1,721,015 research outputs found
Outline for an ethnography of doubt
No full textReligious and secular convictions have powerful effects, but their foundations are often surprisingly fragile. New converts often come across as stringent believers precisely because they need to dispel their own lingering doubts, while revolutionary movements survive only through the denial of ambiguity. This book shows that a focus on uncertainty and doubt is indispensable for grasping the role of ideas in social action. Drawing on a wide range of cases, from spirit mediums in Taiwan to Maoist revolutionaries in India, from right-wing populists in Europe to converts to Pentecostalism in Central Asia, the authors analyse the ways in which doubt is overcome and, conversely, how belief-systems collapse. In doing so, Ethnographies of Doubt provides important insights into the cycles of faith, hope, conviction and disillusion that are intrinsic to the human condition
On the act of comparison: an introduction
No full textThis opening chapter starts with the observation that at its core, comparison is about establishing a relationship between two or more ‘things’ to thereby bring into view differences and similarities. Such acts of comparison are essential for people to make sense of and orient themselves in the world, while at the same time they will be affected (and constrained) by the comparative work of others. The chapter argues that the cross-cultural study of comparison offers insight into several important analytical topics. It does so, first, by showing how comparison is associated with a range of epistemic techniques (e.g. generalizing, contrasting, juxtaposing, ranking, translating), which are variously employed, with greater and lesser intensity, by those who compare. It then builds on this variation to show how acts of comparison may strengthen hegemonic structures, and when they may destabilize such structures. By teasing out the kinds of relationships that are brought into being by the act of comparing, the chapter draws attention to how comparison affects the integrity of both the comparer and the compared. This goes some way to explain why comparison can be a powerful tool of governance as well as why it may be vehemently resisted by those who are compared
Recognizing uniqueness: on (not) comparing the World Nomad Games
No full textThis chapter explores how one’s sense of uniqueness can be squared with the need to have this uniqueness recognized by others. The conundrum lay at the heart of the World Nomad Games, a six-day event held biannually in Kyrgyzstan between 2014 and 2018, and which featured a range of nomadic sports embedded in an extensive cultural program. Organized with the aim of putting Kyrgyzstan on the world map, by 2018, it attracted large numbers of athletes, spectators, and commentators from dozens of countries, many of whom agreed that the World Nomad Games were indeed unique. Notwithstanding these successes, questions remained. How was the integrity of local culture affected by the need to attract global attention? And what exactly was it that observers saw, and commentators reported, when they called the Nomad Games ‘unique’? While the idea of uniqueness implies that an object or phenomenon is incomparable, claims to uniqueness can only be made through active (even if often implicit) comparison. Instead of treating this as some sort of epistemic contradiction, this chapter argues that claims to uniqueness challenge the terms of comparison, and thereby potentially reconfigure the playing field. The World Nomad Games provides a good example of such attempts at reconfiguration, and the tensions that emerge in the process
Conversion after socialism: disruptions, modernisms and technologies of faith in the former Soviet Union
No full textThe large and sudden influx of missionaries into the former Soviet Union after seventy years of militant secularism has been controversial, and the widespread occurrence of conversion has led to anxiety about social and national disintegration. Although these concerns have been vigorously discussed in national arenas, social scientists have remained remarkably silent about the subject. This volume’s focus on conversion offers a novel approach to the dislocations of the postsocialist experience. In eight wellresearched ethnographic accounts the authors analyse a range of missionary encounters as well as aspects of conversion and ‘anti-conversion’ in different parts of the region, thus challenging the problematic idea that religious life after socialism involved a simple ‘revival’ of repressed religious traditions. Instead, they unravel the unexpected twists and turns of religious dynamics, and the processes that have challenged popular ideas about religion and culture. The contributions show how conversion is rooted in the disruptive qualities of the new ‘capitalist experience’ and document its unsettling effects on the individual and social level
Fragile Conviction
Full text linkHow does ideology function during periods of political and economic turmoil? This book, based on long-term ethnographic research in a destitute former mining town in Kyrgyzstan, testifies to the precariousness of life in the former Soviet republics in the decades after the collapse of the USSR. It follows inhabitants as they make sense of a radically changing world and as they try to imbue their lives with relevance and direction, while concentrating in depth on their engagement with a range of religious ideas and other ideological currents, including scientific atheism, evangelical Christianity, Sunni Islamic revivalism, and traditional shamanistic beliefs. By examining such a broad variety of belief systems and how they manifest themselves in daily life, the author provides new insights into how ideology works (or fails to work) and how cultural and religious convictions are collectively produced and shaped
Fragile conviction: changing ideological landscapes in urban Kyrgyzstan
No full textHow does ideology function during periods of political and economic turmoil? This book, based on long-term ethnographic research in a destitute former mining town in Kyrgyzstan, testifies to the precariousness of life in the former Soviet republics in the decades after the collapse of the USSR. It follows inhabitants as they make sense of a radically changing world and as they try to imbue their lives with relevance and direction, while concentrating in depth on their engagement with a range of religious ideas and other ideological currents, including scientific atheism, evangelical Christianity, Sunni Islamic revivalism, and traditional shamanistic beliefs. By examining such a broad variety of belief systems and how they manifest themselves in daily life, the author provides new insights into how ideology works (or fails to work) and how cultural and religious convictions are collectively produced and shaped
All alike anyway: an Amazonian ethics of incommensurability
No full textUrarina people of Amazonian Peru rarely make explicit comparisons of a kind that would focus attention on differences between entities being compared, especially when this could imply, or facilitate, a value judgement. As such, the kinds of comparisons in which anthropologists routinely indulge – of groups and cultural practices, or forms of life – seem to be all but absent, as do interpersonal comparisons of the kind well-described by social comparison theory in psychology. This chapter examines the various forms of thinking and social practice to which an ethics of non-comparison gives rise, arguing that it is closely related to a general reluctance to assume or assert knowledge of the capacities of others: a kind of evaluative abstinence that ultimately amounts to an important way of showing respect. By recognising the singularity of persons and things – not only their incommensurability, but also interdependency – Urarina people avoid establishing relations of dominance and the imposition of hierarchy
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