Exam overview Contemporary Anthropological and Social Theory
Lecture 1: Introduction
The goal of the course
This course will provide you with an overview of thinking and anthropological debates on themes
which are relevant for all the projects. You will learn about multiple anthropological debates but
choose one to build your own research project on. The course is quite broad, but for your own
research, find one argument, one contribution.
This master you’ll learn to do research by doing. You will learn how to connect small scale data with
large scale issues.
CAST is the intellectual challenge what you have to conduct in your own research. This way it is
possible to access the work of all the students fairly.
In finding your research topic, you always have to find the research gab. What is it, where there is no
answer on? You can have a hypothesis, but no real answer.
How to complete this course?
Read all assigned texts and submit a short question or reflection ( 50 to 100 words) before
each class
Attend all sessions, and participate in discussions
Submit two essay assignment
Facilitate a class discussion once (as part as a group)
Give feedback to your peers once (in the group)
*Submit a short question and reflection of the readings the day before class on midnight. Upload in
Etherpad. You can see what other have posted. Keep to this deadline, because it is important to do
the readings.
*Group discussion
This presentation is graded. Try to make the conversation as engaging as possible. The group gets an
hour. There are no constrains on format. You can do experimental things and make it fun. No
mandatory slight presentation.
*Peer feedback circle
On 27 October. By then you have submitted your first written assignment. Instead of reading articles,
you read other peers submission. You are in the same group as the discussion presentation.
*Two essay assignments
1.Searching for new perspectives
2.Engaging with a debate
1
,Course themes
The classes are ordered by four themes:
1. Epistemologies
Epistemology is the study of knowledge. What counts as knowledge, who produces it, and
how it is legitimized.
2. Pluralities
What is pluralities? And how does it matter? How is it something that is considered from a
variety of academic perspective?
3. Environment
Beyond nature vs. culture: As Tim Ingold and others argue, “environment” isn’t an external
backdrop but something inseparable from human life. It elps reframe sustainability, climate
politics, and indigenous knowledge in non-reductionist ways.
4. Revolution
How to turn around stuff. And how to theorize in social science.
Epistemologies:
Challenges in Fieldwork
Ethnography as a method
o Extended case method is one of the most important readings!!
Imagining and imaging space
Dilemmas of collaboration and co-creation (guest lecture)
Pluralities:
Global inequalities and diversities
More-than-Human-Worlds: finding our place on an unravelling planet
How humans are part of all sort of relations with others.
Gender and kinship
Heritages of religion and secularism.
How do we think about the ways in which modernity/tradition/secularism are all sort of ways
of how we value those and how do we think about that.
Environments:
Linguistics and semiotics
Ontology, sustainability and politics
Science and nature
Revolutions:
Capitalism
Commons and communing
Dutch colonial inheritance
Decolonization
2
,Lecture 2: Epistemologies 1: Challenges of Fieldwork
These readings deal with dilemmas in ethnographic research. They do that quite differently but the
shared theme is embodiment
Three themes
1. Ethnographers as insiders and outsiders
2. Observers effects in anthropological fieldwork
3. Interlocutors intuitive knowledge from daily life
Reading 1: ETHNOGRAPHY AS PRECARIOUS WORK - Ashley Mears
Own notes
It is about doing ethnographic fieldwork using the method "observant participation”.
She did carnal ethnography in the fashion industry where she uses her own body in the research. She
gained Embodied knowledge.
Favourite quotes:
“One way or another, I was stepping out of the model habitus and approaching them
dispassionately as interview subjects. Switching social roles like this required a switch in
conversational style, from informal to interrogative, naive to expert.”
“This carnal posturing of both insider and outsider helped me see the structure the world I
was studying, in part through the very challenges of trying to talk to different people in that
world.”
“Through this process of "becoming"—becoming a look in my case, or a firefighter (Desmond
2007), a sales agent (Hanser 2005), or a bar hostess (Parrenas 2011)—sociologists can
occupy and understand the form and context of informants' worlds.”
“Second, challenges in the method can be revealing of larger processes. You have to be
willing to make a jerk of yourself, noted Goffman (1989), because habituation into most
research sites requires the mastery of some skill set that the researcher does not yet have.
Failure is endemic; it is also full of rich analytic potential. My insider/outsider stance enabled
me not only to uncover the stratification in the sphere of modeling, but also helped me
recognize and negotiate the challenges of studying up.”
