Exhaustive Ethnography and Social Theory Study Guide
Standing in The Need: Culture, Comfort, and Coming Home after Katrina
Ethnography Details: - Full Title: Standing in The Need: Culture, Comfort, and Coming Home after Katrina. - Author: Katerine E Browne. - Subject: An investigation of the Peachy Gang and their efforts to maintain culture and family traditions while displaced from their regular environments. - Setting: Saint Bernard Parish, New Orleans, Louisiana. - Chronology: The work took place from .
Overview of the Study: - The study is an ethnographic work that shifts focus away from the immediate chaos of Hurricane Katrina toward the long-term and often invisible struggles associated with recovery. - Core Argument: Browne argues that disaster recovery entails more than rebuilding physical structures; it is fundamentally about restoring a entire way of life. - Subject Group: Browne followed a large African American extended family consisting of over the course of . - Government Disconnect: While government agencies like FEMA prioritize efficiency, individual documentation, and standardized, \"one-size-fits-all\" solutions, the families studied prioritized communal living and shared resources. - Fractured Support: When the government mandates that survivors act as individuals to receive aid, it often fractures the kinship systems essential for survival. - Definition of Journey's End: Recovery is not achieved merely by obtaining a roof over one's head; it is defined by regaining a sense of belonging and peace. - The \"Second Disaster\": Browne explores how the trauma of the storm was compounded by navigating bureaucratic red tape, which stripped individuals of their agency and dignity.
Theories and Frameworks: - Qantarabe’s Ritual Economy: Defined as the circulation of goods, labor, and presence to maintain family bonds. It symbols shared dependency and the reality that one person cannot supply everything economically; it is considered a part of habitus. - Husserl’s Life World: Shared life experiences that allow cultures to sustain themselves. - Bourdieu’s Social Capital: The aggregate of actual or potential resources linked to durable, institutionalized networks of mutual acquaintance and recognition. It represents the value derived from group membership and social connections which can be converted into economic capital. - Kin Network: A social structure comprising individuals related by blood, marriage, or close community ties, offering vital emotional, social, and functional support. - Lakoff’s Direct Causation: A cognitive and linguistic framework where a specific action (application of force) leads to an immediate, local, and observable result in time and space. It is described as single-link thinking or a \"but-for\" test where event A causes event B directly. - Bourdieu's Habitus: The rituals and daily activities individuals perform without having to consciously think about them. - Wilkson’s Social Powerlessness: The presence or lack of agency (power) an individual has within their environment. - Recovery Culture: The bureaucracies and institutions specifically designed to respond to disasters. - Collective Grief: The pain experienced by a number of people who simultaneously share a large-scale traumatic event. - Wounded Culture: Those populations or groups who are directly impacted by a disaster. - Structural Racism: Persistent discrimination characterized by exclusionary practices embedded across institutions and public spaces, making the impacts more powerful and difficult to counteract. - Lakoff’s Systematic Causation: Causation caused by systems of relationships, as opposed to linear or direct causation. - Weak Ties: Social connections that play a small role in your social fabric, requiring no effort or drive to sustain. - Strong Ties: Social connections that play a significant role in your social fabric, requiring time to maintain the connection. - Disaster Capitalism: Limiting opportunity or money from disaster victims. In the context of Standing in the Need, this involves racial issues, housing, and the lower parish losing power. - Disaster Opportunism: Limiting opportunity or financial resources from disaster victims (similar to disaster capitalism in the context of the text).
Key Terms: - Culture Broker: One who bridges cultural divides and smooths communication between groups that do not understand each other. - Culture Shock: The feeling of disorientation experienced by someone suddenly subjected to an unfamiliar culture or way of life. - Root Stalk: A metaphor used to show the strength of family ties and their interconnections. - Interdependent Relationship - Rhizome: Described as a communal, resilient, and multiplying structure. Biologically, a rhizome is a modified plant stem that grows horizontally underground and can produce new root and shoot systems.
The Man in The Dog Park: Coming up Close to Homelessness
Ethnography Details: - Authors: Cathy Small, Jason Koroshy, and Ross Moore. - Subject: The culture of homelessness in Northern Arizona, USA. - Chronology: The study spanned the years .
