Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology最新文献

{"title":"The Undersea Network","authors":"Kristin Decker","doi":"10.5860/choice.191754","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.191754","url":null,"abstract":"Starosielski, N. (2015) The Undersea Network. Durham: Duke University PressBook reviewRarely did a book on my desk get as much attention of colleagues passing by as this one, thanks to its cover showing two massive, concrete-coated cables which mysteriously emanate from the water somewhere in Guam, at a sandy shore of the Pacific Ocean. Withered and overcome with rust, these cables could be the relicts of a bygone era; they are, in fact, part of today's network infrastructure that directs the largest part of data traffic between North America, Asia, and Australia and keeps many digital lives working the way they do.Given that undersea cables are absent from daily experience and remain invisible for most of its users, it might come as a surprise that such hefty material is still needed for running the Internet. More and more ordinary activities - both professional and profane - require a network connection and (ever larger) amounts of data, but the cable infrastructure behind these activities is hardly taken into account when the vices and virtues of living within digital technologies are discussed. \"Although contemporary networking continues to depend on wired infrastructure, we lack a language - beyond terms like 'a series of tubes' - to describe just how grounded these systems remain\" (p. 9), states Nicole Starosielski and experiments with constructing that very language in her debut monograph which explores the transpacific cable network historically and ethnographically. By following the network's route, the author reconstructs some of the immense efforts mobilized for the construction of this infrastructure as well as the numerous frictions - technical, environmental, economic, political - that occurred during that process, rebuking the notion of the Internet as a seemingly free-floating and delocalized entity and turning it into a place-bound and fragile matter in need of incessant \"repair and maintenance\" (Graham & Thrift 2007).Far and wide travels through 13 countries and some amount of patience were required to get hold of a recalcitrant object of ethnographic inquiry that only surfaces at scattered landing points all along the shores of the Pacific Ocean and at cable stations usually kept under surveillance and hidden from view (with the notable exception of Papenoo, Tahiti, where the cable landing point has become a memorial site). When Starosielski opens her diary, sketching the diverse environments, both material and cultural, the network runs through, it dawns on the reader that every mile of her strenuous journey has been worthwhile. Hard to imagine how an exclusively historical or theoretical account could have depicted the infrastructure's manifold contours in such stunning concreteness.The author digs out traces of the undersea network by means of interviews, observations, and analyses of a wide range of written sources, contemporary and historical, and puts the materiality of the network centre stage in most of the book's six c","PeriodicalId":30129,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology","volume":"7 1","pages":"143"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71028527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Linking Social Capital, Cultural Capital and Heterotopia at the Folk Festival","authors":"B. Quinn, Linda Wilks","doi":"10.21427/D7BP6G","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21427/D7BP6G","url":null,"abstract":"IntroductionThis paper seeks to investigate the role of the folk festival in transforming interconnections between people, space and culture. It uses data collected at two longestablished folk festivals: Sidmouth Folk Week in southern England and Feakle Traditional Music Festival in western Ireland and draws on and interlinks three sets of theoretical ideas: social capital, cultural capital and heterotopia.First, it conceives of festivals as \"other\" places, in line with Foucault's 1967 (Foucault 1984, Foucault 2008) writings on the concept of heterotopia. It uses empirical evidence from two cases to investigate how different social relations are fostered within the festival place as heterotopia. Having used Foucault's concept of heterotopia to investigate how social relations become changed, this paper then draws on theories of social capital (Bourdieu 2002 [1986]; Putnam 2000) to deepen understanding of how these processes are facilitated through the workings of the festivals. It investigates the extent to which these changed social relations impact on bonding and bridging social capital; and the role played by cultural capital. The paper concludes by suggesting how these three sets of theoretical ideas could be combined into a useful conceptual framework which would enable others to further investigate these issues.Festivals as other placesFor Foucault, festivals constitute an example of what he termed heterotopia (Foucault 1984: 7). Heterotopic sites (Foucault 1984: 3) are defined as ones in which all the other real sites within a culture are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted: the relationship of the heterotopic site is to \"suspect, neutralize or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect.\" Foucault went on to explain that six principles underpin the idea of heterotopia: (1) all cultures constitute heterotopias, although in varied forms, (2) their function can change over time, (3) they juxtapose several incompatible sites within a single real place, (4) they break or disrupt traditional concepts of time, (5) they may require certain acts, performances or rituals to gain entry to them, and (6) they exist only in relation to all other sites and spaces. Heterotopia is a wide-ranging but under-developed conceptual framework which includes both macro and micro elements. Foucault himself did not fully develop the concept, and he has been criticised accordingly (Johnson 2013). However, it has been widely used by researchers who, like Saldanha (2008: 20181), interpret heterotopias as \"countersites,\" standing \"in an ambivalent, though mostly oppositional, relation to society's mainstream.\" Saldanha goes on to explain that in contrast to utopias, heterotopias are located in real, physical, space-time, and serve to temporarily introduce different ways of ordering society and space into particular places, at particular times. For Hetherington (1997:40), meanwhile, heterotopias are spaces where \"an altern","PeriodicalId":30129,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology","volume":"7 1","pages":"23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68646470","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development","authors":"A. Matei","doi":"10.4324/9780203876282","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203876282","url":null,"abstract":"Paul Dragos Aligica and Peter J. Boettke (2009). Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development. The Bloomington School. London and New-York: Routledge.ReviewThe recent passing of distinguished professors Elinor and Vincent Ostrom has bereaved the academic community of the guidance of two prominent scholars. Their intellectual generosity was at the heart of a novel way of doing research: in a collaborative manner, professors and apprentices working side by side, across disciplinary barriers and bringing together diverse research methods and tools, exactly like in a Workshop. This is how the institution they have created at Indiana University was called, a Workshop. While this may sound for some as a very familiar way of doing research nowadays, this was not at all the case when the workshop was founded in 1973. Moreover, they set the foundations for a complex and novel way of building social theory and for connecting it to its practical facet, institutional development and policy analysis.An overview of their legacy and their fundamental contribution to the advancement of research in social sciences is only natural in such circumstances. To achieve this, I am using Paul Dragos Aligica's and Petter Boettke's book \"Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development. The Bloomington School\" as a vehicle. The book undertakes a careful consideration of the essential contributions to social science Elinor and Vincent Ostrom have brought.The purpose of the above mentioned work is to present in a systematic and comprehensive manner the foundations of the Bloomington School to social science scholars, students and researchers. In the authors' own words, the book is an attempt to \"explore, reconstruct and outline the elements of the basic vision of the Bloomington research program in institutional analysis and development - the assumptions, themes and basic philosophy that frame the research activity and theory building done by the scholars associated with this School\" (Aligica & Boettke, 2009, p. 4). While the work on common-pool resources and on federalism is better known, this is an outline of the larger context in which this type of research was developed, its history, main premises and concepts.The book is structured in three parts and six chapters, to which the conclusions and a postscript are to be added. The first part presents the theory of governance systems as a natural outgrowth of the 1960s and 1970s debates on metropolitan reform. These chapters introduce the main concepts on which the institutional analysis theoretical framework was built: policentricity and monocentricity, public economy and industry, co-production, the nature of goods and services, and public entrepreneurship. The second part illuminates the reader with regard to the social philosophy developed by Vincent Ostrom, a philosophy that integrates reflections on the \"nature of social order, the tension between freedom and organization, the nature and functions of social rule","PeriodicalId":30129,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology","volume":"3 1","pages":"149"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.4324/9780203876282","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70598886","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}