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:
Thursday, July 22, 2004, 10:29
Music and Socitiety in South Africa - Interview with Jonny Clegg
allAfrica.com
"I came from a country that forbade the mixing of culture, through cultural segregation and other enforced laws, so I was immediately attracted to the other side. Anthropology was a natural continuation of an interest I developed at the age of 14, hanging out with street musicians.
"We are at a fascinating moment and different South Africans have different ideas of what it is to be a South African. In all of that, I find myself at a very interesting time in South Africa where there is so much flux, change and movement. Languages are breaking down; languages are bleeding into each other. Indian words are coming into Africa. Afrikaans is coming in and a new hip urban kind of verbal style. All of these things for me as an anthropologist are fascinating. >>continue
Wednesday, July 21, 2004, 22:56
San People Update : Botswana challenges Bushmen witness
Sunday Times, South Africa / AFP
The Botswanan government on Thursday dismissed as "suspect and mischievous" testimony given by a key witness in support of a court claim by the San Bushmen seeking to return to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. >>continue
Wednesday, July 21, 2004, 20:53
Study examines how Inuit coped with contact
CBC North News
A unique anthropology project is under way in Holman – part of a growing trend to try to understand history from an Aboriginal perspective. Anthropologist Don Johnson is studying the adaptations Copper Inuit made after Europeans arrived in the Arctic. He says in some ways his job is to re-write history – in this case, from the Copper Inuit perspective. >>continue
Wednesday, July 21, 2004, 20:25
India considers historic rewrite
The Christian Science Monitor
In the past five years, Indian schoolchildren of all faiths have learned quite a bit about the culture of the Hindu majority. Last week, the allies of the newly elected Congress government, the Communist Party of India, called for yet another rewrite of Indian history, this time with a broader view of India's many cultures instead of focusing on the religion of the majority. >>continue
Wednesday, July 21, 2004, 20:04
Focus On: New product development with anthropologists
Business Europe
Finding out what the customer wants can be a difficult task. A new approach that is becoming more widespread is to treat potential customers as participants in the product development process. This customer research approach is known as ethnographic research and is defined as "the description and study of human culture". For the purposes of new product development, customer research is conducted in a much shorter time scale to fit the needs of industry.
The power of taking such an approach is that it provides real life accounts of customers' everyday activities, needs, desires, beliefs and values; it highlights the differences between what people do and what they say they do, and as a result find needs that have not been directly expressed; and it describes what meanings people place on products and how products are used. It is also cheap as it is purely about observing and listening.
Large multinational companies, including Microsoft, Nokia, Ericsson, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Kimberley Clark, General Mills and Motorola, are using this approach.
>>continue
Wednesday, July 21, 2004, 15:29
Riddu Riddu - Indigenous Festival (1) - The Bands
Back from the festival, here are some links to some bands that played in Manndalen, Kåfjord community in Northern Norway
Drum Drum from Papua New Guinea
Wai, Maori-band from New Zealand
Taima, Inuit band from Canada
Johan Sara jr - Saami Band from Northern Norway
Vajas, another Saami band
Tuesday, July 13, 2004, 11:15
Riddu Riddu! Offline!
I'll be offline for one week to attend the Saami Indigenous Festival "Riddu Riddu" in Northern Norway.
From the self-description: "Northern guests of this year are the Inuit people from Nunavik in Canada and for the very first time we have the pleasure of introducing a people from the southern hemisphere: the Sanpeople from Botswana. At Riddu Riddu you can enjoy all the beautiful cultural impressions and experience a modern indigenous atmosphere with artists from Canada, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Siberia - and from Kautokeino, Kåfjord, Tromsø and Oslo." >>continue
For information about the Saami, check >>Arctic Circle's overview
Tuesday, July 13, 2004, 09:31
New link: Indigenous Studies - African Anthropology
Many useful links about (all?) people in Africa - and most of them do work! I'll review some of the links later / add them to our Africa-section
>>continue
Tuesday, July 13, 2004, 09:04
New link: African Religion -Studies in anthropology & intercultural philosophy
Website with a huge amount of articles and pictures by Wim van Binsbergen, Professor of the Foundations of Intercultural Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Senior Researcher at the African Studies Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands. >>continue
The link is added to the Africa-section
Monday, July 12, 2004, 19:07
New Maori party wins first seat in parliament
The Independent
The party aims to be a new force in New Zealand politics, wooing Maori voters who have traditionally supported Labour. It has threatened to join forces with the centre-right National Party to oust Ms Clark's Labour minority government in an election due to be held next year.