Overview and Major Themes: - Challenging \"Othering\": The study challenges the social exclusion and \"othering\" of people experiencing homelessness. - The Central Premise: The book centers on an unlikely friendship between Cathy Small and Jason Kordosky. Small did not know Kordosky was homeless for years because he was a regular at the dog park. This serves as a metaphor for the invisibility of homelessness. - The \"Living on the Edge\" Concept: Highlights how many people exist in plain sight without fitting the stereotypical image of a person on a street corner. - The Safety Net \"Catch-22\": Authors illustrate how the social safety net often requires individuals to navigate bureaucratic hoops that are impossible without a stable home, phone, or transportation. - Emotional and Mental Toll: - Constant Stress: The mental exhaustion derived from finding food, hygiene, and a safe place to sleep every single day. - Loss of Identity: The shift in perception and self-image from being a \"worker\" or \"neighbor\" to being categorized solely as \"homeless.\" - The Dog Park as Sanctuary: For Kordosky, the park was a \"liminal space\" where he was treated with dignity and respect as a fellow dog lover rather than as a homeless person. - Societal Failure: The book argues that homelessness is a societal failure rather than a personal one.
Theories and Key Terms: - Hugh’s Master Status: A social position that dominates all others in an individual's identity or how they are perceived by society (e.g., race, gender, occupation, or disability). - Bourdieu’s Social Capital: (As defined previously) The aggregate of potential resources linked to institutionalized networks. - Individual Deviancy Hypothesis: The idea that life failures or economic failures are based on personal flaws and poor choices, assuming that economic and social equality exist for everyone. - Street Level Bureaucracy: Personnel on the front lines between systems and clients with small demands of responsibility and power, allowing them to interpret rules and tip cases in various directions. - Small’s Super Visibility: The status of standing out, even when undesired or without trying. - Small’s Invisibility: The status of being unnoticed or avoided; being treated as if one does not exist or belong. - Catch-22: A paradoxical and illogical situation where the desired solution is impossible to achieve due to contradictory rules.
Disability Worlds
Ethnography Details: - Authors: Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp. - Subject: Kinships and the successes/struggles of disabled students. - Setting: New York City. - Chronology: .
Theories and Frameworks: - Double Telos of Modernity: The paradoxical tension between the technological drive to eliminate disability through medical \"cures\" and the social drive to include and celebrate it as human diversity. - Crip Time: A theory viewing time as more flexible for people with disabilities, acknowledging the complexity of their experiences. - New Kinship Imaginaries: The cultural narratives and mental models families use to understand their relationships and futures; the define how we conceptualize family and \"normal\" life paths. - Cultural Imaginaries: Collective sets of values, symbols, and narratives through which a society understands its existence. - Disability Cliff: The point at which resources and support end for a disabled student after graduating high school, leaving them with limited opportunities. - Interdependence: A state where two things need each other for survival. - Crip Kin: A chosen family or community created through shared adversity in the disability world. - Accidental Activism: When a parent or guardian finds themselves standing up for their child without premeditated thought; when a parent becomes an advocate through their child's disability. - Disability World: A projected world where disability fits seamlessly into society. - Biopolitics: How governmental power operates through the regulation of populations' bodies and lives. - Body Minds: An approach to understanding the relationship between the human body and mind. - Foucauldian Paradox: The way biopower both oppresses and creates the tools for resistance; medical labels used for monitoring also provide the frameworks used to organize for political rights. - Paradox of Recognition: The dilemma where an individual must accept a stigmatizing medical label to access services, while simultaneously facing discrimination due to that label. - Demedicalization: The process by which a behavior or condition once labeled \"sick\" becomes defined as natural/normal. - Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: The \"ghost\" of the normative, non-disabled child expected by society that continues to haunt a family's early kinship imaginaries. - Ideological Immunization: A psychological defense mechanism where people use pre-existing beliefs to shield themselves from the implications of new, troubling information. - Neurotypical: A person whose brain functions in a way considered average by society. - Neurodivergent: Someone with a disability or a brain that functions differently than the average. - Ableist Hierarchies: Viewing some disabilities as \"worse\" or \"better\" than others. - Vigilante Moms: Mothers motivated to avenge perceived injustices against their children. - Shadow Syndrome: The theory that siblings of people with disabilities may feel neglected and act upon those feelings due to receiving less attention. - Structural Violence: Violence embedded in social structures and institutions that causes harm through systematic inequalities. - Politicized Body: Bodies involved in violence, suffering, or discipline. - Perfection Preoccupied Planet: A world obsessively focused on normative standards, ideal bodies, and competitive achievement. - Intensive Mothering: An ideology dictating that a \"good mother\" should be the primary caregiver and dedicate all time and energy to the child's development. - Intersectionality: A framework for understanding how social identities (race, gender, class, ability) overlap to create unique experiences of discrimination. - Unplanned Survival: When a child with a disability survives longer than expected, leading to unanticipated situations. - Moxie: Activism. - New Segregation: Exclusion in high school culture caused by homogenous classrooms and stigma. - Ableism: Discrimination against people with disabilities. - Liminal Period: The transition period occurring after high school graduation. - Neo-eugenics: Advocacy for enhancing human capacities through reproductive technology and genetic engineering.
