Search results for " Archaeology"

Practices of Writing in Ethnographic Work

2020

Although the practice of writing is key to the production of ethnographic knowledge, the topic remains understudied. Using material from our own ethnographic research in the fields of air travel and cultural heritage as data, we develop a reflexive account of ethnographic writing. We examine in detail the practices of jotting down observations, writing field notes, analytic annotating, ordering and rearranging, and drafting and revising papers. The article takes a praxeological stance, conceptualizing writing as a practice that is simultaneously cognitive, embodied, and material. Our analysis finds that writing influences and shapes all stages of ethnographic work, from orienting perception…

Schelling, esotericism and the meaning of life

2019

Abstract F.W.J. Schelling argues in his middle period work Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom that will should be understood as the most fundamental constitutive element of reality. Though it is often downplayed in recent scholarship, Schelling derived his most central ideas for this work more or less directly from the theosophy of Jacob Boehme. I will argue that far from peripheral and antiquated curiosity, Schelling´s esoteric influences constitute the very foundation of his middle period thought. Schelling´s affinity to esotericism enabled him to develop a form of pantheism, which is not tied to the familiar problematic aspects of traditional Christian and post-Chri…

Racism and transnationality

2017

The social embeddedness of hydraulic engineers in the regulation of water and infrastructure in Peru

2019

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Majes-Colca watershed in Peru, this article explores some of the questions posed by Wittfogel regarding the management of hydraulic infrastructure and its eff...

Handicaps et sociétés du passé

2016

International audience

Killing and Preparing Animals

2015

International audience

Commentary: ethnography, critique and the state. Some thoughts on “fiscal anthropological insights into the heart of contemporary statehood”1

2018

This commentary explores the assets and liabilities of anthropology for the study of core functions of statehood (such as taxation) that increasingly become a matter of transnational negotiation an...

How to study bureaucracies ethnographically?

2019

We propose a short epistemological and methodological reflection on the challenges of doing ethnographical research on public services (‘bureaucracies’) from the inside. We start from the recognition of the double face of bureaucracy, as a form of domination and oppression as well as of protection and liberation, and all the ambivalences this dialectic entails. We argue that, in classical Malinowskian fashion, the anthropology of bureaucracy should take bureaucrat as the ‘natives’, and acknowledge their agency. This means adopting basic anthropological postures: the natives (i.e. the bureaucrats) must have good reasons for their seemingly ‘absurd’ (or arbitrary) practices, once you underst…

Expecting justice: struggling with the indeterminate between ideals and practices

2018

This commentary contextualizes Jacobs’ study as a contribution to a body of anthropological research concerned with theorizing the state, and more importantly concerned with closing the analytical ...

Contesting Cultural Heritage: Decolonizing the Tropenmuseum as an Intervention in the Dutch/European Memory Complex

2019

AbstractThe chapter discusses how (post-)immigrant activism in the Netherlands currently impacts Dutch and European cultural heritage and their cultural archive and memory complex. The discussion focuses on the Tropenmuseum and the way postcolonial (post)immigrants carried out interventions there, resulting in new ways of visually and textually representing the colonial past. Though the end result is not a final ideal decolonized situation, it did evince de-essentializing processes in which intersectional perspectives are taken up. The interventions coincide with other national and international protests and processes, making it part of a project or movement that produces decolonial counter…