03.08.05: The blog has moved to www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/, and several broken links have been corrected
Here are the most recent posts on the new blog location:
Wednesday, August 04, 2004, 14:37
Ricksha art as political indicator in Bangladesh
Anthropologist Joanna Kirkpatrick, Outlook India
Much has been written on jihadism, terrorist training camps and anti-secularism, but so far none of the published material has ever provided grass-roots evidence of where public opinion, the views of the chhoto lok, stand. Yet these are the very people the jihadis and worse are so successful in organizing.
Thus, it behooves analysts to take a look at the rickshas, an important source of visual revelations on public opinion. Ricksha pictures tend to be ignored by the gentry as vulgar and not art, but my years of research on ricksha art have shown me all too clearly what the common man in the streets has on his mind >>continue
SEE ALSO:
Homepage about The Ricksha Art of Bangladesh (great pictures!)
Wednesday, August 04, 2004, 08:31
The perils of desktop dining - More people are eating while they work
The Baltimore Sun
Americans now eat at their desks to save time, save money, be more productive. Desktop dining and the shrinking lunch break - few people take a full hour anymore - have, in fact, become major trends. "When Mozart was writing his concertos, it wasn't done while he was reading The Wall Street Journal," says Sidney Mintz, 82, a retired professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Current eating trends, he says - combining quick and easily prepared meals with other activities to save time - reflect distaste for food and food rituals. >>continue
READ ALSO
Om Sidney Mintz' book "Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past" (amazon.com)
Wednesday, August 04, 2004, 08:26
Cameroon: Religious Tensions On the Rise in the North
allAfrica.com
Earlier this year, conflict in Nigeria's central Plateau state - resulting in part from religious tensions - sparked concern about relations between Christians and Muslims in that country. Now, another West African state appears to be grappling with a similar problem: Cameroon.
Mbonji Edjenguele, an anthropologist at the University of Yaounde, believes that a lack of education in northern areas plays a key role in enabling the advance of extremism. >>continue
Tuesday, August 03, 2004, 13:27
Spotting the fieldworker in the field
Gabriel Klaeger, eloweb.nl
While the ethnographic fieldworker is famous for producing countless photographic impressions of his own field, the documentary evidences of his presence and involvement in the research process are rather scarce. Hence, this ‘Cherchez le Chercheur’ series presents photographs which focus on one essential element of the fieldwork setting: the researcher himself.
The following pictures stem from my fieldwork project carried out in Kyebi (Akyem Abuakwa, Eastern Region/Ghana) in 2002. >>continue
(found via ethno::log)
Tuesday, August 03, 2004, 08:12
Austronesian Cultural Festival kicks off in Taiwan
eTaiwan News
The 2004 Austronesian Cultural Festival kicked off yesterday in Taitung, eastern Taiwan, focusing on the mythologies, worship and ritual practices in Austronesian civilization. Taiwan's aborigines were considered the northernmost Austronesian people. In a new theory developed in Australia and New Zealand in recent years, anthropologists believe that Taiwan is the place where the Austronesian-language people originated from.
>>continue
Monday, August 02, 2004, 16:08
Your own Life: Young Muslim girls
North-South, Journal of Gender Research in Norway
Young Muslim girls are often described as victims of a culture hostile towards women that deprives them of the possibility to control their own days and their own lives. Cand.polit. Anthropologist Nina Rundgren wanted to see how young Muslim girls in Stockholm experienced their personal situation, and give them a voice.
Western media have a high focus on oppression, honour and shame, while the girls in my study insisted that everybody has to find their own way, live their own life. And they do just that. They are not as bound by their culture as is often claimed. There are big personal differences, and differences between families as to how they respond to cultural demands, says Rundgren.
>>continue
See also: More news and articles in North South. Gendered Views from Norway.
Monday, August 02, 2004, 08:08
'Degrees for sale' at UK universities
The Observer
Cash-strapped British universities are awarding degrees to students who should be failed, in return for lucrative fees, The Observer can reveal. The 'degrees-for-sale' scandal stretches from the most prestigious institutions to the former polytechnics and includes undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, foreign and home students. In the most extreme case, The Observer has evidence of a professor ordering staff to mark up students at risk of failing in order to keep the money coming in.
