Historical Ethnography

La captura y procesamiento de ballenas es en Chile un “evento del pasado”, por lo que su estudio requiere el uso de herramientas metodológicas adecuadas, distintas a las tradicionales de la etnografía. El término “etnografía retrospectiva” nos sirve para denominar un enfoque que involucra el uso integrado de diversos tipos de fuentes: recuerdos de personas que pudieron observar directamente la experiencia ballenera o les hablaron de ella; documentos administrativos, científicos y literarios, noticias y entrevistas de prensa; visitas a los lugares donde la caza de ballenas se produjo y relevamiento de sus testimonios y huellas materiales. El objetivo de este trabajo es integrar la información fragmentada en un “todo” y así construir un relato que comunique tanto las generalidades como las particularidades de una actividad y un oficio que ya no se practica.
El relato está estructurado en dos partes. La primera está dedicada a mostrar un bosquejo cronológico general de la caza de ballenas, de lo general a lo particular, de lo antiguo a lo nuevo, de lo global a lo local; primero en el mundo, luego en Chile y después en Valdivia. Se describe, además, el modelo usado para estudiar el fenómeno: una etnografía histórica de las operaciones balleneras valdivianas.
En la segunda parte, se desarrolla un grupo de temas específicos relacionados con la caza de ballenas en/desde Valdivia. Es así como se muestran las características de la flota ballenera utilizada en la captura de los cetáceos, las plantas de procesamiento ocupadas para faenarlos y la producción obtenida, considerando las especies y ejemplares capturados y los productos elaborados durante toda la época de funcionamiento de las sociedades balleneras valdivianas.
En los dos últimos capítulos de la segunda parte me refiero a los diversos grupos y personas que participaron en estos emprendimientos y a la recepción que tuvieron las operaciones balleneras en la prensa local, relevando temas tales como los malos olores y los accidentes, especialmente los naufragios.
Se sugiere la presencia en Chile de una cultura ballenera originada en el siglo XIX, que fue modificada en el siglo siguiente con el aporte significativo de los balleneros noruegos. La industria ballenera en Valdivia sigue el modelo noruego pero reconoce la existencia de un conocimiento previo, proveniente de experiencias con el modelo norteamericano, tanto en sus variantes clásicas como tradicionales. La participación de japoneses en los últimos años de la actividad ballenera, veinte años después del cierre de las plantas valdivianas, no produjo cambios significativos en la cultura ballenera chilena.

The use of ethnographic methods is on the rise in International Relations. However, research in this area has largely been constrained to critical or interpretive analysis of nontraditional objects of study. This has been driven in part by two practical problems that limit ethnographic analysis: that of aggregation, as international phenomena are necessarily large in scale; and that of access, as institutional settings are often closed or secretive. While we commend critical and nontraditional research for driving much-needed expansion of the disciplinary agenda, we offer a complementary account, arguing that scholars can also use ethnographic methods in explanatory research. To do so, we draw on two methodological literatures in anthropology. The first approximates ethnographic research through historical immersion. The second applies ethnographic methods at multiple research sites, tracking transnational phenomena across them. The paper sketches prospective studies of each kind, concerning the creation and implementation of the United Nations. While neither method is entirely new to IR, the methodological literatures in question have yet to receive systematic treatment in the field.

The key question for many anthropologists and historians today is not whether to cross the boundary between their disciplines, but whether the idea of a disciplinary boundary should be sustained. Reinterpreting the dynamic interplay between archive and field, these essays propose a method for mutually productive crossings between historical and ethnographic research. It engages critically with the colonial pasts of indigenous societies and examines how fieldwork and archival studies together lead to fruitful insights into the making of different colonial historicities. Timor-Leste’s unusually long and in some ways unique colonial history is explored as a compelling case for these crossings.

SEE HERE: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/RoqueCrossing

When news of an uncontacted ‘lost tribe’ began emanating from the island of Bohol in the southern Philippines, visitors were fascinated by the group's unique language and complex writing system, used today by some five hundred people in limited domains. Though few persons have attempted to analyse the language—known today as Eskayan—exotic theories of its origins are widely circulated by outsiders. However, according to speakers, Eskayan was created by the ancestor Pinay who used the human body as inspiration. For Pinay, a language and its written mode were inextricable. In the twentieth century, Pinay's language was rediscovered by the rebel soldier Mariano Datahan who retransmitted it to his followers. This creation story is consistent with my linguistic analysis, which points to a sophisticated encryption of the regional Visayan language. Further, the particulars of how Eskayan was designed shed much light on the sociocultural conditions motivating its (re)creation. Implicit notions of linguistic materiality, boundedness, and inter-changeability are reflected in the relexification process carried out by Pinay/Datahan. In defiance of all imperial claimants to the island, Pinay and Datahan effectively reified a language community whose territorial rights were corporeally inscribed.

