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This article discusses papers included in the current issue. Each article deals with contrasting fields of expertise, identified and described by three ethnographically motivated anthropologists. The articles include "Counting llamas and accounting for people: livestock, land and citizens in southern Bolivia," by Maggie Bolton; "Transformative capacity, information technology, and the making of business ‘experts'," by Hannah Knox et al; and "Subjectivity, visual technology, and public culture: watching the ethnographic film, Malanggan Labadama in New Ireland," by Karen Sykes.

This paper discusses nihilism as it relates to contemporary urban multiculture in outer East London. It addresses how contemporary discourses on, and performances of, nihilism signal shifts in the constitution of urban multiculture. Attention is paid to acts of anti-sociability (and sociability) for what they reveal about contemporary urban rearrangement, and in particular the re-formation of urban multiculture in a moment defined by globalization, virtual communication, ethnic diversity and neoliberal marginalization. Through addressing discourses on, and performances of, nihilism the overall argument of the paper is for a renewal of the terms on which we understand and engage with urban multiculture, and for an appreciation of how relations between class, race and culture have shifted since key texts on the subject were published. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a series of ethnographic encounters collected while hanging around at a seafood stand in east London, the following article aims to explore the relationship between individual expressions of distaste and the production of class, ethnic and generational forms of distinction. Starting with the visceral expressions of distaste directed towards a seafood stand, the following paragraphs draw on a combination of historical and ethnographic data rendered through a matrix of anthropological, sociological and psychoanalytic theory, to explore the role of everyday ambient experiences and the stratifying processes that cut across the lives of the city's inhabitants. Arguing against purely biological explanations of disgust, the paper explores how social histories and cultural experience inflect gut responses to the sensoria that suffuse urban environments. Moving the focus beyond the social construction of urban sensibilities, the paper goes on to develop an account of culturally inflected forms of distaste, shaping the city and the lives of its inhabitants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the contested and racialised nature of Englishness as a national identity. Based on qualitative interviews of white mothers in London, the paper examines the different ways in which the interviewees positioned themselves in relation to concepts of Englishness. National identity involves ways of being, a sense of place and belonging. It is produced through forms of myth-making and narrative production which depend on particular constructions of time and space. This paper examines how nation-ness is imagined and lived by the interviewees. It asks how constructions of Englishness related to constructions of the self and how imaginings of belonging involved imagining of otherness. It also describes how, for some of the interviewees, the domestic, particularly in notions of cleanliness and dirt, as well as food and consumption, was a key metaphor for explaining their relationship to national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses historical and ethnographic data to examine the struggles that surround livestock enumeration in highland Bolivia. Colonial officials counted llamas for purposes of taxation, while present-day government agencies and NGOs enumerate animals to attract money from aid agencies and promote entrepreneurial activity. In both instances, livestock enumeration serves not just to count animals but to render accountable their owners. The paper argues, drawing upon the work of Timothy Mitchell (2002 ) that such enumerative procedures carried out by experts do not simply record a reality, but by rendering herders accountable, seek to produce particular kinds of people within particular economic realities. Far from being a culturally neutral practice, the enumeration of llamas can constitute an act of symbolic violence that seeks to erase specific relationships between herders and animals and to prioritise the individual over the communal. In both colonial and contemporary cases, Andean people seek to produce themselves in ways that contest those in which others would produce them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging studies on private security work in Britain's night-time economy explore important sociological themes such as masculinities and violence. Contributing rich ethnography to this literature, and in furthering an embodied sociology, this paper describes the gendered construction of competency among 'bouncers' or door supervisors within the context of their potentially violent work. Centrally, it explores the door supervisors' variable bodily capital (comprising body build and acquired techniques of the body) alongside normative limits to their violence. Here physicality is central to the practicalities of doorwork, risk management and the embodiment of dominant and subordinate masculinities. Within doorwork culture, embodied typifications such as 'hard men', 'shop boys' and others (eg, 'bullies' and 'nutters') are related to assessments of possible violence against doorstaff, the delineation of (flexible) boundaries for their own (in)appropriate violence against 'problematic' customers and the construction of competent identity. Besides contributing empirical data to the literature this paper underscores the integrative potential of embodiment for social scientists and urges policy makers to appreciate the degree to which (potential) violence is embodied in the night-time economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines, and seeks to develop, the sociological concept of reflexivity. It identifies two senses of reflexivity, one associated with ethnomethodological accounts of members' practical reasoning, the other with a more philosophical sense of conscious self-referencing, and analyses their relationship. The paper argues that the development of this form of analysis leads to a form of propositional undecidability which makes it typically 'postmodern'. The development is linked to ideas of recursion, as these are expounded in computer science and mathematics, and to Derrida's interpretation of 'textual fold' -- this also being used to ground the association of reflexivity with postmodernism. The analysis 'returns to the social' by considering aspects of Niklas Luhmann's explication of social reflexivity. It concludes by examining the understanding that a postmodern sociology might have of a postmodern society in which the grounds for social order have become undecidable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically scrutinizes the thesis put forward by Jennifer Platt in a recent article in The Sociological Review about the general relation between theory and method, based on her investigation of the specific example of functionalism and survey research in post-war US sociology. The present paper questions the extent to which Platt's analysis and general conclusions mask important levels of connectedness between theory and method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subscribers to the British Sociological Association will be aware that its newsletter, Network, has recently been carrying correspondence on the ethics of covert observation, provoked by Roger Homan's paper, in a previous Sociological Review, 'Interpersonal Communication in Pentecostal Meetings'. Homan, himself, has contributed to this correspondence and defended his stance at more length in a paper, published with a rejoinder by Martin Bulmer, in the British Journal of Sociology.[1] I am not, however, convinced that we have yet reached some of the core issues in this area, because the ethical discussion has become so far removed from an adequate understanding of the nature of fieldwork. In this paper, I want to reunite these two topics, partly because I believe ethical debate to be a rather futile activity if it is not grounded in everyday practice and partly to show that there are so many grey moral areas in ethnography that an over-academic analysis may ultimately be inimical to our continued use of this approach to social life. Although I shall concentrate on field practice, this should not be taken to imply a disregard for planning and writing-up research. Plainly the ethical questions are at least as important, but their better documentation makes an extended consideration a less urgent matter for this present paper. By ethnography I intend to include all research based upon naturalistic modes of inquiry within a predominantly inductivist theoretical framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the more certain remarks permissible in today's uncertain society is that we live ia a profoundly relativistic time. This may be due to the decline of authoritarian religion, the relativizing influence of pluralism and the reduction of morality to instrumentalism. Whatever the causes, the effect is an 'ironic culture'[2] which does not take itself seriously. A constantly serious stance may be neither possible nor desirable but there is a danger that the cosy taken-for-granted thought-forms of a self-consciously relativistic culture will become the almost exclusive source for the selection of curricular content.
This paper is intended to be an engagement with the problem of relativism in its more glossy guise of neo-Marxism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the paper of professor Max Gluckman titled "Ethnographic Data in British Social Anthropology" on what is happening in the U.S. with reference to the problem of social anthropology published in this issue of the journal "Sociological Review." In certain respects the situation in the U.S. with regard to the development of social anthropology is a sort of mirror image of that in Great Britain. Whereas modern British social anthropology started with anthropologists A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski in the early 1920s,with a major emphasis on structural and functional theory, the American development under anthropologist Franz Boaz was in terms of culture and with a strong historical interest. Only since the First World War has there been any considerable shift in the U.S. in the directions of social anthropology. In the U.S. a somewhat different revolution in the collection of ethnographic data was brought about much earlier by Franz Boas, who also worked through the native language and whose documentation of Kwakiutl is at least as detailed as Malinowski's on the Trobriands, though differently distributed.