At Swansea, the government's University Visitor, Phillip Havers QC, is conducting an investigation into why the vice-chancellor had ordered the closure of five traditional departments - chemistry, anthropology, sociology, philosophy and development studies. Staff believe the decision has been made to boost the numbers of foreign students coming to study at the university's new management school on lucrative masters' degrees >>continue
Thursday, July 29, 2004, 13:03
Activists: Pipeline Project in Peru threatens indigenous populations
OneWorld.net
Environmental and human-rights groups in the United States and Peru have launched a last-ditch effort to delay final approval as early as this week by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) of a controversial pipeline project in Peru which they say threatens the destruction of some of the world's most unique rainforests and the survival of some of Latin America's last isolated indigenous populations.
When Shell undertook exploratory operations in the region in the 1980s, almost one-half of Nahua people living there died from influenza and whooping cough for which they lacked any immunities. Anthropologists and green groups have reported over the past year that contractors working for the Camisea project have actively sought out uncontacted groups putting them at risk of infection, and some have reported sharply rising death rates among some indigenous groups over the past two years.
>>continue
Thursday, July 29, 2004, 08:57
Unknown Traditions: Tomatoe fights in Malta
Today, the inhabitatants of a village in Malta have descended into a field close to Dahlet Qorrot Bay for a massive tomato fight. For two hours, two teams will hurl huge amounts of ripe tomatoes at each other. This tradition was borrowed from Spain, and the newspaper Malta Today raises the question how ‘right’ is it for traditions to be borrowed. Anthropologist Ranier Fsadni answers. Read more in >>Malta Today
Thursday, July 29, 2004, 08:52
New book: Gender, Ethnicity, and Cultural Politics of Maasai Development
allAfrica.com
In this book, Dorothy L. Hodgson explores the ways identity, development, and gender have interacted to shape the Maasai into who and what they are today. She shows how outside forces, and views of development in particular, have influenced Maasai lifeways, especially gender relations.
Hodgson states that one goal in writing the book includes "contributing to current scholarly efforts to understand the relationship between 'development' as a transnational process and the lived experience of 'development' in local communities." >>continue
Wednesday, July 28, 2004, 08:58
The Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico and Fishing in the Solomon Islands
Nordic Anthropological Film Association (NAFA)
Explore the Chea-villagers' traditional "Kuarao"-fishing in the Solomon Islands - in an interactive presentation based on professor Edvard Hviding and SOTFilm a/s filmproject "Chea's Great Kuarao" (1996).
We also have an interactive presentation of The Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico, based on films made by Frode Storaas. >>continue
Tuesday, July 27, 2004, 09:04
Book review: Ecstasy, Madness, and Spirit Possession in the Nepal Himalayas
Nepal News
Martino Nicoletti, an Italian anthropologist, explains Kulunge Rai’s practice of shamanism in Nepal in his book "Shamanic Solitudes. Ecstasy, Madness, and Spirit Possession in the Nepal Himalayas". Shamanism is widely practiced among the Tibeto-Burman ethnic groups living in most parts of the mid hills of Nepal. Unlike the world’s two old religions – Buddhism and Hinduism - the Shamanism has its own root and unique rituals.
This is what one can find in detail in the book. Nicoletti has completed the book following his long stay in the region observing the practices side by side with the Kulunge Rai community. >>continue
Monday, July 26, 2004, 09:06
Visual anthropology: Documenting the economic exodus from Mexico
Monterey County Herald
Men are absent from the streets. It is often several years before they return from their farmworking, gardening or construction jobs across the border. Sometimes they don't return at all, leaving their wives and children to live in shame.
The rural Mexican town of Ayutla is like so many other pueblitos (villages) -- where economic opportunities are so lacking that men leave their families to try their luck in the United States.
The compelling story of Ayutla's economic flight has been put to film -- a work called simply "Ayutla" -- by CSU-Monterey Bay students Annalisa Moore, Jessica Schorer and Jaymee Castillo. The students came across the town while doing ethnographic field research as part of a CSU-Monterey Bay anthropology class last year.
"We wanted to show the human side, the sacrifices people make to be part of the globalized marketplace," said Moore, who is shopping it around various film festivals. >>continue
Monday, July 26, 2004, 08:59
Riddu Riddu Update: Nunavik rocks Norway
Nunatsiaq News
Nunavik performers had enthusiastic audiences at last week's Riddu Riddu festival in Arctic Norway, where attendance at the circumpolar arts, music and culture bash broke all previous records.
