Prostitution or partnership? Wifestyles in Tanzanian artisanal gold-mining settlements

Tanzania, along with several other African countries, is experiencing a national mining boom, which has prompted hundreds of thousands of men and women to migrate to mineral-rich locations. At these sites, relationships between the sexes defy the sexual norms of the surrounding countryside to embrace new relational amalgams of polygamy, monogamy and promiscuity. This article challenges the assumption that female prostitution is widespread. Using interview data with women migrants, we delineate six ‘wifestyles’, namely sexual-cum-conjugal relationships between men and women that vary in their degree of sexual and material commitment. In contrast to bridewealth payments, which involved elders formalising marriages through negotiations over reproductive access to women, sexual negotiations and relations in mining settlements involve men and women making liaisons and co-habitation arrangements directly between each other without third-party intervention. Economic interdependence may evolve thereafter with the possibility of women, as well as men, offering material support to their sex partners

Sacred sites, contested rites/rights: contemporary pagan engagements with the past

Our Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Rights project (www.sacredsites.org.uk) examines physical, spiritual and interpretative engagements of today’s Pagans with sacred sites, theorises ‘sacredness’, and explores the implications of pagan engagements with sites for heritage management and archaeology more generally, in terms of ‘preservation ethic’ vis a vis active engagement. In this paper, we explore ways in which ‘sacred sites’ --- both the term and the sites --- are negotiated by different interest groups, foregrounding our locations, as an archaeologist/art historian (Wallis) and anthropologist (Blain), and active pagan engagers with sites. Examples of pagan actions at such sites, including at Avebury and Stonehenge, demonstrate not only that their engagements with sacred sites are diverse and that identities --- such as that of ‘new indigenes’ --- arising therefrom are complex, but also that heritage management has not entirely neglected the issues: in addition to managed open access solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, a climate of inclusivity and multivocality has resulted in fruitful negotiations at the Rollright Stones.</p

Occupying (dis)ordinary space

This paper starts by outlining some key work in ethnomethodology, which understands everyday, unnoticed social and spatial practices as “problematic accomplishments ”(Ryave and Schenkein:1974 65-274). Such practices involve a considerable amount of detailed ─ usually seen but un-noticed ─ work in order to maintain the commonplace world where people know what ‘anyone’ knows and does. We are interested to show how doing ‘nothing much’ is a socially achieved activity; how such ordinariness has consequence for those who specifically 'cannot be ordinary'; and in the implications for the everyday occupation(s) of built space. We do this by investigating occupation through the narratives and strategies of diverse disabled people using a tactic that Garfinkel calls breaching. He argues that the underlying practices in commonplace situations are best made visible through their disruption, through ‘making trouble’ (1967, 37-8). Disabled people are often not perceived as ‘anyone’ – not because of any particular impairment but because they do not fit the unspoken conventions of what constitutes doing ‘being ordinary’ (Sacks: 1984 413-429). Here we outline how a disabled-led perspective on occupation can reveal both the amount of work involved in negotiating physical space and how it goes unnoticed as ‘nothing much’. Finally, we look briefly at Milton Keynes Shopping Centre to explore what kinds of descriptions of buildings such an approach might offer. We suggest that rather than simply mirroring what ‘anyone’ knows or does, the design of a particular built space intersects in complex ways with occupation and doing being ordinary

The IRB as Gatekeeper: Effects on Research with Children and Youth

Gatekeepers play an important role in research conducted with children and youth. Although qualitative researchers frequently discuss institutional and individual gatekeepers, such as schools and parents, little attention has been paid to the role that Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) play in determining who is allowed to research particular populations and the ramifications of these decisions for findings involving children and youth. In order to examine this role, we compare negotiations of two researchers working on separate projects with similar populations with the IRB of a large Midwestern university. In both cases, it is likely that board members used their own personal experience and expertise in making assumptions about the race, social class, and gender of the researchers and their participants. The fact that these experiences are supported by findings across a wide range of IRBs highlights the extent to which qualitative research with children is changed (or even prevented) by those with little knowledge of typical qualitative methodologies and the cultural contexts in which research takes place. While those such as principals, teachers, and parents who are traditionally recognized as gatekeepers control access to specific locations, their denial of access only requires researchers to seek other research sites. IRBs, in contrast, control whether researchers are able to conduct research at any site. Although they wield considerably more control over research studies than typical gatekeepers, the fact that they are housed in the institutions at which academic researchers work also means that we can play a role in their improvement