This article outlines the collaborative process of making a watercolour animation drawn from research with women who swim wild in rivers, lakes and seas. Discussing graphic storytelling in sociology, anthropology and related disciplines, we share our experiences of creative collaboration, describing in detail the practical process of making a research-led animation to share with the wider swimming community and situating the project within a larger discussion of graphic and public ethnography, live methods and the possibilities of representation. The article contributes to the ways we can make methods lively and shows how we can both literally and metaphorically animate sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports an ethnographic study of how Brazilians teaching capoeira in the UK use dance as a discursive and embodied pedagogic strategy both to change men's bodies and also to gauge the success of their instructional work. The theoretical framework is drawn from Herzfeld's neglected study of the poetics of manhood in Crete which is revisited in the light of his subsequent analysis of the embodiment of ethnographic practice. Ethnographic research is used to show how British men learning capoeira are enculturated into a different, Brazilian, embodiment in which dance is masculine, and dancing is one way to display a social self-regard. Discourse about performance helps to define the appropriateness of the social self-regard that the capoeira students acquire and display. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An association with mothering is viewed as the greatest stumbling block in the path to raising the quality and status of childminding. As a broadly conceived rite de passage, this article suggests, professionalisation offers childminders a symbolic route out. It is a ritual process which demands the production of 'fabrications'; particular artefacts, special words and appropriate modes of behaviour which are produced specifically to meet the regulatory gaze. When childminders engage in performative professionalism, it is proposed, they gain recognition as bona fide members of the children's workforce, but their work is changed in ways which make it less meaningful for them. Presenting a phenomenology of their encounter with a widely diffused 'technology of quality', the paper reveals how childminders' collective identity is both endangered and engendered in struggles over particular cultural forms. Interpreting data gathered through ethnographic fieldwork with childminders in inner London, the article draws on and extends work focused on audit culture and performativity in secondary schools by synthesising it with feminist work on women's knowledge and the ethics of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue that what is missing from many ethnographic accounts is a recognition that dilemmas inevitably emerge for the researcherbeforethey make contact with the research setting,duringthe process of ethnographic research, and subsequently in the lengthy time taken to unravel the theoretical importance of the researchafterthe fieldwork has ended. Using a comparison of two ethnographies as case studies, and by recourse to a realist methodology, such dilemmas are, we argue, overdetermined by many non-observable social structures that influence the everyday research process. We argue that specificmechanismsdetermine both the process and the outcome of the ethnographic journey in thebefore,duringandafterstages of research. For example we demonstrate how biography and the wider process of institutional knowledge production are two key resources that influence research practice. We use the termpragmatic realismas a means to reflect upon some of the connections between the dilemmas of research and real structures in these three stages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on data from a small-scale ethnographic study of the delivery of maternity care to South Asian descent women in a hospital in Southern England during 1988. Stereotyped views of these women which related to their customs and culture as well as their typification as patients were commonly expressed by staff, particularly midwives. The paper examines the role of medical records and record making in stereotyping Asian women: the ways in which stereotyped views of women may affect the record making process; and how that process itself may reinforce and create stereotypes. The utility of records for `rate production' purposes is also discussed. The focus of the paper is the creation of a woman's maternity records which occurs in the antenatal clinic. The transformation of stigmatised views of a client into `facts' about a client is common among bureaucrats, in this setting health service staff. This process affects the client's future encounters with the bureaucracy. In medical settings records (i.e. the case notes) help to create, transmit and reify negative stereotypes of health service users. These stereotypes can affect the kind of care given to individual patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the 'western' museum practices of representing culture within a dominant visual metaphor as an inherently political act which separates those who view the exhibit from those who are on display. The act of viewing is related to the acts of ordering, defining and representing according to the categories of the 'viewing' culture, and serves to deny shared space and time occupied by the