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AbstractGerman coffee planters in nineteenth-century Alta Verapaz, Guatemala were also ethnographers, archaeologists, and geographers who published their works in Germany, the United States, and Guatemala. Their published works, as well as coffee plantation records, government correspondence, judicial records and other archival materials reveal how German coffee planters-cum-ethnographers drew upon ethnographic knowledge and representations to forge a reliable labor force. Like ethnographers in Britain's colonies, German settlers in Alta Verapaz understood the potential symmetry between ethnography and the governance of indigenous peoples. Their ethnographic knowledges also push us to reconsider distinctions drawn between German cosmopolitan ethnographic traditions and British functionalist ones and demonstrate how ethnographic knowledge and cultural difference could be deployed to forge new kinds of racial capitalism. In Guatemala, the intimate relationship between the rise of capitalism and ethnography shaped the anti-communism of mid-twentieth-century anthropology in the region.

In this afterword, I consider some of the important insights that are generated in this special issue. The thorough and detailed consideration of the ways in which detainees and formerly incarcerated persons survive confinement and the constraints imposed on them illustrates the power of ethnography. Each of the contributions builds on strong empirical material and sometimes decade-long engagement with people in and on the brink of confining institutions. In this way, the contributions form a comprehensive empirical foundation for understanding confinement beyond the carceral institutions, while also allowing us to ask new kinds of questions about confinement beyond site. While firmly rooted in prison ethnography, the special issue thus inspires urban studies and anthropologists more broadly to think concertedly about the role of confinement, not only as the fate of many urban residents but as an ever-present element of the urban imaginary and of urban life.

AbstractBeck and Sznaider call on 'methodological cosmopolitanism' to transcend methodological nationalism and account for an increasingly cosmopolitanized reality. We take up their challenge by drawing on our experiences of conducting a collaborative ethnography of methodological changes in the production of population statistics within and between European national and international statistical institutes. Drawing on debates in science and technology studies, we depart from some conceptual presuppositions of methodological cosmopolitanism to define a 'transversal method'. Referring to this method as performative and ontopolitical, we reflect on how it requires collaboration and, in our ethnography, gave rise to three practical challenges – (1) going beyond the individual project; (2) using each other's field notes; (3) and working against the national order of things. To meet these challenges, we reflect on how this method required us to practise three modes of care – thinking with others, tinkering with field notes, and dissenting within.

AbstractCriminological literature outlines various roles for public criminologists and reflects on both the form and purpose of public criminology. This article reviews this literature and considers institutional and political activist ethnography as methods through which criminologists can address critique, and better combine social justice research and advocacy work. Such methodological considerations demonstrate that, for some, 'doing' public criminology means actively engaging in advocacy work alongside research participants and other activists. Examples and reflections from the author's own work with the criminal justice voluntary sector (CJVS) in Canada demonstrate that a public criminology informed by institutional and political activist ethnography is especially important if we want to: (i) better understand the role of the sector in supporting people with criminal records; and (ii) strengthen the relationship between academics, policymakers, advocates, practitioners, and people with lived experience of criminalisation and punishment.

Abstract This article presents and discusses different sorts of economic exchange between nut gatherers from the São Francisco do Iratapuru community, in Brazilian Amazonia, and Brazil's largest cosmetics company, Natura. Based on fieldwork conducted both at Natura and in the Amazonian community, the ethnography reveals that this encounter makes visible different logics of thought and action, which indicate what has value in the relational sphere of nut gatherers and businessmen. The paper argues in favour of the possibility of communication and exchange through specific conversions, despite their different conventions. Exchange takes place precisely in the domain of difference: in other words, where one sees nuts - in the form of debts and commodities - others see cosmetics - in the form of profitable products. The model, made visible by ethnography, is compared to the anthropological literature dealing with the distinction between gifts and commodities, offering an alternative analytical bifurcation.

This review discusses contemporary developments in qualitative research on race, crime, and criminal justice, focusing on ethnographic studies of race and policing, criminal justice, prisons, and mass incarceration. These ethnographies inform us about the day-to-day contexts in which crime, law, and punishment are produced. They help to make visible structures of power that contribute to inequality, push for a more reflexive approach to ethnography, and sophisticate our understanding of culture. A methodological paradigm has emerged that informs the research process and helps us understand the root causes and consequences of some of the most pressing issues in the United States: race and racism in the justice system, police harassment, police violence, police–community relations, antiauthoritarian social movements, crime prevention, and reentry. This body of scholarship is collectively developing a more reflexive paradigm in ethnography, which we term the sociological double-consciousness approach.

Sartori's strictures on conceptual stretching may have distracted the comparative discipline's attention from a deeper second theme in his work, the shift from top-down, variable-centered analysis to bottom-up ( ab imis) political analysis based on individual persons' decision making and their concrete interactions, a kind of model that has only recently become practical with computer assistance, and which is peculiarly appropriate for a comparative research that seeks to combine case studies and scientific inference. A classic ethnography by Clifford Geertz, based on thick description, is respectfully re-evaluated to show that a bottom-up ontology can provide insights into enduring questions of political science that may elude conventional variable-centered methods. Bottom-up models may add an important dimension to comparative research, bridging old divisions between ethnography, case studies, processes, and mechanisms on one hand, and formalized scientific models on the other.

