolitical ramifications for territories. A GIS analysis of the early Holocene landscape indicates constrained pasturage supporting small resident human populations. Cattle sacrifice in southern Arabia suggests a model of mid-Holocene Neolithic territorial pastoralism under environmental and cultural conditions that made sedentism unsusta

A biocultural approach to breastfeeding interactions in Central Africa

Anthropologists have long recognized that breastfeeding involves much more than feeding; it entails intimate social interactions between infants or children and their mothers. However, breastfeeding has predominantly been studied with respect to structural features (frequency, timing) as well as nutritional and health aspects of infant feeding. Thus, in this study we complement previous anthropological studies by examining social interactions that occur during breastfeeding among the Aka and Bofi foragers and Ngandu and Bofi farmers at various ages (three to four months, nine to ten months, toddlers). Further, we use an integrated biocultural perspective to explore how patterns of breastfeeding and social interactions can be shaped by economic constraints, cultural values, and children's development. Overall, our findings illustrate how biological and cultural factors interact and provide useful explanations of variations in breastfeeding structure and social interactions more so than either perspective alone.

Fat, desire and disgust in the colonial imagination

This article tracks the relatively unexamined ways in which ethnographic, travel and medical knowledge interrelated in the construction of fat stereotypes in the nineteenth century, often plotted along a temporal curve from ‘primitive’ corpulence to ‘civilized’ moderation. By showing how the complementary insights of medicine and ethnography circulated in beauty manuals, weight-loss guides and popular ethnographic books – all of which were aimed at middle-class readers and thus crystallize certain bourgeois attitudes of the time – it argues that the pronounced denigration of fat that emerged in Britain and France by the early twentieth century acquired some of its edge through this ongoing tendency to depict desire for and acceptance of fat as fundamentally ‘savage’ or ‘uncivilized’ traits. This tension between fat and ‘civilization’ was by no means univocal or stable. Rather, this analysis shows, a complex and wide-ranging series of similarities and differences, identifications and refusals can be traced between British and French perceptions of their own bodies and desires and the shortcomings they saw in foreign cultures. It sheds light as well on those aspects of their own societies that seemed ‘primitive’ in ways that bore an uncomfortable similarity to the colonial peoples they governed, demonstrating how a gendered, yet ultimately unstable, double standard was sustained for much of the nineteenth century. Finally it reveals a subtle and persistent racial subtext to the anti-fat discourses that would become more aggressive in the twentieth century and which are ubiquitous today.

Consuming the forest in an environment of crisis: nature tourism, forest conservation and neoliberal agriculture in south India

This article engages ethnographically with the neoliberalization of nature in the spheres of tourism, conservation and agriculture. Drawing on a case study of Wayanad district, Kerala, the article explores a number of themes. First, it shows how a boom in domestic nature tourism is currently transforming Wayanad into a landscape for tourist consumption. Second, it examines how tourism in Wayanad articulates with projects of neoliberalizing forest and wildlife conservation and with their contestations by subaltern groups. Third, it argues that the contemporary commodification of nature in tourism and conservation is intimately related to earlier processes of commodifying nature in agrarian capitalism. Since independence, forest land has been violently appropriated for intensive cash-cropping. Capitalist agrarian change has transformed land into a (fictitious) commodity and produced a fragile and contested frontier of agriculture and wildlife. When agrarian capitalism reached its ecological limits and entered a crisis of accumulation, farming became increasingly speculative, exploring new modes of accumulation in out-of-state ginger cultivation. In this scenario nature and wildlife tourism emerges as a new prospect for accumulation in a post-agrarian economy. The neoliberalization of nature in Wayanad, the authors argue, is a process driven less by new modes of regulation than by the agrarian crisis and new modes of speculative farming.

