Medical doctors arrive at a diagnosis after considering various types of evidence, including the ... more Medical doctors arrive at a diagnosis after considering various types of evidence, including the patient's complaints, their outer appearance, talk, and non-verbal behavior. In psychiatry, the role of conversation is more important than in somatic medicine, because it is in the patient's talk that the disease can express itself. Some elements of the conversational machinery have been studied in diagnostic interviews in a psychiatric ward. In the interviews, a recurrent pattern of the doctor’s questions and the patient’s answers was found. Schegloff (2007) showed that “known answer” questions form a distinctive three-part sequence type: question-response-evaluation. In diagnostic interviews in psychiatry, the questions don't address knowledge but the capacity to perform the task. Not all the test questions have a correct answer, and the result of the evaluation is not always announced by the doctor. The doctor consistently repeats the patient’s answer without evaluating it and then adds a follow-up question. At least parts of the repeated cycles in the sequence of doctor-patient interaction exhibit the following pattern: Doctor’s question > Patient’s answer > Doctor’s echo > (optional Doctor's follow-up question). When the doctor's questions seek real information — and do not just test capacity —they sometimes resort to a reformulation of the patient’s answers instead of just repeating it; this reformulation works as a prompt. The questions in the clinical interview appear to follow two lines of accountability: the ordinary conversational order and that which is provided by the professional reasoning aimed at checking diagnostic hypotheses. The second line is not usually accessible to the patient.
The paper considers some intellectual roots of the contemporary multimodal analysis. The prehisto... more The paper considers some intellectual roots of the contemporary multimodal analysis. The prehistory of microanalysis of social interaction includes semiotics of nonverbal communication and the anthropological study of patterns of expressive and communicative behavior as it was performed by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead in the pioneering research on Balinese character. The Batesonian approach to interaction was influenced by cybernetic ideas—particularly the notion of feedback— which led to theoretical advances on communication in general and, particularly, in the study of family interaction in a psychiatric perspective. The interdisciplinary research project that became known as “The Natural History of an Interview” was the first example of a broad interdisciplinary collaboration involving anthropologists, linguists and psychiatrists. It has brought about a detailed analysis of a filmed interaction that correlated data about talk, paralanguage, and body language (kinesics). The results of this project, as well as of the other attempts at kinesic microanalysis, allowed one to question the goals of research and the adequacy of research methods employed. However, the input from kinesics and, broader, semiotics of non-verbal communication was instrumental for including data about participants’ attention traced as gaze-direction into analysis of talk-in-interaction, as it was put in practice by Charles Goodwin.
The image of the 1990s in the Russian public discourse is controversial: this historical period o... more The image of the 1990s in the Russian public discourse is controversial: this historical period of transition from socialism to a new social system is considered as a time of chaos and crime, but also as a period of openness, opportunities and new consumer culture. The paper presents preliminary results of a study of visual materials from Instagram that in this or that way refer to the 1990s. The analysis of Instagram accounts dedicated to the 1990s, of hashtags related to the topic and of their co-occurrence, as well as the classification of the posts based on their content are presented. The 1990s turn out to be used in Instagram as one among other topics of post-socialist nostalgia, employed by the bloggers to increase the number of followers and likes. Nostalgic feelings refer to teenagers’ experiences mainly related to everyday practices, consumption and popular culture.
Аннотация. Образ 1990-х в российском общественном дискурсе неоднозначен: переход от социализма к ... more Аннотация. Образ 1990-х в российском общественном дискурсе неоднозначен: переход от социализма к новому строю осмысляется как период хаоса и преступности, но также и как время открытости, новых возможностей и новой потребительской культуры. В статье представлены предварительные результаты исследования материалов Инстаграма на тему 1990-х: анализ публичных тематических блогов, соответствующих хэштегов и их сочетаемости, а также содержательная классификация публикаций. Девяностые оказываются одной из тем, связанных с постсоциалистической ностальгией, которые эксплуатируются блогерами для увеличения числа подписчиков и лайков. Ностальгические чувства отсылают к подростковому опыту, связанному в основном с повседневными практиками, потреблением и поп-культурой.
