The death of Peter Winch in 1997 sparked a revived interest in his work with this book arguing his work suffered misrepresentation in both recent literature and in contemporary critiques of his writing. Debates in philosophy and sociology about foundational questions of social ontology and methodology often claim to have adequately incorporated and moved beyond Winch's concerns. Re-establishing a Winchian voice, the authors examine how such contentions involve a failure to understand central themes in Winch's writings and that the issues (...) which occupied him in his Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy and later papers remain central to social studies. The volume offers a careful reading of the text in alliance with Wittgensteinian insights and alongside a focus on the nature and results of social thought and inquiry. It draws parallels with other movements in the social studies, notably ethnomethodology, to demonstrate how Winch's central claim is both more significant and more difficult to transcend than sociologists and philosophers have hitherto imagined. (shrink)

A core historical narrative about anthropological knowledge is that it is created in relations with others, with fieldwork seen as ‘a series of apprenticeships’ whose success is determined by the quality of those relations. An ethnographer connects with the conditions of those studied in ‘circulating exchange’; but on leaving the field a degree of closure is needed to formulate and communicate anthropological knowledge. These obligations and requirements in the creation of knowledge entail attachment and detachment, carrying the seeds of betrayal (...) that can compromise that knowledge. Each epistemological enquiry has its own core ethical imperatives, but as long as knowledge posits a knower, ‘the self of the knower will be at epistemological issue’. In discussing the ethics of knowledge creation I consider the following questions, among others: To what extent is the creation of a particular kind of ethical and epistemic person required for knowledge? How can ethnography produce knowledge about others without betraying them? Can relations of knowledge exchange confer or withhold ‘rights to speak’? Is it possible that unethical relations may destroy or hold up the unfolding of knowledge? And are there circumstances in which it is unethical to disclose knowledge? (shrink)

The article proposes a framework for the analysis of identity as produced in linguistic interaction, based on the following principles: identity is the product rather than the source of linguistic and other semiotic practices and therefore is a social and cultural rather than primarily internal psychological phenomenon; identities encompass macro-level demographic categories, temporary and interactionally specific stances and participant roles, and local, ethnographically emergent cultural positions; identities may be linguistically indexed through labels, implicatures, stances, styles, or linguistic structures and systems; (...) identities are relationally constructed through several, often overlapping, aspects of the relationship between self and other, including similarity/difference, genuineness/artifice and authority/ delegitimacy; and identity may be in part intentional, in part habitual and less than fully conscious, in part an outcome of interactional negotiation, in part a construct of others’ perceptions and representations, and in part an outcome of larger ideological processes and structures. The principles are illustrated through examination of a variety of linguistic interactions. (shrink)

This article argues that anthropology may represent untapped perspectives of relevance to social theory. The article starts by critically reviewing how anthropology has come to serve as the ‘Other’ in various branches of social theory, from Marx and Durkheim to Parsons to Habermas, engaged in a hopeless project of positing ‘primitive’ or ‘traditional’ society as the opposite of modernity. In contemporary debates, it is becoming increasingly recognized that social theory needs history, back to the axial age and beyond. The possible (...) role of anthropology in theorizing modernity receives far less attention. That role should go much beyond representing a view from ‘below’ or a politically correct appreciation of cultural diversity. It involves attention to key theoretical concepts and insights developed by maverick anthropologists like Arnold van Gennep, Marcel Mauss, Victor Turner and Gregory Bateson, concepts that uniquely facilitate an understanding of some of the underlying dynamics of modernity. (shrink)

This article is a defence of objectivity in sociology, not as is usually conceived as ‘value freedom’ or ‘procedural objectivity’, but rather as a socially constructed value that can nevertheless assist us in accessing social reality. It is argued that objectivity should not be seen as the opposite to subjectivity, but rather arising from particular intersubjectively held values (both methodological and societal) held in particular times and places. The objectivity defended here is socially situated in the beliefs and values of (...) communities. This on its own would imply an epistemological relativism, but in the final section of the article I make a plea for realism as a regulatory ideal underpinning objectivity and one which can lead us to novel truths about social reality. (shrink)

