Suchergebnisse

Abstract
The funeral laments (moiroloya) of Inner Mani, a region in southern Peloponnese, are the focus of this article, in particular the gestural and transformative aspects of their liminal character. A specific case of a wake (klama) is discussed and analyzed in order to provide insight into the particular process of lamenting. Some general characteristics of lamenting in the region are reviewed and some of the basic assumptions of anthropologists concerning the role of emotional expression in death rituals are considered. Lastly, by focusing on an excerpt from a lament that was sung in the wake session under question, the article points to the gestural, mimetic and transformative qualities of the emotional performance of lamenting, suggesting thus an alternative reading of the expression of grief within the course of death ritual.

In this article we develop the idea of ethnography as a practice of desire lines. Lines of desire are pedestrian footpaths that are at once amateurish and playful, and that deviate from the grids and schemes of urban planners. We argue that ethnography has always been so at the same time as also being highly professionalized. The article explores these tensions between desire lines and professionalization as they became evident to us during a funded, international multi-modal ethnographic study with children—a study, we argue, that rendered us childlike. We conclude that being childlike and 'out of line' is an appropriate and necessary response for knowledge creation at a time of heightened professionalization in the academy.

How do we recognise children's participation and their relationships with public life? Drawing on evidence from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2016 for the ERC funded Connectors Study on the relationship between childhood and public life, this article explores the ways in which children communicate their encounters with public life. The contemporary phenomenon of listening without hearing is discussed as this relates to the call for listening to children and the simultaneous failure to hear what they say. Idioms are introduced as an 'instrument' for thinking through what it means and feels like to encounter and make sense of childhood and children's practices of relating to public life. The analysis focuses on three emblematic encounters with six- to eight-year-old children living in Athens, Hyderabad, and London. We argue that dominant understandings of listening to children rely heavily on cognitive, conceptual, and rational models of idealised and largely verbal forms of communication that ignore the affective, embodied, and lived dimensions of making meaning. Through ethnographic thick description, we trouble what it means to tune into children's worlds and to 'properly hear', and in doing so demonstrate the ways in which idioms support an understanding of what matters to children.

How do children encounter and relate to public life? Drawing on evidence from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2016 for the ERC-funded Connectors Study on the relationship between childhood and public life, this paper explores how children encounter public life in their everyday family environments. Using the instance of political talk as a practice through which public life is encountered in the home, the data presented fill important gaps in knowledge about the lived experience of political talk of younger children. Working with three family histories where political talk was reported by parents to be a practice encountered in their own childhoods and one which they continued in the present amongst themselves as a couple/parents, we make two arguments: that children's political talk, where it occurs, is idiomatic and performative; and that what is transmitted across generations is the practice of talking politics. Drawing on theories of everyday life developed by Michel de Certeau and others we explore the implications of these findings for the dominant social imaginaries of conversation, and for how political talk is researched.

The study of political activism has neglected people's personal and social relationships to time. Age, life course and generation have become increasing important experiences for understanding political participation and political outcomes (e.g. Brexit), and current policies of austerity across the world are affecting people of all ages. At a time when social science is struggling to understand the rapid and unexpected changes to the current political landscape, the essay argues that the study of political activism can be enriched by engaging with the temporal dimensions of people's everyday social experiences because it enables the discovery of political activism in mundane activities as well as in banal spaces. The authors suggest that a values-based approach that focuses on people's relationships of concern would be a suitable way to surface contemporary political sites and experiences of activism across the life course and for different generations.

This paper engages with the lived and experiential aspects of (trans)national identities in childhood, through the exploration of an ethnographic biography of a Greek‐Albanian boy in Athens. Through a grounded ethnographic approach, we examine the ways in which he experiences and negotiates his (trans)national identity. Our analysis demonstrates the everyday subtle and sophisticated understanding of the complexities and contradictions of national identities, and the child's own positioning within that. In conclusion, we suggest that interdisciplinary approaches should be assumed in the study of (trans)national identities in childhood, and ones that are grounded in children's own meaning making of their experiences of such identities.

Experimenting with the many potentials of anthropological analysis—that shifting interface between the empirical and the conceptual, the space and perhaps the time between ethnography and theory—is at the heart of our journal's intellectual mission. Our aim is to publish articles that display a spirit of analytical exploration by dealing in fresh ways with their empirical materials and showing in the action of their analytical treatment new paths for anthropological thinking to pursue. Alongside full-length research articles, in this issue we inaugurate Think Pieces in Analytics, a forum devoted to slightly shorter and more speculative texts, in which particular aspects of the scope, process, or aims of anthropological analysis are explored for their own sake. Mirroring the ambiguous and shifting character of both the concept and the practice of analysis, we give free rein to contributors to broach matters of methodology, theoretical approach, research ethics and politics, interdisciplinary interface, and institutional infrastructure, as long as their bearing on questions of analytical practice in anthropology is identified.

Un atto d'amore: Manifesto Open Access per la libertà, l'integrità e la creatività nelle scienze umane e nelle scienze sociali interpretative, è il risultato di un workshop finanziato da LSE Research Infrastructure and Investment Funds dal titolo Academic Freedom, Academic Integrity and Open Access in the Social Sciences, organizzato da Andrea E. Pia e tenuto presso la London School of Economics il 9 settembre 2019.