representing and represented cultures, a process related to the anthropological construction of ethnographic distance in ethnographic texts. Two recent Canadian exhibitions which attempt to use irony to subvert traditional exhibit practices are analysed: Into the Heart of Africa and Fluffs and Feathers. Into the Heart of Africa attempted to mount a postmodem critique of colonial collecting practices, but its one-sided use of irony reproduced, for many visitors, the colonial relations of power that made it possible for one group to dominate another. The narrative structure of the exhibit was predicated on a relation of difference. Fluffs and Feathers, on the other hand, directly challenged the white visitor's power to view and define native peoples, by dialogically inviting visitors to try on alternate subject positions that help to fracture essentialist notions of self and culture. Thus irony, a risky trope, can lead to very different results in museum exhibitions depending on who it is aimed at and who does the aiming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes empirical research amongst hooligans. Such research has not always been valued. The significant factor in hooligan behaviour may be asserted to be the generation of violence in the lower working class and its dissemination amongst football fans. It is commonly asserted that hooligans operate in well-organized groups. It is argued here that such assertions need to be based on better evidence. A detailed account is given of the behaviour of a notorious group of fans and its key individuals. This shows that the 'hard core' fans were distinguished from others only by greater dedication to football and their club; they had a potentiality for violence but only of the low level kind that many others shared; they were more often involved simply because they went to more matches; they lacked organization. Nevertheless outsiders were, not unreasonably, sure they were a violent, organized group. This casts doubt on similar beliefs held about other groups unless beliefs are well substantiated. Detailed ethnography is valuable because it helps to sort out the nature of the 'hooligan' problem that requires to be theorized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on recent studies of colonial science and of the social function of science in the underdeveloped world to analyse the social development of science in Ireland and, subsequently, the Irish Republic. It is suggested that after the Act of Union scientific activity in Ireland became prized as a cultural practice, largely isolated from its local context and potential local applications. Because of governmental priorities in the new state and because of the Anglo-Irish character of much of the scientific culture, this isolation persisted after Partition. The recent history of science in the Irish Republic is interpreted in terms of this isolation or marginality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to provide an ethnographic description of the processes involved in constructing a deviant status and may best be seen as making a modest contribution to what has been described elsewhere as the micro politics of trouble and its resolution. Specifically I shall describe the situation of one handicapped child (Linda) resident within a Rudolf Steiner Therapeutic Community. In addition to focusing upon the various ways in which staff accounted Linda as a 'troublesome child' I shall examine their various attempts to cope with the sorts of difficulties they saw her as presenting. As well as focusing upon the ways in which staff sought to cope with Linda I shall also describe their attempts to develop a therapeutic relationship with her. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to examine in detail one type of covert ethnographic research, the pseudo-patient study, to provide an assessment of these ethical issues which is grounded in actual research practices.
Pseudo-patient studies are studies where a person enters a medical setting by adopting the role of a patient, not in order to receive therapeutic treatment but in order to observe covertly the treatment process and the broader medical and social setting within which it occurs. The studies of this kind discussed here have been conducted by social scientists, but there are cases of journalists and even politicians adopting this role in order to conduct undercover studies of medical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The overriding point of this paper is to discuss and compare the criteria of validity attached to (I) descriptions of everyday life by collectivity members, (2) organized descriptions of everyday life by ethnographers and (3) analysis of such descriptions by sociologists. An attempt will be made to point up the main similarities and differences between the criteria of validity considered appropriate to these three different qualitative accounts, and it will be argued that substantially different criteria are appropriate for micro-sociological accounts (e.g. 1 and 2) as opposed to macro-sociological analysis (e.g. 3). In particular it will be suggested that validity is inseparable from what is acceptable as competently and properly arrived at and that such acceptability rests upon ideological assumptions and traditional social practices, conventions; since the natural history of professional academic sociologists differs from that of their research subjects (i.e. collectivity members), we