The Kiosk is designed to reveal the compiled rankings of leading institution that is not exhaustive to include all of doctoral programs. I have, nevertheless, list the major follow-up institutions from the 2010 NRC report. Ranking for each program finally has been yielded by average number of 1996, 2010, and USNW ranking for the graduate programs. Hence the coverage in period is longitudinal possibly 1986 (the first year from last 1985 NRC) through 2020 (the last year for ten year interval (...) of NRC practice, but not surely for every turn). The ranking of USNW graduate programs are mostly yearly, or changed with the interval of about three years for Natural and Social Sciences. The USNW ranking mostly was based on 2017-2018 version (eventually to determine the period of effect for this KIOSK), but in rare case, might be adjusted to avoid a sharp precariousness or in consideration of promotional equity. (shrink)

This thesis is about the crisis in representation that accompanies the attempt to account for lived experience, with particular reference to bodily pain in social science. The diagnosis of this problem of experience identifies epistemology as an inappropriate means of knowing that initiates a translational paradox unable to satisfy the simultaneous demands of making lived experience familiar in representational form yet retaining the foreignness of the original experience at the same time. This problem of simultaneity is not a problem, however, (...) if it is built into a way of knowing, something that escapes epistemological conditions of possibility with its either/or of singularities. To know in such ‘double vision’, or fractionally, characterises post-epistemological thinking. This thesis draws on a relatively underdeveloped method for practicing a fractional means of knowing from post- actor-network theory, that of the pinboard, and explores how it might be usefully applied to the problem of experience. The thesis constitutes an experiment in producing a social science account of the lived experience of chronic pain using this method as an alternative to conventional epistemological techniques that initiate the problem of experience. Through initial theoretical discussion, followed by reflection on its practical application involving the construction of fractional accounts of lived experience for five participants experiencing chronic pain, the pinboard is developed as a technique that seeks to maintain ‘double vision’ whilst inherently resisting attempts to resolve the juxtaposition it makes visible, enacting and engaging in an ontological politics with conventional methods of social analysis. This includes discussion of how the method might be transported from methodological knowledge spaces to effectively intervene on such conventional methods. (shrink)

The aims of this book is clear and straightforward. It was motivated to convert an inhumane or insipid experience with the various sources of global ranking into the kind of humanly and cultural experience within our daily lifestyle. Their outlook from presentation is masked with the number purely and perhaps through a myriad of complicated data or ranking information. The concept or self-identification within the experience or exposure would be less substantial or hard to get palpable. My attempt to improve (...) this aspect of contemporary practice certainly will fall short, but you can sense in some paragraphs or titles. I wrote this small piece of book in the end to take care of human integrity and stories for advancing the inherence and liveliness of interested actors or consumers despite all the wind-heads from the turf of existing ranking sources. The idea hopefully might be compatible with brand personification for the people interested in this area of world phenomenon. The structure of book was organized in less complete way, but might look cursory and spontaneous. The dealings obviously are never exhaustive unlike the major commercial providers, rather more akin to the consulting webs primarily in direct contact with the customers. Nevertheless, the ranking results finalized through this book is original in its methodology or in terms of data collection although the presentation is little in scope and mainly suggestive as a kind of ranking philosopher. Given my status as a college professor, it would be an unusual chemistry or brought me to shimmer at some point of meditation on how I could rank fairly and meaningfully. I merely hope that the readership can generously take this attempt as a pilot work or as the kind of post-modern work Avant Gardo or civilization strolls from understanding, criticism. It might be even through a bootstrap with the universal constitutionalism or communicative democracy. The book had been prepared mainly by editing into each section the previous work of articles and flowing through each of my brief pertaining to the purported ranking. Nevertheless, I am presenting an up-to-date elaboration on the graduate or post-graduate study and KIOSK on research doctorates. As followed by section four, the conventional spectrum of global CU rankings was discussed with a new attempt to measure them. Lastly, a reflection and piece of thought were wrought through little pages titled Epilogue at the end of this booklet. (shrink)

The three main naturalistic approaches to culture the Epidemiological account (Sperber 1996; Atran 1990, 2002; Sperber and Claidière 2006), Memetics (Dawkins 2006 [1976], Dennett 1996) and the Standard Evolutionary approach (Boyd and Richerson 1988 [1985], Mesoudi 2011) reduce it to a set of representational items that are shared by individuals in a population by non-genetic means. Thats why I see those three approaches as versions of what I call the Itemic View of Culture (IVC). I argue that, by that reduction, (...) the IVC is missing a key element in the subject matter of culture: an element that is best captured by the notion of constraints (Barwise and Perry 1983). I call my approach the Constraint-Based Approach (CBA), and I conceive it as an account that situates conventional constraints, and the simple attunement to those constraints by individuals, as the fundamental building blocks of culture. On their grounds, other kinds of attunements can be distinguished, and a natural account of explicit representational items and our cultural knowledge of them can be built. In this sense, the CBA is a necessary fundamental requirement for the IVC. (shrink)

