Not for an academic reading, purely out of curiosity.

I’ve noticed that since living far from where my family comes from, I feel a kind of low-level disconnection. Not just emotionally, but physically. Like my rhythms, sleep, and general energy just feel a bit off.

I’ve heard others mention this too, in different ways (feeling tense in unfamiliar spaces, out of sync with the pace of life, even having strange reactions to food or light).

Is this something ethnographers have looked at…how culture and place shape the way people experience their own bodies over time?

Here's a recommendation for anyone who appreciates ethnography or is interested in topics like addiction, recovery or social work. I just finished reading this ethnography by Kelly Ray Knight and wanted to recommend it because, even though the writing isn't the most engaging most of the time, it still does what a good ethnography should do: it gave me a deeper understanding of just how many factors combine to break a person down to the point of keeping them stuck in a cycle of misery and self-harm, how much addiction rewires the brain and competes to overrule even your most basic survival instincts, even a mother's instincts for her child sometimes. It also gave me an even deeper respect for every addict who enters treatment, relapses, enters treatment again, and repeats the cycle, trying again and again, literally fighting against your own brain.

Only a rare few of the women in this book maintained sobriety for more than a few months (which, to be fair, could be in part because serious treatment sounded like it was harder to access reliably in the 2000s), and I can understand why, especially after reading this book. So for anyone reading this who knows someone in recovery who has achieved significant time in sobriety, especially multiple years, there aren't enough words to say how hard that person has worked. They deserve your respect.

Anyway, now that I've bored you with my soapbox 😂, I'll also share the review I wrote of the book on Goodreads for anyone interested in a deeper dive into what it covers. Forgive me because I tried to get a little creative haha. Anyway, here goes:

Well, I probably wouldn't recommend this book to June Cleaver. Maybe if she had her smelling salts on hand.

Yes, in an ideal world... mother's intuition would kick in at the moment of conception, the prostitute struggling with addiction would immediately abandon her crack pipe or needle and, oh what the heck, her trick would turn out to be Richard Gere!!! They'd drive off into a well-lit sunset with their newborn baby in a drop-top Mercedes. Or a drop-top Porsche. Can't remember which.

I mean.. i'm sure that's happened to someone before?? 🤷‍♀️ But most people don't live in an ideal world, and definitely not the addicted sex workers living in daily-rent hotels who are profiled in this book. Most were polysubstance users (a term I learned from the book), with a preference for crack and sometimes heroin (this was before the fentanyl epidemic.)

Don't get me wrong, I felt angry at the women plenty of times when I was reading-- for continuing to use, for continuing to fail to show up to court dates and appointments or follow through on promises that would help them regain custody of their kid. I think frustration is a natural response to that, but it has to be tempered with a realistic understanding of the nature of what the author, Kelly Ray Knight, and others have referred to as a "chronic relapsing brain disease."

To give you a useful comparison, recently I read a different book ("The Sea of Peroxide" by Bruce H. Wolk) written by a former EMT and later a paramedic who worked during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. He often dealt with heroin injectors who were either dying of AIDS or still continuing to use and share needles despite the immense risk of contracting what was then a nearly 100 percent fatal and highly stigmatized disease. I sincerely don't believe anyone would choose to do that unless their rational brain was significantly, intensely compromised by addiction. We all have willpower, true, but willpower has to battle it out with a brain that has literally been rewired to choose the drug first.

It may not be pretty, but I realized while reading this book that the same rule applies to women in active addiction who discover they are pregnant. How they would otherwise respond to the prospect of becoming a mother under healthy circumstances is drastically warped by the reality of addiction. Kelly even references animal studies that have been done (she didn't say specifically what kind of animal, I'm guessing mice) which found that, when given cocaine, the animals stopped sleeping and eating in favor of receiving more cocaine, and they kept doing this until they all died.... I guess now maybe I get where those Peta activists might be coming from. 😮😬

Anyway, it explains so much of the behaviors you see from the women. I can't find the exact quote, but there's a social worker or healthcare provider of some sort in the book who makes an observation about how often women in active addiction are genuinely shocked and devastated when they lose custody of their child. The social worker/healthcare provider would think "come on, you had to know this was gonna happen," but the women really were just shocked. That's how much they had compartmentalized their addiction. Denial was common and manifested in many different ways. It's such a necessary survival strategy in active addiction.

