Chapter 5 begins by reading Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House as an experiment in cinematic projection, a phantasmagoric erasure of the means of projection. I compare Cather’s cartographic romance to that of Robert and Frances Flaherty’s Moana of the South Seas, the first film to be called “documentary.” Both the Flahertys and Cather mark US national space against the anachronism of the remote island. Spinning this view around, I tell the story of Fialelei, who served as producer and translator for the Flahertys in Sāmoa. She also accompanied them to the United States, and her voyage embodies the Samoan principle of the Vā, or “space-between.” This Oceanian counterpoint provides a new position for studying the role of cinematic fantasy in isolating the “primitive” from “civilized,” and projecting the former onto the “insular.”

This chapter explores the ways folksong research in the Czech lands emerged both within and alongside race and ethnicity studies during the first half of the twentieth century. Many scholars have thoughtfully examined interrelationships between folksong research and German nationalism, specimen culture, and Darwinian assumptions, and yet these same interrelationships in Czech music studies have only recently begun to emerge. Anthropologists, too, have brought into focus the political roles of ethnographic studies in defining the Czech and Slovak nations, but the specific role of folksong research within this remains unstudied. Examining the ways music research in the Czech lands participated alongside and sometimes overlapped with German nationalist race and ethnicity research, however, illuminates early Czech folk-music studies as an instrument of ethnonationalism; a tool not merely descriptive of a repertoire, but also delineative of who belonged and who did not.

Kimberly Hope Belcher surveys an impressive number of authors and theories who have engaged with the broad human phenomenon of ritual. For it is evident that both classical ritual studies and more recent approaches have enormous potential for engaging in a dialogue with scholars of Christian liturgy and liturgies.

Intracultural ethnographic research involves studying the flows of culture(s) in all its different expressions – national, occupational, functional, and so on – as they function, co-evolve, and affect the day-to-day lives of individuals within a single organization. The focus here is on the internal organizational challenges and dynamics that are ubiquitous to such complex cultural contexts as foreign direct investments, cross-national mergers and acquisitions, and international joint ventures. The micro context of these kinds of organizations is in fact the global meeting ground where people experience the everyday challenges of working with diverse Others in today’s culturally complex world. Part I of this book explores the challenges and opportunities facing organizations when there are competing national cultural assumptions around how work is done, language differences, and multiple sources of power and influence.

In today’s globalized world, a deep understanding of how culture affects international business phenomena is critical to scholarship and practice. Yet, armed with only superficial measures of national cultural differences, scholars and practitioners find themselves stereotype rich and operationally poor where culture meets real-world international business context. “Culture” is substantially more complex than this, made up of multiple interacting cultural spheres (national, regional, institutional, organizational, functional) that are differentially enacted by individuals many of whom are multicultural themselves. Settings in international business are therefore rife with multilevel cultural interactions as individuals with diverging cultural assumptions are brought together in real time (often virtually) across distance and differentiated contexts. This coursebook on ethnography in IB is the first of its kind, offering students, academics, and executives a way to study, understand, reduce uncertainty about, and make the most of the effects of culture in today’s global and multicultural business contexts.

This book analyzes the role of different political economic sectors that drive deforestation and clearcutting, including mining, ranching, export-oriented plantation agriculture, and forestry. The book examines the key actors, systems, and technologies behind the worsening climate/biodiversity crises that are aggravated by deforestation. The book is theoretically innovative, uniting political economic, sociological, political ecologic, and transdisciplinary theories on the politics of extraction. The research relies on the author’s multi-sited political ethnography, including field research, interviews, and other approaches, across multiple frontiers of deforestation, focusing on Brazil, Peru, and Finland. Why do key global extractivist sectors continue to expand via deforestation and what are the differences between sectors and regions? The hypothesis is that regionally and sometimes nationally dominant politically powerful economic sectors are major explanatory factors for if, how, and where deforestation occurs. To address the deepening global crises, it is essential to understand these power relations within different types of deforesting extractivisms.

