Elites, Ethnographic Issues PDF Download

Author: George E. Marcus
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Author: George E. Marcus
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400851807
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
In the 1980s, George Marcus spearheaded a major critique of cultural anthropology, expressed most clearly in the landmark book Writing Culture, which he coedited with James Clifford. Ethnography through Thick and Thin updates and advances that critique for the late 1990s. Marcus presents a series of penetrating and provocative essays on the changes that continue to sweep across anthropology. He examines, in particular, how the discipline's central practice of ethnography has been changed by "multi-sited" approaches to anthropology and how new research patterns are transforming anthropologists' careers. Marcus rejects the view, often expressed, that these changes are undermining anthropology. The combination of traditional ethnography with scholarly experimentation, he argues, will only make the discipline more lively and diverse. The book is divided into three main parts. In the first, Marcus shows how ethnographers' tradition of defining fieldwork in terms of peoples and places is now being challenged by the need to study culture by exploring connections, parallels, and contrasts among a variety of often seemingly incommensurate sites. The second part illustrates this emergent multi-sited condition of research by reflecting it in some of Marcus's own past research on Tongan elites and dynastic American fortunes. In the final section, which includes the previously unpublished essay "Sticking with Ethnography through Thick and Thin," Marcus examines the evolving professional culture of anthropology and the predicaments of its new scholars. He shows how students have increasingly been drawn to the field as much by such powerful interdisciplinary movements as feminism, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies as by anthropology's own traditions. He also considers the impact of demographic changes within the discipline--in particular the fact that anthropologists are no longer almost exclusively Euro-Americans studying non-Euro-Americans. These changes raise new issues about the identities of anthropologists in relation to those they study, and indeed, about what is to define standards of ethnographic scholarship. Filled with keen and highly illuminating observations, Ethnography through Thick and Thin will stimulate fresh debate about the past, present, and future of a discipline undergoing profound transformations.

Author: Enrico Dal Lago
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807130872
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Between 1815 and 1861, American slaveholders and southern Italian landowners presided over the economic and social life of two predominantly agricultural regions, the U.S. South and Italy's Mezzogiorno. Enrico Dal Lago ingeniously compares these agrarian elites, demonstrating how the study of each enhances our understanding of the other as well as of their shared nineteenth-century world. Agrarian Elites charts the parallel developments of plantations and latifondi in relation to changes in the world economy. At the same time, it examines the spread of "paternalistic" models of family relations and of slave and free-labor management that accompanied the rise of large groups of American slaveholders and southern Italian landed proprietors in the early-to-mid-1800s. According to Dal Lago, the most articulate and enlightened members of both elites combined the pursuit of profit with the implementation of "modern" contractual practices in dealing with their workforces. Both elites also used their economic and social power for political advantage, opposing the intervention of their national governments in local affairs. The search for ever-better protection of their respective interests in slaveholding and landed property led ultimately to their support for the creation of two nations, the Confederate States of America and the Kingdom of Italy, both in 1861.Dal Lago brings together two subjects that have generated considerable debate and research: systems of slave and nominally free labor and the elites who employed them, and nineteenth-century nationalism. With its pathbreaking approach and singular and comparative insights, Agrarian Elites will inform not only American and Italian studies but also the very practice of comparative history.

Author: Stephen Nugent
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134471203
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Drawing on a diverse, comparative ethnographic literature, this new volume examines the intimate spaces and cultural practices of those elites who occupy positions of power and authority across a variety of different settings. Using ethnographic case studies from a wide range of geographical areas, including Mexico, Peru, Amazonia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Europe, North America and Africa, the contributors explore the inner worlds of meaning and practice that define and sustain elite identities. They also provide insights into the cultural mechanisms that maintain elite status, and into the complex ways that elite groups relate to, and are embedded within, wider social and historical processes.