might expect different criteria of acceptability from them and thus different notions of validity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The figure of the brain has continued to rise in prominence for at least 30 years. This development continues to raise important questions: in particular, to what extent and in what ways does the brain supplant the person as the presumed origin of human behaviour? Whereas it has previously been discussed in general terms, here we address this question through an ethnographic study of the experimental articulation of the brain in neuromarketing research. Drawing on analytical themes from science and technology studies, we argue that it is crucial to investigate the enactment of the brain in situated practice and to understand the effects on prevailing accountability relations. We analyse the enactment of the 'consuming' brain in neuromarketing experiments and in experts' communication of experimental results. We show how the consuming brain emerges from reconfigured sets of socio-material relations (between e.g. consumers, brains, brain scanning operators, consultants) and how this entails a redistribution of accountability relations. This results in an ontological respecification of the consumer, who is no longer deemed accountable for his/her actions. Instead spokespersons on behalf of the brain – neuromarketing technologies and experts – assume accountability for revealing why consumers buy what they buy. We conclude that the putative shift from person to brain is in fact characterised by a redistribution of accountability relations in neuromarketing practices. We call for further studies of accountability redistributions in practice, so as better to situate novel explanations of human behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the take-over by a global corporation (Royal Doulton) of a family-owned and run pottery factory in Longton Stoke-on-Trent, known as ‘Beswick’, and the subsequent re-structuring of production, this paper explores the way in which women pottery workers make social distinctions between the ‘rough’ and ‘posh’, ‘proper paintresses’ and ‘big heads’ which cut into and across abstract sociological notions of class. Drawing on ethnographic data I show that for these working class women, class as lived is inherently ambiguous and contradictory and reveal the ways in which class is gendered. I build on historical and sociological studies of the pottery industry, and anthropological and related debates on class, as well as Frankenberg's study of a Welsh village, to develop my argument and draw analogies between factory and village at a number of levels. My findings support the view that class is best understood not as an abstract generalising category, but in the local and specific contexts of women's working lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is partly a response to the recent ethnographic research carried out by Armstrong and Harris, and partly a survey of a more general set of interconnected discourses about football hooliganism as a social phenomenon over the past thirty years into which the work of Armstrong and Harris fits. Discourses on football hooliganism seemed to have proliferated just as the 'object' in question seems to have disappeared from public view; at least in Britain. if not in other parts of Continental Europe. Part of the problem lies in the difficulty of defining accurately what we mean by the highly contentious phrase 'football hooliganism', a term which has no specific referent in English or Scottish law and whose boundaries, or 'field'. are demarcated by these various discourses or 'disciplines' themselves: namely legal, sociological, psychological, criminological, geographical, architectural and so on. The essay offers examples of approaches which might overcome some of the difficulties experienced in researching football hooliganism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief note argues against the tendency in sociological fieldwork to limit observation and explanation to one medium of communication -- speech. Against such ethnographic reductionism, it pleads for a reincorporation of a sense of place and space in fieldwork, and for attention to the multiple ways in which messages are communicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses changes in use of ethnographic field data in social anthropological analyses in Great Britain. The author regards anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski as the father of modern British anthropology even if it was anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown that supplied the more fruitful theoretical approach in the subject. Theory is but one side of a science, the other equally important side is the type of data, which are subjected to theoretical analysis. Here Malinowski produced a revolutionary change in the subject, though scholars in other countries were working on the same lines as he. Malinowski's long residence in the Trobriands and the fact that he worked through the Trobriands language enabled him to make observations on social life which were quite different in quality from the observations made by the casual travelers who had passed through colonial countries. The change in the nature of his data had a profound effect on his own thinking, and hence on the subject. This can be illustrated briefly by comparing two of his books with a work that is still a classic of ethnography.

