Christof Lammer: Performing State Boundaries. Food Networks, Democratic Bureaucracy and China
= EASA Series vol. 51, New York/Oxford: Berghahn.
Polarizing images of authoritarian, socialist or culturalist otherness compromise analyses of the Chinese state. Still, such images produce effects beyond academia when they inform performances of the boundaries between state and non-state. This book shows how performative boundary work leads to contrasting judgements that decide about support and access to resources. In an ecological village in Sichuan, citizen participation in food networks and bureaucracy signaled Western liberalism, Maoism or traditional rural culture for different audiences. Attention to the multiplicity of performed state boundaries helps China studies and political anthropology to understand such diverging classifications – and how they sometimes co-exist without causing tensions.
André Thiemann: The Politics of Relations. How Self-Government, Infrastructures, and Care Transform the State in Serbia
= EASA Series vol. 49, New York/Oxford: Berghahn.
Rethinking the contributions of the Manchester School of Social Anthropology for political ethnography, the Politics of Relations elaborates its relational approach to the state along four interlaced axes of research – embeddedness, boundary work, modalities and strategic selectivity – that enable thick comparisons across spatio-temporal scales of power.
In Serbia local experiences of self-government, infrastructure and care motivate its citizens to “become the state” while cursing it heartily. While both officials and citizens strive for a state that enables a “normal life,” they navigate the increasingly illiberal politics enacted by national parties and which are tolerated by trans-national donors.
Vincent Dubois & Gabriela Lotta: Street-level bureaucracy. Teaching policy (theory) in practice
In: Handbook of Teaching Public Policy, edited by Philippe Zittoun and Emily St. Denny. E. Elgar, 155-166.
This chapter reflects on why and how teaching street-level bureaucracy can contribute to providing students with concrete and critical knowledge of public policies. We intend to show that teaching street-level bureaucracy is a good way to teach both policy and policy theory ‘in practice’. On the one hand, it provides the opportunity to present policies in the real world and daily practices, thanks to telling examples which sometimes directly echo students’ personal experiences. On the other hand, it grounds theoretical and methodological questions and makes it easier to address them than in an abstract way, i.e., remote from actual practices, situations and experiences. To do so, we mainly draw on our respective experiences in two very different context, both from the academic point of view and regarding institutional settings and policy orientations: Brazil and France.
Vincent Dubois: La etnografía de la política pública como arte marcialanálisis del estado de bienestar contra la corriente
Revista Antropologías del Sur 11 (21): 1-19.
Burawoy distinguishes between policy sociology, professional sociology, and public sociology. Based on my own research experience in critical ethnography to analyze welfare organizations and policies, I show that these three types do not necessarily contradict one another. In a strategy echoing Bourdieu’s notion of “martial art”, I propose to consider them rather as three possible stages. First, commissioned research allows access to the field and data. Provided the researcher preserves his or her autonomy, this provisional stage proves necessary to build innovative academic knowledge on the concrete forms of public policies. Then, this autonomous scientific use of first-hand, internal, and detailed information enables the researcher to disseminate critical knowledge outside the academia. As in a martial art, the critical researcher can use the strength of the partner-adversary (here public bodies) to “fight” him, that is, to contribute to the public critique of its policies.
Anne Sophie Grauslund: Depending on Parenting Experts. Exploring the Ambiguity of Care in the Relationships between New Parents and Visiting Children’s Nurses in Denmark.
= Vienna Working Papers in Ethnography no. 14
In recent years, parenting has again become a prominent topic in public debate in the Global North. With ever more studies stressing the importance of the early years to lifelong outcomes and ‘success’, parenthood has come under scrutiny by public and expert institutions, and the position that parents should rely on expert advice has become prevalent. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among visiting children’s nurses (sundhedsplejersker) and new parents in a Danish municipality, this paper explores the dynamics between these nurses and parents and how the former reinforce the discourse that parenting must be learned from experts. In Denmark, all new parents are offered visits by a children’s nurse who monitors the baby’s development and helps guide their care for it. Examining the tensions in the nurses’ work between their wish to empower new parents, and how they reinforce the parents’ dependency on their help and validation, the paper explores how each group (re)produces the other as ‘needed’ experts and ‘needing’ experts.
Tatjana Thelen: Der Wert der Ethnographie, noch immer: Über Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
In: Inspirationen: Über die Entstehung ethnologischen Denkens, edited by Lisa Burger, Tim Burger and David Sumerauer. Edition Trickster (Peter Hammer Verlag), 90-100.
“The Value of Ethnography, Still: About Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing” (in German)
In this volume, 22 ethnologists describe in very personal texts how certain films, ethnographies, graphic novels, an academic essay or a poem triggered an “aha moment” that had a formative effect on their ethnological thinking or even changed their life path and to which they have returned repeatedly ever since. Tatjana chose Anna L. Tsing’s ethnography In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (1993), which made a lasting impression on her.