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Dullness is a quality that is hard to pin down for a woodworker; it defies easy definitions, and yet has the power to radically change the temper of experience. Using methods of self-observation drawn from sensory ethnography, I describe how I encounter dullness in my own skilled craft practice. I capture the intersensory nature of perception, how dullness is known through touch, sight, and sound. I follow traces of dullness on the wood I carve, in my body, and along the edge of my tool. This sensory portrait of dullness as elusive, relational, and shifting is a textured and nuanced account of how a craftsperson knows what they need to know from the body and experience. In the analysis section, I draw on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's theory of the inexhaustibility of perception to enhance my claim that dullness is not a fixed object, but a state filled with ambiguity. Perception does not give us easy answers. The article counters popular renderings of craft as practical or technical know-how with a contrary theory of craft as filled with poetic ambiguity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do state authorities cope with popular contention under authoritarian legality? Based on ethnographic fieldwork and legal repression cases in China, this article highlights that conflicting rules and signals regarding contention management can impose considerable pressure on governments and motivate them to respond cautiously, even though the prevailing rhetoric of law-based governance provides a convenient basis on which authorities can legitimize their coercive actions. This study further theorizes a discreet pattern of government reaction under authoritarian legality – progressive legal repression – that rests on bureaucratic processing to overcome political uncertainty and lower potential risks before formally employing criminal sanctions to achieve domination. Instead of directly using criminal penalties to deter unruly protesters and potential dissenters, the preferred state action is to induce them to engage in available legal-bureaucratic procedures. By reconceptualizing protesters' claims and behaviour as unreasonable and signalling fulfilment of responsibilities, bureaucratic practices help officials to reduce the risks of damaging their political image and receiving disciplinary action, encouraging them to deploy legal repression. This study reveals more complicated dynamics of state repression under authoritarian legality and emphasizes the important effects of procedural practices on governmental responses and the regime's stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the ways in which non-heterosexual people living in Poland understand and navigate displaying affection in public. I trace how LGBTQ people negotiate and develop their strategies of (in)visibility. I investigate the landscape of queer visibility outside 'the West' and in particular discuss concepts developed in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). I argue that the geographies of sexualities should pay more attention to public displays of affection (PDA) from the perspective of agentic queer subjects. I propose an approach based on tenderness to capture and understand the ambiguity and complexity of strategies of (in)visibility. The paper draws on research on the intimate life of non-heterosexual people living in Poland that included 53 individual in-depth narrative interviews and a monthly ethnographic study conducted with 21 non-heterosexual families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Situated between various social worlds, brokers are highly mobile figures, in a physical and an ideational sense; they channel scarce information and resources, translate different languages and jargons, and mediate and facilitate between individuals and/or organisations, the local and the global, in a wide range of settings. Taking an in-depth ethnographic look at the actual work of brokers and their particular life stories, contributions to this special issue examine brokers' successes and failures, their vulnerabilities and limitations, (changing) interests and motivations within the cultural contexts that these brokers are part of. By adopting a comparative perspective in a thematic and a geographic sense, this special issue discusses the role of brokerage in diverse settings such as the transnational world of trade and development, peacebuilding and activism, refugee care and health care, government services and colonialism. In preparing the ground for our individual contributions, this introductory article identifies gaps in the existing brokerage literature and develops the conceptual framework for the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the issue of ethnic teasing used by a teacher and his students in a multiethnic classroom of a German middle school. The teacher and his students exploit the resources of the racist discourse for multiple in-group rituals. Based on a school ethnography and conversation analysis, this case study attempts to interpret the teasing practices, which are performed in a classroom where ethnicity matters greatly. The teasing interactions here, questioned in the local context, seem to be a part of a working consensus, helping to regulate interpersonal relations in class. These vague and risky practices infringe the politeness norms: they are based on a daily face-attack ritualization through which a partial weakening of the discriminatory effect might be achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Claims of causality and generalizability are the primary means through which sociologists triumph over ambiguity. Yet ambiguity