In today's world where other cultures are being tapped to a greater extent than ever before, the ... more In today's world where other cultures are being tapped to a greater extent than ever before, the processes of mixing and matching are especially relevant in making sense of Russia. Not only do borrowing and assimilation, interaction between the Own and the Alien, constitute a venerable tradition in Russian culture, but during the last two post-Soviet decades a notable Western influence has become apparent. This book provides means for understanding Russianness in this new situation. By bringing together Russian and Western, eminent and younger scholars it provides insights from both inside and outside the country. By extending its perspectives to three fieldslinguistics, cultural studies, and social sciencesit covers different dimensions of creative misunderstandings, hybrids, tensions, and other modes of adaptation in the Russian culture. By offering concrete case studies it avoids easy stereotypes, deconstructs clichés, problematizes accepted truths, and identifies points of interaction between Russia and the West.
ABSTRACT Research projects that employ big data and data visualization approach for analysis of u... more ABSTRACT Research projects that employ big data and data visualization approach for analysis of users’ posts on Instagram deal with materials devoid of contextual information about the circumstances of taking photos and posting, but instead bear traces of users’ activities in the form of meta-data such as location, time and date. However, in order to be interpreted, patterns revealed in big data require reference to the characteristics of places and social practices. More traditional studies of vernacular photography and its uses, as well as studies of social networking and mobile technologies within digital anthropology, are able to provide rich layers of meaning to users’ content from Instagram that can also be considered in the perspective of visual anthropology. In order to check what features and parameters can be relevant for interpretation of data from Instagram, a ‘small data’ approach has been used for manual collection, annotation and analysis of a corpus of photographs that have to do with a Ukrainian town.
In Russia, according to data from 2014, 1 excluding actual police officers, 1.4 million people we... more In Russia, according to data from 2014, 1 excluding actual police officers, 1.4 million people were employed as security officers, among whom one third were contracted by the state, while the rest were employed privately as guards and watchmen. If we add their managers, accountants and other people who work in private security firms, this number comes to around three million. At the same time, the number of people employed in police is around 1 million, which puts Russia rather high in the rating of countries according to the ratio of policemen to population. As of 2014, there were 634 policemen for each 100,000 of population, more than twice the ratio in Germany. Private guards and watchmen mostly sit all day in shops and offices with little to engage them during this work. In Russia they are omnipresent; they can be found in almost every shop, school, or institution (not only those institutions which are run by the state, but private businesses, too). The demand for these security services can partly be explained by the serious crime situation in the country and inefficient work of the police. For example, the number of murders in Russia is one of the highest in the world (in 2010, it was 14.9 for 100,000 people in comparison to 0.86 in Germany). 2 Business and the population buy the services of security to protect themselves. However, this is not the whole story. These days, most institutions with free
Early Ape Language Research projects from 1960-70s conducted by Gardners, Premack, Patterson, Ram... more Early Ape Language Research projects from 1960-70s conducted by Gardners, Premack, Patterson, Rambough, Savage-Rambough, and Terrace demonstrated that apes are able to employ arbitrary symbols and use them in communication with human experimenters in face-to-face communication or in mediated communication involving computer keypads. Data on the communicative abilities of apes exposed to language teaching were supposed to contribute to comparative psychology as well as evolutionary and developmental biology: the studies were aimed at demonstrating the cognitive and linguistic abilities of captive apes beyond that which can be observed in their natural habitat, and at providing insights about the early stages of the emergence of language. However, the obtained results and interpretations were criticized by those scholars who offered more parsimonious explanations of the observed behaviors of the apes and emphasized the contribution of the human partner to the interaction with the animal. The critics regarded ape language experiments within the framework of a long history of smart animals that could demonstrate exceptional abilities in a performance based on unconscious cueing by the human experimenter. This discussion-sometimes referred to as the "chimp-language wars"-is important for two reasons: firstly, it questions the ways in which human-like communicative behaviors can be interpreted. Secondly, it concerns the scholarly status of activities that involve mind-reading and ascribing quasi-human characteristics to non-human beings, and thus challenges the limits of humanity.