Resumen: La etnografía, como observación directa de la vida social y de las prácticas culturales de los grupos humanos, es un procedimiento científico de sarrollado a partir de la segunda mitad del siglo xix, concomitantemente en Eu ropa y en las Américas. En este artículo, sin embargo, trataremos de un jesuita peruano de otros tiempos: Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, que fue misionero en Pa raguay durante casi tres décadas, tiempo durante el cual se hizo «lingüista» de la lengua guaraní. Proponemos aquí mostrar en qué medida puede también ser considerado un «etnógrafo» de su época. Aunque el motivo más explícito de su obra lingüística fue proveer a los religiosos de un instrumento para aprender la lengua indígena, traducir en ella las «verdades» elementales del cristianismo y entender lo que los indígenas les confiaban en la confesión, los misioneros no siempre dejaron de recoger los sentidos más locales y cotidianos de las voces de sus interlocutores. Trataremos, pues, de determinar cómo se dio eso, sobre todo, en el Tesoro de la lengua guaraní del autor mencionado.

El Gobernador de Chiloé, Juan Victorino Martínez de Tineo, procede en 1743 a despachar una expedición al mando del alférez de infantería Mateo Abraham Evrard, con once piraguas y ciento sesenta hnmbres, con víveres para seis mesesl , en busca de todos los pertrechos de la fragata inglesa Wager, naufragada en las Islas Guayanecos el 14 de mayo de 1741. El Padre J. N. Walther señala que una de las consecuencias más importantes del viaje de Evrard es que se descubrió casualmente la nación de los caucahues, los que eran mansos
y apacibles. Si denominamos caucahues a los grupos de indígenas que vivían en las inmediaciones de las Islas Guayanecos, sabemos que, en realidad, habían sido
descubiertos muchos años antes. En este texto revisamos los diversos textos que dan noticias de los caucahues desde el siglo XVII.

Puszta is a widely known phenomenon that primarily denotes a deserted countryside and not the flat areas, vegetation, cattle grazing and some picturesque landscape items that are usually associated with. In Southern Transdanubia, a borderline during Ottoman rule for 143 years, settlement desertion became a crucial and overwhelming factor from 1543 to 1686. My paper addresses the age of reorganization (1686–1720), right after the Ottomans were defeated, and focuses on land use and the general appearance of the land. There are two major views on this situation. Some historians hold that the elaboration took place in a scarcely populated and " wild, " natural area, thus the process of colonization was inevitable. Meanwhile, other scholars who worked with local archival sources have pointed out that plenty of families survived there whose livelihood changed during the Ottoman occupation but they filled the land with human activities. This resulted in a different type of land structure, which was far from the so-called medieval landscape. In my paper I follow the second theory and depict the landscape in a minor area on the basis of archival data. I analyze the practices of land use in order to show the way the " puszta " did and did not exist. I also investigate the key factors that affected a new landscape shift, which brought about the colonial landscape.

The traditional shore whaling or “whale fishing” began in the area of Talcahuano in the first half of the nineteenth century and then spread to the south of Chile, to Chiloe Island. In this paper we develop a historical ethnography of shore whaling in Tumbes and Santa María Island, named in the literature of the time as “whale fishing”. Data on these operations are coming from a series of reports written in the early twentieth century, supplemented with information from interviews with people who knew firsthand the world of whalers. The integration of these data will allow us to write a narrative of whaling in south central Chile in the nineteenth century.

The Resolution for a National Language Policy Programme 2014-2018 was adopted by the Slovene parliament in the summer of 2013, and was intended to set a common agenda in the area of state language policy. In this thesis, I investigate its trajectory from inception to (attempted) implementation. My study analyses policymaking practices during a time of political, social and economic instability in Slovenia, and investigates how the roles of various actors involved with the policy changed along with the political landscape. It focusses particularly on the traditional role of linguists as authorities on language in Slovenia.

The paper is part of the Themenband on Johann Jacob Schudt, edited by Christoph Cluse and Rebekka Voß (Frankfurter Judaistische Beiträge 40/2015). It deals with a Czech manuscript on Jewish mores, authored by Karel Jugl, a Catholic priest in 1740s. Besides analyzing the manuscript, it attempts at describing the inner dynamics of the so-called Early Modern polemical ethnographies of Jews and the mechanisms responsible for their popularity.