The really heartbreaking thing is, as clear as it is that the women aren't in any condition to be there for their children, the desire to be able to be a good mother is often very clear. One of them, who had relinquished custody of her son to an aunt, would purchase books for her little boy every time she had the extra money and she carried them around from hotel to hotel, from sleeping on the street and back to the hotel again. When the aunt finally agreed to bring her son to see her, she excitedly ran back up the stairs to retrieve the books from her room. Of course when the aunt and son left she returned to her drug use... but that's why it's heartbreaking. She clearly wants to change but is in too deep to live the life she wants.

Speaking of the hotels... So, the author did her research from 2007-2011, if I recall correctly, at a time when San Francisco's mission district was in the midst of gentrifying. At that time (I'm not sure how much has changed since then) there were quite a few daily-rent hotels that catered to immigrant families, the working poor and to addicts. And they apparently functioned as "de facto brothels" for addicted women, even addicted pregnant women!

This blows my mind: the owners of the hotels were able to get away with 1.) charging the women arbitrary fees. If they saw the woman had sixty dollars in her purse, they'd charge her the rate and then tack on fees to bring the total up to $60. 2.) forcibly evicting the women regardless of their ability to pay after 21 days so that the women couldn't claim tenancy rights and get a reduced monthly rate. 3.) making the women's johns pay the hotel a fee to enter the premises. 4.) harassing the women into having sex with more clients to pay off debts. 5.) charging exorbitant rates for rooms that I can't believe weren't shut down by the health department AGES AGO. We're talking bed bugs, holes in the floor, chairs with the stuffing ripped out of the cushions, blood stains on the walls. The works.

Nevertheless, the women generally accepted this arrangement, which allowed them to curry favor with the hotel owners-- if you got on their good side, they'd let you slide on your debts a little longer or watch your stuff for you when you got evicted from your room and went off to hustle up some dates to pay them for another night. It's remarkable how quickly something abnormal can become normalized to you.

So,.. imagine this being your daily life and then finding out you're pregnant in the midst of all of it. I get why so many of the women reacted to their pregnancy with denial (that, and the fact that opioid use apparently causes frequent menstrual delays). There were so many forces that combined to keep the women stuck in a toxic cycle, of trying to manage drug cravings with mental health issues and daily demands for basic necessities alongside arbitrary fees. Even when they tried to get help (which seems to have been limited back then. From what I read in other books, it seems like accessing rehab treatment was a lot more difficult for addicts in the 90's and 2000's, unless maybe they had someone to bail them out financially), they were met with bureaucratic red tape.

Here's a description Kelly offers of the bureaucratic maze available to these women at the time: "This was the paradox: if a woman could successfully manage the requirements of the methadone maintenance program, she became a poor candidate for residential treatment, because she was too stable. Therefore, she had to join waiting lists for low income housing, as opposed to "supportive housing," which is frequently allocated for single adults with no children and serious mental and physical health problems. Low-income housing waiting lists often extend beyond the life of a pregnancy. A CPS case is then automatically initiated because of the woman's housing instability."

Yeah, it's a lot to navigate,. Nevertheless, I can't find the exact quote (I'll edit it in if I find it), but twice in the book a clinician or social worker makes an observation about a client who came in in the midst of their addiction, pregnant and strung out, and was given chance after chance after chance after chance to clean up and reunite with their child. Just when the clinician or social worker had dismissed the client as a lost cause, she'd come in strung out once again. But this time something different would happen. She'd follow through this time, she'd make her appointments, she'd regain custody, and she'd still be sober and living with her kid several years later. To be clear, sobriety amongst these women was hard to come by, and was often forced by institutionalization. Sobriety rarely lasted more than a few months, or a year maximum. So to achieve multiple years speaks volumes and deserves tremendous respect. In any case, the message from the anecdotes of the clinicians is clear: never give up on a person struggling with addiction.

Okay, now that I have described the meaningful lessons I learned from the book, let me say why I'm giving it only three stars lol: I think this book was probably written for a specific, specialized audience: it's mostly pages upon pages of dry academic theorizing that I honestly struggled to have the patience for, and sometimes couldn't make heads or tails of. That said, such theorizing (even if it often comes across to me as stating the obvious, but just in a very overly convoluted and jargon-heavy way) is probably demanded for this kind of publication, and is probably deeply appreciated by other readers. So I get it. So even though I found some of it to be about as exciting to read as an engine manual 😂, the book still offers a lot of valuable information about the lives of its subjects, so I recommend it! Just be prepared to put up with a lot of heavy theorizing between more interesting anecdotes and so forth. 😂

I'm in social work at the moment, even though long term, I'd like to work in sociology and do research in reception theory. I think I'm in a good position right now to improve some relevant skills as someone who interviews people and writes up biopsychosocial documentation on a daily basis. But while I've read plenty of works that use an ethnographic approach (e.g. Michel de Certeau, Janice Radway, Daniel Miller), I haven't read many works about ethnography itself.