Ethnography as relation: the significance of the French Caribbean in the ethnographic writing of Michel Leiris

This article considers two kinds of connection between Leiris and the French Caribbean that between his ideas on ethnography and Martinican Édouard Glissant’s concept of Relation; and the impact that his encounter with the French Caribbean had on those ideas. In 1950 Leiris develops a conception of ethnography as a partnership between Western and non-Western societies in which the ethnographer is not only politically involved in the societies she or he studies, but also trains native ethnographers so that the discipline can become a dialogue — or Relation — between the perspectives of ‘self’ and ‘other’ on the self’s and the other’s cultures. In two important articles on Leiris, Glissant comments approvingly on Leiris’s formulation of the difference between his earlier phantasy of identification with the colonized and his new politicized stance. In fact, however, the difference is less clear-cut: Leiris’s writing continues to express a complex imbrication of the personal and the political; the political commitment can be seen as a ‘sublimated’ version of the original emotional investment. Leiris moves from a desire to achieve ‘contact vrai’ with the black other to a sublimated desire to study societies that are themselves made up of contacts with other cultures; and the Caribbean provides the ideal example. But the importance of the Caribbean for Leiris lies also in the greater possibilities it offers, compared with Africa, for making his own personal ‘contacts’, through his friendship with Césaire, with politically active Antillean intellectuals, and hence laying the foundations for interactive ethnographic partnerships.

Self-sale and voluntary entry into unfreedom, 300-1100

Voluntary entry into unfreedom in late antiquity and the early middle ages has tended to be interpreted as anything but voluntary: instead, self-sales and autodeditions have been seen mostly in terms of coercion, whether by force or by necessity, and associated with particular moments of social crisis. This article argues that the sensitive nature of the topic resulted in an exceptionally misleading representation of self-sales in the legal and literary sources, albeit in divergent ways. Roman and Byzantine law treated self-sale as illegal, while at the same time leaving room for manoeuvre in practice, and took a very judgmental view of self-sellers. Early Christian sources, on the contrary, took them as emblematic of the oppression of the poor, and harnessed them for political admonishment, presenting self-sellers as passive victims of rapacious buyers and bad governance. While diametrically different in their presentation of the moral significance of self-sales, law and literary sources both therefore contribute to the impression that the distinction between free and unfree was the most important social divide. Documentary sources, by contrast, present a very different picture, suggesting a higher degree of continuity (and perhaps frequency) in this practice, but also that it could be the object of active and careful negotiation and bargaining, with people in different social and economic circumstances using free status as an asset for a variety of purposes and in a very instrumental way, far removed in its concerns from the elite discourse which took freedom as an essential value.

Women performers and prostitutes in Medieval India

Music and dance, the esoteric performing arts, were markers of culture in medieval India. A number of these differing forms developed into well-recognized and reputed arts over time. The practitioners were, accordingly, regarded as agents of refinement and culture. At the same time, music and dance were also among the most popular forms of entertainment and physical pleasure. This aspect remained crucial in classifying musicians, singers and dancers as entertainers, alongside prostitutes. While the labelling together might have reduced the status of performers at times, the labelling hardly remained fixed. Certain practitioners, even if involved in practices otherwise considered immoral, could remain within the elite circle, while for others the ‘evil’ characteristics got emphasized. There were, within the class of women who prostituted themselves, courtesans trained in the skills of music and dancing and educated in the fine arts, who were treated more as embodiments of culture. These categories—artists, skilled entertainers, courtesans—were quite fluid, with the boundaries seemingly fused together. Still, there were certainly some distinctions among the categories and those did not totally disappear, affording sanctity and purity to certain kinds of performers and allowing them to claim distinctiveness. Notably, the class of courtesans clearly stood apart from the common prostitutes. The attempt in this article is to look at different categories of women performers and prostitutes, their apparent coalescing boundaries and specialities as a separate group, their societal position, their shifting roles and the changes that affected their status. In this, it is worthwhile to consider the state’s attitude towards them, besides societal views that remained quite diverse.

Scents of place: the dysplacement of a First Nations community in Canada

Here I explore how the experience of place at a First Nations reserve in Ontario, located in the middle of Canada's "Chemical Valley," is disrupted by the extraordinary levels of pollution found there. In so doing, I give special attention to air pollution and residents' responses to associated odors - that is, to the sense of smell. Focusing on a unique feature of smell - that it operates primarily through indexicality - I draw on C. S. Peirce's semiotic framework to highlight ways in which perception of odors entails embodiment of the perceived substance, thus connecting self and surroundings in profound and transformative ways. Ultimately, I argue that the local smellscape, while having reinforced a sense of positive emplacement on the reserve in the past, is now, because of the constant presence of toxic fumes, instilling in residents a profound sense of alienation from the ancestral landscape - a condition I call "dysplacement."