Economic and social policies paved the way for inequality alleviation and wellbeing improvements in the lives of millions during the 2000s in Brazil. Drawing from ethnography conducted among recipients of the housing program “My House, My Life”, this article examines the ways public policies intersect with upward mobility. Charting the public and private trajectories of Dona Hilda—a 97-year-old poor black living in the periphery of Porto Alegre—I argue that mobility arising from within the widened scope of state interventions produced multiscale alignments between local politicians, marketers, planners, community leaders, and desiring citizens. To navigate this political, economic, and communitarian terrains, Dona Hilda engaged a laborious work for housing citizenship and worthiness that converted her into the program’s exemplary character. Unraveling the moral boundaries at the juncture of person, history and subjectivity, the cartography of subjective fragments is best suited to explore the lingering afterlives of public policies in present-day Brazil.

In Chile seven whaling stations between Iquique and Punta Arenas were built in the modern whaling environment. The first was built in 1905 and the last in 1956. Since 1983, none of the whaling stations is active. In this paper we want to tell the story of one of the oldest whaling stations in the country, which operated for 30 years (1906-1936): San Carlos de Corral, near Valdivia. The history of each whaling station in Chile is a "history of abandonment", dismantling, oblivion.

In this paper we study a whaling experiment that was projected by the Norwegian captain, Adolfo Andresen, developed between 1903 and 1904. Consisting of two incursions along the Patagonian-Fuegian archipelago, destined to the whaling and sealing, whaling experiment  that used for the first time equipment of the modern whaling tradition, in Magallanes, Chile and the southern hemisphere. The sources used consist of a set of 37 texts published between 1894 and 1904 in the newspapers El Comercio and El Magallanes of Punta Arenas, and in addition, a series of 12 letters contained in the Mauricio Braun Archive, information that allows to fully characterize the itinerary of the ship, the preparation of the whaling operation and the details of the incursions, providing new information for the better knowledge of the local and national whaling culture

Key founders of sociology such as Karl Marx and Max Weber, and key political/social theorists such as Alexis de Tocqueville, never considered social theory as separate from history and historical analysis. The prominent American sociologist Charles Wright Mills famously emphasized that all good sociology is historical sociology. Yet much of the social sciences today have become presentist, as they study the social and political world separate from history. Rather than interrogate why presentism has become the dominant pattern in the social sciences, we take advantage of the fact that comparative and historical sociology is an established subfield in American sociology today. This class offers an introduction survey of  this subfield, and aims to introduce students to different tropes in using historical sociology in their research.

Resumen. Se realizó una etnografía histórica de los cambios surgidos tras la coloni-zación europea del Orinoco Medio, para comprender el desarrollo de distintas represen-taciones y dinámicas del espacio y del tiempo, incluyendo procesos etnogenéticos asociados a la construcción del paisaje, desde el establecimiento de misiones hasta la actualidad, en la región entre los ríos Suapure y Parguaza y en la comunidad mapoyo de El Palomo, Estado Bolívar. Se afirma que dentro del territorio mapoyo existe un proceso de inclusión de comu-nidades vecinas, comprensible por la necesidad de reproducción del grupo y de su(s) identidad(es). Se cuestiona la idea de los territorios indígenas como estáticos, delimitados por fronteras impermeables. Entiendo que los procesos son continuos y fluctuantes, donde las dinámicas de movilización y formas de administración, cooperación y resistencia juegan un rol importante en las diversas situaciones coloniales. Para explicar las dinámicas espaciales y sociales del grupo actual a través de su historia, la investigación tuvo dos dimensiones: una etnográfica, referente a la demogra-fía y a la organización espacial, y una dimensión histórica, con la revisión de documentos y mapas de la región para analizar cómo cambiaron las representaciones y políticas espa-ciales, definiendo territorios exclusivos o permitiendo espacios de inclusión y diversidad. Palabras clave. Cronotopos, Etnografía histórica, representaciones espaciales, evolución cartográfica, indígenas mapoyo, reproducción de fronteras étnicas Abstract. I provide an historical ethnography of the social, economic and political changes in the Middle Orinoco region since European colonization in order to understand the development of different spatial and temporal representations and dynamics, including ethnogenetic processes linked to the use and construction of landscape since the establishment of Jesuit missions during the 18 th-Century until the present in the region between the Suapure and Parguaza rivers and, specifically what became the Mapoyo indigenous community of El Palomo, Bolivar State, Venezuela. I demonstrate that within the Mapoyo territory there has been a process of including neighboring communities and groups, either indigenous or creole, which could be understood from the reproductive needs of the Mapoyo group and its (singular and plural) identities. In order to explain the spatial and social dynamics of the present-day Mapoyo through their history, my research has two dimensions: An ethnographic one, comprising demography and spatial organization, and a historical dimension, which included the study of written documents and historical maps showing changes in spatial representations and policies, which may have defined exclusive territories or allowed spaces of inclusion, plurality and diversity.

