Search results for " Ethnography"
showing 10 items of 63 documents
Umani e animali nell’antropologia socioculturale contemporanea
2022
In the chapter, I show the connection between the ways in which the nineteenth-twentieth century sociocultural anthropologists became interested in the study of human-animal relationships and the dominant conceptions about the relationship between humanity and animality in philosophical and scientific thought of these two centuries. Till the last part of the twentieth century non-human animals were considered by anthropologists mainly as material and/or symbolic resources for the reproduction of humans and their social orders. This view paralleled the dominant vision in Western modern philosophical and scientific thought in which non-human animals were assimilated to mindless machines belon…
Chikage Oba-Smidt, The Oral Chronicle of the Boorana in Southern Ethiopia: Modes of Construction and Preservation of History among People without Wri…
2017
Review
Revista electrónica de investigación y evaluación educativa
2014
El objetivo del presente trabajo consiste en identificar, hacer visibles, describir y explicar las prácticas de enseñanza que declaran realizar los “mejores profesores” de la Universidad de Vigo. Para ello, planteamos un diseño cualitativo a través de la técnica de la entrevista. Antes de hacer mención de las principales conclusiones hemos de hacer constar que nos interesaba buscar referencias de “buenas prácticas”, no hacer una evaluación de las prácticas docentes, buenas o malas, del profesorado de la Universidad de Vigo. La principal conclusión es que incluso entre los “mejores profesores” predominan unas prácticas docentes que podrían encuadrarse, mayoritariamente, en el enfoque “tradic…
The Ka’ulayawaa festivals among the Wayùu. Exploring continuities and variations in forms, meanings and contexts through ethnographic sources
2022
In this paper I review and compare the main sources of information about the ka’ulayawaa festivals among the Wayùu, an Amerindian people inhabiting in the semiarid Guajira peninsula (Northern Colombia and Venezuela). For their peculiar mix of songs, dances, imitative plays and competitive games, inserted into a same festive framework, these festivals are particularly interesting to be studied as expressive metacommentaries (in the sense of Turner) of Wayùu social structures, cultural values and worldview. Nevertheless, they have not so far been the subject of a specific anthropological analysis, also because they ceased to be celebrated around the middle of the twentieth century, that is, b…
Turning experience into expertise : technologies of the self in Finnish participatory social policy
2017
This article investigates the micro-level practices of subject-construction in Finnish participatory social policy. Through a governmental ethnography on projects that invite former beneficiaries to become ‘experts-by-experience’ in social welfare organizations, I discern the possibilities for freedom in the participants’ self-construction. By making use of Michel Foucault’s conceptual tools of care of the self and confession, I illustrate how, contrary to the projects’ emancipatory promise of providing the service users the freedom to reconstruct themselves, the projects entail practices that curb the participants’ way of ‘knowing themselves’. They require the service users to reframe thei…
Living the urban challenge : sustainable development and social sustainability in two southern megacities
2007
Kehitysmaiden nopea kaupungistuminen ja miljoonakaupunkien voimakas kasvu luovat haasteita kestävään kehitykseen tähtäävälle suunnittelulle. Kansainvälisissä kehitysohjelmissa on pyritty turvaamaan suurkaupunkien taloudelliset ja ympäristölliset tavoitteet. Kestävän kehityksen sosiaalinen ulottuvuus on usein rajattu kaupunkien tarjoamiin sosiaalipalveluihin.- Ympäristön säilyttäminen tuleville sukupolville ei onnistu vain talouteen, ympäristöön ja palveluihin kohdistuvilla teknisillä toimilla. Tämä johtuu etelän suurkaupungeille tyypillisestä räikeästä sosiaalisesta eriarvoisuudesta. Suurkaupunkien suunnittelussa tulisi analysoida sellaisia sosiaalisia haasteita, jotka heikentävät kaupunkie…
‘The will to not be empowered (according to your rules)’: Resistance in Finnish participatory social policy
2018
Participation has increasingly become a means and an end for successful and ‘empowering’ social policy. Building on previous governmentality critiques of participatory initiatives, this article investigates practices of resistance in the context of Finnish participatory social policy. I adopt a Foucauldian counter-conducts approach as my lens to study critical speech as a form of resistance in initiatives that invite marginalised people as ‘experts-by-experience’ in social welfare organisations. I illustrate how practices of governing and resistance are intertwined and mutually dependent in a much subtler and more practical manner than allows the often-used analytical dichotomy between domi…
Institutional ethnography as a feminist approach for social work research
2019
The aim of this chapter is to introduce Institutional Ethnography (IE) as a valuable feminist approach for social work research. It first describes how IE found its way through the women’s studies to the academic arenas in Finland, and how it has influenced author’s own research. The second part focusses on social work research, where IE has been used to investigate how the welfare service system transforms the experiences and everyday world of its service users into generalised categorisations and definitions. However, in its focus on institutions and social relations of ruling instead of individuals, IE allows seeing the professionals embedded in the same institutional relations and pract…
Digital ethnography of mobiles for development
2017
This article avails the concept of social generation to explore how intergenerational differences contribute to the diversity in the appropriation of mobile telephony in rural India. Rural India has experienced numerous social changes such as the decline of agriculture, changes in caste and gender relationships, and rising levels of education which have influenced different age groups in distinct ways during recent decades. The article is based on interviews, observation, and survey data on the use of mobile phones in a village in rural West Bengal during 2005, 2007–2008, 2010, and 2012–2013. peerReviewed
Capturing situational interest in the past : the salience of children’s experiences in open-air museums
2019
Open-air museums are immersive learning environments disseminating ideas about the lifestyle and material culture of pre-modern times. Considering their significance and prevalence in Northern and Eastern Europe, little is known about how contemporary children perceive these cultural heritage spaces. This study scrutinizes how primary school pupils from Sweden and Belarus encountered visits to Skansen (Sweden) and the Belarusian State Museum of Folk Architecture and Rural Lifestyle (Belarus) and expressed experiences about their visits in drawings and in follow-up interpretations. To record the patterns in children’s experiences, a mixed method was employed, including participant observatio…