This special issue on anthropology and literature invited proposals for
original contributions focusing on relationships between anthropology
and literature. We were especially interested in the following questions:
what role does literature play in anthropology? Can literature be considered
as ethnography? What are the relationships between anthropology
and literature, past and present? Are anthropology and
anthropological motives used in literature? We also looked for critical
readings of writers as anthropologists and critical readings of anthropologists
as writers. Moreover, we wanted to assess the influence of
literature on the invention of traditions, rituals and cultural performances.
All these different questions and topics are clearly connected
with the study of literacy, illiteracy and popular culture. They also lead
to questions regarding potential textual strategies for ethnography and
the possibilities of bringing together the field of anthropology (more
associated with the social sciences) and literary studies (traditionally
part of the humanities).

How does the Parole Board decide a sex offender is rehabilitated and can be released into the community? This case study of a parole hearing reveals the significance the Parole Board gives to a sex offender's management of his arousal as a clear sign of his rehabilitation. To explain the Board's preoccupation with a sex offender's sexual fantasies and arousal, I draw on a prison ethnography of a sex offender treatment program. Rehabilitation as risk management relies on the development of a crime cycle and relapse prevention plan designed to grasp the connection between fantasies, arousal and offending. I argue the parole hearing and treatment program exist in a symbiotic relationship that fabricates the sex offender into a species larger than life, one at risk of offending all the time.

Key words: rehabilitation, sex offenders, parole, sexual fantasies, ethnography, prison.

This article examines the challenges of deploying ethnography to study the fluid and dispersed processes of ICT use in journalism practice. It draws on the author's ethnographic field experience in Zimbabwean mainstream newsrooms. The article specifically focuses on the practicalities of deploying ethnography to study the fluid and diffuse processes of ICT use in the 'real-world' of journalism practice with the high ethnographic standard of firsthand experience. It closely examines how these challenges shaped and constrained the author's fieldwork and attempts to highlight the strategies employed to manage them. In doing so, the article shows that there is more to gain from ones' 'insider-status' and sustained intuitive and creative inclinations when researching in politically charged and unpredictable contexts such as Zimbabwean newsrooms. The discussion thus offers insight for practically negotiating methodological dilemmas likely to be faced by researchers who may find themselves in similar circumstances.

Laboratory ethnographies have provided valuable insights in the workings of contemporary science and technology and about facts in the making. Nearly all these ethnographic studies have been conducted at nonprofit research institutes. In this article, the authors argue that it is time for science and technology studies (STS) ethnography to direct its gaze toward for-profit knowledge production sites. The authors do so, based on a long-standing recognition that nonprofit academic laboratories do not have a monopoly on knowledge construction. First, they historicize STS' focus on public knowledge production, distinguishing between two roles for STS. Second, they argue that relationships between industry and society have changed, resulting in increasing corporate transparency. Third, they argue that this change enables STS ethnography to enter corporations and corporate laboratories. The authors conclude by proposing a research agenda for the social study of corporate science.

This article contributes to the reflexive turn within the social sciences by arguing for enhanced recognition of the role of gender and emotions in the research process. The chief instrument of research, the ethnographer herself, may alter that which is being studied and may be changed in turn (Golde, 1970). Women may trigger off specific behaviours in male-dominated settings such as the `boy racer' culture. This includes the gender-related behaviours of `sexual hustling' and `sexist treatment' (Gurney, 1985). Ethnographers must adopt a reflexive approach and locate themselves within the ethnography while recognizing the influence of their social position on interactions with the researched and the research itself. An awareness of these interactions does not undermine the data but instead acknowledges that the researcher and the researched are embedded within the research. Hence, they shape the ethnography while also being shaped in turn.

Researchers in a number of fields, including contemporary psychoanalysis, are contributing to the development of a dynamic model of mind that acknowledges the contributions of biology and social experience to the construction of human consciousness and subjectivity. In this paper, I examine this emerging model of mind and I discuss its implications for the development of Culture theory. I argue that theories of culture must reflect the fluidity and complexity of the psychological states that underlie the culture process, and I suggest that even highly conventional models of action, thought, and feeling are rarely, if ever, internalized, appropriated, or reproduced without some degree of modification, refashioning, and personalization. I propose person‐centered ethnography as one of the methods by which we can explore the complex relations among culture, mind, and behavior, [constructivist models of mind, contemporary psychoanalysis, culture theory, self and subjectivity, person‐centered ethnography]

▪ Abstract  In the last decade, anthropology has faced challenges to its self-definition associated both with new worldly circumstances and scholarly trends inside and outside the discipline. Recent interest in globalization has provoked discussion concerning what anthropology should be about, how it might be done, and what its relationships are to other bodies of literature and knowledge practices. Unsettling questions have been raised about working concepts of culture, ethnography, the field, fieldwork, and comparative analysis. Extending the rethinking of "place" in anthropology begun by Appadurai, I consider the future of "culture areas" as discursive frameworks for organizing disciplinary practices. Some characteristics of anthropological regionalism are located by contrasting them to interdisciplinary area studies, insofar as globalization poses apparently similar challenges to each. Because of its iconic disciplinary status as an exemplar of "real" anthropology, Melanesianist ethnography is given extended consideration as a particularly interesting case.

This volume provides fascinating insights into the deportation process as it is felt and understood by those subjected to it. The author presents a rich and innovative ethnography of deportation and deportability experienced by migrants convicted of criminal offenses in England and Wales. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched. ; Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ; The politics of deportation -- Living the law -- Surveillance and control -- Undecided present, uncertain futures -- On compliance and resistance. ; This volume provides fascinating insights into the deportation process as it is felt and understood by those subjected to it. The author presents a rich and innovative ethnography of deportation and deportability experienced by migrants convicted of criminal offenses in England and Wales. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched. ; Mode of access: Internet.