Some Sámi now consider Riddu Riddu to have more political importance than Norway's Sámi Parliament or the Nordic Sámi Council. This year Sámi political leaders, including Sven Roald-Nystø, president of the Norwegian Sámi Parliament, and Ole-Henrik Magga, who heads the United Nations Permanent Forum for Indigenous Issues, were both on hand to underline the festival's importance to the North. >>continue
(see more reports further down the page)
Monday, July 26, 2004, 08:57
Links to the Inuit paper Nunatsiaq
Internal News
If you encounter dead links to Nunatsiaq-articles: All their articles are moved to an archive-folder after some time and get a different URL! Now, all links in this blog should be updated again.
Sunday, July 25, 2004, 18:53
Anthropologist gets paid for hanging out in bars
Fast Company Magazine
Girl walks into a bar. Says to the bartender, "Give me a Diet Coke and a clear sight line to those guys drinking Miller Lite in the corner." No joke. The "girl" is Emma Gilding, corporate ethnographer at Ogilvy & Mather, one of the world's top advertising agencies. Her assignment is to hang out in bars across the country, watching guys knock back beers with their friends.
Since at least the mid-1990s, the advertising industry has been fighting a war on multiple fronts. Some larger firms believe that ethnographic research such as Gilding and Shapira's can help identify consumers' emotional hot buttons, allowing them to craft messages with more resonance.
But ethnographic research is not a panacea. For one thing, it's expensive. The process is time-consuming. Paco Underhill, whose books Why We Buy and Call of the Mall are classics of modern retail ethnography, confesses to a bigger concern: How does this research translate into sales? >>continue
(found via Ideas Bazar Blog)
Saturday, July 24, 2004, 12:52
Currents online, University of California
In an invited lead article in the current issue of the influential journal Human Development, UCSC psychology professor Per Gjerde challenges his colleagues to reconsider popular ideas about the role of culture in human development.
Much of the trouble stems from the use of nations as proxies for cultural units, said Gjerde. Notions of culture are linked to national boundaries and geographical areas, like “East” and “West,” fueling generalizations about “American individualism” and “Asian collectivism,” said Gjerde.
Gjerde is critical of the fieldwork that forms the basis for most notions of culture, saying it has been conducted in “limited and bounded social contexts” and that the fixation on groups has obscured the exploration of variation and complexity within and between human beings.
Gjerde’s model would take a more interdisciplinary approach to the study of culture, incorporating the writings of anthropology and other fields, and it would consider the influence of power, coercion, and class differences on individual psychological development. >>continue
Friday, July 23, 2004, 22:53
Currently in Geneve: Meeting of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Population
Different sources
Main theme for the annual meeting is conflict resolution, writes writes UNPO (Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation).
A report was launched at the meeting in Geneva that states the potential for indigenous people to help curb the destruction of forests is being overlooked by the international community, according to a report, writes the BBC
- The Guaraní community of Tentayapi, in southern Bolivia, one of the last bastions of the indigenous group's traditional way of life, is fighting to keep a foreign oil company out of its ancestral territory. One of the community's leaders, Saúl Carayury, told the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations, meeting this week in Geneva, that Maxus Energy, a subsidiary of the Spanish-Argentine firm Repsol-YPF based in Spain, intends to explore and drill for hydrocarbons on communally-owned indigenous land in Tentayapi according to One World England
Friday, July 23, 2004, 08:52
San Update 2: Defying Ban, Kalahari Bushmen Return to Reserve
National Geographic
Botswana completed a multiyear process of relocating Bushmen outside the reserve. Xuxuri Johannes, a leader of the ragtag Bushmen's rights group First People of the Kalahari claimed the move was designed to "create space" for diamond mining.
When I visited earlier this year, dozens of Bushmen had returned to the Kalahari to take up their old lives as hunter-gatherers in defiance of government edicts. Then, during a media tour orchestrated in March to show off the quality of life in the resettlement areas, reporters say they witnessed widespread hunger and more Bushmen streaming into the reserve. By late spring, the number of returnees was headed into the hundreds. >>continue
Thursday, July 22, 2004, 15:02
Cultures of Music Piracy: An Ethnographic Comparison of the US and Japan
Marc Erickson, channels.lockergnome.com
Ian Condry: "What is this culture of piracy and what is at stake in trying to change it? In this essay, I take an ethnographic look at music file sharing, and compare the situation in the US with Japan. My findings are based on fieldwork in Tokyo, and surveys and discussions with US college students. By considering the ways social dynamics and cultural orientations guide uses of digital media technology, I argue that a legal and political focus on ‘piracy’ ignores crucial aspects of file sharing, and is misleading in the assumptions it makes for policy.”
>>continue incl link to original text (31 pages, 3,8MB!)
(found via flitzlog.blogspot.com/ and Voelkerkunde-Forum Wien)
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