Educational Terms: - Neurodiversity: The concept that brain function varies across the population. - Heterogenous: Classrooms intermixed with disabled and neurotypical students. - Homogenous: Classrooms where neurotypical and neurodivergent students are kept separate.
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies
Ethnography Details: - Author: Seth Holmes.
Theories: - Galley’s Structural Violence: Refers to indirect violence built into the atmosphere of a society. - Biopower: The modern shift toward shaping, managing, and administering life rather than the sovereign's right to take life. - Systems of Migrant Labor: Economic powers exploiting cheap migrant labor while political forces deny those workers citizenship and social rights. - Clinical Gaze: The biomedical perspective of health professionals that examines the physical body without considering social, economic, or psychological factors. - Bourdieu's Symbolic Violence: The process by which social hierarchies (based on power, wealth, race, etc.) are constructed and misrepresented as natural rather than man-made. - Closed Corporate Community: A social unit that controls its own resources, maintains strong internal identity, and limits outside membership. - Collective Bad Faith: Ways individuals knowingly deceive themselves to avoid acknowledging disturbing realities (e.g., self-deception in the face of poverty). - Violence Continuum: The link between wartime direct political violence and peacetime structural/symbolic violence. - Gramsci’s War of Position: The ongoing struggle over meaning and cultural forms which affects political and economic structures. - Farmer’s Pragmatic Solidarity: The idea that compassion must be linked to practical efforts to stop suffering. - Bourdieu’s Political Violence: Use of force that threatens or intimidates authority and individuals involving physical and psychological harm.
Working the Night Shift
Ethnography Details: - Author: Renee Patel.
Theories and Concepts Mentioned: - Public vs private spheres. - Butler's gender theory. - Secor’s regimes of veiling theory. - Patel’s temporal imperialism theory. - Patel's temporal entrapment theory. - Hochschild and Machung’s second shift theory. - Mochschild’s emotional labor. - Raju and Bagchu’s sanskuti sation. - Poster’s rigidification of time. - Ramusack’s maternal imperialism. - Mobility and mortality narrative. - Sassen’s feminization of survival. - Haraway’s situated knowledge. - Harvey’s capital accumulation.
American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the 21st Century
Ethnography Details: - Author: Shannon Lee Dawdy.
Theories: - Hertz’s Social Fabric: The thread connecting a community. - Hertz’s Social Death: Death as a social process of transformation; physical and social death do not occur simultaneously. - Stratherm’s Dividualism: A manifestation of different social relationships explaining the relative importance of individuals vs. groups. - Becker’s Death Denial: The sociological assumption that modern western societies repress the reality of death. - Foucault’s Heterotopia: Specialized spaces that mirror society by exaggerating dominated norms in microcosm and reinforcing hierarchy. - Dawdy’s Corpse Theory: Viewing the physical corpse as a tool for psychological healing. - Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Large societies where members imagine themselves united by shared narratives and traditions. - Heterodoxy: Used in relation to beliefs about the afterlife where experimental ideas question the status quo.
Construction of Peace
Core Theories and Concepts: - Inculturalality: A process where individuals from different cultures interact to learn and question their own cultures, promoting mutual respect and human rights. - Neoliberalism. - Hegemony. - Social Demobilization. - The Peasantry. - Legal Pluralism. - Structural Violence. - Direct Violence. - Cultural Violence. - Institutional Racism. - Self Determination. - Master Status. - Decolonization. - Relativism. - Campesindios. - Social Fabric. - Distributive Welfare State. - Community Integration. - Social Disorganization: A community unable to maintain common values and goals. - Informal Segregation: Non-illegal separation of people (e.g., in housing or education) that contributes to inequality. - Maltreatment: Treating someone cruelly. - Stigmatization: Describing someone as worthy of disgrace or disapproval.