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    Where knowledge meets: heritage expertise at the intersection of people, perspective, and place

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    Drawing on ethnographic research with heritage professionals in Scotland, the essay explores meetings as organizational devices for differentiating and relating various forms of epistemic, social, and material context. The account describes how the bureaucratic ideal of institutional consistency is achieved through staged encounters between the perspectives of the various people who meet, and the buildings that are the objects of their meeting. These ethnographic examples are used to develop two linked points. Firstly, it is suggested that the lens of ‘meeting’ complicates the relatively monolithic characterizations of heritage expertise evident in widely influential deconstructive critiques of heritage practice. Secondly, it is argued that heritage practitioners’ own accounts of these negotiations highlight material and spatial dimensions of bureaucratic conduct that have that have received relatively little ethnographic attention in prevalent textually orientated accounts

    Introduction: reconsidering detachment

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    This volume urges a reconsideration of the productive potential of disconnection, distance and detachment, as ethical, methodological and philosophical commitments. In so doing, we write against the grain of a strong tendency in contemporary social theory and public life. Engagement has, in a wide range of contexts, become a definitive and unquestionable social good, one that encompasses or abuts with a number of other seductive cultural tropes, such as participation, democracy, voice, equality, diversity and empowerment. Conversely, detachment has come to symbolize a range of social harms: authoritarianism and hierarchy, being out of touch, bureaucratic coldness and unresponsiveness, a lack of empathy, and passivity and inaction. Yet as this book will argue, in a wide range of settings detachment is still socially, ethically and politically valued, and the relationship between detachment and engagement is not simple or singular

    Introduction: towards an ethnography of meeting

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    This introductory essay describes a novel approach to meetings in relation to broader literatures within and beyond anthropology. We suggest that notwithstanding many accounts in which meetings figure, little attention has been given to the mundane forms through which these work. Seeking to develop a distinctively ethnographic focus to these quotidian and ubiquitous procedures, we outline an approach that moves attention beyond a narrow concern with just their meaning and content. We highlight some of the innovative strands that develop from this approach, describing how the negotiation of relationships ‘within’ meetings is germane to the organization of ‘external’ contexts, including in relation to time, space, organizational structure, and society. The essay offers a set of provocations for rethinking approaches to bureaucracy, organizational process, and ethos through the ethnographic lens of meeting

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Variations on the Author

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    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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