An Ethnographic Filmflam: Giving Gifts, Doing Research, and Videotaping the Native Subject/Object

Using the discussion of self-reflexivity as an organizing principle, this article examines how mobilizing digital video technology during fieldwork opens up empirical and theoretical space for reconceptualizing the relationship between anthropologists and informants. Placing the field of visual anthropology into critical conversation with long-standing theoretical arguments about the objectivist limitations of native anthropologists, I argue that the slipperiness of nativity as an anthropological designation helps to provide analytical tools for examining filmmaking as a kind of gift-giving process between native ethnographic filmmakers and the subjects of their films. This article highlights some of the ways in which my own filmic and videographic exploits in Harlem, New York, mark integral connections between seeing and being the proverbial other, probing social exchanges predicated on the usefulness of low-budget digital technology as a means of fostering politically and epistemologically valuable ethnographic collaborations

IN MEDIAS RACE (AND CLASS): Post-Jim Crow Ethnographies of Black Middleclassdom

“Race is the modality in which class is lived” (Hall et al., 1978, p. 394). That\u27s how Stuart Hall evocatively put it, emphasizing the extent to which class relations can actually and substantively “function as race relations” for working class Black Brits (and others). He was arguing, amongst other things, against the neatly reified distinctions scholars traditionally policed between class-based analyses and racial ones

POSTRACE 101: Teaching and Unteaching Race in America\u27s High Schools

There are some telltale signs that we might really be living in the kind of moment that academic provocateurs have labeled “postracial” (i.e., indifferent to historically self-evident expectations about race relations and race-based identifications): Duke lacrosse players, all of them White, who taunt a Black collegian-cum-stripper with carefully crafted quips better suited for a comedy club than a Klan rally (“Thank your grandpa for my cotton shirt”); a Black Ivy League professor testifying under oath that a baseball bat-wielding White vigilante who begins pummeling a Black man in Brooklyn by calling his victim a “nigger” does not necessarily harbor any race-specific animus; a former Education Secretary seemingly shocked and appalled that African Americans would be shocked and appalled by his comments regarding the hypothetical abortion of African American babies as a technique for lowering crime rates; and any of the dissenting judicial opinions penned by the lone Black justice on the nation\u27s highest court. Race is doing some very strange things these days

On Ethnographic Sincerity

This essay posits sincerity and humor as linked ways of politicizing the interactions that underpin all ethnographic encounters. This politicization is contrasted with conventional anthropological preoccupations with authenticity (and fetishizations of ethnographic writing), and it demands attention to the human bodies that constitute ethnographic intersubjectivity. Combining a discussion of Habermas’s public sphere with the exploits of a nineteenth‐century African American mesmerist and protoanthropologist, Paschal Randolph, I argue against one kind of “occulted anthropology” (the disembodied version attributed to Habermas) for an agential variety exemplified by Randolph’s differently framed investments in the political powers of occultist possibility. Instead of being seduced by would‐be objective attempts to access a disembodied (i.e., universal) subjectivity, I argue for a Paschal‐like reclamation of the vulnerable ethnographic body (in all of its contingent particularity), a reclamation that fuses rational minds to laughing bodies while opening up space for a critique of potentially impoverished conceptualizations of politics and political activity

Space biology initiative program definition review. Trade study 2: Prototype utilization in the development of space biology hardware

The objective was to define the factors which space flight hardware developers and planners should consider when determining: (1) the number of hardware units required to support program; (2) design level of the units; and (3) most efficient means of utilization of the units. The analysis considered technology risk, maintainability, reliability, and safety design requirements for achieving the delivery of highest quality flight hardware. Relative cost impacts of the utilization of prototyping were identified. The development of Space Biology Initiative research hardware will involve intertwined hardware/software activities. Experience has shown that software development can be an expensive portion of a system design program. While software prototyping could imply the development of a significantly different end item, an operational system prototype must be considered to be a combination of software and hardware. Hundreds of factors were identified that could be considered in determining the quantity and types of prototypes that should be constructed. In developing the decision models, these factors were combined and reduced by approximately ten-to-one in order to develop a manageable structure based on the major determining factors. The Baseline SBI hardware list of Appendix D was examined and reviewed in detail; however, from the facts available it was impossible to identify the exact types and quantities of prototypes required for each of these items. Although the factors that must be considered could be enumerated for each of these pieces of equipment, the exact status and state of development of the equipment is variable and uncertain at this time

All Yah’s Children

Cet article évoque l’histoire de l’émigration des « Israélites africains hébreux de Jérusalem », un groupe d’Africains-Américains qui ont quitté les États-Unis pour l’Afrique de l’Ouest (puis pour l’Afrique du Nord-Est) à la fin des années 1960. Leur voyage reposait sur une forme de sensibilité afrocentriste, sur un mélange de réponses à l’appel de Marcus Garvey pour une politique centrée sur l’Afrique, et de revendications d’une altérité africaine ontologique. En somme, les mêmes revendications intellectuelles qui commençaient tout juste à être codifiées dans le monde universitaire américain par des académiques comme Molefi Kete Asante. Je soutiens que ces « Israélites africains hébreux » donnent à voir une forme complexe d’Afrocentrisme, une version hébraïcisée qui se conforme à certaines formes canoniques d’Afrocentrisme tout en échappant à d’autres. En outre, leurs conceptions du corps aident à expliquer le manque d’intérêt qu’ils ont suscité dans les discussions plus générales de l’Afrocentrisme et de ses relations historiques et institutionnelles avec d’autres formes de contre-discours afro-centrés.This article delineates the emigration story of the “African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem”, a group of African Americans who left the United States for West Africa (and then “Northeast Africa”) in the late 1960s. Their journey was predicated, I argue, on something similar to an Afrocentric sensibility, a mixture of Marcus Garvey-esque calls for an African-centered politics and claims about an ontological African alterity, the same intellectual claims that were just beginning to get codified in the American academy by scholars such as Molefi Kete Asante. I maintain that these “African Hebrew Israelites” represent a complicated kind of Afrocentrism, a Hebraicized version that does (and does not) conform to certain canonized renditions of Afrocentric thinking. Moreover, their conceptions of “the body” help to further explain their purposeful omission from broader discussions about Afrocentricity and its historical/institutional relationship to other varieties of African-centered counter-discourse