Cultivating Suspicion: An Ethnography

Cultivating Suspicion: An Ethnography

Author: Davina Junck

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2019-02-11

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 9956550086

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At the heart of 21st century discourses are questions of whose lives may matter more than others. While the debates themselves are not new, the #hashtags they are linked to and the media through which concerns around moralities of living together are expressed allow for debates to reach large numbers of people in accelerated, individualised and accessible ways. The new media have been powerful in (re)igniting debates and (re)activating demands for social change. Yet, the focus of ubiquitous #hashtags on binary positions may render it easy to neglect their nuances and facets. In recognition of grey-zones, contradictions and ambiguities, this ethnography focuses on a suburb of Cape Town, Observatory, and its recently revived Neighbourhood Watch as an urban renewal project and attempt to decrease notions of vulnerability to crime and violence. In Observatory considered to be liberal and bohemian by its inhabitants the framing of topics within the Neighbourhood Watch group often take on an abstract, intellectualised form. Nevertheless, the group with its rather clashing ideals is grounded in and fuelled by recycled crime stories as well as snapshots of suspected criminals that continue to reappear via various social media channels. Individual experiences, stories and inner conflicts of local Neighbourhood Watch members are at the centre of this exploratory engagement with how fear becomes embodied, everyday practice and the ways in which desires for relationality and spatial exclusivity become entangled in a place where every life matters only in principle.


Cultivating Suspicion

Cultivating Suspicion

Author: Junck, Leah Davina

Publisher: Langaa RPCIG

Published: 2019-02-10

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 9956550191

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At the heart of 21st century discourses are questions of whose lives may matter more than others. While the debates themselves are not new, the #hashtags they are linked to and the media through which concerns around moralities of living together are expressed allow for debates to reach large numbers of people in accelerated, individualised and accessible ways. The new media have been powerful in (re)igniting debates and (re)activating demands for social change. Yet, the focus of ubiquitous #hashtags on binary positions may render it easy to neglect their nuances and facets. In recognition of grey-zones, contradictions and ambiguities, this ethnography focuses on a suburb of Cape Town, Observatory, and its recently revived Neighbourhood Watch as an urban renewal project and attempt to decrease notions of vulnerability to crime and violence. In Observatory – considered to be liberal and bohemian by its inhabitants – the framing of topics within the Neighbourhood Watch group often take on an abstract, intellectualised form. Nevertheless, the group with its rather clashing ideals is grounded in and fuelled by recycled crime stories as well as snapshots of suspected criminals that continue to reappear via various social media channels. Individual experiences, stories and inner conflicts of local Neighbourhood Watch members are at the centre of this exploratory engagement with how fear becomes embodied, everyday practice and the ways in which desires for relationality and spatial exclusivity become entangled in a place where every life matters only in principle.


Cultivating Moral Citizenship. An Ethnography of Young People's Associations, Gender and Social Adulthood in the Cameroon Gra

Cultivating Moral Citizenship. An Ethnography of Young People's Associations, Gender and Social Adulthood in the Cameroon Gra

Author: D. Fokwang

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2023-02-14

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1957296038

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In Cultivating Moral Citizenship, ethnographer Jude Fokwang unpacks the meanings, mechanisms and processes through which young people in an inner city of the West African nation of Cameroon respond to local and global challenges as they seek to position themselves as social adults. Faced with the decline of old predictabilities, the diminishing capacity of the postcolonial state to control its destiny and the precarity of waithood, young people instrumentalise the opportunities and resources afforded by associations to build reciprocal relationships that advance their individual and collective pursuits in a community that has increasingly become transnational. In positioning themselves as moral actors, the young people in this ethnography invest in high profile social and communal projects, including the enforcement of moral orthodoxies that enable readers to appreciate the ways in which moral citizenship is engendered, expanded and eroded simultaneously.


Security and Suspicion

Security and Suspicion

Author: Juliana Ochs

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2011-06-06

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 0812205685

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In Israel, gates, fences, and walls encircle public spaces while guards scrutinize, inspect, and interrogate. With a population constantly aware of the possibility of suicide bombings, Israel is defined by its culture of security. Security and Suspicion is a closely drawn ethnographic study of the way Israeli Jews experience security in their everyday lives. Observing security concerns through an anthropological lens, Juliana Ochs investigates the relationship between perceptions of danger and the political strategies of the state. Ochs argues that everyday security practices create exceptional states of civilian alertness that perpetuate—rather than mitigate—national fear and ongoing violence. In Israeli cities, customers entering gated urban cafés open their handbags for armed security guards and parents circumnavigate feared neighborhoods to deliver their children safely to school. Suspicious objects appear to be everywhere, as Israelis internalize the state's vigilance for signs of potential suicide bombers. Fear and suspicion not only permeate political rhetoric, writes Ochs, but also condition how people see, the way they move, and the way they relate to Palestinians. Ochs reveals that in Israel everyday practices of security—in the home, on commutes to work, or in cafés and restaurants—are as much a part of conflict as soldiers and military checkpoints. Based on intensive fieldwork in Israel during the second intifada, Security and Suspicion charts a new approach to issues of security while contributing to our appreciation of the subtle dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This book offers a way to understand why security propagates the very fears and suspicions it is supposed to reduce.