“After one presentation of my work, a senior sociologist in the room asked, "I notice you put
yourself in your paper quite a lot. Why is that?" As observant participants, researchers are an
inseparable part of the research they have conducted, and they must write in ways that
convey how their experiences in the field contribute to and generate sociological knowledge.
To these ends, I try to write myself into the pages of each draft, weaving my emotions and
physical transformation into the analysis, aiming to give my reader the chance to cringe in
embarrassment and hot-flushed cheeks alongside me. This acknowledgment of the
sociologist within the site—as an embodied, living, feeling being—allows researchers the self-
reflexivity that can interrogate and advance under standings of particular social world.”
3
,Class discussion:
She wrote this article in the process of the book: Pricing beauty.
Insider/ outsider
She uses her body to immerse into the field.
“Many ethnographers engaged in long-term immersion toggle between their scholarly and field
identities. They invariably take on, for a time, characteristics of the field. We must tune our bodies
into the field so we can feel what our informants feel, to get the logic and sense of their social world
right into our bones”
In carnal ethnography you might get an insider position. But an insider position come with both
advantages and disadvantages/ risks.
“My insider position allowed me to inhabit the structure and risks of a steep hierarchy, one in which I
lacked power to talk back or even to ask questions of the very people in charge of my value. Not only
did I see myself in the lives of the models I was studying, but I also shared the feeling that my own
status was insecure and threated.”
When she wanted to step out of this insider position into the outsider position, something interesting
happened. She wanted to learn things that she couldn’t learn from the insiders position. But she
really did negotiate this step, because she knew that the relationship between her and the
interlocutors would dramatically change if she revealed het role as researcher. One of the
consequences was the she would probably never work with her clients again afterwards and she even
predicts that she would be exiled from that world fully. So, she was in a dilemma if and when, she
would ask the uncomfortable question what would change the relationship permanently.
Ethical question
The question is if this way of doing ethnographic research is ethical. Her clients did not know they are
part of a research project. And the fact that the relationship will change after that she revealed
herself as a researcher, shows that they would not have given conformed consent. It is not
transparent at all!
Class question:
What are the advantages and disadvantages of being an insider in anthropological research? (and
if you already have a potential topic of research, what kind of position will you occupy? How will
your position affect what you can and cannot learn?)
Advantages
- understanding the context
- access
- understand the motivation of the interlocutors by living it herself
- Interlocutors have more trust in you / sense of horizontality
4
,Disadvantages:
- You loss a bit of objectivity. It is harder to be aware of what needs to be critiqued.
- Hard to ask difficult questions
- Negative impacts on being embodied in the field (physically and mentally)
- Fear of losing your access. So control your behaviour to maintain the access.
- Feel guilty. You are an insider to get information without be able to give something back.
- Can you really be an insider? There is always something about you that you cannot fully adapt. How
honest should you be?
Being an ethnographer always involves being both an insider and outsider. There is a discussion if and
where the line is working as an ethnographer. How far will you go? You can you guarantee your own
physical and emotional safety?
Uncomfortable is a necessary part of ethnography. But are you are being uncomfortable because it is
unfamiliar, or because you are feeling unsafe?
In your own research project, you will make the decisions mostly about safety, in conversation with
your supervisor. The institutional rules are how safe the country is based on the colour codes (yellow,
red, etc)
Reading 2: Observers Observed An Anthropologist under Surveillance - Katherine Verdery
Own notes
The text is about an American ethnographer doing her fieldwork in Romania. However, the
authorities though she was a spy and she was followed by Secret police agencies.
I found it interesting that she explained that they thought she was a spy because they use the same
methodologies. Like using a pseudonym for interlocutors.
“As the excerpt I quoted from my surveillance report makes clear, officers thought they recognized in
my ethnographic practices their own norms of professional conduct. They too used pseudonyms for
“informers,” coded notes, tape recorders, and a comprehensive data-gathering strategy that went
beyond the confines of a single project statement. Like me, they generated a wealth of typed data,
producing from their observations an enormous body of field notes (their file on me contains 2,780
pages). And like me, they generated interpretations and conclusions: that I am a CIA agent, that I am
feeding the US propaganda machine against socialism, that I am fomenting discontent among
Romania’s minority.”(p. 17).
The text observer observed made me realise that it is not so easy to become an insider. In Verdery’
case she was not only treated as an outsider, but even as a spy. It made clear that there are potential
dangers as an ethnographer and that you should be aware of that.
Class discussion
This article was written in the process of the her book: My life as a spy.
5
, Her research and earlier books where about traditional members of a Romanian village. It is a strange
experience readings these books, knowing that all of this spy things was going on at the same time.
