Capacity Building in Ethnographic Comparison

by Rachel Douglas-Jones and Justin Shaffner, editors of Hope and Insufficiency: Capacity Building in Ethnographic Comparison

We open our new edited collection Hope and Insufficiency by traveling the world in workshops. Three capacity building events, ranging from Paramaribo to Addis Ababa, sketched as thumbnails, form our introductory paragraph. These three events, drawn from thousands, simply demonstrate the breadth of topics to which it is applied. Capacity building, or its more recent iteration as capacity development, is, we argue, both ubiquitous and under-theorised within the social sciences. The title of our book identifies characteristics of capacity building’s intervention: as we put it, hope and insufficiency interplay in a way that makes the idea of capacity building persuasive.

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Excerpt: Austrian “Gypsies” in the Italian archives

Paola Trevisan


In the spirit of Gypsy, Roma, Traveller History Month in June, we invite you to read the following excerpt from “Austrian ‘Gypsies’ in the Italian archives: Historical ethnography on multiple border crossings at the beginning of the twentieth century” by Paola Trevisan.

This article is featured in Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, a part of the Berghahn Open Anthro collection of open-access journals.

Pictured: Chromolithograph entitled Enfants Tsiganes (Autriche) [Gipsy Children, Austria]; published by Garnier, Paris, printed by Testu & Massin, Paris (Public Domain)

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