If ethnography is more than participant-observation, then relations are more than connections: The case for nonlocal ethnography in a world of apparatuses

Feldman, Gregory

doi:10.1177/1463499611429904

Cited by 109 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Ethnographic experiences explore aspects of the material world in order to analyze socially meaningful aspects of it. In this way, ethnographies examine place-based processes to address the multiple ways and forms through which power and history come together to create subjective realities of people's lived experiences (Feldman 2011). Subsequently, ethnographic description, interpretation, and analyses often bring lived and experienced first-person accounts in line with participant quotes, narratives, and overall perspectives (Rose 2015).…”

Section: Ethnography and The Hillsidementioning

confidence: 99%

Cleansing public nature: landscapes of homelessness, health, and displacement

Rose

2017

Journal of Political Ecology

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This article engages directly with a group of individuals who reside in and among the margins of an urban municipal park, through a 16-month critical ethnography. Facing abject poverty, threats from law enforcement, and trials of living outdoors, these 'Hillside residents' cite the local health department as a primary source of potential displacement from the place they call home. 'Health', in this context, references three interconnected features of contemporary urban homelessness: the material interactions associated with living outdoors, the litter that occasionally accumulates in the area, and human solid waste. Health also has specific discursive constructions on the Hillside, where the individuals living there are presented as unclean, particularly vis-à-vis the 'natural' unbuilt world in which they live. A logic of sanitizing the unclean means that 'cleaning' moves beyond the material imposition of humans on nature, or nature on humans. Instead, cleaning speaks to a societal problem: a need to cleanse society of unwanted social detritus, to create a healthy society. 'Cleanliness' creates an optimum, healthy urban experience to facilitate the transactions of contemporary consumer and financial capitalism, providing a new and central facet of global neoliberal restructuring, having particularly devastating effects for the lowest classes. Political ecology is leveraged to consider the roles of material and discursive cleanliness as an agent of health in the social reproduction of capitalism, creating natures and subjects that further support it. Key words: urban homelessness, cleanliness, political ecology of health RésuméCet article s'adresse directement à un groupe d'individus qui résident dans et dans les marges d'un parc municipal urbain, à travers une étude ethnographique de 16 mois. Face à la pauvreté abjecte, aux menaces de l'application de la loi et aux procès de vivre à l'extérieur, ces «résidents de Hillside» citent le département de santé de la commune comme l'agence principale chargée de les déplacer de leur domicile dans le parc. Dans ce contexte, la «santé» se présente sous trois aspects interreliés de l'itinérance urbaine contemporaine: les interactions matérielles associées à la vie à l'extérieur, les ordures qui s'accumulent parfois dans la région et les déchets solides humains. La santé est également représentée d'une certaine manière sur la Colline, où les individus qui y vivent sont présentés comme sales, en particulier vis-à-vis du monde «naturel» non construit dans lequel ils vivent. Une logique de désinfection de l'impur signifie que le «nettoyage» se déplace au-delà de l'imposition matérielle des humains sur la nature, ou la nature sur les humains. Au lieu de cela, le nettoyage parle d'un problème sociétal: le besoin de nettoyer la société des détritus sociaux indésirables, de créer une société saine. «Propreté» crée une expérience urbaine optimale et saine pour faciliter les transactions du capitalisme contemporain des consommateurs et du capital financier, apportant une nouv...

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Section: Ethnography and The Hillsidementioning

confidence: 99%

Cleansing public nature: landscapes of homelessness, health, and displacement

Rose

2017

Journal of Political Ecology

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“…In this context, I find Gregory Feldman's () prioritization of political and abstract relations between different sites of action particularly helpful and in tune with my line of argument. Such analytical prioritization of abstract and mediated interrelations in terms of a “nonlocal” ethnography (378) addresses what I see to be spatially distinct and primarily political commonalities that ran through my different ethnographic experiences.…”

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confidence: 76%

“…On one level, this moralization refers to the dissemination of the moral vocabulary of intimacy and good intentions in the public sphere and the reformulation of the contradictions of global capitalism in terms of failed symbiosis. It is within this context that I choose to address European funds as a high‐scale moral narrative that brought together various levels of policymaking (Feldman ; Heyman ). Nonetheless, as I show, these processes not only pertain to the nominal “moral” or “cultural” content of discourses but also reflect a broader relocation of the scope and focus of social debates from systemic inquiries and quantitative preoccupations to the realm of problematized conduct…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Within the context described, EU funds became constitutive facets of a broader “interpretative paradigm” (Feldman , 375) in the Greek state. In functioning as argumentative and heuristic devices, they allowed for the production of political and scholarly discourses that correlated the eventual failure of Greek capitalism with the problematic behavior of dominated social agents.…”

