Tag: Editor article

‘Is it inevitable you’ll turn into your mother?’

(This post was originally published in 2016)

by Siân Pooley and Kaveri Qureshi

 

On the 2nd March this year, ahead of Mother’s Day, there was a thoughtful discussion on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour addressing the question: ‘is it inevitable you’ll turn into your mother?’. For counsellor Myira Khan, who was interviewed on the programme, this is a topic that comes up frequently in her therapy sessions. Indeed, for women who have struggled with their relationships with their mothers, it can be a source of great conflict. Khan claims that ‘you’re turning into your father’ is not a jibe for men in the same way that ‘you’re turning into your mother’ so often is for women, and that men do not worry about this to the same extent.  She suggests that because our mothers are our role models for womanhood, this gives mother-daughter relationships a particular charge. A lot of her counselling work with women is about trying to ‘break the cycle’, which she approaches therapeutically by exploring mother-daughter relationships, trying to understand what those relationships mean, and encouraging women to accept the reality of who their mother really was, rather than the awe-inspiring model of her that they have in their minds.

 

This programme made us pause for thought, as it was broadcast just ahead of the publication of our book Parenthood Between Generations: Transforming Reproductive Cultures. In this edited volume we bring together ten contributions by historians, anthropologists and sociologists addressing precisely the extent to which people replicate the models of parenthood that they encounter from their own parents. Continue reading “‘Is it inevitable you’ll turn into your mother?’” →

Željko Jokić: Researching Assault Sorcery

This post is the transcript of an electronic interview between D. S. Farrer and Željko Jokić. Farrer is the special issue editor for Social Analysis Volume 58, Issue 1, and Jokić is the author of the article “Shamanic Battleground: Magic, Sorcery, and Warrior Shamanism in Venezuela” appearing in that issue. Below, Jokić answers a series of questions related to her article in Social Analysis.

 

This is the eighth in a series of interviews with contributors to this volume. Find the previous contributions on our blog.

 

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Material Agency as a Challenge to Empirical Research?

nature and cultureThe following is a guest blog post from Stefan Böschen, Jochen Gläser, Martin Meister, and Cornelius Schubert, guest editors of Nature and Culture Volume 10, Issue 3.

 

Our interest in compiling this special issue was sparked by a curious imbalance that prevails in the recent turn to materiality in social research. The current proclamations for (re)considering materiality are mostly levelled at theoretical conceptualizations. Framing materiality as a theoretical challenge is of course necessary, but this debate has little to say about how to deal with materiality in terms of empirical research. We think that considering materiality as a purely theoretical challenge is taking the second step before the first. What might be even worse is that decoupling conceptual treatments of material agency from empirical research makes the “material” of material agency itself disappear behind abstract concepts. It seems that although there is substantial interest in the research on materiality and agency, there also is a marked carelessness, if not helplessness, to how deal with this challenge in empirical research.

 

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Demystifying “Austerity”: Series Editors Reflect on Greek Crisis

The following is a guest blog post written by Stephen Gudeman, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota and co-editor for the Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy series.  Below, Gudeman discusses connections between the current Greek Crisis and the first two volumes of this series.
 
The first two volumes in the Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy series, which are edited by Chris Hann and myself, bring to mind the current Greek crisis. I wish I had been a fly on the wall throughout the negotiations, been able to interject a word or two, and talked to a few Greeks and other Europeans for their thoughts. From afar, I see they featured feisty personalities, as well as different visions about how economy operates, wellbeing, and the purpose of economic life. They reflect cultural differences within the Euro zone.
 

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Artisan Society and Struggles in the Ottoman Empire

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the history of the lives and work of middle eastern artisans. Bread from the Lion’s Mouth: Artisans Struggling for a Livelihood in Ottoman Cities, soon to be published, uses archival documents to re-create a scene of life in the Ottoman Empire from the fifteenth through twentieth centuries. Following, editor Suraiya Faroqhi discusses the history of this project and her interest in this region.

 

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What drew you to the study of artisans in Ottoman cities? Why do you think there is a renewed interest in this field today?

 

Perhaps because I am fond of my own work, as a historian I have for a long time been interested in people that work – as opposed to those that pray, govern, or fight. Moreover I like to see the things that artisans/artists have made; and we must keep in mind that the beautiful things we admire in museums did not come into being ‘just like that’ but are the product of human work, especially that of artisans and artists.

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Identity at the Intersection of Science and Culture

Drawing on the work of medical researchers, anthropologists, historians of science, and sociologists, Identity Politics and the New Genetics: Re/Creating Categories of Difference and Belonging explores how science and culture are used to create and perpetuate ideas of race and ethnicity. The volume was published as a paperback in November. Following, David Skinner, who co-edited the volume with Katharina Schramm and Richard Rottenburg, reflects on the volume’s reception and its distinction from other volumes on genetics and social history.

 

As the attention devoted to science journalist Nicholas Wade’s recent book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History illustrates, discussion of race and genetics is habitually deemed ‘difficult’ or ‘controversial’. Wade is one of a long line of writers who portray themselves as fearless truth-seekers battling the politically correct consensus that races are social not biological types.

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Social Exchange and Conceptual Query

Combining classic and contemporary theory, Thinking through Sociality: An Anthropological Interrogation of Key Concepts is an exploration of concepts from disjuncture to social space and field to sociability. In advance of the volume’s publication later this month, editor Vered Amit discusses its origins and purpose.

 

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This volume is the outcome of a continuing series of exchanges among the contributors, which took place over several years. When I initiated the first of these exchanges in 2006, I wondered why anthropologists had often resorted uncritically to relatively few, familiar concepts of sociality—such as community—in spite of the availability of a much broader range of ideas that might be effectively applied to the varied contemporary situations they were seeking to apprehend.

 

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Writing for Goffman: Coincidence Drives Idea behind ‘Vehicles’

Recently published Vehicles: Cars, Canoes and other Metaphors of Moral Imagination, edited by David Lipset and Richard Handler, offers insight into the vehicle as an object that can move not only people, but also ideas. Following, Handler discusses the origination of the volume, which all came about by way of an interesting connection of coincidence.

 

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This volume came about serendipitously.

 

My friend David Lipset emailed me in the summer of 2008 with the standard “what are you working on” question. I replied that I was working on a series of essays about the great American sociologist, Erving Goffman. David wrote back to tell me the rather astounding story about his first car, a late-1950s VW Beetle that his father had bought from Goffman, in Berkeley, California, where both of them taught.

 

The fact that Goffman was an “early adopter” (in the U.S.) of the Beetle explained, I thought, some cryptic comments in Behavior in Public Places, where Goffman described the interactional contempt that drivers of small cars endured.

 

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The Social Impact of Economic Growth

Editors Susanna Price and Kathryn Robinson explore the social aspects of Chinese economic growth in their soon-to-be-published book, Making a Difference? Social Assessment Policy and Praxis and its Emergence in China. Following, Susanna Price offers further insight into the book’s origins and the impact the book may have on the field of Asian development studies.

 

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Why did we write this book?

 

We are all familiar with the striking, sometimes wildly exaggerated, news headlines on China’s rapid economic growth, its geo-political consequences and – perhaps less frequently − the possible flow-on implications for liberal democratic governance. We felt that such headlines, focusing on growth, overshadowed an alternative narrative, on the social dimensions of that growth and transformation. It came down to a simple wish: we wanted to tell a different China story that reflected our own experience and practice.

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