This article aims to reconsider Mary Douglas's well-known aphorism – that, 'where there is dirt there is system' – through the work of street-cleaning in and the handling of detritus in the Upper Town district of Gibraltar. In 'working out' the aphorism, we adopt an ethnomethodological approach and focus upon the description of situated categorisation practices in the treatment of waste and dirt. The article is thus concerned with the methods in and through which objects are handled in the everyday work of street-cleaning. We describe these practices across three sections concerned with: the seeing of waste as a situated accomplishment; the practical distinction between objects to be removed and those to be left in situ ; and the seeing of categories through discarded objects. In this way, rather than explaining the practices of street-cleaners via recourse to a notion of 'system', we recover the ways in which objects come to be treated, in a situated sense, as a potential 'inference-rich' resource for moral reasoning relating to residual categories and predicates of people and places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops theories of collective memory by attending to the everyday practices and meaning-making involved in creating and sustaining sites of heritage. While research across disciplines linked to memory studies has increased in recent years, with a notable sociological contribution, as yet ethnographic understandings of how collective memory is produced and maintained through locally situated and embedded practices are not fully realized. Our research took place in the village of Six Bells in the South Wales Valleys, where living memory of a coal mining disaster in 1960 and coal mining itself are slowly disappearing. One of ways in which the people of Six Bells are remembering and commemorating this past is by giving their narratives and artefacts to the community's 'heritage room' as gifts. This form of remembering, prompted by an extraordinary event and the rapid social change associated with deindustrialization, produces and sustains legitimate representations and imaginaries of the past. By developing anthropological understandings of gift exchange, we propose that these practices are one visible component of the claims to authenticity and the bestowal of value active in the memory work of everyday life. We attend to three interrelated characteristics of gift exchange to develop our argument; the importance of the personal in producing authenticity through the gift relation; the provenance and social impetus of the act of giving; and the systems of reciprocity generated across and between generations, which work to assign value to the gift itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While waste marks the beginning of relocation, re-materialization, and resourcing processes, it is also a set of connections, producing specific figurations of citizenship that follow from, as they inform, waste management strategies. This article regards household practices to do with the disposal of used fats as a site where citizenship forms. The authors see the figure of ‘good citizen’ appear along the trajectory of kitchen fats. They contrast this figure with the ‘re-user,’ who acts by a different set of rules, so as to explore logics and normativities embedded in the mundane processes of discarding fats. Fat waste not only turns out to be different things for different stakeholders; it is in different fat disposal practices that different (kinds of) stakeholders emerge. As the authors situate citizenship in mundane practices, kitchen fats suggest the situational, material-relational character of waste and waste-eliminating schemes – and of citizenship itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents original qualitative data gathered during prolonged ethnographic fieldwork with violent men in deindustrialised communities in the north of England. The data are used as an empirical platform for a theoretical exploration of the symbolism and subjectivising influences of traumatic life experiences in these men's biographies. The article concludes by making the tentative suggestion that there is a complex and mediated causal link between traumatic experience and a deep subjective commitment to aggression and violence in adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnographic research is often multilingual, requiring the researcher to work in two or more different languages, if necessary with the assistance of an interpreter. Given this, surprisingly few ethnographers have attempted to discuss in detail how their own knowledge of different languages and their decisions to use interpreters and/or translators during fieldwork have affected the research they have conducted. Drawing on material from our own research, as well as from published accounts by other ethnographers, we aim in this article to dispel some of the 'silence' or 'mystique' surrounding such matters. More specifically, we argue for the importance of documenting and analysing not only the process of language learning in ethnographic research but also the ways in which levels of fluency in a second or additional language can affect the research process, including the writing of ethnographic fieldnotes and forms of self and other identification. We suggest that a heightened awareness of these issues can help researchers make more informed choices when carrying out and writing up ethnographic research using different languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the 50th anniversary of its original publication, this article revisits The Established and the Outsiders, a largely forgotten and in our view unfairly neglected community study by Elias and Scotson (1965). Drawing from our ethnographic research on an urban community in South Wales, the contemporary significance of the theoretical and empirical contributions to the analysis of insider-outsider relations in bounded, household-based communities made by the original work is foregrounded. The findings from our research on 'Cornerville' confirms many of the empirically based conceptual claims of Elias and Scotson's earlier diagnosis of largely intra-working class relations, distribution of status honour, and processes of micro-sociality. The article concludes by drawing out some of the implications of community-based research for advancing sociological criminology's contribution to the specific analysis of group stigmatization and more broadly of social processes of communal ordering and informal rule-making and rule-breaking in contemporary localities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a research conducted among complementary medical practitioners, focusing on issues of professionalisation. The objective of the study was to examine three groups of complementary therapists - reflexologists, homeopaths and chiropractors. The authors aimed to test their occupational boundaries with orthodox medicine. Complementary practitioners have tended to see themselves as beleaguered groups, threatened by the antagonistic power of orthodox medicine. In order to seek the opinion of the professionals regarding this, the authors conducted interviews with them. In some instances during the interviews with the participants, the interviewees used the interview as a means to gain information about other groups. they would be happy to cooperate with us. One of the authors was asked by one professional group to give a presentation on the research proposal to the directors and was asked her opinion on the kind of therapy advocated by them.