In this article, Verdery is very transparent about her research (in contrast with Mears) and yet she is
still read as a spy.
It was interesting that the secret police is finding all kind of similarities in her ethnographic work and
the work they themselves are doing.
Class question:
What distinguishes ethnographic fieldwork from espionage? If the work of anthropologists can be
deemed more ethical than that of spies, what makes it so? In what ways and to whom, should
anthropologist be transparent about their research?
(is “undercover” ethnography ever justifiable? When and why?)
There is no clear cut criteria. You have to consider the vulnerability of the interlocutors, and the
power dynamics between you and them.
Transparency is important. But in some cases undercover ethnography is justified. One example is an
ethnography in the organs travel industry which operates internationally. These books were not
rejected of this undercover ethnography.
Questions are raised what are the ethics of researcher such an unethical industry? Ethics is one big
dilemma for people engaging in this kind of work. Are you going to protect the interlocutors or feel
the ethic to be honest and might have legal consequences for the people involved. Do we expose
their names? How do the ethnographer take care of himself and make sure he is not at risk? In this
example it was tremendously dangerous.
Some styles of ethnography function as investigating journalism.
Reading 3: Driving while Palestinian in Israel and the West Bank: The politics of disorientation and the
routes of a subaltern knowledge – Bishara
Own notes:
I found it fascinating to read about driving in Gaza and Israel. I learned that driving can been seen as a
technique of the body, entailing skills to direct the car and that these skills have cultural and political
dimension. He uses example of his own road trips through these areas, explaining how driving and
politics come together. From roundabout routes, to traffic signs with the name of a village Israel
wants to call it, instead of the real Arabic name. Palestine’s gain knowledge on the road and is imbued
with emotions. Through driving they (re)connect with the land.
Favourite quotes:
“My use of the concept of habitus emphasizes embodied and active skills somewhat more
than does Bourdieu's, though they are not necessarily the studied, conscious skills Charles
Hirschkind (2006) writes about in his discussion of habitus. In some regards, Palestinian
citizens of Israel and Palestinians of the West Bank share a similar habitus regarding political
movement, and, in other regards, they do not.” (p.35)”
“I focus on movement, particularly its embodied dimensions”(p.36)
6
Lecture 1: Introduction
The goal of the course
This course will provide you with an overview of thinking and anthropological debates on themes
which are relevant for all the projects. You will learn about multiple anthropological debates but
choose one to build your own research project on. The course is quite broad, but for your own
research, find one argument, one contribution.
This master you’ll learn to do research by doing. You will learn how to connect small scale data with
large scale issues.
CAST is the intellectual challenge what you have to conduct in your own research. This way it is
possible to access the work of all the students fairly.
In finding your research topic, you always have to find the research gab. What is it, where there is no
answer on? You can have a hypothesis, but no real answer.
How to complete this course?
Read all assigned texts and submit a short question or reflection ( 50 to 100 words) before
each class
Attend all sessions, and participate in discussions
Submit two essay assignment
Facilitate a class discussion once (as part as a group)
Give feedback to your peers once (in the group)
*Submit a short question and reflection of the readings the day before class on midnight. Upload in
Etherpad. You can see what other have posted. Keep to this deadline, because it is important to do
the readings.
*Group discussion
This presentation is graded. Try to make the conversation as engaging as possible. The group gets an
hour. There are no constrains on format. You can do experimental things and make it fun. No
mandatory slight presentation.
*Peer feedback circle
On 27 October. By then you have submitted your first written assignment. Instead of reading articles,
you read other peers submission. You are in the same group as the discussion presentation.
*Two essay assignments
1.Searching for new perspectives
2.Engaging with a debate
1
,Course themes
The classes are ordered by four themes:
1. Epistemologies
Epistemology is the study of knowledge. What counts as knowledge, who produces it, and
how it is legitimized.
2. Pluralities
What is pluralities? And how does it matter? How is it something that is considered from a
variety of academic perspective?
3. Environment
Beyond nature vs. culture: As Tim Ingold and others argue, “environment” isn’t an external
backdrop but something inseparable from human life. It elps reframe sustainability, climate
politics, and indigenous knowledge in non-reductionist ways.
4. Revolution
How to turn around stuff. And how to theorize in social science.
Epistemologies:
Challenges in Fieldwork
Ethnography as a method
o Extended case method is one of the most important readings!!