Emmanuel Levinas and the ontology of eating

This essay examines the existential philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in relation to issues of food and eating. I argue that for Levinas, the act of eating is central to founding the ethical self, and that any understanding of Levinas's approach to embodiment must begin with what it means for us to ingest the outside world. Even in Levinas's earliest work, food is already a freighted ontological category. As his ideas mature, eating is transformed from the grounding for an ethical system to the system itself. The act of giving bread to another person takes its place as the ethical gesture par excellence. The story is not that we eat. The story is that we eat and develop a relationship to eating, and that relationship in turn helps determine our sense of ourselves in the world. Eating is the ethical event. The essay ends by asking how Levinas can help us answer the question, what would it mean to imagine every bite I take, or give to another, as a direct engagement with my own and my neighbor's existence?

Food porn

Since the term first appeared, food porn has typically referred to watching others cook on television or gazing at unattainable dishes in glossy magazines without actually cooking oneself. This forum seeks to revisit this notion of food porn that is mostly taken for granted in both popular and scholarly literature. It offers a brief perspective of the appearance and use of the term food porn to examine how it came to be a term used mostly by commentators rather than by people actively engaged in the world of cooking. Practitioners (chefs and a food television producer) and academics address whether or not food porn exists, what shape it might take, what purpose it might serve, and/or what usefulness it might have, showing that these contentious issues are more complex than the ease with which the term is used might let on.

On the tomato trail: in search of ancestral roots

A profile of Roger Chetelat, the director of the C.M. Rick Tomato Genetics Resource Center at the University of California, Davis. Chetelat maintains one of the largest collections of tomato seeds in the world. Many of those seeds come from wild tomato species that Chetelat and his associates collect on field research trips to the dry coastal areas of Chile, Peru, and Ecuador. Wild tomatoes are tough, versatile organisms that have evolved resistance to virtually all common tomato diseases and pests and stubbornly tolerate extreme environmental conditions. Some boast extraordinarily high levels of sugars, beta carotene, vitamin C, lycopene, and antioxidants. Chetelat has dedicated his career to finding and preserving these genetic riches. Modern cultivated tomatoes are a frail, inbred lot. They all trace their origins to a single, wild tomato plant that underwent a random mutation sometime in prehistory. Because of this genetic fluke, that plant's fruits were plump, juicy, and many, many times larger than the output of its progenitors. Offspring from that tomato were taken away from the Andes and domesticated in what is present-day Mexico, becoming severed from their wild ancestors and the vast pool of genetic diversity that tomatoes had evolved over the millennia. Botanists call this a “bottleneck.” It leaves subsequent generations susceptible to disease and unable to adjust to rapid climate changes. The stored wild seeds at the Rick Center enable plant breeders to re-incorporate desirable wild traits into new tomato varieties, literally reconnecting them to their ancestral roots, ensuring that this vast reservoir of genetic diversity will be available when it is needed.

From "lists of traits" to "open-mindedness": emerging issues in cultural competence education

The incorporation of "culture" into U.S. biomedicine has been increasing at a rapid pace over the last several decades. Advocates for "cultural competence" point to changing patient demographics and growing health disparities as they call for improved educational efforts that train health providers to care for patients from a variety of backgrounds. Medical anthropologists have long been critical of the approach to "culture" that emerges in cultural competence efforts, identifying an essentialized, static notion of culture that is conflated with racial and ethnic categories and seen to exist primarily among exotic "Others." With this approach, culture can become a "list of traits" associated with various racial and ethnic groups that must be mastered by health providers and applied to patients as necessary. This article uses an ethnographic examination of cultural competence training to highlight recent efforts to develop more nuanced approaches to teaching culture. I argue that much of contemporary cultural competence education has rejected the "list of traits" approach and instead aims to produce a new kind of health provider who is "open-minded," willing to learn about difference, and treats each patient as an individual. This shift, however, can ultimately reinforce behavioral understandings of culture and draw attention away from the social conditions and power differentials that underlie health inequalities.

A broader discussion of authorship

While it may be useful to consider the development of new topics in teaching the responsible conduct of research (RCR), it is perhaps equally important to reconsider the traditionally taught core topic areas in both more nuanced and broader ways. This paper takes the topic of authorship as an example. Through the description of two specific cases from sociocultural anthropology, ideas about credit and responsibility are examined. It is suggested that placing more focus on the array of meanings found in the act of authoring might help students see themselves as part of a wider community both of scientists and beyond science.