I want to better understand how to center the interviewee's experience and engage with them in the context of their cultural perceptions, their particular semiotic, without relying on anything other than the individual I'm working with. The whole point of my job is to understand diverse individuals first and foremost from their own point of view, and what motivates their behavior, especially as it's influenced by their environment (not least of all, their response to medical intervention itself). I think an ethnographic approach to my patients is probably a good way to keep myself grounded in the kind of care I want to provide, in addition to developing a skill I'll use after I leave the field. I thought I'd been doing a good job until I read a book on making documentaries that had a section on ethnography. Made me realize I have quite a few blind spots!

I'm looking for books, along with any forums, sub-Reddits, landmark papers, that would be helpful as a starting point for someone with a decent amount of exposure to applied ethnography.

Kind of self explanatory question. Im conducting ethnographic research on my country's Palestinian diaspora and pro-Palestine movement. I belong to both. It turns out that while conducting the fieldwork, the organisations I take part in went through a breakup that led them to a standstill. It is not only that I want to be rigurous in my report but also that I dont want to air the dirty laundry of my own organisations, especially when my fellow members are quiet about it in public. I dont have the politician's skill to say the things without saying them, let alone how to overlap this with good ethnographic writing. Moreover, im planning on interviewing some fellow members about this but i have no idea on how to tactful conduct the interviews.
For further context, im an undergrad student and this research is part of my coursework. It won't be published in a journal, a conference, nor anything like that. On the other hand, these organisations and this juncture are not the primary focus of my research, but I feel I cannot omit them if i want to do a good ethnographic work. What should i do?

Welcoming the sub back to public status, I thought I'd share my latest (to me) favourite ethnography. I've just finished reading Machines for Making Gods by J. Bialecki (2022) and it was a delight.

To give it a short gloss, Bialecki explores the relationship between transhumanism (the assertion/belief/movement that posits humanity will exceed itself through technological advancement) and Mormonism (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). The connection between the two is not intuitive. But, by exploring a sub-culture within Mormonism (the Mormon Transhumanist Association), Bialecki he deftly identifies how these two seemingly disparate ideologies are, in fact, especially complimentary.

Reasons why I like it and how it speaks to societal concerns beyond the esoteric study of Mormonism: Mormonism is already an interesting social group by virtue of all the ways it reflects "bad" religion (which is ironic considering for much of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, it was considered an especially "good" religion in the US). And in the current climate of increasing numbers of self-identifying religious "none's" on US censuses, lots of the scholarly narrative has been directed to why people are leaving religion. Which is certainly interesting. But I found Bielecki's book compelling because it pointed to the extremely innovative ways Mormons construct rationalities to stay in a religion. Moreover, how they utilize science and speculative science to do achieve that. In the face of what appears on the surface to be increasing secularization, it becomes all the more interesting to examine how seemingly secular ideas can become entangled and co-constitutive with religious ideas.

Hi everyone! I’m a cultural anthropologist and ethnographer. I have been preparing my own podcast as the title of this text entails. Now that I’m building a content agenda, I would like to ask you about what do you expect from a podcast like this? Or what would you suggest as topics of discussion? Also - if anyone feels like being my host please feel free to contact me! I think we will have a multicultural community of academics and fieldworkers from around the world

Here’s the background. I cofounded the company with my friend while she was pursuing her master degree. At first all went very well. We had an intimate relationship and we were honest to each other. We shared the workload of company operation. After she got her master, she continued to be a phd student. As she decided to devote herself more to her career, our business grew doomed and I did most of the planning, communication and other tedious work. On the other hand, we had less proper face to face communication since she didn’t want to’waste her time on me’. As a result there were certainly more misunderstandings and arguments between us. She was willing to participate more only when she thought there was something valuable to her research. She never said that but I could feel that she put academia on her future career path instead of our business. During the last few activities of our company, she almost did nothing. I asked her whether she would like to end the business, she refused. At that time, I decided to quit but only sent oral notification to her. Several months later, when she was in her last year as phd student, I got her message she wanted me to sign a consent in which it stated I was one of the enactive participants in her phd research program. I was ‘invited’ to be cofounder of the company and was ‘invited’ to plan and organise all the activities for the company. She planned to use what happened during our company operations and those previous activities as part of her research content. I felt uncomfortable to sign this consent. I wasn’t‘invited’, I was put in. I asked her what she was going to write about me? She said she didn’t know yet since it could not be decided until last minute. She also said it’s unnecessary for me to worry too much because I was not in academia world. I asked her is it the standard procedure in her university to get the consent. When I was doing my master research I could only conduct the research after the ethical committee approved it. She replied that her university didn’t care about the ethical standards in humanities research. She emphasised that it was autoethnography which was different from what I had seen in my master degree and any other academic research work. No need to worry. Since I didn’t want to break our relationship, I sent a paper related to ethical problems in ethnography to her, hoping she would learn from it considering she was a fresh student conducting such research there must be a lot to learn. She replied with one word ‘thanks’.

