Category The Idle Ethnographer

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Welcome to the portable e-soapbox of a sociologist with too much time on her hands. Milena Kremakova is fascinated by too many things and refuses to devote her time single-mindedly to any one pursuit. In this column she gives voice to one of her thinking selves: that of a perpetual traveller comfortably stuck between the positions of outsider and insider, geared to discover the unusual even in the most mundane setting, and always having something to say (or show). She pledges to irregulary scribble thin, unabashedly empirical quasi-ethnographic observations, loosely driven by pre-developed concepts, while promiscuously recycling insights from sociological theories.
Sometimes she tweets short thoughts as @idlEthnographer.

Prickles and Goo (or Quals versus Quants)

Jan 25, ’12 8:00 AM

A new video of an old talk by philosopher Alan Watts (1915-1973) perfectly illustrates the falsity of the quantitative vs qualitative sociology divide:

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SI Top 10 #2 – Car Boot Sale

Dec 25, ’11 8:00 AM

In this episode, a sneaky ethnographer of East European origin embarks on a quest to deconstruct one of Britain’s informal institutions: The Local Bank Holiday Sunday Car Boot Sale. Below are her unabridged and unabashed field-notes.

Rather than participant observation, this is an exercise in observant participation. Observant participation is a variant of the ethnographic method of participant observation, first described by Polish researcher M. Kaminski who wrote a book based on his experience in as political prisoner (Kaminski, Marek M. (2004) Games Prisoners Play: The Tragicomic Worlds of Polish Prison). Now, you might think that a car boot sale is no prison, even though you are confined to a narrow patch of a few square feet. But the ethnographic method works, regardless.

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SI Top 10 #1 – A Mexican, a Kiwi and a Nigerian walk into a bar… a dose of (sociological) Xmas humour

Dec 24, ’11 8:00 AM

Over the rest of 2011, we’ll be reposting the 10 most popular SI articles in the 1 1/2 years we’ve been around, in preparation for lots of new stuff next year. Here’s #1 – enjoy!

You are not seriously checking out SI on Christmas Eve! Well, if you are – we have to  make you laugh. And yes, this is sociological: if knowing about Others makes them less other, more human, there is no better way than sharing their humour.  Enjoy this marvellous collection of jokes from many countries: read article by Joris Luyendijk in the Guardian here

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Sociology song

Dec 23, ’11 8:00 AM

For a change from the Christmas tunes, here is something, ahem, serious. Professional. OK, only professional and not serious. Anyway – happy Christmas to those of you who celebrate it with this song by Tom Lehrer – an American singer-songwriter, satirist, polymath, mathematician, lecturer, …, … – which is, unbelievably, about sociology:

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The universe (and everything in it)

Dec 21, ’11 8:00 AM

As sociologists, we deal with a wide range of empirical and philosophical phenomena, but their scope, in universal terms, is quite narrow: locked somewhere between the individual human and the whole of humanity. With this in mind, the Idle Ethnographer admits to having a hard time justifying this particular post. Initially, I decided to post it just because it is amazing, fascinating, educational, and humbling. It is a visualisation of the universe and its physical scale.

But, being an Ethnographer, albeit Idle, I could not resist racking my brains for potential sociological uses. E.g., in the sociology of science, or that of Western European modernity. A symbolic analysis would reveal what is important enough to be given as an example in a scientific visualisation. The small and large objects are more impersonal, detached and ‘scientific’, while examples closer in size to humans only appear random, but their range is, in fact, highly socially conditioned (HIV virus, red blood cell, coffee bean, Rubic cube, silhouette or a male human being of average (Caucasian) height; Eiffel tower; USA map; length of a marathon). There are also a few hidden jokes: if you watch carefully, you’ll spot them. Or perhaps one can just watch it as a neat visual representation of the physical world in which we live. Or as a cosmology. Or a fairy tale. Or with the reverence of a tiny speck in the face of the universe. I leave this to your sociological imaginations.