also has significant uses in the process of theorizing. This article identifies and examines three ethnographic approaches: (1) Ambiguity in shared situations highlights how subjects create and resolve disruptions in face-to-face interactions, (2) ambiguity as a transitional social form addresses certain stages and spaces as persistently ambiguous types of situations and phenomena, and (3) ambiguity as separating means from ends identifies mechanisms that conceal from subjects the risks and limitations of their own behaviors and choices in their everyday lives. Each of these approaches presents patterns in how ethnographers use analytic techniques to make sense of where ambiguities come from and how they can be turned into sociological cases. By making these approaches explicit, researchers can become better equipped at using them as provocations for sociological theorizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hayden et al. (2012) have questioned whether there was a Palaeolithic „astronomy', yet nevertheless show that ethnographic evidence confirms such knowledge amongst extant „complex hunter-gatherers'. Included in their critique is a rejection of Marshack's (1972) suggestion that Palaeolithic modern humans made nondecorative lunar notational systems. During fieldwork in the Basque country in March 2015 the authors examined the orientation of the Praileaitz I cave in the valley of the River Deba. The site excavation report (Peñalver, 2014) reveals that the cave was a place of ritual for local hunter-gatherers during the Magdalenian period around 15,500BP. The cave was one of 22 probably inhabited by the same group during the Magdalenian. Since none of the remaining 21 caves displayed any evidence as being places of ritual, then this data-set allows a statistical procedure to identify what particular portfolio of characteristics led to this cave being chosen as a place of ritual. The Praileaitz I cave has a vulva shaped entrance, 29.5 pendants arranged around the cave's chambers, an outward facing vestibular seat, red ochre crayons, a cutting antler baton and abstract „art'. Many of the pendants displayed marks consistent with Marshack's lunar model. The field archaeoastronomy reveals that the cave entrance had an alignment on summer solstice sunrise. This lunar-solar astronomical finding shows a step-change from tracking discrete months as demonstrated by Marshack to organising „lunar' rituals abstracted from any particular month displaced onto a solarized time scale. This suggests that the Magdalenian Praileaitz I rituals served as a bridging ritual form between monthly, synodic, rituals in the early Palaeolithic and later monumental alignments on the solarized sidereal moon in the Mesolithic, as for example at Warren Field in Scotland (Gaffney et al., 2013), and in the Neolithic, as for example at Stonehenge (Sims, 2006). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I examine the practice of ethnographic knowledge-production through my fieldwork encounter with Álvaro, a political leader of fishers in Mexico's oil-producing state, Tabasco. Exercising ethnographic reflexivity, I analyze how my relations with Álvaro and his family in a context of conflict between fishers and the oil industry shaped my analytical lens on the politics of resource access. The essay focuses on ambiguity as an overriding characteristic of the research encounter, and suggests that paralleling ambiguities in my analysing of Álvaro during fieldwork and in my own, gendered and racialized positionality within the family were formative for my perspective on fisher - oil industry politics. Furthermore, the analysis shows how my knowledge about the 'field' was made in the intersection of my and the family's mutual efforts to draw each other into our categories of thinking, Álvaro's reflection about his role in politics, and the wider historical and political economic context shaping the relations between the fishers and the oil industry in the Gulf of Mexico. This analysis draws attention to the importance of ethnography in showing the complexity and situatedness of politics of resource access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a focus on enacted narratives, this ethnographic study addresses how people with mental illness communicate returning home after a treatment stay at a psychiatric centre. Data were analysed based on Ricoeur's theory of narrative and action. Our analysis consisted of three analytic layers: the significant issue of discharge, identifying three stories of how being on the way home is enacted, and a further interpretation and discussion. The narrative analysis shows how significant issues of returning home are enacted among persons in everyday activities at one centre, and how an inherent ambiguity raised some challenges within the field of mental health. This study shows how conducting everyday activities enable people use the available narrative resources to negotiate the self; hence they reflect and create thoughts about the return home that are shared among persons at the centre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Propelled by the globalization of work opportunities in the Global South, thousands of Viet Kieu (overseas Vietnamese) 1.5- and second-generation migrants are “returning” to Vietnam to find skilled work. Through a global ethnography in urban Ho Chi Minh City, this article illustrates how these diasporic “returnees” negotiate their contentious relationship with their nonmigrating, often poorer extended family. My research contributes to the migrant gift giving and reciprocity literature by examining the many ways that “return” migration can create tensions and ambiguity within existing transnational