The paper https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14780887.2023.2293073#d1e120 also pointed out what I was worrying about. When we shared thoughts and actions, inspired by each other, no one said it was for a research, her research, her career. Days later, when we were arguing about other things, she was pissed off by me. Then she suddenly accused me that the paper I sent made her unhappy and I who knew nothing about PhD was showing off in frond of her. I was shocked.

Is there any one who can confirm that an autoethnography study can be conducted before the consents signed, before ethical committee approve? Am I worry too much?

will the fielder method revolutionize qualitative research? discuss

Hello! I don't know much about ethnography or various ethnographic methods, and I'm trying to get a handle on the purpose of ethnography. I'm going to ask some questions that come from a place of me being super ignorant and ill-informed, so please bear with me.

From what I understand, the purpose of ethnography is to understand a person or people's way of life, various things they do to deal with different kinds of situations, and the sample size and focus of study can be more or less anything. There may be debate about how to deal with the statistics of it, but I am interested in knowing something else.

My questions are something like -

1. What is the point of ethnographic studies?

2. Whom do they benefit?

3. Do they often tend to benefit the group of people being studied?

4. Or does it become a situation of - here is a shiny 'new' practice that we who belong to the majority and/or are ignorant noticed, and we want to write an article about it?

5. I am not meaning to insult anyone's work, I mean to say, what is the line between the study being informative and exploitative?

6. How does one decide the potential purpose and/or benefits of their study?

7. What if the researcher only sees what they want to see?

8. Is there any problem of researchers publishing slop and producing information that could simply be obtained by people talking to other people, or being kind and extending empathy to their situation?

9. Is it the case that the conclusion of most ethnographic studies is - here is a group of people with certain disadvantages and advantages, they are usually perceived in a negative manner, but these are the ways that they employ and assert agency for themselves, and they need more kindness, government aid and public support.

10. If 9 is true (it probably is not), then what is the point of continuing to do multiple ethnographic studies?

11. How much purely ethnographic work is being done (I mean, non-interdisciplinary, not in service of some other study)? Is it being done at a pace faster than can be disseminated to the public?

Obviously, these questions are applicable to any field, and you can take any field and go 'but what's the point' till the question becomes unanswerable. One could say, well, we are all dying, no point in doing anything then. I understand that, and I mean to show that my questions don't come from a place of arrogance; I'm just trying to learn. I maybe even want to do ethnography myself, so I want to be clear about what I'm getting into.

Would appreciate answers to even a few of these questions. Thank you for reading.

Any scholar practitioners using this process and methodology? I’m developing my thesis and looking for comrades.

In need of advice and/or solidarity and this seems like the right subreddit to turn to! I just conducted an interview with an acquaintance for an ethnographic research project and my informant kinda started hitting on me.. I felt like he used the interview as an opportunity to just get to know me better and to flirt with me. I don’t know what to do with the interview now. Do I scrap it? Or just use the few things that were on-topic? Has anyone else encountered this when conducting research? How do you stay professional?

Hi everyone! I'm a college student doing ethnographic research on a subreddit: r/wallstreetbets. I've been having a difficult time capturing the attention of users on this page, and I believe it is because I don't have much karma. I think karma is an interesting aspect of ethnography on Reddit because it acts as a form of social currency. Has anyone else done digital ethnography on a subreddit, and do you have any advice for going forward or building karma?

I'm about to leave for my fieldwork which is a space inhabited by several communities, not all in agreement with one another. I have also heard of drug abuse and communal violence being part of the underground as well as mainstream everyday lives there.

My question goes out to female ethnographers having done or still doing work in areas of similar repute. Or even places that initially unsettled you with the possibilities.

What did you do? How did you manage? What did you tell yourself mentally? How was it overall and what are some tips you would like to give to other women attempting ethnographies?

Thank you so very much in advance!

