No abstract

Qualitative Research 16 (2) is that the interviewees are allowed to speak for themselves. What might surprise some readers is that each interviewee believed that Distance courses provide an effective way of learning and teaching. It suggests the need in the 'purposive sampling' (pp. 94-5) to find educators who are dissatisfied with the new pedagogy, and not just the competing demands of research and teaching.The reviewers of my journal submissions would probably want even more emphasis on objectivity and method. The researcher would have to discuss and test some body of theory. She might have to speak to university administrators to supply a 'balanced view'. She would be asked to condense or remove the lengthy extracts from the interviews. After all, what do interviews show that cannot be represented using quantitative methods? This is why qualitative researchers need a credo, but this text falls some way short of a statement that will unite the warring factions and provide an intellectually coherent, scientific justification for qualitative research.

Gestures of taxidermy:Morphological approximation as interspecies affinity A B S T R A C TAnthropologists have recently begun to highlight human relatedness with other animal species, arguing for a more inclusive posthumanism in which boundaries between different categories of "life" become blurred. Taxidermy in Britain and western Europe both troubles and supports assumptions about interspecies entanglements. In taxidermy, living humans meet dead animals in ways that suggest kinship relations beyond death, expressed in morphological analogies. Lifelike animation occurs both discursively and plastically, and the recent influx of artists into taxidermy has given it particular prominence. A specific ethics of the body emerges, one that makes a professed environmental affinity among artist-taxidermists pale in comparison with the "morphological approximation" performed by professional taxidermists in relation to the animals whose lives they claim to prolong. [morphology, ethics of the body, taxidermy, interspecies affinity, morphological approximation, Britain, western Europe]

What constitutes a dance step executed just right? Does its success reside in its faithfulness to an ‘original’ model or script or in a feeling experienced by the dancer interpreting the model in a new context? This is the kind of epistemological, and moral, dilemma that was often voiced during my fieldwork amongst Indianists, amateurs involved in re‐enactment of Native American lifeworlds on European soil. In Indianism, museum‐quality replicas made by and worn on European bodies function as heuristic tools in exploring ‘what life was really like’ in other times and places. Focusing on Woodland Indianist performances and replicas in a variety of European settings, I suggest that Indianism, as an amateur engagement with re‐imaginings and reifications of the North American Indian, faces constant moral breakdown because of its unease with the transformative nature of mimesis.