'Working out’ identity: distance runners and the management of disrupted identity

This article contributes fresh perspectives to the empirical literature on the sociology of the body, and of leisure and identity, by analysing the impact of long-term injury on the identities of two amateur but serious middle/long-distance runners. Employing a symbolic interactionist framework,and utilising data derived from a collaborative autoethnographic project, it explores the role of ‘identity work’ in providing continuity of identity during the liminality of long-term injury and rehabilitation, which poses a fundamental challenge to athletic identity. Specifically, the analysis applies Snow and Anderson’s (1995) and Perinbanayagam’s (2000) theoretical conceptualisations in order to examine the various forms of identity work undertaken by the injured participants, along the dimensions of materialistic, associative and vocabularic identifications. Such identity work was found to be crucial in sustaining a credible sporting identity in the face of disruption to the running self, and in generating momentum towards the goal of restitution to full running fitness and reengagement with a cherished form of leisure. KEYWORDS: identity work, symbolic interactionism, distance running, disrupted identit

A qualitative enquiry into OpenStreetMap making

Based on a case study on the OpenStreetMap community, this paper provides a contextual and embodied understanding of the user-led, user-participatory and user-generated produsage phenomenon. It employs Grounded Theory, Social Worlds Theory, and qualitative methods to illuminate and explores the produsage processes of OpenStreetMap making, and how knowledge artefacts such as maps can be collectively and collaboratively produced by a community of people, who are situated in different places around the world but engaged with the same repertoire of mapping practices. The empirical data illustrate that OpenStreetMap itself acts as a boundary object that enables actors from different social worlds to co-produce the Map through interacting with each other and negotiating the meanings of mapping, the mapping data and the Map itself. The discourses also show that unlike traditional maps that black-box cartographic knowledge and offer a single dominant perspective of cities or places, OpenStreetMap is an embodied epistemic object that embraces different world views. The paper also explores how contributors build their identities as an OpenStreetMaper alongside some other identities they have. Understanding the identity-building process helps to understand mapping as an embodied activity with emotional, cognitive and social repertoires

Politics, religion and the Lord’s Resistance Army in Northern Uganda

This paper outlines the current situation in Northern Uganda and examines whether conventional approaches to conflict analysis produce a convincing diagnosis of the causes of the protracted conflict between the Ugandan government and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). It concludes that the reasons for the war are multifaceted and do not neatly fit within any contemporary conflict theory\ud without leaving significant gaps in the analysis. The paper highlights one of those gaps, the role of religion.\ud The paper draws on a variety of secondary sources and the author’s extensive work in Africa, including Uganda, between 1996 and 2008. The history of the conflict in northern Uganda and the evolution of the LRA are outlined. With no access to significant economic resources such as\ud diamonds or oil, no environmental driver, and no clash of civilizations, the war in northern Uganda appears to confound much conventional analysis of the rationality of violence in Africa. Clearly the key initial actors felt that they had lost out under the new regime and feared that Museveni would seek vengeance for the violence perpetrated by an Acholi-dominated military. However over time, those\ud involved with the initial drivers have become fewer, as the ranks of the LRA have become filled with younger fighters, frequently abducted and then initiated

Sports, Inc. Volume 3, Issue 1

The ILR Cornell Sports Business Society magazine is a semester publication titled Sports, Inc. This publication serves as a space for our membership to publish and feature in-depth research and well-thought out ideas to advance the world of sport. The magazine can be found in the Office of Student Services and is distributed to alumni who come visit us on campus. Issues are reproduced here with permission of the ILR Cornell Sports Business Society.https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/sportsinc/1003/thumbnail.jp