In a study published in 1969, Hermann Bausinger compares the situation of ethnog-raphy to a parallelogram: " the hypostatized object is always smaller in reality, and the compensatory construction is always larger " (Bausinger 1982: 9). The narrowing of the parallelogram's base is increasingly perceptible if we focus our attention on the study of folk art: we have to consider not only the increasingly debatable framework of the concept of folk, but also the ever more intensive blurring of the categories of art and material world, handicrafts, and cottage industry, or even the impossibility to draw clear boundaries between them. The objects of our analysis waver even more in the 20 th century: we have to extend the concept of folk art not only in the direction of the popular, but we also have to apply some narrowing of the concept as a niche art. In fact, from the second half of the 20 th century onwards, we can no longer talk of a motivated folk art, but rather about handicrafts, and we also have to introduce the concept of hobby activity into the terminology of our investigations. This study attempts to survey the 20 th century forms of the lace-making cottage industry of the Székely Land proceeding precisely within this delicate border area. The research on lace-making has hitherto been quite neglected by the ethno-graphic literature. In the portions concerned with lace of his monographic work entitled A magyarság néprajza [The Ethnography of the Hungarians], Károly Viski dedicated little space to the filet lace-making (rece) from Magyargyerőmonostor (Mănăstireni) (Viski 1923: 335). After the brief summary of Antal Szmik from 1925, which only mentioned Transylvanian lace-making in passing (Szmik 1925: 57), it was only Kornélia Ferencz who discussed the sewn laces from the Lugos (Lugoj) and Kalotaszeg (Călata) region (Ferencz 1937). Hajnal F. Halay offered an interpretation of the famous bobbin lace-making from Torockó (Rimetea) (Halay 2010) and, more recently, Lilla Erdei T. discussed in a separate ethnographic study the popular use of laces and primarily the role of the lace from Torockó (Rimetea) in popular clothing (Erdei T. 2005, 2010). Recently, renewed attempts were made to present the most important technologies and centres within the framework of

La unidad cultural de Iberoamérica es un anhelo colectivo y al mismo tiempo la realidad más esquiva, un dilema permanente. Por utopía o por crudo interés mercantil, representa el sueño de todo editor de libros en lengua castellana. No así para sus pares lusófonos. Algunos creen alcanzarla. A otros se les esfuma como un espejismo. Sólo existe como totalidad a nivel de un mito. En las tramas de la historia, en la tristeza de los trópicos, todo parece fragmentario. En ciertos períodos, sin embargo, la unidad de las culturas nacionales de este continente simbólico avanzó sobre vastos territorios unidos por canales comunicativos, trazados por editores idealistas y ambiciosos. Antes de la Primera Guerra Mundial, era únicamente posible para grandes emporios trasnacionales como Hachette, Appleton, Ollendorf, Jackson, Garnier, Cabaut o para un puñado de editores españoles como Gaspar y Roig, Calleja o Espasa & Calpe. Recién al tiempo de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, algunas editoriales latinoamericanas entraron en dicha competición. El deseo de participar del negocio y/o de contribuir para una completa emancipación de las culturas del continente se gestó como actitud política, moral, ante las barreras para expandir la producción de bienes simbólicos más allá de sus mercados nacionales. Frente a las políticas proteccionistas españolas o las inequidades económicas, un lenguaje de denuncia, bélico, acompañó los intentos de Losada, Sudamericana y Fondo de Cultura Económica para expandirse con sucursales y establecer otras condiciones del intercambio cultural entre los países de Iberoamérica. A partir de una historia etnográfica de la editorial Siglo XXI (y especialmente de la trayectoria de su fundador: Arnaldo Orfila Reynal -La Plata 1897 - México DF 1998- ), mi trabajo explora el ápice del combate que supuso la integración de los mercados editoriales de este continente simbólico. En conclusiones se dispone de una discusión sobre los términos "América Latina", "Iberoamérica" y otras escalas imprescindibles para cualquier análisis de la producción editorial en castellano

The research paper is an ethnographic study of the Rabari community of Kutch. The available studies on Rabaris are based on narratives’ of life and history of Rabaris through the anthropological surveys conducted during the British colonial times. The following study is based on the field works conducted in the region of Kutch and thereafter through the primary and secondary versions of the folk memories of the Rabari community which remains the significant identity of the Rann and its regions in Kutch. [