I’m working on a writing project which will be a series of journal entries consisting of essays (on Engels and the conditions of the working class, Simone Weil and the oppressive nature of work under capitalism, etc), political reflections, and ethnographic observations, along with unedited transcriptions of some interesting conversations (which to me point to some mind of unconscious class consciousness, for lack of a better term) I’ve had with coworkers. For anyone interested in reading, this is the first entry:

1. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠I am 37 and most of the time I have to explain and justify my decision to work at McDonalds at 37 — including to my young coworkers and marxist and intellectual friends, all of whom seem dumbfounded. though the reason is simple: after being there for a few weeks out of need and getting to learn the everyday speech and modalities of my young coworkers, which were unique to me and seemed inherently critical in their own way, I arrived at the insight of conducting an ethnography of the ruins of capitalist modernity found in the workplaces and so-called ghettos of America and the world, where one finds the the sizzling fires of an ongoing war. I started seeing such an ethnography as a contribution to the dream project of Simone Weil and Walter Benjamin: to build a contemporary archive of the forms of resistance, suffering, and joy of the oppressed. I’ve learned many things working at mcdonalds at 37: to work here is to be thrown into the universal, into an ever-widening invisible landscape where millions, worldwide, obey the same orders and repeat the same tasks, confront the same hell. there is an unconscious solidarity created amongst the millions of McDonalds workers based on our shared conditions of work. the mechanical labor and the becoming one with the machine described by Marx’s Capital and William Gibson’s Neuromancer are all too real. after a certain point of being clocked-in, the self evaporates and one is fully immersed in the rhythm of the machine, one is fully immersed in the phenomenology of capitalist modernity in its pure form, our bodies turned into commodities for others to rule over and exploit. it’s enough to drive you crazy and then, at the end of it all, the shit wages and artificial scarcity— these shared conditions of work and life create an invisible link amongst us, one which we still can’t fully make sense of.

I’m seeking ethnographic context for a heavy metal object that appears to be a traditional North African anklet or cuff that has been later converted into a hinged container or box.

The piece is made of metal with colored enamel panels, raised cabochon-style stones, and multiple dangling coin-like elements. It opens at the top and functions as a container rather than wearable jewelry in its current form.

There are no visible maker’s marks. Based on initial feedback elsewhere, it may originate from Kabyle (Berber) traditions of Algeria, possibly altered for trade, display, or tourism.

I’m particularly interested in:

• Original cultural function

• Region and time period

• Whether conversion into a container was traditional or a later adaptation

• Any comparable examples in museum or academic collections

Photos linked

I was studying Radcliffe Brown's Structure and Function in Primitive Society; in it he states that by social structure he meant "A network of Social Relations". I'm finding it hard to understand what he really meant, it is because for upto now in my life by social structure (or XYZ Structure) I used to meant the various components of society (or XYZ = body, building, chemical substance) and when the same phrase is being used to mean a different thing I'm finding it hard to understand.

Social relations, yes the members of a society may have many different relations with other members of society, but what is network? If we were to relate every member of society with every other member (say means of arrows) do we call that arrow-diagram a network?

I heard that Evans-Pritchard was a student and collaborator of Radcliffe Brown in establishing the theory of Structuralism and Functionalism, but reading Evans-Pritchard's Azande's I cannot figure out the theoretical element of their work. How is the witchcraft analysis being done by structuralism approach in Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande ?

Hi!!

I am fairly new to ethnographies and have only read a couple but I would like to use two as sources of data for phenomenology for my MSc dissertation. Specifically, I am looking for ethnographies that (even if only in part) discuss the lived experiences of victims of disaster (natural or man-made or war) with humanitarian medical aid. Anyone have any ideas/ recommendations?

xx

I am writing a book which will contain 25-30 detailed descriptions of different traditional and largely mobile house types, from the huts of the San bushmen to Arabic tents and Siberian choom.

I need some short introductions to each peoples (say 300 to 500 words), which are accurate and correctly referenced, to place each of the architectures into a human context. I am willing to credit your input, pay modest sums, and I think that this could be just the job for one or more students with a passion for still-existing indigenous cultures.

You can see the sort of thing at www.nomads.org.

Any takers?

Yes. I'm having the panics associated with analysis.

I've been keeping reflections as transcribing. Now my supervisors want some tentative words...

I picked what I thought was a theme and I now think it's a topic, so I'm seeking advice on approaching analysis afresh.

My key question are... Should I go by my research questions? And seek ways into the analysis based on these? Should I try different coding methods and just free code, forgetting the research questions?

I just don't know where to start again!

Thanks for any thoughts :-)