The development of information technology over the last three decades has revolutionized everyday... more The development of information technology over the last three decades has revolutionized everyday activities in a domain that can be referred to as personal information management. The personal information environment in which this management takes place consists of both digital and nondigital information artifacts, which a user employs systematically. Interfaces of digital information technology employ analogies for nondigital affordances and nondigital methods of handling information artefacts. Ethnographic studies of nondigital information management have established two poles toward which personal information management strategies tend to gravitate: systematization of documents kept in topically organized folders and keeping documents in chronologically organized piles. Interfaces of digital information technologies provide affordances for both types of strategies. Affordances that make possible dealing with digital information artifacts provide means for finding objects without...
Только что вышедший сборник «Post-Soviet Nostalgia: Confronting the Empire’s Legacies» посвящен т... more Только что вышедший сборник «Post-Soviet Nostalgia: Confronting the Empire’s Legacies» посвящен теме как нельзя более актуальной в свете политического использования прошлого в целом и советского прошлого в риторике российских властей в частности. В сегодняшней России повсеместно бросается в глаза то, в какой степени историческое прошлое, соответствующим образом оформленное, оказывается ресурсом: власть выбирает оттуда нужные для консолидации общества символы и элементы. Эта идеология опирается на ностальгические чувства, широко представленные в обществе. Text in Russian DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-2-265-271
Medical doctors arrive at a diagnosis after considering various types of evidence, including the ... more Medical doctors arrive at a diagnosis after considering various types of evidence, including the patient's complaints, their outer appearance, talk, and non-verbal behavior. In psychiatry, the role of conversation is more important than in somatic medicine, because it is in the patient's talk that the disease can express itself. Some elements of the conversational machinery have been studied in diagnostic interviews in a psychiatric ward. In the interviews, a recurrent pattern of the doctor’s questions and the patient’s answers was found. Schegloff (2007) showed that “known answer” questions form a distinctive three-part sequence type: question-response-evaluation. In diagnostic interviews in psychiatry, the questions don't address knowledge but the capacity to perform the task. Not all the test questions have a correct answer, and the result of the evaluation is not always announced by the doctor. The doctor consistently repeats the patient’s answer without evaluating it and then adds a follow-up question. At least parts of the repeated cycles in the sequence of doctor-patient interaction exhibit the following pattern: Doctor’s question > Patient’s answer > Doctor’s echo > (optional Doctor's follow-up question). When the doctor's questions seek real information — and do not just test capacity —they sometimes resort to a reformulation of the patient’s answers instead of just repeating it; this reformulation works as a prompt. The questions in the clinical interview appear to follow two lines of accountability: the ordinary conversational order and that which is provided by the professional reasoning aimed at checking diagnostic hypotheses. The second line is not usually accessible to the patient.
The paper considers some intellectual roots of the contemporary multimodal analysis. The prehisto... more The paper considers some intellectual roots of the contemporary multimodal analysis. The prehistory of microanalysis of social interaction includes semiotics of nonverbal communication and the anthropological study of patterns of expressive and communicative behavior as it was performed by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead in the pioneering research on Balinese character. The Batesonian approach to interaction was influenced by cybernetic ideas—particularly the notion of feedback— which led to theoretical advances on communication in general and, particularly, in the study of family interaction in a psychiatric perspective. The interdisciplinary research project that became known as “The Natural History of an Interview” was the first example of a broad interdisciplinary collaboration involving anthropologists, linguists and psychiatrists. It has brought about a detailed analysis of a filmed interaction that correlated data about talk, paralanguage, and body language (kinesics). The results of this project, as well as of the other attempts at kinesic microanalysis, allowed one to question the goals of research and the adequacy of research methods employed. However, the input from kinesics and, broader, semiotics of non-verbal communication was instrumental for including data about participants’ attention traced as gaze-direction into analysis of talk-in-interaction, as it was put in practice by Charles Goodwin.
The image of the 1990s in the Russian public discourse is controversial: this historical period o... more The image of the 1990s in the Russian public discourse is controversial: this historical period of transition from socialism to a new social system is considered as a time of chaos and crime, but also as a period of openness, opportunities and new consumer culture. The paper presents preliminary results of a study of visual materials from Instagram that in this or that way refer to the 1990s. The analysis of Instagram accounts dedicated to the 1990s, of hashtags related to the topic and of their co-occurrence, as well as the classification of the posts based on their content are presented. The 1990s turn out to be used in Instagram as one among other topics of post-socialist nostalgia, employed by the bloggers to increase the number of followers and likes. Nostalgic feelings refer to teenagers’ experiences mainly related to everyday practices, consumption and popular culture.
