ethnography Archives

Postcolonial Citizens

According to the International Organisation for Migration, the Bangladeshi diaspora is one of the world’s largest with around 2.4 million members, and the United Kingdom and the United States are two of the primary countries of settlement. Postcolonial Citizens examines the experiences of different generations of Muslim Bangladeshi migrants in London and Los Angeles. Although narratives of globalisation suggest increasing homogeneity this book shows how the Bangladeshi diaspora experience has been shaped by their cities of settlement. We examine how the context of reception influences experiences of citizenship. Crucial to this analysis is the concept of ‘racial regimes’ developed by Cedric Robinson and Alana Lentin, which demonstrates how ‘race’ and racial hierarchies are (re)produced in different historical and geographical contexts and how they evolve over time.

Since 9/11, the transnational practices of diasporic Muslims have received significant negative attention, as both security threats and impediments to citizenship. Postcolonial Citizens unpacks the mutually constitutive relationship between citizenship and transnationalism by focusing on three transnational domains – remittances, religion and investment – in relation to Bangladesh-origin migrants in the US and the UK. It is a tale of two cities separated by the Atlantic, and by the respective, albeit interconnected, histories of colonialism and settler colonialism but which remain intimately interlinked in the current conjuncture.

The Chronopolitics of Life

The Chronopolitics of Life represents an important, timely and novel contribution in the fields of anthropology, social sciences of medicine, science and technology studies and cognate disciplines. By examining the concept of chronopolitics, this interdisciplinary collection explores the coproduction of temporalities, bodies and power relations in health contexts.

The book offers an original perspective on how temporalities shape the embodiment of health-related inequalities, across the beginning and the end of life. It provides empirical examples, from different places in Europe and Africa, of how technoscientific and biomedical endeavours reconfigure the temporalities of life. It also describes how time becomes a resource that is unequally distributed. By investigating health practices and lived experiences in science, institutions and governance, the authors reveal how specific temporal regimes can lead to discrimination on the basis of age, race, gender, (dis)ability and sexual orientation. This differentially shapes the experiences of ill-health, biomedical practices, the governing of bodies, biographies and the life course.

Family Life in the Time of COVID

COVID-19 turned the world as we knew it upside down, impacting families around the world in profound ways. Seeking to understand this global experience, Family Life in the Time of COVID brings together case studies from 10 countries that explore how local responses to the pandemic shaped, and were shaped by, understandings and practices of family life. Carried out by an international team during the first year of the pandemic, these in-depth, longitudinal, qualitative investigations examined the impact of the pandemic on families and relationships across diverse contexts and cultures. They looked at how families made sense of complex lockdown laws, how they coped with collective worry about the unknown, managed their finances, fed themselves, and got to grips with online work and schooling to understand better how life had transformed (or not). In short, the research revealed their everyday joys and struggles in times of great uncertainty. Each case study follows the same methodology revealing experiences in Argentina, Chile, Pakistan, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the USA. They show how local government responses were understood and responded to by families, and how different cultures and life circumstances impacted everyday life during the pandemic. Ultimately the analysis demonstrates how experiences of global social upheaval are shaped by international and local policies, as well as the sociocultural ideas and practices of diverse families.

Ancient Identities in Britain

How are ideas about Iron Age and Roman pasts relevant to people in contemporary Britain? And how do the interests and ideologies of our own society shape the way we present, curate and understand these histories? This book is the first detailed study to explore these questions. It addresses how Iron Age and Roman heritage in Britain is conceived and understood today and sheds new light on the continued social significance of these ancient histories.

Ancient Identities in Britain investigates how ideas about the Iron Age and Roman past remain socially relevant: how they are studied in UK classrooms and presented in the media, and how they are projected by ancient monuments, open-air museums, re-enactments, living history exhibits and community projects across England, Scotland and Wales. Adding to this survey, fieldwork and interviews at five heritage venues, including Vindolanda, Castell Henllys and Butser Ancient Farm, reveal the principles and motivations of professional staff and different styles of presentation for the public. An engaging and nuanced account of everyday practices, this study sheds new light on the processes through which heritage has been made. Throughout, Ancient Identities in Britain explores the actions, ideas and material conditions through which these periods become, and have become, heritage in the present, and investigates how contemporary social practices are transformed through encounters with material traces and conceptual legacies.

Dwelling on the Future

Dwelling on the Future focuses on the design of dwellings and their varied environments, and questions how an architect responds to the challenge of providing humane places in which to live for a growing, multifarious population in an increasingly divided world. The issue is never just housing. People – individuals, groups and societies – can and do have different goals and aspirations. Is it possible to imagine and implement a world in which a level of comfort and stability is available for even the poorest members of societies?

Pierre d’Avoine covers a wide range of examples, including proposals for luxury housing and designs for low-cost dwellings, which all address the needs and desires of their potential inhabitants. He explores an inclusive approach to the design of settlements – and not just in cities – that recognises difference, an approach that demands a fresh political vision to resolve humanity’s increasing inequality, for the benefit of all. D’Avoine asks if we can respond with optimism to the Kabakovs’ mordantly titled installation ‘Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future (2001)’. While this was perhaps a statement of fact in Russia and elsewhere in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, it is implicit, and ever more so, in the West today.

