Academic literature on the topic 'Social anthropology'

This thesis examines the recent trend in the museum world of increasing the relevancy of museums exhibits toward the public. It focuses on Anthropology museums and their relationship with the history of the discipline of anthropology and its core theories. Through a literature review and case study examination, I identify key challenges that museums with anthropological content face in trying to increase their significance and impact. By addressing these challenges, this thesis also evaluates the strategies museums have used in the recent past for their relative success and effectiveness. Particular emphasis is placed on the Arizona State Museum's Through the Eyes of the Eagle as a case study, as I was personally involved in the exhibition's process and can therefore share deeper insights into the functioning of that exhibit.

Thesis (MPhil (Sociology and Social Anthropology))--University of Stellenbosch, 2008.<br>It has been said that anthropology operates in “liminal spaces” which can be defined as “spaces between disciplines”. This study will explore the space where the fields of art and anthropology meet in order to discover the epistemological and representational challenges that arise from this encounter. The common ground on which art and anthropology engage can be defined in terms of their observational and knowledge producing practices. Both art and anthropology rely on observational skills and varying forms of visual literacy to collect and represent data. Anthropologists represent their data mostly in written form by means of ethnographic accounts, and artists represent their findings by means of imaginative artistic mediums such as painting, sculpture, filmmaking and music. Following the so-called ‘ethnographic turn’, contemporary artists have adopted an ‘anthropological’ gaze, including methodologies, such as fieldwork, in their appropriation of other cultures. Anthropologists, on the other hand, in the wake of the ‘writing culture’ critique of the 1980s, are starting to explore new forms of visual research and representational practices that go beyond written texts.

My ethnography begins providing its bibliographical, historical and geographic frameworks along the methodological issues in Chapter I. There, I outline the most explicit phenomena of postsocialism in Gjirokastër city, the introduction of private vehicles and private immobile property and their relationship with the radical transformations of the urban topography. This city today gradually centralises the road infrastructure, reflecting and facilitating the respective postsocialist social centralisation of spatial mobility and the increasing impact of the cross-border network on the social life of the city. The thesis continues in Chapter II with the history of motor-roads in Albania, with particular focus on the relationship between highways and modernisation during socialism and the paradox relationship between society and these infrastructures. During socialism Albanians had to build roads, but they were not able to use them, a process that paved in fact the way for the postsocialist social perceptions of roads and automobility. The main ethnographic and synchronic part begins in Chapter III and continues in Chapters IV and V where I study how the particular cross-border road network is perceived in postsocialist Gjirokastër, while I discuss its social agency after 1990. In Chapter III I focus on the contemporary road mythology in the city and I discuss it in reference other motifs of road mythology that are available in the bibliography. Chapters IV and V are the most important for the argument of the thesis as I emphasise the two most comprehensive road myths of the contemporary socio-cultural condition in Albania and I talk about their relationship with the actual materiality of that infrastructure in reference to the material dimensions of globalisation and transnationalism. In Chapter IV I present the politico-economic asymmetries of postsocialist capitalism in Albania as they are formed dialectically in the material and social constructions of Kakavije-Gjirokastër. In Chapter V, I continue with the dialectical scheme focusing on the social and material articulations of this transnationalism and fluidity from below, with focus on the ontological and material extension of the road: the houses built by migrants. There I show how the super-fluid and asymmetrical global relationships of the postsocialist transition are being familiarised and to a certain degree absorbed within the intimate material entity of the house, via the same road which incorporates and facilitates the international dependency of the society to the migratory process. The last chapter (VI) presents my conclusions emphasising the relationship between anthropology and roads, locating the current ethnography on the wider theoretical discussions on automobility infrastructures, space, time and scale.

Although belief in ghosts or analogous concepts is prevalent cross-culturally, including in contemporary Western cultures, social scientific treatments of spirit belief and experience often dismiss such views as superstitious, or overlook this dimension of culture completely. Using mixed methods, we examine ghost belief, experience, and media consumption, as well as the practice of ‘ghost hunting’ in the United States. Results from a national survey demonstrate that these beliefs and practices are common and concentrated strongly among younger generations of Americans, especially moderately religious ‘dabblers.’ Fieldwork with multiple groups centered on ‘hunting’ ghosts reveals several notable themes, including rhetorical appeals to both science and religion, magical rites, the extensive use of technology to mediate evidence and experiences of ghosts, and the narrative construction of hauntings. We argue that the inherent liminality of spirits as cultural constructs accounts for their persistence, power, and continual recurrence.

The police play an increasing role in the public construction of order and control. This thesis explores the modes of thought by which police practices are generated in pursuit of this control. A publicly proclaimed approval of social research is not supported by the analysis and academic enquiry is shown to be a binary opposite to a preferred ‘practical mastery'. This suggests the police maintain structural invisibility while appearing to be massively accessible to society. The 'insider/anthropologist' operates in a kind of extended liminality, with the potential to illuminate such hidden beliefs by a seditious interpretation. Reflexive participant observation therefore threatens and creates anti-structural possibilities for a society obsessed with conserving known and inculcated practice. This analysis of manufactured reality reveals a dramatic creation of ‘real’ and marginal policemen and villains, where the use of extreme metaphor, language and masculine symbols of status translate thought into action. Intrusion of women into this ideal world creates structural anomaly, for the world of ‘crime’ is dramatised to reinforce traditional belief in a masculine criminal justice system. An exploration of ambiguity caused by policewomen illustrates their incorrect place in the world of 'street-visible crime control’. Archetypes of feminine susceptibility are invoked, just as the archetype of 'hero‘ is attributed to the detective, 'fighting his war against crime’. However, analysis explodes the mythology surrounding the idea of 'crime', showing it to be an arbitrary police construct directed against the 'dangerous classes', manipulated and produced as a social drama. The revelation that this major structuring principle is used to preserve a known social etiquette is impossible to acknowledge and explains how research or academic enquiry into philosophies of power must be resisted. The police world has a public face, but a well-concealed private reality which this semantic exploration makes apparent.