Imagining and imaging space
Dilemmas of collaboration and co-creation (guest lecture)
Pluralities:
Global inequalities and diversities
More-than-Human-Worlds: finding our place on an unravelling planet
How humans are part of all sort of relations with others.
Gender and kinship
Heritages of religion and secularism.
How do we think about the ways in which modernity/tradition/secularism are all sort of ways
of how we value those and how do we think about that.
Environments:
Linguistics and semiotics
Ontology, sustainability and politics
Science and nature
Revolutions:
Capitalism
Commons and communing
Dutch colonial inheritance
Decolonization
2
,Lecture 2: Epistemologies 1: Challenges of Fieldwork
These readings deal with dilemmas in ethnographic research. They do that quite differently but the
shared theme is embodiment
Three themes
1. Ethnographers as insiders and outsiders
2. Observers effects in anthropological fieldwork
3. Interlocutors intuitive knowledge from daily life
Reading 1: ETHNOGRAPHY AS PRECARIOUS WORK - Ashley Mears
Own notes
It is about doing ethnographic fieldwork using the method "observant participation”.
She did carnal ethnography in the fashion industry where she uses her own body in the research. She
gained Embodied knowledge.
Favourite quotes:
“One way or another, I was stepping out of the model habitus and approaching them
dispassionately as interview subjects. Switching social roles like this required a switch in
conversational style, from informal to interrogative, naive to expert.”
“This carnal posturing of both insider and outsider helped me see the structure the world I
was studying, in part through the very challenges of trying to talk to different people in that
world.”
“Through this process of "becoming"—becoming a look in my case, or a firefighter (Desmond
2007), a sales agent (Hanser 2005), or a bar hostess (Parrenas 2011)—sociologists can
occupy and understand the form and context of informants' worlds.”
“Second, challenges in the method can be revealing of larger processes. You have to be
willing to make a jerk of yourself, noted Goffman (1989), because habituation into most
research sites requires the mastery of some skill set that the researcher does not yet have.
Failure is endemic; it is also full of rich analytic potential. My insider/outsider stance enabled
me not only to uncover the stratification in the sphere of modeling, but also helped me
recognize and negotiate the challenges of studying up.”
“After one presentation of my work, a senior sociologist in the room asked, "I notice you put
yourself in your paper quite a lot. Why is that?" As observant participants, researchers are an
inseparable part of the research they have conducted, and they must write in ways that
convey how their experiences in the field contribute to and generate sociological knowledge.
To these ends, I try to write myself into the pages of each draft, weaving my emotions and
physical transformation into the analysis, aiming to give my reader the chance to cringe in
embarrassment and hot-flushed cheeks alongside me. This acknowledgment of the
sociologist within the site—as an embodied, living, feeling being—allows researchers the self-
reflexivity that can interrogate and advance under standings of particular social world.”
3
,Class discussion:
She wrote this article in the process of the book: Pricing beauty.
Insider/ outsider
She uses her body to immerse into the field.
“Many ethnographers engaged in long-term immersion toggle between their scholarly and field
identities. They invariably take on, for a time, characteristics of the field. We must tune our bodies
into the field so we can feel what our informants feel, to get the logic and sense of their social world
right into our bones”
In carnal ethnography you might get an insider position. But an insider position come with both
advantages and disadvantages/ risks.
“My insider position allowed me to inhabit the structure and risks of a steep hierarchy, one in which I
lacked power to talk back or even to ask questions of the very people in charge of my value. Not only
did I see myself in the lives of the models I was studying, but I also shared the feeling that my own
status was insecure and threated.”
When she wanted to step out of this insider position into the outsider position, something interesting
happened. She wanted to learn things that she couldn’t learn from the insiders position. But she
really did negotiate this step, because she knew that the relationship between her and the
interlocutors would dramatically change if she revealed het role as researcher. One of the
consequences was the she would probably never work with her clients again afterwards and she even
predicts that she would be exiled from that world fully. So, she was in a dilemma if and when, she
would ask the uncomfortable question what would change the relationship permanently.
Ethical question
The question is if this way of doing ethnographic research is ethical. Her clients did not know they are
part of a research project. And the fact that the relationship will change after that she revealed
herself as a researcher, shows that they would not have given conformed consent. It is not
transparent at all!
Class question:
What are the advantages and disadvantages of being an insider in anthropological research? (and
if you already have a potential topic of research, what kind of position will you occupy? How will
your position affect what you can and cannot learn?)