Mobile Museums

Mobile Museums presents an argument for the importance of circulation in the study of museum collections, past and present. It brings together an impressive array of international scholars and curators from a wide variety of disciplines – including the history of science, museum anthropology and postcolonial history – to consider the mobility of collections. The book combines historical perspectives on the circulation of museum objects in the past with contemporary accounts of their re-mobilisation, notably in the context of Indigenous community engagement. Contributors seek to explore processes of circulation historically in order to re-examine, inform and unsettle common assumptions about the way museum collections have evolved over time and through space.

By foregrounding questions of circulation, the chapters in Mobile Museums collectively represent a fundamental shift in the understanding of the history and future uses of museum collections. The book addresses a variety of different types of collection, including the botanical, the ethnographic, the economic and the archaeological. Its perspective is truly global, with case studies drawn from South America, West Africa, Oceania, Australia, the United States, Europe and the UK. Mobile Museums helps us to understand why the mobility of museum collections was a fundamental aspect of their history and why it continues to matter today.

Labour, Nature and Capitalism

Labour, Nature and Capitalism traces how the alliance between labour and capital manifests in the form of conflicts between organised trade unions and a local environmental movement in the context of the much-acclaimed Kerala model of development. It explores the history of the area’s local industrialisation, the presence of varied economic interests and exposes the barriers to forming solidarity networks among the working classes.

Situated in the backdrop of the Eloor-Edayar industrial belt, this book delves deeper into the ways in which capitalism infiltrates and manipulates the social movement landscape in Kerala. It shows how the hegemonic coalition between the state, industries and institutionalised trade unions enable capitalist rationality to mediate and control social movements in postcolonial settings.

Using an ethnographic approach, the book seeks to embark on a journey to understand the tensions between two progressive social movements – a trade union collective and a local environmental movement – foregrounding the experiences of members of the respective groups. The analysis presented here shows how the contestations/conflicts between the movements stem from interpretive as well as ideological differences surrounding economic development and environmental justice.

Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan

Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan is the first ethnographic monograph on migration in Tajikistan, one of the most remittance-dependent countries in the world. Moving beyond economistic push-pull narratives about post-Soviet migration, it foregrounds the experiences of those who ‘stay put’ in the sending society and struggle to reproduce their moral communities. Elena Borisova examines the role of mobility in historical and cultural ideas about the good life and how it becomes entwined with people’s efforts to become good, moral and modern subjects. Addressing the complex relationship between the economic, imaginative and moral aspects of (im)mobility, she shows that mass migration from Tajikistan is as much a project of navigating ethical personhood as it is a quest for economic resources.

This book reveals how transnational regimes and structures of mobility, citizenship and histories map out in the intimate spheres of the body, the person and the family. It is a contribution to contemporary migration research, which is mostly centred on Europe and North America, and to the field of Central Asian studies. It will be of interest to researchers of migration, (im)mobility and citizenship, and to scholars of all disciplines working on Central Asia.

The Faces of Authoritarianism and Strategies of Dissent in Contemporary Brazil

Rather than looking back into Brazil’s authoritarian past, the Bolsonaro administration (2019–2022) provides an innovative case study through which to explore Brazil’s manifold and recurring expressions of authoritarianism. This book investigates the ways that authoritarianism most recently emerged and how it was confronted, and, in doing so, the varied ways (and spaces) in which struggles over the meaning and practice of democracy that took place during the period.

The Faces of Authoritarianism and Strategies of Dissent in Contemporary Brazil examines repression and dissent: efforts to dismantle democratic foundations alongside forms of contestation and resistance to authoritarianism. The chapters offer valuable theoretical and ethnographic insights, from interdisciplinary perspectives, into the complex realities that Brazilians experienced in the four years of Bolsonaro’s presidency. The book is organised around four sections, each addressing a core area where democracy, as meaning and practice, was contested, attacked and defended. This is shown not only between Bolsonaro’s government and those who resisted it from within and outside the state, but also between state and non-state actors and between public and private sectors, allowing for a broad view of the country’s polarised political landscape and the impact such struggles have had on civil society.

The Hand that Feeds

Food plays a major part in shaping human–animal relations, from nurturing farm and zoo animals to bringing wild birds into suburban gardens. Food-mediated interactions create personal interspecies bonds, enrich and alter environments, change species distributions, enable new relationships and reconfigure social perspectives, but also lead to many concerns over health and disease, for example, as well as conflicts over spaces and resources. However, previous attention has almost exclusively focused on the purpose-driven, utilitarian and economic aspects of feeding, rather than the affective and emotional encounters that motivate many feeding practices.

Presenting new research and interdisciplinary case studies, The Hand that Feeds considers animal feeding from historic to modern times. The volume explores the nuances and complexity of non-utilitarian feeding relationships, across urban and rural divides, in the wild, on the farm, at the zoo and in the garden, and how our feeding relationships have altered animal distributions and behaviours. The authors scrutinise contrasts between which species are promoted and which are persecuted, and how the species we choose to feed reflects broader world views and cultural values. Ultimately, this volume engages in the discussion of how we feed, why we feed, which animals we deem worthy of feeding and the widespread impacts of feeding relations.