Author: Luis L. M. Aguiar
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409429555
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 499

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Book Description
Presenting the latest empirical case studies from Canada, the USA and Australia, this volume explores the challenges and difficulties involved in conducting research amongst the rich and elite, whilst shedding light on the manner in which power is harnessed, protected and controlled to manage and manipulate resources. A demonstration of the importance of studying up to our understanding of decision-making, governance and the nature of contemporary democracy in the global economy, Researching Amongst Elites will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists and geographers working in areas such as social research methods, social stratification, the sociology of elites and relations of class, wealth and power.

Author: J. Abbink
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137290552
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Offering insightful anthropological-historical contributions to the understanding of elites worldwide, this book helps us grasp their ways of life and role in times of contested global inequalities. Case studies include the Polish gentry, the white former colonial elite of Mauritius, professional elites, and transnational (financial) elites.

Author: Cris Shore
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415277952
Category : Elite (Social sciences)
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
What makes an elite? This authoritative new volume examines elite groups in power across Europe, North America, Mexico, Peru, Indonesia and Africa to answer this question fully at a time of their increasing dominance.

Author: Wale Adebanwi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139917110
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Yorùbá Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria investigates the dynamics and challenges of ethnicity and elite politics in Nigeria, Africa's largest democracy. Wale Adebanwi demonstrates how the corporate agency of the elite transformed the modern history and politics of one of Africa's largest ethnic groups, the Yorùbá. The argument is organized around the ideas and cultural representations of Ọbáfemi Awólowo, the central signifier of modern Yorùbá culture. Through the narration and analysis of material, non-material and interactional phenomena - such as political party and ethnic group organization, cultural politics, democratic struggle, personal ambitions, group solidarity, death, memory and commemoration - this book examines the foundations of the legitimacy of the Yorùbá political elite. Using historical sociology and ethnographic research, Adebanwi takes readers into the hitherto unexplored undercurrents of one of the most powerful and progressive elite groups in Africa, tracing its internal and external struggles for power.

Author: Rebecca Hardin
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299248739
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
The ethnographic methods that anthropologists first developed to study other cultures—fieldwork, participant observation, dialogue—are now being adapted for a broad array of applications, such as business, conflict resolution and demobilization, wildlife conservation, education, and biomedicine. In Transforming Ethnographic Knowledge, anthropologists trace the changes they have seen in ethnography as a method and as an intellectual approach, and they offer examples of ethnography’s role in social change and its capacity to transform its practitioners. Senior scholars Mary Catherine Bateson, Sidney Mintz, and J. Lorand Matory look back at how thinking ethnographically shaped both their work and their lives, and George Marcus suggests that the methods for teaching and training anthropologists need rethinking and updating. The second part of the volume features anthropologists working in sectors where ethnography is finding or claiming new relevance: Kamari Maxine Clarke looks at ethnographers’ involvement (or non-involvement) in military conflict, Csilla Kalocsai employs ethnographic tools to understand the dynamics of corporate management, Rebecca Hardin and Melissa Remis take their own anthropological training into rainforests where wildlife conservation and research meet changing subsistence practices and gendered politics of social difference, and Marcia Inhorn shows how the interests in mobility and diasporic connection that characterize a new generation of ethnographic work also apply to medical technologies, as those mediate fertility and relate to social status in the Middle East.

Author: Howard Prosser
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315453355
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
A response to Argentina’s shifting political climate, Global Liberalism and Elite Schooling in Argentina reveals how elite schooling encourages the hoarding of educational advantage and reinforces social inequalities. Presenting Buenos Aires’s Caledonian School as part of the growing scholarly discussion on elite education in the Global South, Howard Prosser situates the school’s history in concert with that of the state, the region, and the globe. The book applies new methodologies for the study of elite schools in globalizing circumstances by fusing ethnographic fieldwork with archival research and a wealth of secondary sources. This transdisciplinary approach focuses on the nature of liberalism as a global ideal, positing that eliteness is sustained by an economy with its own culture of value and exchange that, ironically, the scholarship on elites may help perpetuate.