Meaning vs. Power: Are Thick Description and Power Analysis intrinsically at odds? Response to Interpretation, Explanation, and Clifford Geertz

This essay clarifies and defends the methodological multidimensionality and improvisational character of Clifford Geertz’s account of interpretation and explanation. In contrast to accounts of power analysis offered by Michel Foucault and Talal Asad, I argue that Geertz’s work can simultaneously attend to meaning, power, identity, and experience in understanding and assessing religious practices and cultural formations

Latah in Java: A Theoretical Paradox

Page range: 93-10

The impact of capital-intensive agriculture on peasant social structure : a case study

Cover title"June 1956."At head of title: Economic Development Program"#76"--handwritten on cover"Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology; summary of a larger CENIS study by Dr. Geertz, The social context of economic change; an Indonesian case study, C/56-18.

"What is Bread?" The Anthropology of Belief

This is a postprint (accepted manuscript) version of the article published in Ethos 40(3):341-357 in September 2012. The final version of the article can be found at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ezproxy.bu.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1548-1352.2012.01261.x/abstract (login required to access content). The version made available in Digital Common was supplied by the author.Accepted Manuscripttru

Changing the Ties That Bind? The Emerging Roles and Identities of General Practitioners and Managers in the New Clinical Commissioning Groups in the English NHS

The English National Health Service (NHS) is undergoing significant reorganization following the 2012 Health and Social Care Act. Key to these changes is the shift of responsibility for commissioning services from Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) to general practitioners (GPs) working together in Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs). This article is based on an empirical study that examined the development of emerging CCGs in eight case studies across England between September 2011 and June 2012. The findings are based on interviews with GPs and managers, observations of meetings, and reading of related documents. Scott’s notion that institutions are constituted by three pillars—the regulative, normative, and cognitive–cultural—is explored here. This approach helps to understand the changing roles and identities of doctors and managers implicated by the present reforms. This article notes the far reaching changes in the regulative pillar and questions how these changes will affect the normative and cultural–cognitive pillars

Sacred communities: contestations and connections

This article discusses a project whose purpose was to review existing qualitative and quantitative data from two separate studies to provide new insights about everyday religion and belonging. Researchers engaged in knowledge exchange and dialogue with new and former research participants, with other researchers involved in similar research, and with wider academic networks beyond the core disciplines represented here, principally anthropology and geography. Key concluding themes related to the ambivalent nature of ‘faith’, connections over place and time, and the contested nature of community. Implicit in terms like ‘faith’, ‘community’, and ‘life course’ are larger interwoven narratives of space, time, place, corporeality, and emotion. The authors found that understanding how places, communities, and faiths differ and intersect requires an understanding of social relatedness and boundaries

An Opportunity to Address Menstrual Health and Gender Equity

Menstruation is a monthly challenge for billions of women and girls worldwide. On any given day, more than 800 million girls and women between the ages of 15 and 49 are menstruating. Challenges with menstruation go beyond practical management to issues that affect the girl and her role in the community. While more governments, funders, and other actors are now addressing issues related to menstrual health, many existing efforts are disparate and siloed, and the field lacks the research needed to mobilize more organizations to get involved.This report examines the existing research linking menstrual health to broader outcomes around health, social norms, and education; describes the current state of the menstrual health field; and explores opportunities to better support women and girls.  Top TakeawaysThere has been increased momentum from donors, governments, and other private players to address problems related to menstrual health, but the focus to date has largely been on "hardware" (e.g., products and/or facilities). Few governments, corporations, and NGOs are looking at menstrual health as a systemic problem and thus are missing the opportunity to address the problems sustainably and at scale. There have been limited rigorous evaluations of menstrual health programming to understand what works and is replicable at scale.Evidence about the impact of poor menstrual health on other health, development, and empowerment outcomes is scant, not statistically significant, and largely inconclusive suggesting a need to invest in targeted research to mobilize targeted players in the field.Girls' experience with menstruation is inextricably linked to a broader set of changes affecting girls during puberty. The field needs to explore where menstruation can serve as an opportunity to access girls at a critical transition point in her life. With finite resources available to address issues facing adolescents, understanding the links between menstrual health and a broader set of norms can help to identify if there is an opportunity to influence a cross-cutting set of outcomes and set girls on a longer-term path to success

Bots, Seeds and People: Web Archives as Infrastructure

The field of web archiving provides a unique mix of human and automated agents collaborating to achieve the preservation of the web. Centuries old theories of archival appraisal are being transplanted into the sociotechnical environment of the World Wide Web with varying degrees of success. The work of the archivist and bots in contact with the material of the web present a distinctive and understudied CSCW shaped problem. To investigate this space we conducted semi-structured interviews with archivists and technologists who were directly involved in the selection of content from the web for archives. These semi-structured interviews identified thematic areas that inform the appraisal process in web archives, some of which are encoded in heuristics and algorithms. Making the infrastructure of web archives legible to the archivist, the automated agents and the future researcher is presented as a challenge to the CSCW and archival community