Аннотация. Образ 1990-х в российском общественном дискурсе неоднозначен: переход от социализма к ... more Аннотация. Образ 1990-х в российском общественном дискурсе неоднозначен: переход от социализма к новому строю осмысляется как период хаоса и преступности, но также и как время открытости, новых возможностей и новой потребительской культуры. В статье представлены предварительные результаты исследования материалов Инстаграма на тему 1990-х: анализ публичных тематических блогов, соответствующих хэштегов и их сочетаемости, а также содержательная классификация публикаций. Девяностые оказываются одной из тем, связанных с постсоциалистической ностальгией, которые эксплуатируются блогерами для увеличения числа подписчиков и лайков. Ностальгические чувства отсылают к подростковому опыту, связанному в основном с повседневными практиками, потреблением и поп-культурой.
In today's world where other cultures are being tapped to a greater extent than ever before, the ... more In today's world where other cultures are being tapped to a greater extent than ever before, the processes of mixing and matching are especially relevant in making sense of Russia. Not only do borrowing and assimilation, interaction between the Own and the Alien, constitute a venerable tradition in Russian culture, but during the last two post-Soviet decades a notable Western influence has become apparent. This book provides means for understanding Russianness in this new situation. By bringing together Russian and Western, eminent and younger scholars it provides insights from both inside and outside the country. By extending its perspectives to three fieldslinguistics, cultural studies, and social sciencesit covers different dimensions of creative misunderstandings, hybrids, tensions, and other modes of adaptation in the Russian culture. By offering concrete case studies it avoids easy stereotypes, deconstructs clichés, problematizes accepted truths, and identifies points of interaction between Russia and the West.
ABSTRACT Research projects that employ big data and data visualization approach for analysis of u... more ABSTRACT Research projects that employ big data and data visualization approach for analysis of users’ posts on Instagram deal with materials devoid of contextual information about the circumstances of taking photos and posting, but instead bear traces of users’ activities in the form of meta-data such as location, time and date. However, in order to be interpreted, patterns revealed in big data require reference to the characteristics of places and social practices. More traditional studies of vernacular photography and its uses, as well as studies of social networking and mobile technologies within digital anthropology, are able to provide rich layers of meaning to users’ content from Instagram that can also be considered in the perspective of visual anthropology. In order to check what features and parameters can be relevant for interpretation of data from Instagram, a ‘small data’ approach has been used for manual collection, annotation and analysis of a corpus of photographs that have to do with a Ukrainian town.
In Russia, according to data from 2014, 1 excluding actual police officers, 1.4 million people we... more In Russia, according to data from 2014, 1 excluding actual police officers, 1.4 million people were employed as security officers, among whom one third were contracted by the state, while the rest were employed privately as guards and watchmen. If we add their managers, accountants and other people who work in private security firms, this number comes to around three million. At the same time, the number of people employed in police is around 1 million, which puts Russia rather high in the rating of countries according to the ratio of policemen to population. As of 2014, there were 634 policemen for each 100,000 of population, more than twice the ratio in Germany. Private guards and watchmen mostly sit all day in shops and offices with little to engage them during this work. In Russia they are omnipresent; they can be found in almost every shop, school, or institution (not only those institutions which are run by the state, but private businesses, too). The demand for these security services can partly be explained by the serious crime situation in the country and inefficient work of the police. For example, the number of murders in Russia is one of the highest in the world (in 2010, it was 14.9 for 100,000 people in comparison to 0.86 in Germany). 2 Business and the population buy the services of security to protect themselves. However, this is not the whole story. These days, most institutions with free
Early Ape Language Research projects from 1960-70s conducted by Gardners, Premack, Patterson, Ram... more Early Ape Language Research projects from 1960-70s conducted by Gardners, Premack, Patterson, Rambough, Savage-Rambough, and Terrace demonstrated that apes are able to employ arbitrary symbols and use them in communication with human experimenters in face-to-face communication or in mediated communication involving computer keypads. Data on the communicative abilities of apes exposed to language teaching were supposed to contribute to comparative psychology as well as evolutionary and developmental biology: the studies were aimed at demonstrating the cognitive and linguistic abilities of captive apes beyond that which can be observed in their natural habitat, and at providing insights about the early stages of the emergence of language. However, the obtained results and interpretations were criticized by those scholars who offered more parsimonious explanations of the observed behaviors of the apes and emphasized the contribution of the human partner to the interaction with the animal. The critics regarded ape language experiments within the framework of a long history of smart animals that could demonstrate exceptional abilities in a performance based on unconscious cueing by the human experimenter. This discussion-sometimes referred to as the "chimp-language wars"-is important for two reasons: firstly, it questions the ways in which human-like communicative behaviors can be interpreted. Secondly, it concerns the scholarly status of activities that involve mind-reading and ascribing quasi-human characteristics to non-human beings, and thus challenges the limits of humanity.