Screenshot from the Scale of the Universe, scaleofuniverse.com

Click here to go to the Scale of the Universe website

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University life 41 years ago

Dec 12, ’11 8:00 AM

The sixth former entering university often has difficulty in adjusting to a new academic and social life…

… so this film, made by university of Warwick students back in the 1970s, served to prepare newcomers to university life (with a large pinch of salt). Back then, 8-year-old Warwick university was still in its infancy and far from the leading status and aspirations that it has today. Come to think of it, were there university rankings at all at that time? I am not sure. But there certainly was no Top Banana, Kazbah, Tesco, Costa, Warwick Arts Centre, or horrendous multi-storey car-parks. No one was talking of students as consumers, the ‘university experience’, or the ever-increasing string of unpaid internships that the luckiest students undergo on their way to the glories of permanent post-degree employment. There were the Beatles and the Stones and traditional lecturers. The campus was a fraction of its today’s size, with only a handful of buildings.

But some things haven’t changed. The Op Mobile No.10 was already there, as were some of the accomodation blocks (Rootes Halls, named after Lord Rootes, spelt with an “e”, and not in reference to a substantial part of the anatomy of a tree, as some of its residents are convinced. Thanks to inflation, its cost has increased 25-fold over the 41 years since the film was made.). Watch and see for yourself!

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Reality Check

Dec 10, ’11 8:00 AM

Right, we are going to do something different today. It’s called a Reality Check.

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Russia and democracy: analysis by Mark Harris

Dec 9, ’11 8:00 AM

«Вместе победим!» ('Together we shall win!'). Russian Legislative elections: 2011. Source: National Post (http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/12/03/russian-vote-monitor-detained-in-moscow-before-election/)

As someone who is half-Russian myself and counts Russian as her first language, but who has never set foot in Russia (only to Ukraine), I often find myself torn between a ‘Western’ and a ‘Russian’ logic. This is not something I can analyse: for better or worse, sociology does not give you the tools to rationalise your own self; in Marx’ expression, I am unable to see underneath my own feet. I seem to understand both, to some extent, but when they clash (and they quite often do), I often cannot make up my mind.

Good analyses of Russian affairs by Western authors are few and far between. This is why I was so impressed by Mark Harris’ brief but excellent analysis of Russian attitude to democracy, in the context of the recent elections in Russia that took place on 4 Dec 2011 and have not finished yet. Harrison’s argument cuts through a usual misunderstanding and a clash in the basic meanings taken for granted by people on both sides of Europe. His analysis also touches on the issue of translation – not only linguistic, but also cultural. In a nutshell: before judging, we need to make sure we are aware what exactly it is that the two sides understand when they use the same term, in this case – democracy and the terminology surrounding it. As Harris argues, and the Russian, Bulgarian, and English sections of my brain all agree, democracy does not necessarily mean the same thing in the different [national, cultural, and political] languages.

Mark Harrison writes about economics, public policy, and international affairs. He is a Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick and a research fellow of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University.

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Riding the bicycle to freedom

Dec 7, ’11 8:00 AM

Continuing yesterday’s theme (which we picked at Brainpickings.org), here is another book which provides ample visual material for a historical analysis of femininity in the last century: Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (With a Few Flat Tires Along the Way). Read Brainpicking’s review (with pictures!) here.

Wheels of Change

'Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (With a Few Flat Tires Along the Way)', by Sue Macy

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Women and Muscles: a history in image

Dec 5, ’11 8:00 AM

Venus with Biceps: a Pictorial History of Muscular Women by David L. Chapman and Patricia Vertinsky is an invaluable collection of rare images of athletic women in the 19th and 20th centuries. Maria Popova at Brainpickings has written a fantastic review which you can read here.

source: http://www.brainpickings.org/

One of the archival images in 'Venus with Biceps' (image source: Brainpickings.com)

P.S. Thanks to this, we have also discovered Brainpickings: definitely an online space we’ll be watching!

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