Learning the moral economy of commodified health care: "community education," failed consumers, and the shaping of ethical clinician-citizens

Leaders of health professional schools often support community-based education as a means of promoting emerging practitioners' awareness of health disparities and commitment to serving the poor. Yet, most programs do not teach about the causes of health disparities, raising questions regarding what social and political lessons students learn from these experiences. This article examines the ways in which community-based clinical education programs help shape the subjectivities of new dentists as ethical clinician-citizens within the US commodified health care system. Drawing on ethnographic research during volunteer and required community-based programs and interviews with participants, I demonstrate three implicit logics that students learned: (1) dialectical ideologies of volunteer entitlement and recipient debt; (2) forms of justification for the often inferior care provided to "failed" consumers (patients with Medicaid or uninsured); and (3) specific forms of obligations characterizing the ethical clinician-citizen. I explore the ways these messages reflected the structured relations of both student encounters and the overarching health care system, and examine the strategies faculty supervisors undertook to challenge these messages and relations. Finally, I argue that promoting commitments to social justice in health care should not rely on cultivating altruism, but should instead be pursued through educating new practitioners about the lives of poor people, the causal relationships between poverty and poor health, and attention to the structure of health care and provider-patient interactions. This approach involves shining a critical light on America's commodified health care system as an arena based in relations of power and inequality.

Being Yoruba in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro

Through the experiences of two West Africans shipped to Bahia as slaves, probably in the 1840s, then sold south to Rio de Janeiro where they met, became lovers, bought their freedom, married, and divorced, I comment on an ongoing debate over the refashioning or transfer of African ethnic identities in American slave societies. The sources in this Brazilian case suggest that previous identities were not suddenly erased, but rather, new layers of understanding and ways of responding were added. Whatever the dynamic of cultural formation, it was memory that crucially bridged the distance between the past they carried with them and the present into which they were thrust; and so it becomes illuminating to reconstruct the plausibly remembered African pasts on which this couple drew to make sense of an unfamiliar Brazilian present.

Toward a comprehensive demography: rethinking the research agenda on change and response

This essay drafts a new interdisciplinary agenda for research on population and development. Starting from Kingsley Davis's 1963 formulation of change and response, Davis's analytical categories are broadened to include inertia as well as change and to encompass both demographic and non-demographic responses at the micro, meso, and macro levels. On that basis the essay proposes what can be called a comprehensive demography, an approach drawing principally on micro-level methodologies like those employed in anthropological demography. Like anthropological demography, comprehensive demography questions the rationality of actors, emphasizes cultural infuences, and stops short of the postmodernist extremes of anthropology. But it also takes explicit account of higher-level social, economic, and political factors bearing on demographic behavior and outcomes. The conclusion raises some epistemological issues. Illustrative examples are offered throughout to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach, mainly referring to sub-Saharan africa and the Caribbean and often drawn from the authors' own fieldwork.

The evolution of human warfare

Here we propose a new theory for the origins and evolution of human warfare as a complex social phenomenon involving several behavioral traits, including aggression, risk taking, male bonding, ingroup altruism, outgroup xenophobia, dominance and subordination, and territoriality, all of which are encoded in the human genome. Among the family of great apes only chimpanzees and humans engage in war; consequently, warfare emerged in their immediate common ancestor that lived in patrilocal groups who fought one another for females. The reasons for warfare changed when the common ancestor females began to immigrate into the groups of their choice, and again, during the agricultural revolution.

Agricultural illustrations of 19th century Korea: 'Imwon gyeongjeji' (Treatises on Management of Forest and Garden) by Seo Yugu

The generative relationship between text and image has long been established. Its structure evolved historically as a result of varying understandings of the functions of art and technology. Agriculture illustration, which emerged in China during the Song dynasty, is a prime example of this creative dialogue in which aspects of both disciplines were combined. Political, technological, and aesthetic concerns informed the reformulations of this new genre. This paper will address agricultural illustrations on nineteenth-century Korea, when notable changes occurred in the visualization of agricultural texts. It will explore changes in the understanding of the roles of agriculture, technology, and labor through an analysis of shifts in modes of illustration and the texts selected. The relationship between technology and visual representations during late Joseon Korea will be contextualized through an exploration of the evolution of technical drawing in East Asia. This paper will suggest that the recognition of imagery's ability to convey textual and technical information provided an important alternative paradigm for the presentation and use of knowledge.

