Ethnography in Unstable Places

Ethnography in Unstable Places

Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change

  • Author: Greenhouse, Carol J.; Mertz, Elizabeth; Warren, Kay B.; McC. Lewin, Carroll; Gordon, Robert J.
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822328339
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822383482
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2002
  • Month: March
  • Pages: 448
  • DDC: 305.8
  • Language: English
Ethnography in Unstable Places is a collection of ethnographic accounts of everyday situations in places undergoing dramatic political transformation. Offering vivid case studies that range from the Middle East and Africa to Europe, Russia, and Southeast Asia, the contributing anthropologists narrate particular circumstances of social and political transformation—in contexts of colonialism, war and its aftermath, social movements, and post–Cold War climates—from the standpoints of ordinary people caught up in and having to cope with the collapse or reconfiguration of the states in which they live.
Using grounded ethnographic detail to explore the challenges to the anthropological imagination that are posed by modern uncertainties, the contributors confront the ambiguities and paradoxes that exist across the spectrum of human cultures and geographies. The collection is framed by introductory and concluding chapters that highlight different dimensions of the book’s interrelated themes—agency and ethnographic reflexivity, identity and ethics, and the inseparability of political economy and interpretivism.
Ethnography in Unstable Places will interest students and specialists in social anthropology, sociology, political science, international relations, and cultural studies.

Contributors. Eve Darian-Smith, Howard J. De Nike, Elizabeth Faier, James M. Freeman, Robert T. Gordon, Carol J. Greenhouse, Nguyen Dinh Huu, Carroll McC. Lewin, Elizabeth Mertz, Philip C. Parnell, Nancy Ries, Judy Rosenthal, Kay B. Warren, Stacia E. Zabusky

  • Contents
  • Introduction: Altered States, Altered Lives
  • Part One. Law against Culture
    • Ghettos in the Holocaust: The Improvisation
    • Unsettled Settlers: Internal Pacification
    • Judges without Courts: The Legal Culture
  • Part Two. Ethnographies of Agency in the Fissures of the State
    • Ethnography in/of Transnational Processes: Following Gyres in the Worlds of Big Science and European Integration
    • The Composite State: The Poor and the Nation in Manila
    • Domestic Matters: Feminism and Activism among Palestinian Women in Israel
    • "Best Interests" and the Repatriation of Vietnamese Unaccompanied Minors
  • Part Three. Resistance and Remembrance
    • Beating the Bounds: Law, Identity, and Territory in the New Europe
    • ‘‘Honest Bandits’’ and ‘‘Warped People’’: Russian Narratives about Money, Corruption, and Moral Decay
    • Trance against the State
  • Part Four. Conclusion
    • The Perfidy of Gaze and the Pain of Uncertainty: Anthropological Theory and the Search for Closure
    • Toward an Anthropology of Fragments, Instabilities, and Incomplete Transitions
  • Contributors
  • Works Cited
  • Index

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