A multispecies ethnography of year-round stall-feeding of cattle in byre-houses illuminates problems and opportunities of exhibiting historical human-animal relationships in open-air museums. Although received wisdom claims modernization alienated from nature, agricultural intensification in the Economic Enlightenment increased the intimacy of sociality with livestock. Year-round stall-feeding coexisted with living in byre-houses, and dairymaids began doing almost all of their work close to cows. This complicates straightforward narratives of modernity and animal agency. With byre-houses, open-air museums are uniquely positioned to tell this story of intimate working and living together and help re-center animals in often human-centered cultural history, even though welfare problems of housing in historical byre-houses, the risk of sentimentalizing past husbandry, and echoing the historical absenting of animals can present complications.

Nisly, Jadon (2020): Under One Roof Year-round. The Multispecies Intimacy of Co-habiting with Cows in Byre-houses since the Economic Enlightenment. In Ethnologia Europaea 49 (2), 50–69.

En el marco de una investigación interdisciplinaria sobre problemas de extrema pobreza, pudimos estudiar, en particular, un modo de vida, en el cual se establece una compleja red de relaciones entre un grupo humano con su ambiente específico, con el propósito fundamental de
asegurar su supervivencia, poco conocido en la literatura antropológica: los salineros, grupo cuya subsistencia depende básicamente de la sal que artesanalmente sacan, en los meses de verano, de las lagunas costeras en la zona central (en este caso de la Laguna de Cahuil, ubicada en la desembocadura del Río Nilahue, Provincia Cardenal Caro, VI Región).

Das Papier plädiert für eine integrale historische Populärliteratur-forschung, die die Geschichte der Texte, Stoffe, Motive systematisch verknüpft mit der Geschichte der Umgangs- und Gebrauchsweisen. Seine These ist, dass es für eine zeitgemässe Kulturwissenschaft soziale Praxen sind, die populäre Literatur als historisch konkretes kulturales Phänomen konstituieren: diskursive Praxen, die die Hierarchien zwischen oben und unten vorschreiben, materielle Praxen wie die Ohrfeige für den, der <Schlechtes> liest, und symbolische Praxen wie die Desinfizierung von Leihbibliotheksbeständen.

In this essay, Ali Sipahi describes how the Gezi Park protests of 2013 transformed his thinking about the 1985 massacres of Armenians in Harput, Turkey, analyzed in his CSSH essay, “Deception and Violence in the Ottoman Empire: The People’s Theory of Crowd Behavior during the Hamidian Massacres of 1895.” https://cssh.lsa.umich.edu/2021/03/01/battle-of-agencies-released/

This chapter presents the theoretical underpinnings of historical ethnography in the analysis of policy discourse and examines key methodological considerations in studies which take this approach. I begin by situating such research theoretically according to three dimensions, the discursive, ethnographic and historiographic, pointing out existing synergies between relatively distinct theoretical and methodological traditions. To examine how policy analyses can benefit from integrating these approaches, I then present a case study in which this methodology was applied, focussing on the development and implementation of a language policy in Slovenia. I show how the use of historiographic methods of gathering sources and a discursive approach to analysing them allowed me to develop a detailed description of a highly complex policy text despite having no direct access to back-stage political deliberations.

Trabalhos recentes no campo do patrimônio, especialmente aqueles relacionados à ética do conhecimento, promoveram um foco no que é chamado de grupos "comuns", "locais", "populares" e "comunitários". Embora seja um corretivo necessário para histórias de pesquisas extrativistas, de cima para baixo, esse foco produziu um relativo desinteresse (ou até mesmo aversão) em examinar as elites do patrimônio e suas burocracias, como às relacionadas ao Estado. Desse modo, esse ensaio utiliza uma etnográfica do patrimônio do Estado em Ruanda, para criticar a linguagem e as prioridades éticas dos estudos patrimoniais em relação aos diferentes grupos sociais. Aqui o argumento segue pela importância, ambos na ética e na prática, que o mesmo nível de atenção seja dado à todas as partes interessadas tidas como "comuns" e aos atores de elite.

En Chile se construyeron siete plantas balleneras entre Iquique y Punta Arenas en el marco de la caza moderna de ballenas. En 1905 se construyó la primera y en 1956 la última. Desde 1983 ninguna de las plantas se encuentra activa. En este trabajo queremos contar la historia de una de las plantas balleneras más antiguas en el país, que funcionó durante 30 años (1906-1936): la de San Carlos de Corral, situada cerca de Valdivia. La historia de cada planta ballenera en Chile es una “historia de abandono”, de desmantelamiento, de olvido.