Advantages
- understanding the context
- access
- understand the motivation of the interlocutors by living it herself
- Interlocutors have more trust in you / sense of horizontality
4
,Disadvantages:
- You loss a bit of objectivity. It is harder to be aware of what needs to be critiqued.
- Hard to ask difficult questions
- Negative impacts on being embodied in the field (physically and mentally)
- Fear of losing your access. So control your behaviour to maintain the access.
- Feel guilty. You are an insider to get information without be able to give something back.
- Can you really be an insider? There is always something about you that you cannot fully adapt. How
honest should you be?
Being an ethnographer always involves being both an insider and outsider. There is a discussion if and
where the line is working as an ethnographer. How far will you go? You can you guarantee your own
physical and emotional safety?
Uncomfortable is a necessary part of ethnography. But are you are being uncomfortable because it is
unfamiliar, or because you are feeling unsafe?
In your own research project, you will make the decisions mostly about safety, in conversation with
your supervisor. The institutional rules are how safe the country is based on the colour codes (yellow,
red, etc)
Reading 2: Observers Observed An Anthropologist under Surveillance - Katherine Verdery
Own notes
The text is about an American ethnographer doing her fieldwork in Romania. However, the
authorities though she was a spy and she was followed by Secret police agencies.
I found it interesting that she explained that they thought she was a spy because they use the same
methodologies. Like using a pseudonym for interlocutors.
“As the excerpt I quoted from my surveillance report makes clear, officers thought they recognized in
my ethnographic practices their own norms of professional conduct. They too used pseudonyms for
“informers,” coded notes, tape recorders, and a comprehensive data-gathering strategy that went
beyond the confines of a single project statement. Like me, they generated a wealth of typed data,
producing from their observations an enormous body of field notes (their file on me contains 2,780
pages). And like me, they generated interpretations and conclusions: that I am a CIA agent, that I am
feeding the US propaganda machine against socialism, that I am fomenting discontent among
Romania’s minority.”(p. 17).
The text observer observed made me realise that it is not so easy to become an insider. In Verdery’
case she was not only treated as an outsider, but even as a spy. It made clear that there are potential
dangers as an ethnographer and that you should be aware of that.
Class discussion
This article was written in the process of the her book: My life as a spy.
5
, Her research and earlier books where about traditional members of a Romanian village. It is a strange
experience readings these books, knowing that all of this spy things was going on at the same time.
In this article, Verdery is very transparent about her research (in contrast with Mears) and yet she is
still read as a spy.
It was interesting that the secret police is finding all kind of similarities in her ethnographic work and
the work they themselves are doing.
Class question:
What distinguishes ethnographic fieldwork from espionage? If the work of anthropologists can be
deemed more ethical than that of spies, what makes it so? In what ways and to whom, should
anthropologist be transparent about their research?
(is “undercover” ethnography ever justifiable? When and why?)
There is no clear cut criteria. You have to consider the vulnerability of the interlocutors, and the
power dynamics between you and them.
Transparency is important. But in some cases undercover ethnography is justified. One example is an
ethnography in the organs travel industry which operates internationally. These books were not
rejected of this undercover ethnography.
Questions are raised what are the ethics of researcher such an unethical industry? Ethics is one big
dilemma for people engaging in this kind of work. Are you going to protect the interlocutors or feel
the ethic to be honest and might have legal consequences for the people involved. Do we expose
their names? How do the ethnographer take care of himself and make sure he is not at risk? In this
example it was tremendously dangerous.
Some styles of ethnography function as investigating journalism.
Reading 3: Driving while Palestinian in Israel and the West Bank: The politics of disorientation and the
routes of a subaltern knowledge – Bishara
Own notes:
I found it fascinating to read about driving in Gaza and Israel. I learned that driving can been seen as a
technique of the body, entailing skills to direct the car and that these skills have cultural and political
dimension. He uses example of his own road trips through these areas, explaining how driving and
politics come together. From roundabout routes, to traffic signs with the name of a village Israel
wants to call it, instead of the real Arabic name. Palestine’s gain knowledge on the road and is imbued
with emotions. Through driving they (re)connect with the land.
Favourite quotes:
“My use of the concept of habitus emphasizes embodied and active skills somewhat more
than does Bourdieu's, though they are not necessarily the studied, conscious skills Charles
Hirschkind (2006) writes about in his discussion of habitus. In some regards, Palestinian
citizens of Israel and Palestinians of the West Bank share a similar habitus regarding political
movement, and, in other regards, they do not.” (p.35)”
“I focus on movement, particularly its embodied dimensions”(p.36)
6