The decline of adult smallpox in eighteenth-century London

Smallpox was probably the single most lethal disease in eighteenth-century Britain, but was a minor cause of death by the mid-nineteenth century. Although vaccination was crucial to the decline of smallpox, especially in urban areas, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, it remains disputed the extent to which smallpox mortality declined before vaccination. Analysis of age-specific changes in smallpox burials within the large west London parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields revealed a precipitous reduction in adult smallpox risk from the 1770s, and this pattern was duplicated in the east London parish of St Dunstan's. Most adult smallpox victims were rural migrants, and such a drop in their susceptibility is consistent with a sudden increase in exposure to smallpox in rural areas. We investigated whether this was due to the spread of inoculation, or an increase in smallpox transmission, using changes in the age patterns of child smallpox burials. Smallpox mortality rose among infants, and smallpox burials became concentrated at the youngest ages, suggesting a sudden increase in infectiousness of the smallpox virus. Such a change intensified the process of smallpox endemicization in the English population, but also made cities substantially safer for young adult migrants.

Feet and fabrication: footbinding and early twentieth-century rural women's labor in Shaanxi

The early twentieth-century transformations of rural Chinese women’s work have received relatively little direct attention. By contrast, the former custom of footbinding continues to fascinate and is often used to illustrate or contest theories about Chinese women’s status. Arguing that for rural women at least, footbinding needs to be understood in relation to rural economic conditions, the authors focus on changes in textile production and in footbinding in two counties in Shaanxi province. Drawing on historical sources and their own interview data from rural women who grew up in this period, the authors find evidence that transformations in textile production undercut the custom of footbinding and contributed to its rapid demise.

Ready, willing, and able to divorce: an economic and cultural history of divorce in twentieth-century Sweden

This study outlines a long history of divorce in Sweden, recognizing the importance of considering both economic and cultural factors in the analysis of marital dissolution. Following Ansley Coale, the authors examine how a framework of multiple theoretical constructs, in interaction, can be applied to the development toward mass divorce. Applying a long historical perspective, the authors argue that an analysis of gendered aspects of the interaction between culture and economics is crucial for the understanding of the rise of mass divorce. The empirical analysis finds support for a marked decrease in legal and cultural obstacles to divorce already during the first decades of the twentieth century. However, economic structures remained a severe obstacle that prohibited significant increases in divorce rate prior to World War II. It was only during the 1940s and 1960s, when cultural change was complemented by marked decreases in economic interdependence between spouses, that the divorce rate exhibited significant increases. The authors find that there are advantages to looking at the development of divorce as a history in which multiple empirical factors are examined in conjunction, recognizing that these factors played different roles during different time periods.

Art, class and gender in Joseon dynasty Korea: representations of lower-class women by the scholar-painter Yun Duseo

This paper examines several pioneering genre paintings by the important scholar painter Yun Duseo (1668-1715), with its focus on their artistic sources which have not yet been explored so far. Painted on ramie, 'Women Picking Potherbs' is one of the most intriguing examples among Yun Duseo's oeuvre, which encompasses a broad variety of themes, including genre imagery, landscapes, portraits, dragons, and horses. Even among Yun Duseo's genre paintings, 'Women Picking Potherbs' is extraordinary, as recent scholarship regards it as the earliest independent representation of lower-class women in the history of Korean art. In particular, Yun Duseo painted two women who were working ourdoors to gather spring potherbs. In a conservative Confucian society, it was extraordinary women who were working outdoors. Hence, Yun Duseo occupies a highly important place in Korean painting. Furthermore, even though Yun Duseo came from the upper-class, he often painted images of lower class people working. It is possible that Yun Duseo was familiar with the book titled "Tian gong kai wu" (Exploitation of the Works of Nature) which was published in the 17th century. By identifying the probable body of his artistic sources in the book known as "Tian gong kai wu," it will be possible to assess the innovations and limitations found in 'Women Picking Potherbs'.