family remittance relationships across borders. The increased presence of diasporic “return” migrants also prompts scholars to reconsider the durability of transnational family ties across the generations, as face-to-face encounters reveal how class, generation, age hierarchy, and gender can create micro-level axes of difference and distancing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: San rock paintings in the Cape, South Africa, are residual but readable images that contain some intentionally ambiguous figures. Male and female figures were almost never ambiguous at the time of painting but many have become so, after much loss of detail. The boundary between animals and people, by contrast, is often ambiguous with therianthropic, animal-headed human figures quite commonly depicted. These decisions are rooted in a world view that is well documented in San folklore and ethnography. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article reviews recent ethnographic works on the former Soviet Union, Eastern and Central Europe, and Mongolia that explore the experiences of people enduring drastic transformations following the collapse of socialism in 1990 and the consequent implementation of a neoliberal "shock therapy." The anthropologists working on postsocialist societies have shown that transition theories are inherently faulty and their implementation often had damaging results. The current condition is not a period of transition or "bridge" between socialism and capitalism. Instead individuals' activities, memory, social networks, and culturally specific values lead to uncertainty as a state of dynamic being. This article argues that uncertainty is a complex conceptual space that offers further opportunities to step away from the evolutionary mode of thinking and to develop theories of multiple ways of being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A fundamental question in psycholinguistic research concerns the universality of comprehension strategies. We investigated this issue by examining the so-called “subject preference” in Turkish, a language which allows for a natural (unmarked) object reading of an initial ambiguous argument. Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we observed increased processing difficulty in the form of a broadly distributed positivity when an initial ambiguous argument was disambiguated towards an object reading. This effect was independent of the animacy (i.e. semantic subject prototypicality) of the ambiguous argument. Our results therefore speak in favour of a universal tendency to interpret the first argument encountered as the “subject” of the clause, even in languages providing no obvious structural motivation for such a strategy. However, we argue that the underlying explanation for this preference must be modified in accordance with cross-linguistic considerations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Actor-network theory (ANT) has contributed greatly to the development of science and technology studies. However, recent critiques appear to have left ANT in a gloomy theoretical black box. What is the likelihood of ANT exiting its current theoretical discontent? Is ANT worthy of salvation and on what grounds? Law argues that recent critiques stem from ANT's development into a particular theoretical strategy. However, this article will argue that by focusing on strategy as messy and impure, ANT can be afforded the opportunity to shift from a fixed approach to an ambiguous and contingent strategy, well placed to carry on. The article achieves such an argument by first highlighting how ANT has contributed to a recent study of strategy in action; second, by outlining the strategic aspects of ANT; and third, by using the study of strategy in action as a means of engaging with ANT's current theoretical discontent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article is evaluated the philosophical thought that translated from Grek Culture to İslamic Culture by translations, its establisment in language of Arabic and its philosophical language in the model of al-Farab. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the cultural relation that women have to the construction of masculinities. It is based on ethnographical fieldwork that examined the development and the transformation of masculine identities by both men and women in a "colonia popular" of Mexico City. The distinct conceptual and methodological approaches employed by anthropologists in studying manhood are compared. The concepts of men as engendered and engendering, as integral to understanding the ambiguities of gender differences, are discussed.

I investigate the extent to which interviewers and respondents in a 1995 national survey consistently classify race in Brazil, overall and in particular contexts. Overall, classification as white, brown or black is consistent 79 per cent of the time. However, persons at the light end of the colour continuum tend to be consistently classified, whereas ambiguity is greater for those at the darker end. Based on statistical estimation, the findings also reveal that consistency varies from 20 to 100 per cent depending on one's education, age, sex and local racial composition. Inconsistencies are in the direction of both "whitening" and "darkening", depending on whether the reference is interviewer or respondent. For example, interviewers "whitened" the classification of higher educated persons who self-identified as brown, especially in mostly non-white regions. Finally, I discuss the role of the Brazilian state in constructing race and the implications of these findings for survey research and comparative analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]