Category The Idle Ethnographer

Entries 54 Total Description

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.

Loneliness in Japan

May 7, ’12 8:00 AM

Japan is facing a decline in community spirit. Recent studies have shown that for the first time in history, the average number of people in a Tokyo home has dropped below two. While this is nothing new if we look at the rest of the industrialised world, Japanese sociologists are worried that this is becoming an acute problem in the context of an ageing society, and is creating new responsibilities for which the state and local authorities are simply not suited. Read the article and watch the news report on Al-Jazeera


Tokyo Christmas Streetscene (christmasstockimages.com) / CC BY 3.0

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Yesterday… (an ode to essay marking)

Apr 22, ’12 6:30 PM

‎Yesterday*

Yesterday, all the students seemed so far away.
Now a bunch of essays block my way,
My desk is now in disarray.

The pain of marking

Don't get me wrong, marking can be fun... but it is usually rushed and the marker feels a stab in the heart every time s/he reads something that is wrong... or worse: something that is not even wrong.

Suddenly, I avoid the university,
There’s a shadow hanging over me.
The end of term came suddenly.

Why they write so bad? Not a clue, I wouldn’t know.
I taught something wrong, now the errors overflow!

Yesterday, I was free to work on my research;
Now I need a place to hide away.
Instead, I am marking night and day.

All the same mistakes written time and time again!
Seventeen-point scale, fail or pass, but all in vain!

Yesterday, I avoided research like the plague,
All I did was file my notes away…
I want to do the same today.

What will happen now, all the scripts have coffee stains?
Even if they paid, that would not alleviate the pain!

Yesterday…

*A Sunday evening tribute to the genius of Sir Paul McCartney, written by one Idle Busy Ethnographer lost among empty cups coffee and red pens.

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How much sleep?

Mar 12, ’12 8:00 AM

In 2001, Roger Ekirch (historian at Virginia Tech) published an important paper that revealed a wealth of historical evidence that throughout our history humans used to have a different sleeping pattern from us today.  They used to have a “first sleep” which began about two hours after dusk, after which they woke up for an our or two, followed by “a second sleep”. However, this remains largely unknown to the general public.

During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.

And these hours weren’t entirely solitary – people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex.

A doctor’s manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day’s labour but “after the first sleep”, when “they have more enjoyment” and “do it better”.

(Stephanie Hegarty, “The myth of eight-hour sleep”, BBC News, 22 February 2012)

Roger Ekirch’s book, At day’s close: night in times past (2005)

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The invisible mothers

Mar 8, ’12 8:00 AM
These mysterious looking old photographs were not intended to be as sinister as they may appear to us. IN order to make the best use of the technology of the time, and to achieve a well-focussed photograph of the ever-fidgeting children, photographers used to apply this trick. More photos here
The invisible mothers. Photos: http://www.retronaut.co/2011/10/the-invisible-mother/

The invisible mothers. Photos: http://www.retronaut.co/2011/10/the-invisible-mother/

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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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