Chapter 1 locates the invention of the unemployment novel in the 1930s and the mass unemployment instigated by the Great Depression. Through an account of discussions and studies of the unemployed during that time, the chapter defines the Depression-era emotional genre of unemployment as imbued with passivity, apathy, and the slow breaking of men. The unemployment novel emerged and intervened in this context with its aesthetics of resentment and class struggle.

In this introduction, I explore theories of injury and ethnographic methods for studying them. I treat injuries and their causes holistically, as reflecting the wounding and coactive effects of an array of harmful exposures, historical circumstances, technologies, environments, and political systems. In conceiving of injury across different scales of time, I offer insights into what health scholars term the ‘secondary’ impacts of injury on claimants and their families. Increasingly, scholars recognize that compensation systems, medico-legal assessments, and claim-making practices themselves contribute to or cause significant negative harm and secondary impacts to both the injured and their families. In contrast to the medical language of primary and secondary illness, I argue for a participant-centred and experience-near approach, one that can trace the connections test veterans themselves draw across time and within their personal and community illness narratives, as they built understandings of radiation injury and harm. Original injury or exposure ‘events’ were narratively enfolded within the cascade of transforming and accumulating harms that participants experienced.

Chapter 1 grounds this study in larger policy and theoretical debates, including literature on US-China competition, China’s authoritarian diffusion, South–South communication flows, and China–Africa relations. It further introduces the analytical and conceptual framework of this study: China’s uneven image-making in Africa, which includes its ambitious image promotion mechanisms, as well as disjointed implementation and reception on the ground. The chapter also explains the methodological choices, including the focus on Ethiopia and Global China ethnographic approach.

This chapter examines how “open science” is a practical problem for scientists, focusing on what is central to it: the extended access to research data. It considers how researchers evaluate the social and moral accountabilities of the open access to data and the tensions that result from them. In astronomy, most large scientific datasets are made by collaborations. This chapter considers two collaborations, including the MUWAGS team discussed in Chapter 6. As these teams’ members prepared datasets for public release, they became both inquirers into, and actors in, what many astronomers refer to as their discipline’s “culture of open data access.” Both teams can be described as groups of practical methodologists who used “inner dialogues” to explore the normative expectations and tensions of this domain ethnographically, seeking to inhabit proper statuses in it. The chapter argues that examining scientists’ understanding of statuses and their achievement offers resources for a refined critique of “open science” that is considerate of the context sensitivity of data production and use. Along the way, it examines some methods by which scientists, as members, are “doing ethnography.”

The Outlook argues that whatever the participant or mediatory statuses of machines may be in future research with large and complex datasets, understanding their uses and impacts at the granularity of human interaction and social accountability will be essential for attempts to integrate human and machine learning from data. It highlights the uses of the two notions of accountability addressed in this book, identifies a spectrum of natural scientists’ social inquiries that hints at their normative orientations, and argues for the use of ethnography as a reminder of human agency and responsibility.

Mistakes and missteps in theory development and testing are inevitable but there are ways to decrease them. One way to detect potential problems is to outline the definitions, scope conditions, assumptions and finally derivations. Stripping down the theory to the simplest form helps spot definitions that are not precise or derivations that are not sound. Once done, it becomes easier to diagnose problems and think through potential solutions. Another way to find potential problems is to talk through your ideas with others—especially those you know to be skeptical. Having to explain your logic and then your potential tests with others can provide invaluable feedback and can make you rethink aspects of your formulations.

The Introduction sets out from an ethnographic vignette to specify the book’s anthropological approach to data-rich science. It briefly reviews the literature on the social practices of data use in the sciences. It then argues for setting out from the tenet that humans are fundamentally evaluative and attending to social interactions and accountabilities by means of ethnography. Doing so helps making sense of data-centric socialities: forms of social coordination unfolding in the making, use, and publication of data. Adopting this view, readers discover a view of ethics that is mindful of all participants and see how researchers learn from technicians about data production, instruct new data users, use diagrams to cultivate data, engage mundane reasoning to resolve disjunctive findings, organize collaborative work, manage issues of normativity in “open science,” and seek to encode their knowledge in datasets. The Introduction concludes with a description of ethnographic fieldwork and a discussion of its representativeness and generalizability.

