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After Haiti's 2010 earthquake, over half of U.S. households donated to thousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in that country. Yet we continue to hear stories of misery from Haiti. Why have NGOs failed at their mission?Set in Haiti during the 2004 coup and aftermath and enhanced by research conducted after the 2010 earthquake,Killing with Kindnessanalyzes the impact of official development aid on recipient NGOs and their relationships with local communities. Written like a detective story, the book offers rich enthnographic comparisons of two Haitian women's NGOs working in HIV/AIDS prevention, one with public funding (including USAID), the other with private European NGO partners. Mark Schuller looks at participation and autonomy, analyzing donor policies that inhibit these goals. He focuses on NGOs' roles as intermediaries in \"gluing\" the contemporary world system together and shows how power works within the aid system as these intermediaries impose interpretations of unclear mandates down the chain-a process Schuller calls \"trickle-down imperialism.\"

Taking its point of departure from the debate on 'water as commodity' versus 'water as commons', the article compares recent changes in the water governance of two rural communities in the Peruvian Andes. It draws on the anthropological tradition of controlled comparison to examine the different ways that the state and other external agents have accelerated the commodification of water in these communities and challenged their notions of water rights and water accountability. The article suggests that water is commodified through three kinds of transaction: as tribute-for-usage, which is used to manage water as a common good; as tax/tariff-for-right, which is used to manage water as a public good; and as ticket-for-product, which is used to manage water as a private good. It argues that Peru’s water users, rather than considering these three types of transactions to be conflicting forms of accountability, view them as complementary relations of exchange with the agents that control the water flow in their communities and regulate their water supply. It also proposes that, rather than being a one-way process that moves from communal control towards commercialisation and privatisation, the commodification of water is inherent in the water management of Peru’s highland communities. The article concludes that in a time of climate change and growing water scarcity the communities are keeping as many options open as possible. Managing water as at the same time a common, public and private good, and accounting for their water use to not one but several water providers, is therefore an important priority for these communities.

The relationship between theory and place has remained a central problem for the discipline of anthropology. Focusing on debates around the concepts of human rights and networks, specifically as these traverse African and Melanesian contexts, this article highlights how novel ideas emerge through sustained comparison across different regions. Rather than understanding places as sources of theories to be applied to other contexts, we argue that anthropologists need to recognize how new concepts are generated through reflexive comparison across different regions. This analysis leads us to question a widespread propensity to understand places as the sine qua non of anthropological theory, proposing instead that place emerges retrospectively as an artifact of comparison. We conclude that while it is therefore necessary to acknowledge the analytic construction of Africa and its sub-regions, there remain compelling reasons to recognize its analytic utility.

Although the Dutch and the Canadian postgraduate Obstetrics and Gynecology (OBGYN) medical education systems are similar in their foundations [programmatic assessment, competency based, involving CanMED roles and EPAs (entrustable professional activities)] and comparable in healthcare outcome, their program structures and assessment methods considerably differ. We compared both countries' postgraduate educational blueprints and used an auto-ethnographic method to gain insight in the effects of training program structure and assessment methods on how trainees work. The research questions for this study are as follows: what are the differences in program structure and assessment program in Obstetrics and Gynecology postgraduate medical education in the Netherlands and Canada? And how does this impact the advancement to higher competency for the postgraduate trainee? We found four main differences. The first two differences are the duration of training and the number of EPAs defined in the curricula. However, the most significant difference is the way EPAs are entrusted. In Canada, supervision is given regardless of EPA competence, whereas in the Netherlands, being competent means being entrusted, resulting in meaningful and practical independence in the workplace. Another difference is that Canadian OBGYN trainees have to pass a summative written and oral exit examination. This difference in the assessment program is largely explained by cultural and legal aspects of postgraduate training, leading to differences in licensing practice. Despite the fact that programmatic assessment is the foundation for assessment in medical education in both Canada and the Netherlands, the significance of entrustment differs. Trainees struggle to differentiate between formative and summative assessments. The trainees experience both formative and summative forms of assessment as a judgement of their competence and progress. Based on this auto-ethnographic study, the potential for further harmonization of the OBGYN PGME in Canada and the Netherlands remains limited.

Ethnographic research in international business studies focuses mainly on small group case studies, ignoring other genres of ethnography and limiting its role. I argue, based on a study of BMW MINI, that holistic ethnography allows multiple perspectives on the organization, making it particularly useful for studying cross-border acquisitions. I analyze cross-cultural relationships in the organization, the interaction of manager and worker perspectives, and the expression of national identities within the firm as its culture is negotiated, allowing for greater understanding of the conflicts that, in its managers' view, affected the integration of the acquired subsidiary.

