The Reservedness of the English Ballet Style
In the essay 'Notes on the English Character', E.M. Forster 1996 1926 13 reflects on the incompleteness of national characters, especially the English character But the English character is incomplete in a way that is particularly annoying to the foreign observer. It has a bad surface - self-complacent, unsympathetic, and reserved. Perhaps the English need foreigners to release them. This seems at least to have been one explanation to the legendary partnership between Russian Rudolf Nureyev and...
Ordinary Objects Sacred Objects
Museums of everyday life, and museums more generally, typically contain objects, often in great numbers. The Skye Museum of Island Life expanded from one 'blackhouse' single-storey thatch-roofed stone dwelling opened in 1965 to five such houses full of the 'old things' with which its creator has filled it. Agricultural implements stack up in profusion, pottery crowds the dresser, photographs fill wall after wall. Some of these objects are historically unique and even precious -such as some...
Social Technology
I want to talk about this social environment as 'social technology'. By that I mean something not so far from what Jack Goody 1977 meant when he argued that the kind of technology a society uses has a profound impact on its social organization, its culture and its cognitive performance. For example, Goody 1976 and Stock 1983 , Street 1984 , Anderson 1983 and others, have argued that the technology of writing externalizes memory, shifts 'truth' from the mind of an authoritative elder into an...
Disciplined Ballet Bodies
As Howard Morphy 1996 astutely observes, the anthropology of the body needs to include an anthropology of clothing and bodily adornment, which should be treated as an area of inquiry in aesthetic anthropology. This can propel us to view the English ballet style as performed by more or less authentic 'English bodies', but otherwise there is not anything particularly English about constructions of the body at the Royal Ballet. Apart from differences in the national styles, the body is one of the...
Three Tenets
The anthropological study of modern-day Britain was, with the partial exception of the Mass Observation project between the two World Wars and since , originally the province of geographers Alwyn Rees, Life in a Welsh Countryside 1951 Bill Williams, The Sociology of an English Village Gosforth 1956 and A West Country Village Ashworthy 1963 and sociologists Michael Young and Peter Wilmott, Family and Kinship in East London 1957 Norman Dennis et al., Coal is our Life 1956 . I will not rehearse...
We Cant Rewrite the History Books
' and, of course, we can't rewrite the history books', the commentator had said. E. H. Carr in his famous lecture 'What is History ' questioned that very point, concluding that history was 'an unending dialogue between the present and the past' Carr 1964 30 . The ceremony's commentary had gone on to inform those assembled that Tynwald Day has survived, little changed, for more than a thousand years. What dialogue, therefore, was being presented here If not an invention of 'tradition', a la...
Helena Wulff
Historical and political circumstances such as nationalism are often negotiated, both in terms of identification and repudiation, through the arts, music and dance. In the ballet world, which has a tradition of transnationality with ballet people moving to other countries or between different countries on longer or shorter stays, the idea of national ballet styles is still prominent, especially in transnational contexts. There is a constant awareness of the style and standard of dancing...
Ballet Aesthetics in Britain From the Professional Point of View
The anthropology of art and aesthetics has mostly dealt with non-Western societies, or with problems around transformation or appropriation of non-Western objects and expressive forms in the West, yet this needs to be complemented with studies on art and aesthetics within the West cf. Maquet 1986, Thomas 1997 . This is so because of growing cultural exchange which makes the Western non-Western distinction unclear, as Thomas 1997 argues, but also because of a changing political and cultural...
The Search for Subcultures
Given a strong central tendency in both personal values and perceptions of Welshness, our next step was to search for any sociological variables that might define subcultures with distinct views. This analysis was limited to data from the northern site, since Lampeter, as a college town, has a demographic profile that is less typical of Welsh towns in general. This left the southern town on which to test any theories we developed from the analysis of the northern data.1 Residents of Wales make...
Research Ethics Committees History and International Context
Concerns about the ethics of medical research have existed throughout the development of specialist medical knowledge Lock 1995 . These focus on the morality of doing things to living people that have never been done before and whether the potential harm outweighs potential benefit. One of the earliest examples of legal intervention in human research dates from 1898. Albert Neisser, professor of dermatology and venereology at the University of Breslau was fined by the Royal Disciplinary Court...
Reciprocity
Reciprocity has also long been a crucial part of the social-scientific toolbox of sociality. It is reciprocity which is essential for social cohesion, asserted Simmel stable interpersonal relations and a stable social system depend on a reciprocity of gratification, Parsons averred economic transaction between two parties entails continuing reciprocal action and reaction from both sides, Sahlins attested 'homo reciprocus', Becker concluded. For a definition of reciprocity we may turn to a...
Inalienable Possessions and Biographical Objects
To help refine the nature of the object relations involved here let us briefly consider two particular 'special' cases inalienable possessions, as formulated by Annette Weiner 1992 and Janet Hoskins' concept of biographical objects 1998 . In an account partly based on a re-analysis of the famous Trobriand Kula described by Malinowski 1922 , Weiner examines cases of what she terms the 'paradox of keeping while giving'. In Kula exchange, valuables vay'gua - shell arm-bands and necklaces -...