It was a precious opportunity as a teacher and researcher that I had completed two research method classes with the peers of Laureate Education Inc. Since the generation of creative knowledge and meaningful contribution to the field is charged on the professional researcher, the classes are foundational, but unfortunately with less an attention by the scholars, and, if more problematically, even lack of courses for some graduate or training programs. Within this paper, I can be gladly reminiscent of the course (...) learning, and can present a work of demonstration by employing the issues of global college rankings. In this article, my purpose is gone with three basic aims; (i) present the brief summary of my experience on the two method classes (ii) suggest a new perspective and mindset within the changing technology and post-modern transformation of society (iii) finally show two examples of mixed method involved with the global college rankings and provide a view for the students situated within the temporal boundary I had set forth. (shrink)

Once I had explored the research issue of North and South unification with a focus on the legal integration for uniform constitution and various statutes. It pushed me to deal with a big question, and looked like a semi-textbook with an inchoate idea and baby theory upon the completion of research project. The literature review thankfully had allowed the space of creativity and originality of my work product, and can also be a typical way of foreign graduate legal researchers in (...) the process of his dissertation work. They would be beneficial with new statutes and codes, for example, from the Korean Congress, that are enacted recently, which would be their research topic certainly original and contributive. This could be viewed as one of qualitative enclaves enmeshed into a larger scope of qualitative inquiry. This interplay is fairly consequential in excavating a new knowledge and research findings. It could be aboriginal -- one trait word to characterize the qualitative studies-- from the viewpoint of host country, but became original as a crop to expand the horizon of new knowledge. I have once argued that the quantitative studies are on generality of subjects and commonness for involved strands. This profile would vary that the qualitative studies tend to be strong with the story and enclaves. The e-age and rapid compression of space with the development of telecommunication technology also factor to change a paradigm of knowledge and research activities. At least, the contemporary society certainly would be more specific as if we can trace a person with the satellite spotting and the electronic identifier on the leg of sex criminals in Korea guarantees to be safeguarded from his potential danger. That may be favorable concerning the elements and environments of qualitative studies. For example, we may follow up by comparing the research work of Korean statute with the e-government of Korea displaying the statute. We can entertain many on-line sources of information and stories with the dissertations of aboriginal culture. With my time on the qualitative studies, I came across the nocebo effect illustrated with the fear of MERs-CoV in Korea. The effect looks into the negative dimension of human mind and his personality, which could aggravate the current challenge of national crisis, June, 2015. Paradoxically, the nocebo effect can be said to characterize the qualitative context of inquiry. As Freud suggested, the vast of human element is of unexplainable dimension that is less easily quantifiable or generizable over the population (Broome, 2010). This does not say that the continental researchers had been affected with a late nationalization or late development of region leaving them to search for an ego. This is to say that the qualitative studies could explain the part of truths for the universe and human. The researchers interested in deep knowledge could employ their method, but in ethics, who would not vulture the objects of his theme and conduct on due scientific ground. (shrink)

The bone of contention that divides Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons in their 1940–1941 debate is that Schutz acknowledges an ontological break between the commonsense and scientific worlds whereas Parsons only considers it “a matter of refinement.” Schutz’s ontological distancing that disconnects the “world of consociates” where social reality is directly experienced in face-to-face contacts, and the “world of contemporaries” where the Other is experienced in terms of “types” has been crucial to social scientists. Implicated in the break is that (...) all intellectual attempts to understand experiences of Others must be based on the “models” constructed in the “world of contemporaries” (or “predecessors”); hence, epistemologically, to grasp the subjective point of view with a here-and-now understanding is an outright impossibility. Based on a Schutzian perspective, the author suggests that the sociologist must objectivize the Thou-orientations involved in his/her analysis in order that s/he can possibility grasp the subjective point of view in objective terms. (shrink)

