The concept of friendship is more easily valued than it is described: this volume brings together reflections on its meaning and practice in a variety of social and cultural settings in history and in the present time, focusing on Asia and the Western, Euro-American world. The extension of the group in which friendship is recognized, and degrees of intimacy (whether or not involving an erotic dimension) and genuine appreciation may vary widely. Friendship may simply include kinship bonds—solidarity being one of its more general characteristics. In various contexts of travelling, migration, and a dearth of offspring, friendship may take over roles of kinship, also in terms of care.
Newly revised, Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader Second Edition provides readers with a picture of the breadth, variation, and complexity of fieldwork. The updated selections offer insight into the ethnographer’s experience of gathering and analyzing data, and a richer understanding of the conflicts, hazards and ethical challenges of pursuing fieldwork around the globe. Offers an international collection of classic and contemporary readings to provide students with a broad understanding of historical, methodological, ethical, reflexive and stylistic issues in fieldwork Features 16 new articles and revised part introductions, with additional insights into the experience of conducting ethnographic fieldwork Explores the importance of fieldwork practice in achieving the core theoretical and methodological goals of anthropology Highlights the personal and professional challenges of field researchers, from issues of professional identity, fieldwork relations, activism, and the conflicts, hazards and ethical concerns of community work.
In this volume, sixteen distinguished scholars address the impact of digital technologies on how anthropologists do fieldwork and on what they study. With nearly three billion Internet users and more than four and a half billion mobile phone owners today, and with an ever-growing array of electronic devices and information sources, ethnographers confront a vastly different world from just decades ago, when fieldnotes produced by hand and typewriter were the professional norm. Reflecting on fieldwork experiences both off- and online, the contributors survey changes and continuities since the classic volume Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology, edited by Roger Sanjek, was published in 1990. They also confront ethical issues in online fieldwork, the strictures of institutional review boards affecting contemporary research, new forms of digital data and mediated collaboration, shifting boundaries between home and field, and practical and moral aspects of fieldnote recording, curating, sharing, and archiving. The essays draw upon fieldwork in locales ranging from Japan, Liberia, Germany, India, Jamaica, Zambia, to Iraqi Kurdistan, and with diaspora groups of Brazilians in Belgium and Indonesians of Hadhrami Arab descent. In the United States, fieldwork populations include urban mothers of toddlers and young children, teen tech users, Bitcoin traders, World of Warcraft gamers, online texters and bloggers, and anthropologists themselves. With growing interest in both traditional and digital ethnographic methods, scholars and students in anthropology and sociology, as well as in computer and information sciences, linguistics, social work, communications, media studies, design, management, and policy fields, will find much of value in this engaging and accessibly written volume. Contributors: Jenna Burrell, Lisa Cliggett, Heather A. Horst, Jean E. Jackson, Graham M. Jones, William W. Kelly, Diane E. King, Jordan Kraemer, Rena Lederman, Mary H. Moran, Bonnie A. Nardi, Roger Sanjek, Bambi B. Schieffelin, Mieke Schrooten, Martin Slama, Susan W. Tratner.
This collection of essays emerged out of intense conversations on multi-sited ethnography, prompted by a workshop held at the University of Sussex that brought together researchers from different institutional backgrounds and affiliations in Europe, the United States and Africa – including George Marcus himself, the person most associated with the term and the method. These researchers were brought together not only to discuss the shifting meaning of the concept in anthropology, but also to see how it has influenced actual research projects that have spanned the world. The volume that has resulted is not meant to be read as a program but as an extended provocation, an argument that multi-sitedness can be good not only to think, but also to act, both with and through. Arguably, this creation of a dynamic, shifting perspective is not so different from anthropology itself – a discipline dependent on the cultivation of aesthetic, embodied and intellectual sensibilities in relation to the world at large.
A friend should be able to be an attentive listener, which made semiotician Roland Barthes wonder in his intriguing dictionary of love, "cannot friendship be defined as a space with total sonority?". This volume takes on the encyclopedic task - in the sense of Umberto Eco, where an encyclopedia is a very complex sign - to explore friendship in detail, not only as a form of love but in all its complexity as a bond that connects people and forms communities. Semiotics, the study of signs and meaning-making, is used alongside insights from a wide range of friendship studies to create a far-reaching intellectual resonance, or sonority, around friendship as a central human experience. As a study of the significance of friendship, it presents findings from friendship research across the globe, enabling new ways of thinking about friends. It includes: key concepts from semiotics, sociology, anthropology, and other fields, briefly explained major models of friendship from antiquity to contemporary societies proverbs and sayings about friendship from Africa, America, Asia, and Europe stories about famous or forgotten friends from mythology, fiction, and real history summaries of research on friendship from selected academic disciplines bibliographical references for further studies
Nicholas Pileggi’s vivid, unvarnished, journalistic chronicle of the life of Henry Hill—the working-class Brooklyn kid who knew from age twelve that “to be a wiseguy was to own the world,” who grew up to live the highs and lows of the mafia gangster’s life—has been hailed as “the best book ever written on organized crime” (Cosmopolitan). This is the true-crime bestseller that was the basis for Martin Scorsese’s film masterpiece GoodFellas, which brought to life the violence, the excess, the families, the wives and girlfriends, the drugs, the payoffs, the paybacks, the jail time, and the Feds…with Henry Hill’s crackling narration drawn straight out of Wiseguy and overseeing all the unforgettable action. “Nonstop...absolutely engrossing” (The New York Times Book Review). Read it and experience the secret life inside the mob—from one who’s lived it.
"Why was Banaras such a mystery to me when I arrived in 1981? Was it ironically because I was an Indian and expected to have a privileged insight into it?" In this unusually personal, evocative account of her fieldwork experiences, Kumar tackles the dilemma of how a Western-trained Indian intellectual adapts to the field and builds deeply affecting relationships with strangers. She discloses what it is like to be a native researching her own culture, offering her fieldwork memoirs in all their spontaneity and candor. We see Banaras through her eyes when she first arrives: throngs of people, cramped and dark lodgings, unappetizing food, mischievous monkeys, and almost overwhelming filth. But as she establishes friendships, we are treated to her discoveries not only about the city and its people, but also about her place in this society. The familiar problems that face most anthropologists conducting fieldwork—of Self versus Other, objectivity versus bias, familiar circumstances versus new and dismaying ones—are given a surprising and complex dimension. Through a narration of her own experiences, the author demonstrates how personal locations—habits, preferences, expectations deriving from childhood memories, and areas of ignorance—impose themselves on the process of selection, observation, and interpretation in research.
As increased access to employment and educational opportunities brought dramatic changes to women's lives, sociologists began to look at the effect of women's changing roles on their children and families. Based on empirical investigations and personal experience, the studies included in the volumes of The Sociology of Gender and the Family set of The International Library of Sociology set out to establish patterns and regularities in social behaviour, and to understand the social roles of kinship groups, mothers, wives, children and the elderly.