The development of information technology over the last three decades has revolutionized everyday... more The development of information technology over the last three decades has revolutionized everyday activities in a domain that can be referred to as personal information management. The personal information environment in which this management takes place consists of both digital and nondigital information artifacts, which a user employs systematically. Interfaces of digital information technology employ analogies for nondigital affordances and nondigital methods of handling information artefacts. Ethnographic studies of nondigital information management have established two poles toward which personal information management strategies tend to gravitate: systematization of documents kept in topically organized folders and keeping documents in chronologically organized piles. Interfaces of digital information technologies provide affordances for both types of strategies. Affordances that make possible dealing with digital information artifacts provide means for finding objects without...
Только что вышедший сборник «Post-Soviet Nostalgia: Confronting the Empire’s Legacies» посвящен т... more Только что вышедший сборник «Post-Soviet Nostalgia: Confronting the Empire’s Legacies» посвящен теме как нельзя более актуальной в свете политического использования прошлого в целом и советского прошлого в риторике российских властей в частности. В сегодняшней России повсеместно бросается в глаза то, в какой степени историческое прошлое, соответствующим образом оформленное, оказывается ресурсом: власть выбирает оттуда нужные для консолидации общества символы и элементы. Эта идеология опирается на ностальгические чувства, широко представленные в обществе. Text in Russian DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-2-265-271
Книга посвящена этнографическому кино ХХ века одновременно как важнейшему компоненту визуальной а... more Книга посвящена этнографическому кино ХХ века одновременно как важнейшему компоненту визуальной антропологии и как кинематографическому феномену. В главах книги классические этнографические фильмы Г. Бейтсона с М. Мид, Т. Эша с Н. Шэньоном и с Л. Коннор, Р. Гарднера, Ж. Руша и Чинь Минь-ха, а также документальные ленты Ф. Уайзмена, Э. Кинга и Б. Шрёдера снабжены подробными комментариями и использованы как повод для популярного введения в соответствующие антропологические сюжеты, среди которых невербальная коммуникация, ритуализованная агрессия в племенных обществах, сеансы транса одержимости в разных культурных кон-текстах, границы нормальности и психопатологии в современной западной цивилизации. Книга адресована специалистам в области визуальной антропологии, а также всем интересующимся социальной антропологией, историей и теорией неигрового кино.
This ethnographic study of big wave surfing in Waimea Bay in Hawai’i by the Italian sociologist ... more This ethnographic study of big wave surfing in Waimea Bay in Hawai’i by the Italian sociologist Ugo Corte discovers how this extreme sport involving risk-taking activity is performed interactively. The data from observations and interviews are interpreted in terms of the theory of interaction ritual, which claims that the key to understanding these group activities is the notion of emotional energy generated as result of the social interaction. Unlike his predecessors Еrving Goffman and Randall Collins, Ugo Corte does not proceed from theory, but from his empirical material, for the interpretation of which he uses comparisons with somewhat similar phenomena from different fields, from other sports to creative industries. However, the book’s theoretical framework is Collins’s thesis on affect as a driving force of social order, from which the ideas emerge about how the focus of emotion and attention in joint activity generates group solidarity. The book illustrates how a sociologist and anthropologist can address the issues of risk and danger, and also shows the ways in which modern interactionist sociology, armed with post-Goffmanian tools, is developing.
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