The article defines a new referential problem of ethnographic description: the verbalization of the "silent" dimension of the social. As a documentary procedure, description has been devalued by more advanced recording techniques that set a naturalistic standard concerning the reification of qualitative "data." I discuss this standard from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge and replace it by a challenge unknown to all empirical procedures relying on primary verbalizations of informants. Descriptions have to solve the problems of the voiceless, (...) the silent, the unspeakable, the pre-linguistic, and the indescribable. Ethnography puts something into words, which did not exist in language before. To respond to this task, descriptions have to turn away from the logic of recording and develop into a theory-oriented research practice. (shrink)

This dissertation addresses the question of marginalization in cross-cultural communication from the perspectives of hermeneutic philosophy and postcolonial theory. Specifically, it focuses on European colonialism‘s effect on language and communicative practices in Latin America. I argue colonialism creates a deeply sedimented but unacknowledged background of inherited cultural prejudices against which social and political problems of oppression, violence and marginalization, especially towards women, emerge—but whose roots in colonial and imperial frameworks have lost transparency. This makes it especially difficult for postcolonial subjects (...) to meaningfully express their own experiences of psychic dislocation and fragmentation because the discursive background used to communicate these experiences is made up of multiple, sometimes conflicting traditions. To address this problem, I turn to a strategic use of Nietzsche‘s conceptions of subjectivity and language as metaphor to engage the unique difficulties that arise in giving voice to the subaltern experience. Thus, I argue that while colonialism introduces an added layer of complexity to philosophical discussions of language, the concrete particularities and political emergencies of Latin American history necessitate an account of language that can speak to these concrete particularities. To this end, I develop a conception of, what I call, ―hydric life,‖ a postcolonial feminist hermeneutics that better accommodates these cultural specificities. (shrink)

Nurse researchers are increasingly adopting qualitative methodologies for research practice and theory development. These approaches to research are, in many cases, more appropriate for die field of nursing inquiry than the previously dominant techno‐rational methods. However, there remains the issue of adapting methodologies developed in other academic disciplines to the nursing research context. This paper draws upon my own experience with interpretive research to raise questions about the issue of nursing research within a social science research framework. The paper argues (...) that by integrating the characteristics of nursing practice with the characteristics of research practice, the researcher can develop a ‘nursing lens’, an approach to qualitative research that brings an added dimension to social science methodologies in the nursing research context. Attention is drawn to the unique nature of the nurse‐patient relationship, and the ways in which this aspect of nursing practice can enhance nursing research. Examples are given from interview transcripts to support this position. (shrink)

This article locates Bourdieu’s sociology within the lasting controversy concerning the nature of causal explanation and interpretative understanding in the social sciences, with a special focus on the classical problem surrounding the alleged compatibility between these procedures. First, it is argued that Bourdieu’s praxeological and relational perspective on the social universe leads him not only to join the ‘compatibility field’ of the debate, but to sustain, more radically, the identity between explanation and understanding. Second, the article defends the view that (...) this methodological proposal is tied to a distinction often ignored among the commentators of Bourdieu’s oeuvre, namely that between objectivism, a mode of knowledge of the social which he intends to integrate and overcome in his structural praxeology, and determinism, adopted by the author as a fundamental scientific principle and, at the same time, a potentially emancipatory ethico-political tool bequeathed by his reflexive sociology. While basically sympathetic to Bourdieu’s perspective, the article concludes in a more critical vein, by defending the need to bridge the gap between the ‘pessimism of the intellect’ that marks his portrayal of the reflexive capabilities of the lay agent, on the one hand, and the ‘optimism of the will’ infused in the critical program of reflexive sociology, on the other. (shrink)

Anthropology?its methodology, its paths to knowing; but also its epistemology, its modes of knowing?saturates the practices of Science and Technology Studies (STS). In a nutshell, anthropology has helped STS find ways to break open the discourses of science. If we were to believe our ?natives??scientists?and accept what they say about what they do and know on their own terms, we would not be able to add anything to these stories. And so in STS, we have modified the anthropological propensity to (...) make the strange familiar and invented the technique of making the familiar strange. Now we can reimagine our natives? stories, note how they are told, and investigate why they are told the way they are?relating them to the practices from which they spring. Our terminological tinkering?refusing to adopt the terms of the actors?is, then, also an epistemological tinkering; we account for these practices in terms of our own. (shrink)