The politics of urban informality in Philadelphia's recovery house movement

There are some 60,000 vacant properties in the city of Philadelphia, 30,000 of which are abandoned row houses. In the neighbourhood of Kensington, street-level entrepreneurs have reconfigured hundreds of former working-class row homes to produce the Philadelphia recovery house movement: an extra-legal poverty survival strategy for addicts and alcoholics located in the city's poorest and most heavily blighted zones. The purpose of this paper is to explore, ethnographically, the ways in which informal poverty survival mechanisms articulate with the restructuring of the contemporary welfare state and the broader political economy of Philadelphia. It is argued that recovery house networks accommodate an interrelated set of political rationalities animated not only by retrenchment and the churning of welfare bodies, but also by the agency of informal operators and the politics of self-help. Working as an alternative and partially vestigial boundary institution or buffer zone to formal regimes of governance, the recovery house movement reflects the ‘other story’ of the new urban politics in Philadelphia.

The Ayala Mazar-Xiaohe culture: new archaeological discoveries in the Taklamakan desert, China

This article, accompanied by colour photos, records the author's recent archaeological expedition in the Taklamakan Desert. His advance northwards along the now mostly sand-covered beds of the Keriya River proved to be a march backward through time, from the Iron Age city of Jumbulakum to the early Bronze Age necropolis of Ayala Mazar. The artifacts he found are contemporary with, and similar to Chinese discoveries at Xiaohe. This proves that Xiaohe was not an isolated case and provides evidence for a whole culture based on some sort of fertility cult. The remains also suggest that some, at least, of the peoples concerned had Indo-European affiliations.

Backstage discourse and the reproduction of white masculinities

This article documents the shared patterns of private white male discourse. Drawing from comparative ethnographic research in a white nationalist and a white antiracist organization, I analyze how white men engage in private discourse to reproduce coherent and valorized understandings of white masculinity. These private speech acts reinforce prevailing narratives about race and gender, reproduce understandings of segregation and paternalism as natural, and rationalize the expression of overt racism. This analysis illustrates how antagonistic forms of “frontstage” white male activism may distract from white male identity management in the “backstage.”

Networks, narratives and territory in anthropological race classification: towards a more comprehensive historical geography of Europe's culture

This article aims to integrate discourse analysis of politically instrumental imagined identity geographies with the relational and territorial geography of the communities of praxis and interpretation that produce them. My case study is the international community of nationalist scientists who classified Europe's biological races in the 1820s-1940s. I draw on network analysis, relational geography, historical sociology and the historical turn to problematize empirically how spatial patterns of this community's shifting disciplinary and political coalitions, communication networks and power relations emerged, were structured, persisted, changed, interacted and disappeared. I focus especially on core-periphery relations. I argue that if local historical spatial patterns affect those of later phenomena, geographies like that of European integration should be understood in the context of Europe's complex historical cultural geography. Unlike discourse deconstruction alone, this complementary relational de-essentialization of geography can identify large-scale, enduring associations of cultural patterns as well as cultural flux and ambiguity.

"The last thing that tells our story": the Roodepoort West Cemetery, 1958-2008

This article attempts to capture some of the complexity in the way that memory, meaning and agenda interact in the history of the cemetery of Roodepoort West. Roodepoort West was the 'old location' where Africans and others lived until 1955, after which a gradual process of removals took place until 1967, when it was finally destroyed. However, not everything was lost of the old location. The cemetery remained, after unrest caused by the proposed removal of the local cemetery during the late 1950s persuaded the authorities to leave it alone. More recently, the cemetery has played a part in land restitution, becoming both a site of tension and remembrance. This article explores the many meanings attached to the old cemetery, and funerals more broadly, over a period of time beginning from the 1950s to 2005. By looking at the history of funerals, and the cemetery, new insights and an alternative understanding of what it meant to live in an urban area in Apartheid South Africa can be gained.

Thinking with Montaigne: evidence, scepticism and meaning in early modern demonology

In 1612 the Bordeaux witchcraft inquisitor Pierre de Lancre (1556–1631), himself linked by marriage to Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), revealed that the essayist and sceptic was related on his mother’s side to a leading authority on magic and superstition, the Flemish-Spanish Jesuit Martin Delrio (1551–1608). De Lancre confounded historians' expectations by using the revelation to defend Montaigne against his cousin's criticism. This article re-evaluates the relationships of De Lancre, Delrio and Montaigne in the light of recent scholarship, which casts demonology as a form of "resistance to scepticism" that conceals deep anxiety about the existence of the supernatural. It explores De Lancre’s and Delrio’s very different attitudes towards Montaigne and towards evidence and scepticism. This, in turn, reveals the different underlying preoccupations of their witchcraft treatises. It hence argues that no monocausal explanation linking scepticism to witchcraft belief is plausible.