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confidence: 99%

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European Funds and the Hermeneutics of the Capitalist Crisis: Insights from within the Greek State

Gkintidis

2018

PoLAR

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In this article, I seek to explore the political and epistemological implications of European Union developmental funds in settings of policymaking in Greece. Building on fieldwork with specialized technocrats in Athens and with political personnel in Evros, I initially posit that the discourse on European funds has functioned as a recurrent argument for the justification of a coherent liberal idealist paradigm starting in the 1980s. Notwithstanding the ideological usage of European funds, I suggest that its increasing relevance in the practices and worldview of these social agents also pertains to a broader relocation of political and analytical focus onto the ethical conduct and qualitative features of dominated classes. Most evidently, the recent manifestation of the capitalist crisis in Greece reactualized the precept of moral and cultural introspection as well as its interrelation with the discourse of past benefaction. Ιn this sense, the recent crisis also made evident the pertinence of Michel Foucault's “hermeneutics of the self” to understand the delineation of class hegemony in capitalism. I argue that the discourse of European funds has been conducive to the consolidation of the “hermeneutics of the self” as an overarching political imperative in Greek society over the last decades.

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“…If one wishes to transform or modify this practice, one must first appropriate and understand these codes. On the other hand, these global relations are marked by being indirect, and not specific to a time and space (Feldman 2011). At the same time, these flows are mediated through different means, such as the production, diffusion and consumptions of goods, the trade and transfer of commodities, the movement of people, the transfer of information thanks to the internet and technologies such as broadcast devices (films, TV, cd etc.).…”

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confidence: 99%

Glocalization: An Analytical Path Towards More Inclusive Contemporary Art?

Abazine¹

2017

JEA

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' (Enwezor 2003, 57).The process of globalization has been famously described by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai in his book Modernity at Large (Appadurai 1996), which focused on the cultural dimensions of globalisation, or else, as he called it, the 'disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy.' Globalization has been equated with a shrinkage of time and space which in turn has created an interdependency between world economies, politics and cultures. Appadurai uses the concept of flows and deterritorialization to describe the process of globalisation which confers fluidity to relations and to the transfer of information and people. This is also related to the idea of 'time and space' -flows are moving and therefore not associated with one local and temporal point. He opposes this phenomena of globalisation to the notion of landscapes, predominant in the nationstate hegemony and to the perception of people, practices and ideologies as attached to lands. As an alternative, Appadurai coins the term: scapes. Through the lens of the concept of scapes, individuals are no longer assigned to one particular locality but instead seen as interacting with a deterritorialized environment where they participate in creating, reproducing and potentially modifying cultural apparatuses. The degree of individuals' participation in these cultural apparatuses can be correlated to the nature of the cultural form. In this sense, contemporary art can be seen as a 'hard cultural form.' This is to say that the bond between the value, the meaning and the practice itself is very strong. As such, it requires a thorough comprehension of the codes of this practice: its vocabulary, mechanisms, meanings and representations. If one wishes to transform or modify this practice, one must first appropriate and understand these codes. On the other hand, these global relations are marked by being indirect, and not specific to a time and space (Feldman 2011). At the same time, these flows are mediated through different means, such as the production, diffusion and consumptions of goods, the trade and transfer of commodities, the movement of people, the transfer of information thanks to the internet and technologies such as broadcast devices (films, TV, cd etc.). The condition sine qua non is to have the ideological frame in common, otherwise these relations cannot exist.The contemporary art market represents a particular case within the general market. In the art market it is hard to make a distinction between the monetary value and the artistic value. The art market seems to have its own way of working with special actors involved in it: gallery-owners, auctioneers, collectors, private buyers, and states. It is seen as a special, mysterious phenomenon, and a controversial one at that, because of the nature of the art-piece and the prices involved, not to mention collectors, mostly from elite upper-class, creating artists' success or fall through their purchases.

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If ethnography is more than participant-observation, then relations are more than connections: The case for nonlocal ethnography in a world of apparatuses

Cited by 109 publications

References 21 publications

Cleansing public nature: landscapes of homelessness, health, and displacement

Cleansing public nature: landscapes of homelessness, health, and displacement

European Funds and the Hermeneutics of the Capitalist Crisis: Insights from within the Greek State

Glocalization: An Analytical Path Towards More Inclusive Contemporary Art?

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