The “ontological turn” is a recent movement within cultural anthropology. Its proponents want to move beyond a representationalist framework, where cultures are treated as systems of belief (concepts, etc.) that provide different perspectives on a single world. Authors who write in this vein move from talk of many cultures to many “worlds,” thus appearing to affirm a form of relativism. We argue that, unlike earlier forms of relativism, the ontological turn in anthropology is not only immune to the arguments of (...) Donald Davidson’s “The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” but it affirms and develops the antirepresentationalist position of Davidson’s subsequent essays. (shrink)

This article develops a concept of lyrical sociology, a sociology I oppose to narrative sociology, by which I mean standard quantitative inquiry with its "narratives" of variables as well as those parts of qualitative sociology that take a narrative and explanatory approach to social life. Lyrical sociology is characterized by an engaged, nonironic stance toward its object of analysis, by specific location of both its subject and its object in social space, and by a momentaneous conception of social time. Lyrical (...) sociology typically uses strong figuration and personification, and aims to communicate its author's emotional stance toward his or her object of study, rather than to "explain" that object. The analysis considers many examples and draws on literary criticism, the philosophy of time, and the theory of emotion. It also addresses contemporary debates in ethnography. (shrink)

Current debates about “Darwinizing culture” have typically focused on the validity of memetics. In this article we argue that meme-like inheritance is not a necessary requirement for descent with modification. We suggest that an alternative and more productive way of Darwinizing culture can be found in the application of phylogenetic methods. We review recent work on cultural phylogenetics and outline six fundamental questions that can be answered using the power and precision of quantitative phylogenetic methods. However, cultural evolution, like biological (...) evolution, is often far from treelike. We discuss the problems reticulate evolution can cause for phylogenetic analyses and suggest ways in which these problems can be overcome. Our solutions involve a combination of new methods for the study of cultural evolution , and the triangulation of different lines of historical evidence. Throughout we emphasize that most debates about cultural phylogenies can only be settled by empirical research rather than armchair speculation. (shrink)

This essay critically explores resources and reasons for the study of culture in religious ethics, paying special attention to rhetorics and genres that provide an ethics of ordinary life. I begin by exploring a work in cultural anthropology that poses important questions for comparative and cultural inquiry in an age alert to "otherness," asymmetries of power, the end of value-neutrality in the humanities, and the formation of identity. I deepen my argument by making a foundational case for the importance of (...) culture as a topic of normative analysis through a discussion of the emotions as cultural artifacts. To illustrate how cultural analysis can inform religious ethics, I turn to works by Wayne Meeks, Margaret Trawick, and Charles Taylor. I conclude by sketching some implications of a "cultural turn" for future work in religious ethics. (shrink)

(1992). The rituals of science: Comments on Abir‐Am (with response) Social Epistemology: Vol. 6, The Historical Ethnography of Scientific Rituals, pp. 373-387.

Residual categories are those which cannot be formally represented within a given classification system. We examine the forms that residuality takes within our information systems today, and explore some silences which form around those inhabiting particular residual categories. We argue that there is significant ethical and political work to be done in exploring residuality.

The article defines a new referential problem of ethnographic description: the verbalization of the “silent” dimension of the social. As a documentary procedure, description has been devalued by more advanced recording techniques that set a naturalistic standard concerning the reification of qualitative “data.” I discuss this standard from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge and replace it by a challenge unknown to all empirical procedures relying on primary verbalizations of informants. Descriptions have to solve the problems of the voiceless, (...) the silent, the unspeakable, the pre-linguistic, and the indescribable. Ethnography puts something into words, which did not exist in language before. To respond to this task, descriptions have to turn away from the logic of recording and develop into a theory-oriented research practice. (shrink)

Epistemological differences fuel continuous and frequently divisive debates in the social sciences and the humanities. Sociologists have yet to consider how such differences affect peer evaluation. The empirical literature has studied distributive fairness, but neglected how epistemological differences affect perception of fairness in decision making. The normative literature suggests that evaluators should overcome their epistemological differences by ‘‘translating’’ their preferred standards into general criteria of evaluation. However, little is known about how procedural fairness actually operates. Drawing on eighty-one interviews with (...) panelists serving on five multidisciplinary fellowship competitions in the social sciences and the humanities, we show that Evaluators generally draw on four epistemological styles to make arguments in favor of and against proposals. These are the constructivist, comprehensive, positivist, and utilitarian styles; and Peer reviewers define a fair decision-making process as one in which panelists engage in ‘‘cognitive contextualization,’’ that is, use epistemological styles most appropriate to the field or discipline of the proposal under review. (shrink)

