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This book takes a body of ethnographic data collected in 2001-2, during a year's fieldwork at the Bank of Scotland (BoS) and HBOS, and revisits it from the perspective of the 2014-16 period. It explores the tension between the 'ethnographic present' of the author's original research and the unavoidable alteration of perspective on that data that the economic crisis has created. The original research had been planned to take place in the BoS but in 2001, before the research began, BoS had merged with the Halifax to form HBOS. The book provides a long-term historical perspective on BoS/HBOS, from inception to the 2008 financial crisis, and then a consideration of the nature of historical explanation, under the rubric of 'theory'. The main attempts to explain the proximate causes of the 2008 crisis, as well as more encompassing political economic arguments about the trajectory and dynamics of capitalism are examined. The concept of 'culture' as applied to both national groups, Scots and English, and organizations, BoS and Halifax, are also dealt with. The book examines other governing concepts such as organisational change in the business world and social change, identity and the way Scottish and English experience their own personhood, and comparative nature of ethnographic research. The conclusion reviews and draws together the themes of the book, returning to the overarching question of historical perspective and explanation.
( Inter-sector Coordination Group, 2018 ; UNHCR, CARE and ActionAid, 2020 ), as if disempowerment is the norm. Such narratives are linked to what Fluri (2012) calls the ‘bargain with capitalism’, which assumes that economic empowerment will increase women’s agency and voice (38). Based on ethnographic data (outlined below) from Syrian refugees in Jordan as well as interviews with local and international humanitarian practitioners, this paper
7 Comparison: doing ethnography and thinking comparatively The concept of comparison that shapes this chapter functions somewhat differently from the concepts organising the previous three chapters (culture, change and identity). Those served as analytic lenses to bring out particular dimensions of the data. Comparison here is primarily a matter of relating the ethnographic data to other experiences which lie beyond that research. I am using comparison to draw out further themes from the data, and to revisit some we have already explored, but also to pull back
's ( 2014 : 34) term – and frames egg providers as rational, responsible biocitizens (Pande and Moll, 2018 ). In contrast to scholars like Nikolas Rose ( 2007 ), who considers the concept of eugenics inadequate in the context of genomics and reproductive choice, this chapter employs the term to highlight both continuities and changes regarding the reproduction of existing hierarchies. My analysis is based on an extensive corpus of ethnographic data collected during two research stays in South Africa (November/December 2014 and January/February 2016), which I analysed
) ‘invention of tradition’ to include the reinvention, reinterpretation, inversion and the Sinification of tradition. In addition, variations in the selectivity of, and emphasis on, differing cosmological and ritual precedents and the influence of transnational cultural flows have been integrated into the framework. Analysis of the ethnographic data illustrates that these various technologies of religious synthesis have been triggered in reaction to societal catalysts resulting in religious transformation, and that, as such, as forms of adaptation to either opportunity or
, 2007: 1195). For this reason, the discussion below focuses on the insight that ethnographic data and interview material lend to understanding how the movement is experienced organisationally by its grassroots members following a brief outline of the formal structure of the organisation. ‘No one is bigger or better than anyone else’: structure, function and hierarchy Even formally, the EDL is characterised by a relatively flat structure. Until the resignation of Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll in October 2013, the structure consisted of Robinson and Carroll as co
This chapter considers recent increases in homicides and ‘higher harm’ violence recorded in England and Wales since 2015 and draws upon ethnographic data collected as part of an ongoing research study of male violence to inform the discussion. Increased interpersonal violence in recent times must be understood in relation to both recent austerity measures and the longer-term decline of industrial working-class communities, which, it is argued here, collectively constitute a form of ‘slow’ violence.
This chapter analyses the configurations of a transnational cooperation police programme for Portuguese-speaking African students in Portugal (PALOP). I show how the policy of Lusophony, which aims to promote the translation of late postcolonial differences, in practice produces spaces of othering and racialisation. In a learning context charged with national and historical references, the African cadets witness another side of the virtuous Lusophony. Based on historical and ethnographic data, I describe how despite the promised solidarity of the cooperation, the imperative colonial past still claims dominance, generating multiple ambiguities in the learning and social environments.
This book is about the extreme sport of marathon swimming. It provides insight into a social world about which very little is known, while simultaneously exploring the ways in which the social world of marathon swimming intersects and overlaps with other social worlds and configurations of power and identity. Drawing on extensive (auto) ethnographic data, Immersion explores the embodied and social processes of becoming a marathon swimming and investigates how social belonging is produced and policed. Using marathon swimming as a lens, this foundation provides a basis for an exploration of what constitutes the ‘good’ body in contemporary society across a range of sites including charitable swimming, fatness, gender and health. The book argues that the dominant representations of marathon swimming are at odds with its lived realities, and that this reflects the entrenched and limited discursive resources available for thinking about the sporting body in the wider social and cultural context. It argues that in spite of these constraints, novel modes of embodiment and pleasure seep out between the cracks of those entrenched understandings and representations, highlighting the inability of the dominant understandings of sporting embodiment to account for experiences of immersion. This in turn opens up spaces for resistance and alternative accounts of embodiment and identity both within and outside of marathon swimming.
In this chapter, attention is turned to how the boundaries of ‘old age’ are delineated by older people intra-generationally amongst peers. Chapter Four brings into focus a cultural account of the boundaries surrounding older age as both a social category and as a lived experience. It argues that ‘old age’ is not a frontier whose edges, once breached, are irreversible. Instead, using detailed and rich descriptions from the ethnographic data, it shows the subtle pressures older people in this community put on themselves and on each other whilst they discriminate between ‘normal’ and ‘real’ old age. Of particular consideration are ideals of personal comportment, body talk and interpersonal monitoring for signs of ‘real’ old age. This material permits a closer consideration of the gap between pragmatics and epistemology in the way old age is conceptualised and experienced by older people.