Stories, skulls, and colonial collections

The essay explores the hypothesis of colonial collecting processes involving the active addition of the colonial context and historical past to museum objects through the production of short stories. It examines the emergent historicity of collections through a focus on the "histories" that museum workers and colonial agents have been attaching to scientific collections of human skulls. Drawing on the notions of collection trajectory and historiographical work, it offers an alternative perspective from which to approach the creation of singular histories and individual archives for objects in collections.

Research into witchcraft in psychoanalysis and history

Witchcraft and witch-hunting have been a topic for numerous historical and psychoanalytical research projects. But until now, most of these projects have remained rather isolated from one from the other, each in their own context. In this article I shall attempt to set up a dialogue between psychoanalysis and history by way of the example of research into witchcraft. However, I make no claim to covering the different psychoanalytical and historical approaches in full. As a historical 'layman', my interest lies in picking out some of the approaches that seem to me particularly well suited to contribute to reciprocal enhancement.

Daredevils and early birds: Belgian pioneers in automobile racing and aerial sports during the belle époque

During the belle époque, Belgium was a trend-setting nation in many domains, including motorised sports. Belgian automobile racers and pilots shattered world records and became international stars. Striking was the shift in sports. Indeed, around 1896, sporting members of the leisure class stepped from the bicycle into the automobile and, around 1908, from the automobile into the airplane. Although these motorised sports were extremely expensive, this article shows that sportsmen and sportswomen from the working class could achieve upward social mobility through their performances. The achievements of these motorised pioneers had a major impact and wide-ranging significance. They laid the foundations for the expansion of the automobile industry and the emergence of civilian and military aviation.

The bones of the body politic: thoughts on the Savorgnan de Brazza Mausoleum

This essay examines three examples of political treatment of the dead (specifically their bones) in the Republic of the Congo: the return of the remains of its capital's founder, Savorgnan de Brazza; the disappearance of the body of André Matswa, hailed by the people as their messianic ‘saviour’ guardian; and finally, the treatment of unidentified victims of the various armed conflicts that occurred during the years 1990–2002. These events can be analysed through the prism of two different historical perspectives: in terms of the moyenne durée, the treatment of Matswa's bones paved the way for the subsequent occurrences by creating a precedent; in the context of the ‘present of history’, the construction of a Brazza mausoleum is contemporaneous with official denial of the presence of human remains scattered across the capital city of Brazzaville as a result of armed conflicts. The comparative analysis of these historical configurations posits a set of circumstances whereby the bones become a symbolic buttress of the capital. The historical puzzle here is to understand how that which came together in claiming Matswa's bones becomes, in the context of democratization of the regime, an aesthetic sense of the ‘beauty of death’ as expressed by people when they see the shrine as their country's finest architectural accomplishment. Through the splendour of the monument, this aesthetic sense articulates the denial of the presence of the nameless dead.

Fertility decline in rural China: a comparative analysis

Many models have been proposed to explain both the rapidity of China's fertility decline after the 1960s and the differential timing of the decline in different places. In particular, scholars argue over whether deliberate policies of fertility control, institutional changes, or general modernization factors contribute most to changes in fertility behavior. Here the authors adopt an ethnographically grounded behavioral-institutional approach to analyze qualitative and quantitative data from three different rural settings: Xiaoshan County in Zhejiang (East China), Ci County in Hebei, (North China), and Yingde County in Guangdong (South China). The authors show that no one set of factors explain differential timing by a combination of differences in social-cultural environments (e.g. spread of education, reproductive ideologies, and gender relations) and politico-economic conditions (e.g. economic development, birth planning campaigns, and collective systems of labor organization) during the early phases of the fertility decline.

The historical development of Chinese group callisthenics

The history of Chinese group callisthenics can be traced back to the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasties. Modern callisthenics was brought to China in the Republic of China Era (1912-49) and developed rapidly in the People's Republic of China Era (1949 to the present). Since the foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, group callisthenics has developed in five stages: the formation of systemisation, the breakthrough, the multiple development and the comprehensive development. Today, Chinese group callisthenics has become world-famous and has continued its development from its own system and style.