Bureaucratizing the Ethnographer's Magic

Dauber, Kenneth

doi:10.1086/204343

Cited by 10 publications

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“…Cuando Handler le preguntó en la entrevista publicada en 1991 si el trabajo de campo en Bali había implicado el aprendizaje de la lengua, respondió: "No, jamás aprendí bien el balinés". 23 En un artículo sobre la importancia de los procedimientos burocráticos en las etnografías de algunos antropólogos, Kenneth Dauber (1995) analiza el caso de Malinowski y llama la atención para la preocupación con los registros precisos, valiéndose para ello también del Diario. ejemplar.…”

Section: El Etnógrafo De Los Etnógrafosunclassified

Doxa y creencia entre los antropólogos (Traducción)

2021

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Para explicar cómo una interpretación se vuelve hegemónica y cómo se reproducen los fenómenos de creencia colectiva, el artículo se enfoca en la recepción del Ensayo sobre el don, de Marcel Mauss, y de los diarios de Malinowski. La comparación entre los casos permite examinar los fundamentos de la legitimidad que se atribuye a ciertos intérpretes, así como también la dinámica de la estructuración y la difusión de una doxa.

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Section: El Etnógrafo De Los Etnógrafosunclassified

Doxa y creencia entre los antropólogos (Traducción)

2021

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“…Yes, an organization is more than the sum of its parts, but ethnographers nevertheless access the parts, the something more, and the constructive process through relationships with the people who inhabit the organization, remaining continually sensitive to how those relationships are mediated by organizational structures, formal policies, norms, and culture. Once they have secured the raw materials for their analyses, ethnographers must indeed do the sifting, sorting, juxtaposing, abstracting, and reorderingwhat Dauber (1995) describes as "bureaucratizing the ethnographer's magic." It is this that allows ethnographers to learn things that people in the organization truly do not know about themselves and their organization and may even be chagrined to learn.…”

Section: Conclusion: the Relational Work Of Organizational Ethnographymentioning

confidence: 99%

What Is a Clinic? Relationships and the Practice of Organizational Ethnography

Heimer

2018

Sociological Methods & Research

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This article examines the practices of ethnographers carrying out research in and, especially, on organizations. Ethnographers studying organizations, like other ethnographers, emphasize close observation and understanding the meaning of actions, words, and artifacts; they differ from other fieldworkers, though, in focusing on the organization itself, not just what happens inside it. Because fieldwork relationships are the core technology of organizational ethnography, this article argues, the challenges of studying organizations differ from the challenges of doing ethnography in other settings or with other analytic purposes precisely because the character of the organization and its activities shape what the researcher can and will study. This article discusses how fieldwork relationships are constrained and shaped as ethnographers submit their projects for ethics review, gain access to research sites, hang out in the organizations they are studying, interview informants, study organizational documents and paperwork, and handle requests to give back to the site.

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“…Weber 1968)-practices that scholars have found equally central to the construction of knowledge in other systems, such as accounting, audit, science, and even ethnography (cf. Dauber 1995;Strathern 2000;Riles 2004b;Maurer 2002;Yngvesson and Coutin 2006). An essential component to the rationality embedded in these practices was the emergence of written records that furthered the degree of separation (of person from office, and people from corporation) that characterized organizations of the kind Weber described: "Here affairs of state were embodied in written records which tended to distance them from the personal affairs of the office-holder and to offer some kind of accountability" (as cited in Goody 1986:106).…”

Section: The Aesthetics Of Legal Form Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Files Circulation and the Forms of Legal Experts

Barrera¹

2008

Journal of Legal Anthropology

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A common assumption in Western legal cultures is that judicial law-making is materialised in practices that resemble the operation of a professional bureaucracy, practices that are also central to the construction of knowledge in other systems, such as accounting, audit, science, and even ethnography (Dauber 1995; Strathern 2000; Riles 2000, 2004, 2006; Maurer 2002; Yngvesson and Coutin 2006). This argument situates the judiciary as a formalistic organization that builds its ambition of universality on the procurement and dissemination of knowledge on a rational basis. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Argentine Supreme Court, this paper seeks to unpack this assumption through a detailed look at how the figures of legal bureaucrats, in particular law clerks, become visible through the documentary practices they perform within the judicial apparatus. As these practices unfold, they render visible these subjects in different forms, though not always accessible to outsiders. Persons are displayed through a bureaucratic circuit of files that simultaneously furthers and denies human agency while reinforcing the division of labour within the institution. This dynamic, I argue, can be understood in light of Marilyn Strathern’s (1988) insights about the forms of objectification and personification that operate in two “ethnographically conceived” social domains (Pottage 2001:113): a Euro-American commodity-driven economy, and Melanesia’s economy based on gift-exchange.

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Bureaucratizing the Ethnographer's Magic

Cited by 10 publications

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Doxa y creencia entre los antropólogos (Traducción)

Doxa y creencia entre los antropólogos (Traducción)

What Is a Clinic? Relationships and the Practice of Organizational Ethnography

Files Circulation and the Forms of Legal Experts

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