An Ethnography of Knowledge

An Ethnography of Knowledge

Author: Netsayi Mudege

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2007-12-31

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9047423305

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This book contributes to academic debates on knowledge. A resettlement area with people resettling from different agro-ecological regions with different knowledge and approaches to agriculture and farming provides a fascinating area to investigate how knowledge is produced and socialised. The fact that the resettlement scheme became a melting pot of different knowledge makes the term ‘local’ problematic yet farmers still use and produce knowledge that is considered ‘local’. Of interest is how the gender dynamics, politics, power, conflicts, resistance, religious beliefs and government policies impact on farming knowledge and on farming in general. This book unravels how local knowledge makes use of scientifically based state organised interventions. The book is of interest to policy makers and anyone involved in development studies.


Waste Siege

Waste Siege

Author: Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2019-12-10

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 150361090X

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Waste Siege offers an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it depicts the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians are obliged to forge their lives. To speak of waste siege is to describe a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life. Within this rubble, debris, and infrastructural fallout, West Bank Palestinians create a life under settler colonial rule. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins focuses on waste as an experience of everyday life that is continuous with, but not a result only of, occupation. Tracing Palestinians' own experiences of wastes over the past decade, she considers how multiple authorities governing the West Bank—including municipalities, the Palestinian Authority, international aid organizations, NGOs, and Israel—rule by waste siege, whether intentionally or not. Her work challenges both common formulations of waste as "matter out of place" and as the ontological opposite of the environment, by suggesting instead that waste siege be understood as an ecology of "matter with no place to go." Waste siege thus not only describes a stateless Palestine, but also becomes a metaphor for our besieged planet.


Handbook of Ethnography

Handbook of Ethnography

Author: Paul Atkinson

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2007-04-25

Total Pages: 529

ISBN-13: 1446204820

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"I wish the Handbook of Ethnography had been available to me as a fledgling ethnographer. I would recommend it for any graduate student who contemplates a career in the field. Likewise for experienced ethnographers who would like the equivalent of a world atlas to help pinpoint their own locations in the field." - Journal of Contemporary Ethnography "No self-respecting qualitative researcher should be without Paul Atkinson′s handbook on ethnography. This really is encyclopaedic in concept and scope. Many "big names" in the field have contributed so this has to be the starting point for anyone looking to understand the field in substantive topic, theoretical tradition and methodology." - SRA News Ethnography is one of the chief research methods in sociology, anthropology and other cognate disciplines in the social sciences. This Handbook provides an unparalleled, critical guide to its principles and practice. The volume is organized into three sections. The first systematically locates ethnography firmly in its relevant historical and intellectual contexts. The roots of ethnography are pinpointed and the pattern of its development is demonstrated. The second section examines the contribution of ethnography to major fields of substantive research. The impact and strengths and weaknesses of ethnographic method are dealt with authoritatively and accessibly. The third section moves on to examine key debates and issues in ethnography, from the conduct of research through to contemporary arguments. The result is a landmark work in the field, which draws on the expertise of an internationally renowned group of interdisicplinary scholars. The Handbook of Ethnography provides readers with a one-stop critical guide to the past, present and future of ethnography. It will quickly establish itself as the ethnographer′s bible.


Ethical Life

Ethical Life

Author: Webb Keane

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-04-11

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0691176264

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The human propensity to take an ethical stance toward oneself and others is found in every known society, yet we also know that values taken for granted in one society can contradict those in another. Does ethical life arise from human nature itself? Is it a universal human trait? Or is it a product of one's cultural and historical context? Webb Keane offers a new approach to the empirical study of ethical life that reconciles these questions, showing how ethics arise at the intersection of human biology and social dynamics. Drawing on the latest findings in psychology, conversational interaction, ethnography, and history, Ethical Life takes readers from inner city America to Samoa and the Inuit Arctic to reveal how we are creatures of our biology as well as our history—and how our ethical lives are contingent on both. Keane looks at Melanesian theories of mind and the training of Buddhist monks, and discusses important social causes such as the British abolitionist movement and American feminism. He explores how styles of child rearing, notions of the person, and moral codes in different communities elaborate on certain basic human tendencies while suppressing or ignoring others. Certain to provoke debate, Ethical Life presents an entirely new way of thinking about ethics, morals, and the factors that shape them.


Improvising Theory

Improvising Theory

Author: Allaine Cerwonka

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-11-15

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 0226100286

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Scholars have long recognized that ethnographic method is bound up with the construction of theory in ways that are difficult to teach. The reason, Allaine Cerwonka and Liisa H. Malkki argue, is that ethnographic theorization is essentially improvisatory in nature, conducted in real time and in necessarily unpredictable social situations. In a unique account of, and critical reflection on, the process of theoretical improvisation in ethnographic research, they demonstrate how both objects of analysis, and our ways of knowing and explaining them, are created and discovered in the give and take of real life, in all its unpredictability and immediacy. Improvising Theory centers on the year-long correspondence between Cerwonka, then a graduate student in political science conducting research in Australia, and her anthropologist mentor, Malkki. Through regular e-mail exchanges, Malkki attempted to teach Cerwonka, then new to the discipline, the basic tools and subtle intuition needed for anthropological fieldwork. The result is a strikingly original dissection of the processual ethics and politics of method in ethnography.


Kenyan Khat

Kenyan Khat

Author: Neil C. M. Carrier

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 9004156593

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This detailed ethnography follows trajectories the controversial stimulant khat takes from Kenya's Nyambene Hills to consumers spread throughout the world, and highlights the great economic, social and cultural significance of this transnational commodity for those animating its 'social life'