This chapter focuses on evaluations of persons as a lens into scientific data production and its ethics. That humans are fundamentally evaluative is a basic tenet of social interaction and social life. People are concerned that others understand their intentions adequately, knowing that their actions are being evaluated, and they examine others’ actions and intentions likewise. In many sciences, data production has become a service, with technicians generating data in the absence of researchers. Such new arrangements of data production come with numerical and social accountabilities as well as ethical evaluations. Focusing on data production in astronomy, this chapter traces these through several contexts. Joining data-producing technicians and data-using scientists as an ethnographer reveals that both are themselves exploring the epistemic and social accountabilities they face. Their way of “doing ethnography” is an ordinary social competence. The chapter argues that such ethnographic practices support and enable scientific data production as a service while also revealing its ethical tensions.

This chapter will highlight the major differences between qualitative and quantitative research papers, focusing on the unique aspects of planning, executing, and reporting qualitative studies. In it, we outline from start to finish the events involved in a qualitative research paper.

Over the years, and at the margin of psychology, there have been interesting and original lines of reflections on ageing based on careful observations of older people’s lives in their environment. First, the environment came to the fore in approaches developed in dialogue with geography, which started to apprehend it as a landscape of care. Second, ethnographies of ageing gave in-depth understanding of development in age in more or less supportive, more or less formal environments. Third, psychoanalysis developed its reflection on ageing as it saw its steady change. It has theorised the specificities of the ageing psyche, while showing its multiple determinations. Put together, these three lines of studies pave the way for a rich, case-study based approach to development in older age, where people are understood as deeply related to the evolving environments in which they live.

In this chapter, I focus not so much on the paradigmatic victims of police terror in Brazil – and the expanding nature of the fundamentally anti-Black economy of violability that explains this country’s astonishing level of homicidal violence against Black and non-Black individuals living in predominantly Black spaces – but instead on the critical role that urban ethnographers can play in demystifying the “war on police” and advancing an insurgent intellectual movement that pushes toward police abolition in the contemporary world. Brazil is the departure point of analysis for obvious reasons. As the country with the highest rates of civilians killed by the police, it has seen a proliferation of anthropological studies on police violence and police culture within the last few decades. Not only have anthropologists dedicated increasing attention to the challenges and possibilities of democratic policing, but officers themselves have become ethnographers – or at least relied on some of ethnography’s techniques – in their attempts to provide “privileged” accounts of police praxis.

Our goal in this chapter is to consider the impact of our “Racializing Affect: A Theoretical Proposition” theoretical proposition and lay out a possible roadmap for future ethnographic research to further develop the concept’s material and social analytical value. We approach this goal in three main substantive sections. The first provides an overview of our 2015 theoretical proposition on “racializing affect,” considering its main contributions and cornerstones. In the second section, we show how this theoretical intervention has influenced scholarship on an array of themes, including and transcending the specific intersection of affect and race in our original 2015 analysis. We do this through a systematic review of selected scholarly engagements with the piece accessed via its citational record available through Current Anthropology and Google scholar. Finally, we engage in a critical reappraisal of how discussions around “racialized affect” have expanded in anthropology and the humanistic social sciences more broadly, particularly in relation to ethnography as methodology.

The afterword synthesizes the chapters in this volume to draw out themes, lessons, and future directions and acknowledges the importance of the ethnographic approach of this work. We expand on the three themes of ideals in tension with practices, the shifting nature of acquaintanceship to friendship, and the enactment of public and private across space and place. We argue for three valuable insights gained from reading these chapters together. First, they point towards the importance of how people read our intentions, friendship performances, and relationships. Second, friendships impinge on our ontological security. Third, there are rhythms to connections across space. Interactions are temporally bound and accounting for the temporal is helpful in completing analyses of friendships. Ultimately, we show how these chapters sit at the intersection of critical theory and symbolic interaction. We also underscore that this volume marks not the end, but a beginning of a renewed research agenda on critical friendship, one that began with contributors who were mostly strangers but who are now mostly friends.

Chapter 3 describes and demonstrates the use of several tools of language study, including elicitations, grammaticality judgments, participant observation, discourse analysis, and corpus analyses.

Euro-American intellectuals began by thinking of folklore as relics from a pre-modern era, showing our own nostalgic anti-modernism. Paradoxically, we then subjected folklore to the information control mechanisms of modernity: identification, observation, investigation, collection, classification, analysis, comparison, interpretation, and evaluation – all in service to science, expertise, universities, and the knowledge production industry. Today, we challenge the inscription of folklore studies into the epistemology of modernity and its institutional power structures, especially in terms of its consequences for minorities and people of color. In this chapter I construct a brief history of folksong observation and collecting chiefly in the United States, the region I know best. I attend to how and why the consensus among American folklorists changed over time concerning who are the folk (if not peasants, then who?), what constitutes folksong, and how folksong is to be studied and understood.