The study builds on ethnographic research noting an emphasis in many Indigenous communities of the Americas on learning through keen observation of and participation in ongoing community activities. Fortyfour U.S. Mexican-heritage 5-to 11-year-old children whose families likely have experience with Indigenous ways more frequently attended to and learned from a toy construction activity that was directed to another child, compared to 36 U.S. Mexican-heritage children whose mothers had extensive experience with Western school (and related European American practices). The results support the idea that children whose family history emanates from Indigenous communities of México may be especially oriented to learning by observing ongoing events, and that this method of learning may be less commonly used by children whose families have extensive experience with schooling (and related Western practices).

Purpose - This article aims to explain how a transnational \"retirement industry\" in Southeast Asia has emerged recently as a result of interplays between various national and transnational forces, particularly in the domain of elderly care. \"Retirement industry\" refers to business operations related to the relocation of foreign retirees, primarily Japanese pensioners, who seek affordable social care and alternative retirement life.Design methodology approach - This paper is based on extensive documentary studies and multi-sited ethnographic research from 2004 to date. In-depth interviews with retirees and relevant agencies were carried out in Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia.Findings - This article delineates how demographic and economic changes in Japan create demand for the transnational retirement industry, and how Southeast Asian countries actively promote the industry as a national development strategy. As such the boundaries between nation-state and between the market and the state are simultaneously crossed. The industry opens new transnational routes and spaces and thus further complicates the transnationalization of elderly care in Asia.Originality value - Current research on social welfare remains dominated by methodological nationalism, and this article calls attention to the transnational dimension in understanding recent changes in social care. By engaging the predominant paradigm of \"care diamond\", the article shows that how boundaries shift between various care providers within nation states is inextricably related to how borders are crossed between nation states.

The introduction addresses the question of whether it is useful or indeed possible to develop an anthropological theory of value. By way of a Socratic debate, two rather conflicting points of view emerge. On the one hand, it is argued that anthropology can make a major and quite coherent contribution to the issue of value in social theory. On the other hand, it is argued that anthropology, as an ethnographically driven discipline, produces an anti-theory of value. The two perspectives derive from two different visions for anthropology, which differ radically on how they see the relationship of the discipline to other disciplines and to the history of ideas more generally. Where these views converge, however, is on the aim of exploring the potential of value as theory. In both perspectives, value is seen as a powerful concept that can generate new ethnographic questions and insights and can provide a crucial dimension to cultural critique.

This essay examines the spaces across societies in which persons with severe mental illness lose meaningful social roles and are reduced to “bare life.” Comparing ethnographic and interview data from the United States and India, we suggest that these processes of exclusion take place differently: on the street in the United States, and in the family household in India. We argue that cultural, historical, and economic factors determine which spaces become zones of social abandonment across societies. We compare strategies for managing and treating persons with psychosis across the United States and India, and demonstrate that the relative efficiency of state surveillance of populations and availability of public social and psychiatric services, the relative importance of family honor, the extent to which a culture of psychopharmaceutical use has penetrated social life, and other historical features, contribute to circumstances in which disordered Indian persons are more likely to be forcefully “hidden” in domestic space, whereas mentally ill persons in the United States are more likely to be expelled to the street. However, in all locations, social marginalization takes place by stripping away the subject’s efficacy in social communication. That is, the socially “dead” lose communicative efficacy, a predicament, following Agamben, we describe as “bare voice.”

This paper explores the space of translation spanning cross-cultural description and the verbal act of rendering in one language what is expressed in another. We make a three-way distinction between translation as a method of revealing difference and similarity, cultural interpretation, which is related but distinct, and endogenous translation that takes place within a single language or culture. Intracultural translation plays a constitutive role in the social life of any human group, and not only in mediating between different groups and languages. This is evident in all varieties of reported speech, paraphrase, commentary, and exegesis. These share with translation two features that distinguish it from other kinds of interpretation: a translation both refers to and paraphrases its source text. It is the target language into which one translates that ultimately constrains the process. An adequate target language must be functionally capable of self-interpetation through metalanguage. Cross-linguistic translation presupposes intralinguistic translation. Historical examples of languages changing through intertranslation abound in (post)colonial contexts in which authoritative texts in a dominant language are translated into a subordinated language. This process inevitably alters the semantics and pragmatics of the subordinate language. The direction, scope, and depth of change are historically variable. Examples are adduced from modern and colonial Yucatec Maya and Spanish.