This article explores the implications of Bernhard Waldenfels’s responsive phenomenology for the discipline of cultural anthropology or ethnology, insofar as it understands itself as the “science of the culturally Other”. It discusses Waldenfels’s own engagement with ethnology and shows the compatibility of his approach with discussions within the discipline. The intertwining of ownness and alienness that is central to Waldenfels’s account of experience is applied to the problem of culture in ethnology. This leads to an acknowledgement of a domain between (...) cultures, a genuine interculturality, as the fundamental field of ethnological research, which, however, can only be addressed through indirect forms of representation. Such forms are identified in the practice of ethnographic citation, and through a reinterpretation of Horace Miner’s classical satire “Body Ritual among the Nacirema”, thus demonstrating the possibility of a prospective “responsive ethnology”. (shrink)

Increasingly, psychologists have shown a healthy interest in cultural variation and a skepticism about assuming that research with North American and Northern European undergraduates provides reliable insight into universal psychological processes. Unfortunately, this reappraisal has not been extended to questioning the notion of culture central to this project. Rather, there is wide acceptance that culture refers to a kind of social form that is entity-like, territorialized, marked by a high degree of shared beliefs and coalescing into patterns of key values (...) that animate a broad range of cultural performances and representations. Ironically, anthropologists and other scholars in cultural studies have overwhelmingly come to reject this view of culture. Arguably, then, the move in psychology to attend to cultural environments has paradoxically further distanced it from the fields most concerned with cultural forms. This essay reviews this state of affairs and offers a proposal how a more nuanced appreciation of cultural life can be articulated with theories and methods familiar and available to psychologists. (shrink)

This paper engages with “researcher reflexivity” in terms of a set of discourse analytical imperatives which derive from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and as a set of epistemological implications which follow from my ethnographic-interventionist engagement with a specific field of practice. The focus of the paper is on a reflexive discourse analysis of two data events. My key claim is that a reflexive discourse analysis which succeeds in revealing the role of social class as an interpretative filter on data (...) events and their histories, can result in a deepened research design which also sets a specific agenda for relevant social-theoretical understandings of Late Modernity. (shrink)

How does the question of temporality get translated into the register of values in the process of constructing knowledge through ethnography? Is there a possibility of critical ethnography that tracks politics of time in the accounts of the other? By centring these questions to the domain of ethnographic endeavours in Indian anthropology, this article takes a look into the shifting locations of self and the other in the practice of ethnography with reference to the notion of temporality as value. Ethnography, (...) once a key device of anthropological research, has become one of the significant approaches in almost all social science disciplines today and even in certain domains of humanities, management and market research. Ethnography itself has been reimagined and reshaped under different terrains of interdisciplinary approaches. But one would rarely find accounts of political and ideological manoeuvring of temporal concepts and value orientations which inform the theories and rhetoric in it. It pronounces upon the knowledge gathered from such research a discourse which construes the other in terms of a distance from the self, both spatial and temporal. Drawing upon this register of ‘time’ from the writing of Johannes Fabian, the article transposes the framework to understand the currents in contemporary Indian anthropology. (shrink)

All matters related to ethnography flow from a decision that originates at the very beginning of the research process—the selection of the basic object of analysis—and yet fieldworkers pay scant attention to this crucial task. As a result, most take as their starting point bounded entities delimited by location or social classification and in so doing restrict the kinds of arguments available to them. This article presents the alternative of relational ethnography. Relational ethnography involves studying fields rather than places, boundaries (...) rather than bounded groups, processes rather than processed people, and cultural conflict rather than group culture. While this approach comes with its own set of challenges, it offers an ethnographic method that works with the relational and processual nature of social reality. (shrink)

In the standard native tradition of Albanian studies, descriptive and empirical research has only confirmed their own ultimate goal of constructing national specificity and a particularly antiquated view of national culture. In this article, I show how and why an articulate analysis of the main intellectual traditions and their impact can provide fresh insights into grasping the cultural particularism of Albanian studies. Methodologically, a new picture of knowledge production must arise if we consider the historical, cultural, political and ideological terrain (...) on which certain influential ideas and practices in Albanian studies of people’s culture have emerged. The aim, then, is not to provide an exhaustive picture of a positive knowledge of culture and society, but to show the urgent need for avoiding any adoption of concepts that might be pure reconstructions of arbitrary and timeless structures and values, while rejecting any approach in terms of survivals and folklorism. (shrink)