A Better Way to Describe Intracultural Diversity
By eliminating any assumptions about the significance of demographic groups, and focusing instead on the views of individuals, we were able to use the centrality scores of respondents to determine where each was situated with respect to the local hegemonic values and views of Welshness. We can think of each person as having a position on each of these two dimensions. One might be very close to the cultural consensus on both dimensions, on one or the other of the dimensions, or on neither. In...
Peter Collins
'. . . all we seem to do is talk . . .' A Quaker after a particularly gruelling meeting for 'I. . . hear voices in everything, and dialogic relations among them.' Bakhtin 1986 169 Introduction There are two libraries in the Quaker meeting house in Dibdenshaw a pseudonym , in the North of England. As I browse through and rearrange the small collection of books stored on shelves and tables near the entrance I find several that relate, in one form or another, to 'the Quaker story' for instance...
Carol Trosset and Douglas Caulkins
In recent years, the study of values has assumed a more central place in social science Huntington and Lawrence 2000 Inglehardt 1998 . For anthropologists, however, values are frequently subsumed under notions of cultural and behavioural norms. Something like values have reappeared as psychological anthropologists have paid increasing attention to concepts of personhood the social meanings of being a good human individual in a particular culture , and to the ways that these vary between...
Nigel Rapport Isi
The chapters in this section deal with practices and techniques which make up for some sense of deficit, loss or trauma in modern life in Britain from overly rapid rates of change to the 'massification' of social life, entrepreneurial pressures to consume and succeed, and unemployment and retirement. Through a variety of 'strategies of modernity' may be achieved or regained a sense of personhood, of continuing local identity, of self-worth, resistance and self-control. Such strategies may span...
Nigel Rapport 1
The chapters in this section explore the links between nationalism and various kinds of ritual or ceremonial performance. The latter is seen to provide a stage on which nationalism can be both celebrated and contested, reconstituted or replaced by regional identities both intra-national and trans-national. At the same time nationalism is itself a discourse through which other aspects of identity are construed and negotiated the hierarchical, the civil-religious, the autobiographical....
Approaching Britain
In what follows I refer especially, though not exclusively, to the Skye Museum of Island Life on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, a museum which I first came to visit during the 1980s as part of fieldwork concerned with matters of identity, cultural revival and history in the Scottish Highlands Macdonald 1997a . I have also returned more recently to spend time at the Museum and to talk with those involved in running it, especially its creator, Jonathan Macdonald who was born and brought up on the...
Introduction Hqa
Important correspondences exist between literary and anthropological enterprises, I would contend, such that reading the English novelist E.M. Forster furthers my interpretation of lives in the English village of Wanet the site of my field research , while writing about Wanet furthers my appreciation of Forster I can profitably zigzag between the voices of Forsterian characters and those of my informants in Wanet, and list significant overlaps in the ways they and their authors Forster and I...
Contextualizing the Armenian Study
In the late 1960s and 1970s, the efflorescence of ethnic studies was driven by a reinterpretation of the historicity of ethnicity. During the first half of the twentieth century, inspired by an earlier generation of European theorists from Durkheim to Tonnies, scholars such as the members of the Chicago School led by Robert Park, had tended to regard ethnic affiliation as a premodern anachronism and, as such, assumed that it would inevitably be overtaken by the forces of state formation,...
Notes Qzp
1. The title is borrowed from Strathern's 'Culture in a Netbag' 1981 . This mis use of the phrase is wordplay on two themes critiques of some feminist positions on the notion of 'woman' a theme in Strathern's paper , and the popular use of information and communications technologies 'networks' as a means to generate a discourse on perceived cultural change. 2. I am not here concerned with the analytical study of 'network' as a concept. See Riles 2000 for a critical analysis of the use of the...
References Geb
Abu-Lughod, L. 1986 Veiled Sentiments Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society, Berkeley University of California Press. Baumann, G. 1996 Contesting Culture Discourses of Identity in Multi-ethnic London, Cambridge Cambridge University Press. Borgatti, S.P. 1992 ANTHROPAC 4.91, Columbia Analytic Technologies. Bowie, F. 1993 'Wales from Within Conflicting Interpretations of Welsh Identity', In S. Macdonald ed. Inside European Identities, Oxford Berg. Brow, J. 1996 Demons and Development The Struggle...
At Home at the Ballet Abroad in Britain
It was in the autumn of 1994 that I went to London to do what was in fact my second field study there. The first one, my rite-de-passage into anthropology, took place during altogether fifteen months in the early 1980s when I was studying a group of black and white teenage girls in an inner city area of South London for my PhD thesis Wulff 1988, 1995 .4 This time I was heading for the other end of the British class and race system as a part of a two-year study on ballet as a transnational...
References Tmj
Amit-Talai, V. 1998 'Risky Hiatuses and the Limits of Social Imagination Expatriacy in the Cayman Islands', in N. Rapport and A. Dawson eds Migrants of Identity Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement, Oxford and New York Berg. Bazin, F. C. 1997 Much Inclin'd to Music The Manx and their Music before 1918, Douglas Manx Heritage Foundation. Cannadine, D. 1992 1983 'The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual The British Monarchy and the Invention of Tradition, c.1820-1977', in E. Hobsbawm...