The chapter chronicles the close relationship that anthropology, from its very outset as a discipline, had with psychoanalysis, and seeks to make a broader conceptual argument: namely that, over the decades, anthropologists moved from applying to their ethnographic material psychoanalytic concepts, which were generated in clinical settings by practicing psychoanalysts, to engaging themselves in psychodynamic encounters with their own interlocutors, and in so doing reaching the point of generating original theory of psychoanalytic value. This was possible due to the increasing conviction that the prime subject of psychodynamic investigation should not be any given society’s cultural material, interpreted and “analyzed” abstractly to deductively reach aprioristic inferences on the members of the respective community. Rather, the subject of such psychodynamic studies could only be the individual, analyzed from within the social norms, values, and idioms constraining the individual’s development. In turn, this idiographic study would yield invaluable elements necessary to adequately understand the dynamics of the social context in which the individual exists to begin with.

The misuse of ethnographic analogy, illustrated through several case studies, has been and remains widespread in the archaeology of pastoralism. Earlier programmatic papers on how to strengthen the use of analogy in archaeology point to three proposals for how archaeologists interested in pastoralism might use ethnographic analogy more reliably, especially through evaluation of systematic biases in mid-twentieth-century pastoralist ethnography and highlighting temporal and spatial variability evidenced in ethnographic and historical accounts. Archaeological and ethnoarchaeological work on historical mobile pastoralism in southeastern Turkey illustrates one way of engaging with some of these proposals.

Giulia Bruna, in her chapter, offers a comparative framework for discussing the different strategies of J. M. Synge and Emily Lawless for achieving an authentic representation of the otherworldly geography of the Aran Islands, which was so much a part of the folklore of the region. Synge’s The Aran Islands, often treated as a spiritual autobiography, offers a way of reading the West of Ireland that complicates our understanding of authentic Irishness. While he derives a sense of authenticity through largely documentary and ethnographic rather than fictional means, Lawless, in Grania, captures an authentic sense of rural Ireland through the formal arrangements of the novel. Bruna is concerned with identifying, in Synge’s and Lawless’s work, modes of plural and dialogic authenticity that recognizes the “parasitic” relation of culture to nature. Bruna concludes that their versions of authenticity, though different in methodology, serve the same revivalist purpose of shaping Irish cultures for future generations.

This chapter outlines the ethnographic and qualitative methodology employed in this study. The methodological choices focus on understanding language ideologies in a multilingual setting. The study does not engage in a linguistic focus on speech patterns and instead emphasizes the cultural and social meanings that speakers attach to language. It challenges monolingual, Western-centric assumptions by exploring complex links between language and social structures. Data collection included interviews, field notes, observations, classroom recordings, and surveys on language use. The study uses grounded theory to analyse data, and it prioritizes speakers’ perspectives as experts of their own language culture. The chapter argues that decolonising research practices have to treat local language ideologies as legitimate frameworks rather than folk beliefs. A linguistic analysis examines public English, inspecting its variability and influence from both local and external norms. By integrating linguistic, cultural, and social data, the methodological approach provides a holistic view of how language ideologies emerge and intersect with broader social discourses.

The chapter explores the social relations of renewable energy and everyday life in the Indian state of Karnataka, focusing on the 2 GW Pavagada solar energy park, said to be the largest in Asia, and on the experience of wind energy at the local level. It analyses these installations in the historical context of national and state-level energy policy, framed by wider developmental dynamics and stratification in the Karnataka locality. We contrast the renewable ‘resource’ with fossil fuel sources and highlight differences between solar and wind power. We discuss the drive to attract renewable investment to the region, along with development finance, in the context of Karnataka’s development trajectory. We interpret the transition to renewable energy in terms of social structures and the extent to which it exacerbates or alleviates pre-existing social divides. There is a strong focus on implications for land, water, livelihood, caste, gender, and environment, including for instance the role, or displacement, of rural landless and lower-caste groups.

The chapter centres on the expansion of wind power and the subsequent ‘solar rush’ in the German ‘energy state’ of Brandenburg, where the energy transition (or Energiewende) has been underway for more than two decades. We follow the unfolding process of renewable energy development and socio-ecological capture, paying particular attention to the changing scale of operations exemplified by a move to larger wind turbines and the current shift to large-scale solar farms. The chapter provides a rich account of the nexus between a well-established renewables sector and other forms of land use, such as leisure, aesthetics, agriculture, or forestry. The conflict between narratives of regional and local development, prompted, defined, and mobilised in the energy transition, is seen as opening new fields of engagement and disputation in the emerging ‘green’ economy.