Ethnographic interview data recording the experience of alterations in appetite in pregnancy, notably aversions to and cravings for food are reported. These data are interpreted in the light of symbolic interactionist insights into the process of self-indication, the process whereby people's sense of self and identity entails the attribution of meaning to the world in which they find themselves, a world that includes their own bodily self. Aversions appear unequivocally identifiable, but doubts arise about cravings - doubts that are conceptualised with reference to a sense of body, of self and conception of moral worth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a critical analysis of a qualitative research in the field ethnography: on the way of understanding the family lives and on the way sociologists use the term the family. Whilst sociologists accept that the so-called normal family is statistically insignificant, they object to the abandonment of the use of the term the family as an analytical category. They argue that we must avoid conflating households of different compositions with so-called family types. The way people use the term family is enormously complicated -- far more complicated than some sociologists believe. Firstly, there is the problem of primacy and immediacy. Secondly, there is the surprisingly protean nature of the concept which has been reconceptualised as ubiquity - that is, family terms are present in a host of different situations involving different meanings all at the same time. Thirdly, family terms are prototypical - that is, they carry political, ideological and moral power as patterns, models, standards or archetypes.

The article explores the relation between academic disciplines and of disciplines to their social context. Even those sociologists who are aware of the once closer relations between sociology/social anthropology and Folklore tend to assume that current distant relations are due to the evaporation of folklore itself from urban-industrial society. Sociologists with an interest in folklore are most likely to be found working in fields which emphasize the comparative analysis of "underdeveloped" and "developed" societies, and there has been a strong tendency for them to eliminates folklore. The almost moribund state of folklore studies in Great Britain might seem to confirm their assumption were it not for the fact that the few studies carried out on folklore in urban Britain show that it is far from dead or dying. And in the United States of America, the flourishing academic discipline of Folklore has no difficulty in discovering a flourishing crop of urban folklore.

The article discusses about empiricist strategy. Critiques of empiricism in sociology have become highly elaborated outside the perspective, yet have remained substantially ignored within it. The reason for the failure of the critique in this sort of situation is not hard to locate. It is simply the inevitable estrangement of research practice and the philosophical reconstruction of its basis. Empirical researchers tend to see philosophical discussion as confining itself to logical preliminaries and of being no use to their distinctive problems. Clearly there is a need for a closer assessment of the methodological principles that are implicit in the detail of research practice. There is a need for the philosopher of science to use something akin to participant observation and to attempt to understand research from the insider's point of view. The fundamental problem with the empiricist strategy is that it does not allow to define adequately the social situation one is trying to explain. The major item that remains undefined and, in fact, cannot be defined is the unit of analysis of the problem.

Whilst engaged in research into Pentecostalism in the North of England, and later in London, one became convinced of the need for detailed ethnographic studies of particular Pentecostal sects and their organized events. Although normative values were held in common by many of the congregation, as evidenced by their familiarity with the hymns and choruses, verbal appreciation of the jokes and enjoyment of the sermons, there were elements of uncertainty as to how to behave. This uncertainty was matched with a total acceptance that one looked to the platform for instructions. This was especially noticeable in relation to clapping during choruses. The congregation would never clap enthusiastically unless the platform did so first, and even then there seemed to be no consensus on how hard and loud clapping should be. The community sense-of being with people of similar expectations and shared normative values--was taken for granted by the believers and it was not necessary to know of the biographical background of a person to be sure of his ideological commitment because Pentecostals have various 'recognition signals' whereby they know each other and thus can structure their interaction assured of their common ground.