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The perils of working at home: IRB “mission creep” as context and content for an ethnography of disciplinary knowledges
RENA LEDERMAN
Among kinds of fieldwork “at home,” ethnographies of higher education inevitably draw on informal gleanings of everyday insider experience. Such informality is implicitly outlawed by federal human-subjects research regulations, which presume a clinical biomedical model that formally demarcates research from other activities. Intricately implicated in these circumstances, this article describes a comparative investigation into the methodologically embedded ethical conventions of anthropology and related disciplines for which institutional review board (IRB) participation itself became inadvertently informative, work that also reveals a conflict between the ethics of human-subjects protections (confidentiality) and of collegial exchange (citation).
[disciplinarity, institutional review boards (IRB), mission creep, participant-observation fieldwork, research ethics, unfunded research, ethnography of academic life and higher education]

Fuzzy boundaries and hard rules: Unfunded research and the IRB
DANIEL BRADBURD
In this article, I describe my use of the institutional review board (IRB) while conducting unfunded research at my institution. I examine the relationship between rule and practice in my research and attempt to outline the assumptions underlying my practical choices.
[IRB, unfunded research, rule, practice, officializing strategies]

Ethical escape routes for underground ethnographers
JACK KATZ
Campus committees for supervising research ethics have developed rules and procedures that are indifferent to the emergent nature of ethnographic research. As a result, participant-observing fieldworkers have appreciated that, independent of their ethical commitments, they cannot comply with official regulations. Resolution of the fieldworker’s dilemma requires limiting review jurisdiction to funded studies; articulating the meaning of regulatory language defining auspices, exemptions, waiver, and research; and, above all, developing a culture of legality in campus ethics administration.
[ethnographic methodology, institutional review board, research ethics, participant-observation, academic freedom, administrative discretion, sociology of law, sociology of higher education]

Protecting human subjects and preserving academic freedom: Prospects at the University of Chicago
RICHARD A. SHWEDER
Within the terms of the federal regulatory scheme requiring institutional review board (IRB) oversight of federally funded research with human subjects, projects that are not federally funded are not mandated for IRB review. Eighty percent of social-science projects at the University of Chicago are not federally funded. This article is a critique of the overextension of federal regulations by university and college administrators and provides some suggestions for reform.
[academic freedom, IRB, human-subjects protection, research ethics]

Theorizing world culture through the New World: East Indians and creolization
VIRANJINI MUNASINGHE
This article is an ethnographic inquiry into the production of theory. In it, I specifically ask why the concept “creole” has assumed such significance today for theorists working outside the Caribbean for interpreting the dynamics of cultural change globally. Relocating “creole” in its historical and regional context, I analyze how and why interculturation, an essential feature of creolization that is championed by global theorists, is transformed into acculturation when creolization theory is applied to East Indians in Trinidad. I argue that creolization fails as theory with respect to East Indians because of its ontology as a schizophrenic theory, that is, one in which theory and ideology are conflated. I call for a reconceptualization of creolization theory by first recognizing the limitations imposed by such instances of epistemological collapse.
[creolization, global culture, Caribbean, East Indians, anthropological theory, Trinidad]

Empire is in the details
CATHERINE LUTZ
Recent writing that identifies the United States as an empire has focused overwhelmingly on its political-economic underpinnings, without questioning the cultural making of value or examining empire as more than an elite project. This writing has not drawn on ethnographic work that would reshape it in more adequate, less economistic forms, make the human face and frailties of imperialism more visible, and, in so doing, make challenges to imperial practice more likely. Focusing on military institutions, and via some examples from U.S. imperial projects in the Philippines and elsewhere, I suggest where ethnographies of empire might be done and what vulnerabilities they might explore.
[empire, imperialism, United States, military, Philippines]

Beyond the ethnic lens: Locality, globality, and born-again incorporation
NINA GLICK SCHILLER, AYSE ÇAGLAR, and THADDEUS C. GULDBRANDSEN
Migration studies have focused attention on ethnic institutions in global and gateway cities. This ethnic lens distorts migration scholarship, reinforces methodological nationalism, and disregards the role of city scale in shaping migrant pathways of settlement and transnational connection. The scale of cities reflects their positioning within neoliberal processes of local, national, regional, and global rescaling. To encourage further explorations of nonethnic pathways that may be salient in small-scale cities, we examine born-again Christianity as a means of migrant incorporation locally and transnationally in two small-scale cities, one in the United States and the other in Germany.
[ethnic lens, city scale, immigrant incorporation, transnational, methodological nationalism, religion, Christianity, migrant incorporation, Germany, United States]

Reclaiming modernity: Indigenous cosmopolitanism and the coming of the second revolution in Bolivia
MARK GOODALE
In this article I explore the emergence of complicated new forms of indigeneity in Bolivia over the last 15 years. I argue that although what I describe as a second revolution is underway in contemporary Bolivia, there is a danger that this revolution will be misread by scholars, political commentators, and others because of the prevailing tendency to interpret social and moral movements in Bolivia (and elsewhere) in rigidly neopolitical–economic terms. I offer an alternative theoretical framework for understanding current developments in Bolivia, which I describe as “indigenous cosmopolitanism”: the ability of national political leaders, youth rappers in El Alto, rural indigenous activists, and others to bring together apparently disparate discursive frameworks as a way of reimagining categories of belonging in Bolivia, and, by extension, the meanings of modernity itself.
[cosmopolitanism, indigenous peoples, resistance, moral imagination, revolution, modernity, Bolivia, Andes, Latin America]

Body, nation, and consubstantiation in Bolivian ritual meals
SUSAN PAULSON
During a remarkable period of official ethnic recognition and indigenous political mobilization in Bolivia, farmers in the rural Municipality of Mizque have invested increasing energy in ritual meals widely characterized as indigenous, expanding the number of meals celebrated and increasing their spatial distribution. Multisited ethnographic study of how people connect to body, place, and identity shows that the intense corporal experiences and tangible materiality of these ritual meals contrast with tendencies of official multiculturalism to privilege symbols and products of indigenous culture while disregarding the substance of indigenous bodies and the material bases of their survival. Consubstantiation in ritual meals resonates with other collective bodily practices that are gaining prominence in Bolivia, including mass manifestations and constituent assemblies, to point toward possibilities for a new kind of civil society grounded in concern for the ethnic identities and for the bodily and material subsistence of its diverse members.
[Andes, body, food, race, national identity]

“Everyone can do as he wants”: Economic liberalization and emergent forms of antipathy in southern Ethiopia
JAMES ELLISON
After the fall of Ethiopia’s socialist government, people in Konso in the south appropriated idioms associated with neoliberal economic reforms to describe and to shape their reconfiguration of hereditary status groups, as some historically despised Xauta artisans and merchants became wealthy and some dominant Etenta cultivators adopted Xauta identity. Countering scholarship that assumes a recent break with previously separate and stable status groups, I argue that, throughout the 20th century, people in Konso reshaped inherited social categories through interactions with novel information and changing political–economic circumstances. Emergent relations today are shaped in an increasingly transnational postsocialist context, and they reconfigure, rather than eliminate, local hegemonies.
[hereditary status groups, emergence, neoliberalism, hegemony, marginality, Konso, Ethiopia]