This article initiates a Sociology of Security. Such a field should analyze how conditions transpire for security-however defined-to surface as a value in individual and collective living, how this value comes to be articulated, and how different kinds of individual and collective experiences shape its meaning. In addition, a Sociology of Security should pay attention to how the kinds of individual and collective responses to particular understandings of security, institutions and policies put in place to this end (or lack thereof), and consequences of such practices are shaping the nature of our social world and the aesthetics of our physical environment. Specific focus is on the relationship between security and surveillance.
The articles in this issue highlight the relationship between collective memory and tourism. In what ways are practices of collective remembering implicated with those of tourism? Where do collective memory scholarship and tourism studies meet? How might the two interdisciplinary academic fields be shaped through each other's concepts? We suggest that experiencing the collective past is integral to specific forms of tourism, particularly what is called 'heritage tourism'. So, too, are certain kinds of public practices of collective remembering increasingly connected with the tourism industry. In the absence of, or complementary to, financial support for the historic preservation efforts, the entrepreneurial approach to the collective past turns objects of such memory into tourist attractions to keep them economically viable. Thinking about collective remembering in relation to tourism directs our analytical focus to the authority of experiencing the past in a specific tourist place in the present. It centres our attention on what is involved in making this experience possible.How heritage plays a role as means of preserving the collective past varies according to the context. In some parts of the West, as Urry (1990: 104) comments, 'it seems that a new museum opens every week or so'. These conservation efforts seem to be spearheaded by nostalgia for fastvanishing ways of life and the public places they sustained (Lowenthal 1985). Augé (1995) provides an insight into this longing for the past. Much of our public life today, he suggests, revolves around motorways, airports or shopping centres -nondescript spaces that tend to individuate people and discourage attachment to place. In contrast, the public places we are trying to preserve encourage sociality and people's identity with that social life so
The highly contextual nature of ethnographic inquiry allows a researcher to develop and adjust data collection and analysis to specific social situations. This methodological flexibility also makes it possible to choose for analytic attention specific instances of human activity and experience that show potential to illuminate conceptual issues or alter our theoretical understandings. Theoretically interesting social activity can be identified using Peircean abduction. In the field, the researcher embraces serendipity and intuition. Data analysis begins neither with inductive nor deductive reasoning. By initially disassociating the data from their context, specific theoretical debates, and the experience of data collection in the field, the ethnographer is able to play with the data freely and let this process generate a surprising discovery. This discovery is then articulated through a dialog among insight, contextualized empirical evidence, and theoretical knowledge. Leaving open the possibilities of insight and discovery, abductive ethnography is a strategy of unforeclosed possibilities.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.