Tag Archives: death without weeping

November 19, 2012 | 0 Comments

Ethnozine: November 2012 (Anniversary) Edition


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This month we celebrate Ethnographymatter’s first year with a bumper edition of features about ethnographic practice in the world, as well as some exciting news about the growth of our team!

Tricia Wang writes a reflection of the past year at Ethnography Matters, covering some of the more remarkable discussions over the year as we’ve grown into a “community of mavericks whose curiosity about and commitment to ethnography have ignited discussions about ethnography outside of formal institutions”. Rachelle Annechino tells us the “love story of two ethnographers” by letting us in on her chats with Judd and Tamar Antin about their work as research scientists studying motivation and public health narratives.

We’re really lucky to have two guest contributors this month. Wendy Hsu writes about the software that she built to gather more qualitative data for her research on independent rock musicians, and Erik Bigras shares the story of The Asthma Files, a project to understand the contested space of asthma research.

This month also sees the launch of the Ethnomatters Book Club #ethnobookclub with a conversation about what struck readers as important or interesting about Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ book, ‘Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil’.

We’d love you to contribute to the discussion, so feel free to head on over to the group or contribute your ideas on the blog or anywhere else using the #ethnobookclub tag. We’re also hoping to see a few face-to-face book clubs emerging and feeding into the virtual conversation in the new year so let us know if you’re interested in starting one in your city!

Last, but certainly not least, to celebrate our one-year anniversary we’re very excited to announce that Nicolas Nova joins the team as a regular contributor. Nicolas has written several guest posts already for Ethnomatters and brings a great deal of experience in design research, interaction design and speculative applied ethnography. What’s more, Nicolas is based in Switzerland and works closely with design and corporate firms throughout Europe so we’re looking forward to him bringing a new community of European researchers to our conversation.

What a year it’s been! Here’s to even more fruitful, supportive conversations in the next 🙂

The Ethnomatters Team.

PS: Would you like to be our next guest contributor? Ethnography Matters is your space. You can feature a project/paper/book/syllabus, provide a fieldwork update, or share your thoughts. Here are some more ideas for how you can participate. We’d love to hear from you!

Announcements

  • Today (19 November) Deadline for Microsoft Research Social Media Collective postdoctoral research applications. “This position is an ideal opportunity for a scholar whose work draws on anthropology, communication, media studies, sociology, and/or science and technology studies to bring empirical and critical perspectives to complex socio-technical issues.”
  • 30 November Deadline for contributions to the December EthnoZine edition
  • New blog The American Anthropological Association’s Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC) recently launched a new blog that ‘aims to promote dialogue on theories, tools, and social interactions that explore questions at the intersection of anthropology and science and technology studies.

Next month

November 6, 2012 | 5 Comments

#ethnobookclub The role of the ethnographic Self in the field: “Death Without Weeping”


Yesterday I settled down with a cup of coffee at Blackwell’s book shop in Oxford to re-read the highlights that I’d made of the Kindle edition of our book club book of the month, Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ “Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil“. But, once again, I was drawn so completely into her really lucid, powerful writing about her role in the field of the alto that I found myself re-reading the chapter and thinking about how I might apply her approach in my own ethnographic work (or alternatively as where I might be a little more tenuous). I’m kicking off what we hope you might continue: picking a single paragraph that stood out for you the most and talking about what it means to you and your practice. Feel free to post in the comments section below or come on over to the mailing list where the team will be discussing the book with the incredible group of ethnographers who inhabit it. Also feel free to blog, Tweet and/or talk about the book in other places by using the tag #ethnobookclub as you come across interesting stuff! 

Situating my own work and the act of “witnessing” the experience of many Wikipedians in terms that Nancy Scheper-Hughes uses

“The field” in Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s book is the hillside favela above the plantation town of Bom Jesus de Mata in Northeastern Brazil. Scheper-Hughes returns to the village that she had worked in as a 20-year-old activist to try to understand why mothers do not treat the death of so many of their infants as a tragedy. During a period of 25 years, returning on and off to the village, Scheper-Hughes follows three generations of shantytown women in their struggles against starvation, sickness and death.

Scheper-Hughes says that her writing departs from traditional or classical ethnography in the way that the self, other, and scientific objectivity are handled, as well as how her own values and sympathies are made explicit, rather than “invisible” or hidden. She describes the role of the ethnographer as follows (my highlights):

The ethnographer, like the artist, is engaged in a special kind of vision quest through which a specific interpretation of the human condition, an entire sensibility, is forged. Our medium, our canvas, is “the field”, a place both proximate and intimate (because we have lived some part of our lives there) as well as forever distant and unknowably “other” (because our own destinies lie elsewhere). In the act of “writing culture,” what emerges is always a highly subjective, partial, and fragmentary – but also deeply felt and personal – record of human lives based on eyewitness and testimony. The act of witnessing is what lends our work its moral (at times its almost theological) character. So-called participant observation has a way of drawing the ethnographer into spaces of human life where she or he might really prefer not to go at all and once there doesn’t know how to go about getting out except through writing, which draws others there as well, making them party to the act of witnessing.

I love this paragraph for so many reasons, but the glimpse of answers to three important questions stand out for me:Read More… #ethnobookclub The role of the ethnographic Self in the field: “Death Without Weeping”

October 11, 2012 | 1 Comment

#ethnobookclub launches the first book: Death Without Weeping


Jenna’s post on ethnographic monographs inspired us to start an ethnography reading group. (You can join our Ethnographic Monograph group on Mendeley here.)

For our first experiment in reading together, we’ve picked Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, by Nancy Scheper-Hughes.

Death Without Weeping is based on Scheper-Hughes’ fieldwork in a rural village in Northeastern Brazil in the 1980s, and her decades of contact with the community there.  The book centers on maternal love in a context where scarcity and child death are the norm. Along the way, Scheper-Hughes explores conflicts between academic reflection and activism, and what it means to be an ethnographer:

The ethnographer, like the artist, is engaged in a special kind of vision quest through which a specific interpretation of the human condition, an entire sensibility, is forged. Our medium, our canvas, is “the field,” a place both proximate and intimate (because we have lived some part of our lives there) as well as forever distant and unknowably “other” (because our own destinies lie elsewhere). In the act of “writing culture,” what emerges is always a highly subjective, partial, and fragmentary — but also deeply felt and personal — record of human lives based on eyewitness and testimony. The act of witnessing is what lends our work its moral (at times its almost theological) character. So-called participant observation has a way of drawing the ethnographer into spaces of human life where she or he might really prefer not to go at all and once there doesn’t know how to go about getting out except through writing, which draws others there as well, making them party to the act of witnessing.

It’s gorgeous. Go get it! We would love to hear what you think of it. You can share your thoughts, your favorite quotes, your blog posts, etc. on twitter with the hashtag #ethnobookclub, or send us an email at ethnographymatters[at]gmail.  We’re still experimenting with formats, but our current plan is to post thoughts on the book every week or so starting in November.