The Armenian Diaspora Through the Looking Glass
In the early 1980s, the diasporic network of the London Armenians seemed important in understanding this particular case but certainly did not have the celebrated standing it has now been accorded. However, it seems that, in the shift from ethnicity to diaspora as master tropes of social diversity and migration, two unfortunate tendencies have been preserved respectively an inclination toward ever more expansive definitions of the related concept and the interpretation of this status i.e. first...
Diaspora as an Icon of Postmodernity
Amid the proliferating appearance of diaspora in a variety of scholarly literatures, two particular trends stand out. In one of these, diaspora appears tacked onto fairly conventional and localized accounts of immigrant populations. Accounts which might once have had 'ethnic' or 'immigrant' as identifying descriptors now rely on the euphemism of 'diaspora' without much in the way of justification or theorization. Tellingly, diaspora often appears more prominently in the titles of such pieces...
Anne Rowbottom
One warm summer evening I stood squashed among a mass of people, contained behind crush barriers, outside a cinema in London's West End. This crowd had not gathered to see a film, they were there to see the Duchess of York attend a charity performance. The Duchess, resplendent in evening gown and diamond tiara, arrived in a gleaming chauffeur-driven car to be met by bows and curtseys from her official reception party. As she swept past my section of the cheering crowd I overheard an American...
Meeting Discourse A Trinity
In considering these further aspects of meeting I began to develop a threefold delineation of Quakerism as encountered in the field. Quakers not only talk - they write, and emphasize the written text. It is among the texts in the two libraries at Dibdenshaw that we most easily locate examples of the first mode of Quaker discourse. First, then, we can identify a canonic discourse, best exemplified by the text entitled Quaker Faith and Practice 1995 , the revised version of Christian Faith and...
Sarah Green The Structure of the ICT Hype
I will briefly take the media hype about ICTs seriously initially rather a difficult step, I have to admit . What marks this hype out is its character of radical doubt the possibility that the structure of social and material connections, their form as opposed to their content, is radically changing. And as outlined above, the net has rapidly become both metaphor and metonym for this postmodern condition, while also being regarded as one of its ultimate products and one of the driving forces...
The Real Royalists
So far I have been using the terms 'public' and 'people', but in a large-scale society this is an undifferentiated and ultimately nebulous term. As it does not provide a population that can be studied ethnographically, my focus of interest in this chapter is with a group of men and women who make a particularly enthusiastic engagement with the monarchy. I first became aware of the existence of these 'real royalists', as they style themselves, in the autumn of 1988. During 1989 and 1990 I...
Conclusions From Discourse and Narrative to Dialogism
My preference for the term 'dialogism' rather than 'discourse' or 'narrative' for example is easily explained. Before fully appreciating the importance of Bakhtin's ideas relating to the construction of our selves I argued in favour of the fundamentally co-authored nature of everyday narratives Collins 1996a . Bakhtin endeavoured over the course of several decades to develop, though rather unsystem-atically Dentith 1995 88 Morson and Emerson 1990 232 the concept of the dialogic to express and...
References Kfh
Anderson, J. 1996 'On the Social Order of Cyberspace - Knowledge Workers and New Creoles', Social Science Computer Review 14 7-9. Ardill, S., and Sullivan, S.O. 1986 'Upsetting an Applecart Difference, Desire and Lesbian Sadomasochism', Feminist Review 31-57. - 1989 'Sex in the Summer of 88', Feminist Review 127-34. Aug , M. 1995 Non-places Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, London Verso. - 1999 The War of Dreams Studies in Ethno Fiction, London Pluto. Baudrillard, J. 1994...
Nigel Rapport Jqm
The chapters in this section examine the nature of community its making and unmaking through the use of different kinds of discourse which individuals strategically and contingently draw on in the course of their lives. Community is seen to be a matter of shared practices of representation. This is true whether the substantive basis of community turns out to be ethnicity, religiosity or locality. The latter notions cannot be treated analytically as descriptions of social identities always or...
Westrigg Littlejohn
Ardener, S. 1984 The Incorporated Wife, London Croom Helm. Arensberg, C. 1937 The Irish Countryman, London Macmillan. -and Kimball, S. 1940 Family and Community in Ireland, Cambridge MA Ashley, K. 1990 'Introduction', in K. Ashley ed. Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism, Bloomington Indiana University Press. Aug , M. 1995 Non-places, London Verso. - 1998 A Sense for the Other, Stanford Stanford University Press. Banton, M. 1955 The Coloured Quarter Negro Immigrants in an...
The Tynwald Ceremony
As the starting time for the Ceremony approached, the grandstand started to fill, and the seated audience looked down on the green expanse of the Front Field with its gathering crowds. The ladies of the Manx Folk Dance Society weaved in and out of a complex jig. Hundreds of people jostled for position along the retaining wall of the processional pathway, keen to gain a good view. Further back, others wandered at leisure around the field, or in and out of the Homecomer s Tent, or played with...