For the last 6 years, I have been dealing with a health insurance claim for my wife’s hip operation in Thailand in January 2020. We were insured by Blue Shield of California at the time which is an administrator for my employer’s health care program at the time, the California Public Employees Retirement System (CALPERS). The policy Blue Shield administered included coverage for global emergency and urgent health care needs. In November 2019, Blue Shield pre-approved an operation on my wife’s hip because she could barely walk, and agreed the condition was considered urgent.…
Tag: Ethnography
Bracelets in Difficult Times: The Importance of Ordinary People’s Stories
– by Sigrid van Roode –
The young man looked at me hesitantly. “Well, I don’t know….” he said. “I’ll have to ask my grandfather, but he’s praying right now. Would you like some more tea?” Three glasses of hot sweet tea later, his grandfather entered the tiny shop in Cairo, Egypt’s Khan el-Khalili market where I sat, surrounded by old and vintage silver jewellery. We exchanged greetings and pleasantries, shared some more tea, and eventually settled on a price for the bracelet I wanted to buy.…
Distant Doctors: A Surgical Theater in Romania
Distant Doctors: A Surgical Theater in Romania
– By Cristina A. Pop –
Someone has a fondness for purple decor, I decide, as I look around the examination room at a gigantic poster of blooming irises, a mauve plastic cover atop the gynecological table, and a vase of artificial lilac cuttings on the windowsill. No need to look further: sitting at a desk covered in patient paperwork, the doctor sports a lavender gown.…
Ethnography.com launches on Youtube thanks to Chinese Smartphones in Africa
Greetings Ethnography.com aficionados!
My previous post “What Happens if Chinese Smartphones Teach English Lessons in Tanzania?” is now on Youtube. Keeping up with the times, Tony and I will be working together so that Ethnography.com articles will be in video format along with the transcription here on Ethnography.com. Please subscribe to Laurelin the Other– the Other meaning, the Ethnographer. Hit that like button and leave a comment on Youtube.…
Understanding the Shaman’s Tribulations
Understanding the Shaman’s Tribulations
– By Taba Menia –
The scholarship of shamanism is closely related to ideas about traditional healing and their knowledge. Found across the world in concern with the relationship between health and the super-natural, Shamans are observed as custodians of the human realm. Becoming a shaman involves expertise in traditional knowledge and transcendental abilities. Many researchers have focused on the initiation in Shamanhood and their roles. However, few discuss the Shaman’s own accounts of their hardships
I came across Shaman understandings of their work when I was carrying out my fieldwork in Arunachal Pradesh, high in the Himalayas in the far east of India between December 2020 and March 2021.…
(Almost) Native Ethnography Meets the Heat of the Tunisian Desert
– by Imen El Amouri –
Before embarking on my ethnographic graduate research, I dove into literature on native anthropological research in North Africa and the Arab world. My personal anguish over social and political conditions in my parents’ (and sometimes my own) home country motivated me to study Tunisian society. With confidence, I started my fieldwork in a remote desert village in the south of Tunisia. The following vignette from my fieldwork has put my native gaze in question.…
One (dis)placed ethnographer’s movements during the pandemic: Is the on-line world a lesser ethnographic world?
– guest blog By Sarah Huxley –
The joys and pains of ethnography, as many an ethnographer might tell you, focus on the immersive, and experiential conundrums that ‘real life’ invariably spits up. That’s not to say that there is no/ little preparation, but rather to say that the very nature of the ethnographic methodology, that is– the ontology, allows for and acknowledges that, just as in life, research must have a space for the unknown, or uninvited dinner guest.…
The Fear of Dahalo Bandits on a Drive Through the Alaotra Night (Madagascar)
– guest blog by Anders Norge Lauridsen –
Why are we stopping? The shadows are growing longer and the twilight is near, but we still have a long way home to the village of Anororo ahead of us. A man at a run from the other tractor several ridges behind us catches up with our tractor and announces between his gasps for breath the bad news. The other tractor has broken down.…
What does a Chicken, Drums, Whiskey, Gossip, and International Diplomacy have in common?
With the Ethnography.com website’s updated ‘modern’ look and my ‘mysterious’ long-term disappearance from America, you may be wondering about the site’s header photos, and what the heck is going on over here? Maybe call this ‘flash ethnography’ mixed with ethnographic photography. Here are five short stories…
^ THIS IS THE CHURCH COURTYARD at the ethnographer’s primary Fulbright research site. It is an important Pentecostal church in town that is also a small community.…
Would sobriety coins be an acceptable form of payment at the liquor store?
Notes From the Liquor Store
It’s the second time Rita has been into the liquor store where I work in Chico, California. Last time was Wednesday, when it was pouring rain, and the man she was with was dressed from hood to boots in bright yellow PVC. She’s from Paradise, or what was the town in which the November 8th ‘Camp Fire’ destroyed 19,000 buildings, and she keeps telling me to watch the city council. …
“Certain esoteric rites” for The Ethnographer
There need be no explanation for most occupations– but ethnographer? At least one of Argentina’s beloved poets would not have asked what I do if we’d met at a cocktail party, so I’d told him I was an ethnographer. It’s 1969, an assortment of olives and cheese crumbles between us, I swirl my dram glass nervously, to be conversing with the great Jorge Luis Borges, who seems to perceive the troubling nakedness under Ethnography’s cloak of neat dichotomies, authoritative conclusions, and its lone hero.…
The Place That Is Our Home
In 1978, Remmy Ongala left his home in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (not far from the city of Bukavu) for Tanzania. He boarded a boat across Lake Tanganyika to Kigoma, Tanzania’s main port city on the great lake. From Kigoma, he then traveled by train to Dar es Salaam to eventually become one of the most famous and well-loved ‘Tanzanian’ songwriter-musicians, Dr. Remmy.
For me, that small city of Kigoma that Dr.…