This paper explores a form of activism that operates with and within matter. For more than 150 years materialism has informed activist practice through materialist conceptions of history and modes of production. The paper discusses the ambivalences of these previous configurations of activism and materialism and explores possibilities for enacting activist interventions in conditions where politics is not only performed as a politics of history but as the fundamental capacity to remake and transform processes of matter and life. What is (...) activism when politics is increasingly performed as a politics of matter? What is activism when it comes to a materialist understanding of matter itself? (shrink)

We suggest that human culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties, and argue that the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with the structure of the science of biological evolution. This latter claim is tested by outlining the methods and approaches employed by the principal subdisciplines of evolutionary biology and assessing whether there is an existing or potential corresponding approach to the study of cultural evolution. Existing approaches within anthropology and archaeology demonstrate a good match with (...) the macroevolutionary methods of systematics, paleobiology, and biogeography, whereas mathematical models derived from population genetics have been successfully developed to study cultural microevolution. Much potential exists for experimental simulations and field studies of cultural microevolution, where there are opportunities to borrow further methods and hypotheses from biology. Potential also exists for the cultural equivalent of molecular genetics in “social cognitive neuroscience,” although many fundamental issues have yet to be resolved. It is argued that studying culture within a unifying evolutionary framework has the potential to integrate a number of separate disciplines within the social sciences. (shrink)

Ethical issues in linguistic fieldwork have received surprisingly little direct attention in recent years. This article reviews ethical models for fieldwork and outlines the responsibilities of linguists involved in fieldwork on endangered languages to individuals, communities, and knowledge systems, focusing on fieldwork in a North American context.

Frequent public uproar over forms of data science that rely on information about people demonstrates the challenges of defining and demonstrating trustworthy digital data research practices. This paper reviews problems of trustworthiness in what we term pervasive data research: scholarship that relies on the rich information generated about people through digital interaction. We highlight the entwined problems of participant unawareness of such research and the relationship of pervasive data research to corporate datafication and surveillance. We suggest a way forward by (...) drawing from the history of a different methodological approach in which researchers have struggled with trustworthy practice: ethnography. To grapple with the colonial legacy of their methods, ethnographers have developed analytic lenses and researcher practices that foreground relations of awareness and power. These lenses are inspiring but also challenging for pervasive data research, given the flattening of contexts inherent in digital data collection. We propose ways that pervasive data researchers can incorporate reflection on awareness and power within their research to support the development of trustworthy data science. (shrink)

In this paper, we describe how critical data designers have created projects that ‘push back’ against the eclipse of environmental problems by dominant orders: the pioneering pollution database Scorecard, released by the US NGO Environmental Defense Fund in 1997; the US Environmental Protection Agency’s EnviroAtlas that brings together numerous data sets and provides tools for valuing ecosystem services; and the Houston Clean Air Network’s maps of real-time ozone levels in Houston. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews, we analyse how critical (...) data designers turn scientific data and findings into claims and visualisations that are meaningful in contemporary political terms. The skills of critical data designers cross scales and domains; they must identify problems calling for public consideration, and then locate, access, link, and create visualisations of data relevant to the problem. We conclude by describing hazards ahead in work to leverage Big Data to understand and address environmental problems. Critical data designers need to understand what counts as a societal problem in a particular context, what doesn’t, what is seen as connected and not, what is seen as ethically charged, and what is exonerated and discounted. Such recognition is produced through interpretive, ‘close reading’ of the historical moment in which they operate. (shrink)

Multicultural education was attacked by antiracists in Britain in the 1980s. Although it is arguable that not all of the criticisms were valid, the debate raises questions about the efficacy of religious education in countering racism. The paper argues that a lack of analysis of the concepts 'religions' and 'cultures' in British RE has led to a representation of religious traditions which essentialises them, playing down their internal diversity, and which assumes a 'closed' view of cultures. A more flexible approach (...) is suggested, drawing on work in ethnography and other social science disciplines, which might better combine with antiracist stances than earlier approaches. The work of the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit is introduced briefly as an example of an attempt to address some of the above issues in terms of an integrated approach to theory, the study of religions in the community and the development of religious education curriculum materials. (shrink)