Legislation placing the seabed and foreshore under public control is opposed by Maoris, who say it will deprive them of traditional ownership of coastal areas. The government says it is intended to protect public access to beaches and fisheries while accommodating Maori customs such as gathering seafood on ancestral lands. The plan sparked the biggest Maori protest for decades, with 20,000 demonstrators cramming the grounds of parliament in Wellington in May. >>continue
Monday, July 12, 2004, 19:01
Botswana bushmen in legal fight
BBC
A group of bushmen from Botswana who claim the government illegally evicted them from their ancestral lands have begun challenging the move in court. The Basarwa are recognised by many internationally as the indigenous people and claim a right to stay on their ancestral land. The BBC's correspondent in the region, Alastair Leithead, describes the case as a historic one for the rights of bushmen in southern Africa. >>continue
Sunday, July 11, 2004, 23:01
Anthropologist: Iranian Nomads Constitute Cultural Treasure
Iranian Cultural Heritage News Agency
“Nomads constitute a cultural treasure, not a simple community, because the Iranian society can trace back its roots among them and still feeds on their agricultural products,” said Dr. Jalaludin Rafifar, nomad expert and head of the Anthropology Association of Tehran University. Economically speaking, nomads meet 20 percent of Iran’s needs to red meat, though they themselves are very content and incur little, if no, cost on the central government.
>>continue
Sunday, July 11, 2004, 22:52
Berkeley students work to preserve lost Native American languages
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Since mid-June, the university's linguistics department has been helping about 50 Native Californians learn to read, write and speak their languages, many of whom have not been used for decades and are considered "dead languages." Throughout the 20th century, the federal government aggressively tried to stamp out the languages, sending native children to boarding schools where only English was permitted and prohibiting the teaching of the languages in public schools.
>>continue
Friday, July 09, 2004, 15:28
German expatriate employees, globalisation and social mapping
Fiona Moore, Anthropology Matters 1 (2004)
Transnational business people are seldom studied by anthropologists. Here, I examine the role that two ‘global cities’ — London and Frankfurt — play in the lives of a group of employees from a German transnational financial corporation. In researching transnational groups, anthropologists need to think less in terms of ‘global’ versus ‘local’, and more in terms of complex relationships between groups of varying degrees and kinds of globalisation.
>>continue
Friday, July 09, 2004, 08:10
Inuit play makes fun of anthropologists
Nunatsiaq News
Erin Brubacher, who, with Odile Nelson, is co-directing and acting in the play in Iqaluit this weekend, says this is a play that "fits with the community". "The issues involved are universal: interracial marriage, the concept
of cultural appropriation, political correctness...," Taylor says. "Many Native issues are cross-cultural."
One of the themes in the play involves a group of kids on a reserve who are visited by a group of anthropologists researching traditional legends. None of the elders will talk to the anthropologists, so instead, the kids told them the legends their grandparents had told them, in some cases making them up for 50 cents a legend.
The play not only makes fun of the anthropologists, but also the kids who made up the stories, and "how a trick can come back and trick you," as Taylor puts it.
>>continue (Link updated 26.7.04)
Thursday, July 08, 2004, 23:03
A personal look at anthropology
Kenai Peninsula Online (Alaska)
Generations of anthropologists have appeared in Alaska Native villages and attempted, with varying degrees of tact, naivete or insight, to explain the villagers' lives. Margaret B. Blackman who teaches anthropology at the State University of New York College at Brockport parts in "Upside Down: Seasons among the Nunamiut," from typical scholarly writing to create a book of essays that read more like personal memoir than academic treatise.
" ... I tired of academic writing," she says in her introduction. " ... I became increasingly irritated with the uncanny ability of so many anthropologists to render, in stilted prose, the most interesting cultures hopelessly pedantic and unappealing. I wanted to write differently about Anaktuvuk Pass." The result is a beautifully written exploration of an anthropologist's life as well as a portrait of the remote Nunamiut village in the Brooks Range.
>>continue
Thursday, July 08, 2004, 19:14
When cultures shape technology - Interview with Genevieve Bell
Tom's Hardware Guide
Tech firms flood consumers which new products every month. n an interview with Tom's Hardware Guide, Intel's anthropologist Genevieve Bell explains why cultures will determine the development of new products. Dell initiated at Intel a new way to think about the connection between people and technology, their cultural practices and "daily habits," she says. Rather than innovating and then trying to make people use products, the idea is to start with people and their needs first and learn what individual cultures care about.
>>continue
for more articles on this issue, see the special about Corporate Anthropology (both Norwegian and English)
Thursday, July 08, 2004, 09:52
Anthropologist tries to fathom how advertisers can approach today's youth
Business Week
Timothy Malefyt is now an in-house anthropologist for BBDO New York, the advertising firm. His mission is to study a group of college students at Columbia University and figure out how in the world they process all of the information that comes their way, whether it's from TV, movies, billboards, video games, cell phones, the Internet -- just about everything but the fortunes wrapped inside Chinese cookies.
If a college student receives a targeted ad on her instant messaging (IM) screen, or a text message on her cell phone, is she likely to resent it? Consider it a joke? Would certain types of advertisements be welcomed? The answers depend, from an anthropologist's perspective, on the communications rituals associated with each of these tools.
>>continue
Wednesday, July 07, 2004, 22:56
Haiti: Possessed by Voodoo
National Geographic
The ceremony begins with a Roman Catholic prayer. Then three drummers begin to play syncopated rhythms. The attendees begin to dance around a tree in the center of the yard, moving faster and harder with the rising pulse of the beat. The priest draws sacred symbols in the dust with cornmeal, and rum is poured on the ground to honor the spirits. In Haiti these rituals are commonplace: Voodoo is the dominant religion.
It was easy to meld the two faiths, because there are many similarities between Roman Catholicism and voodoo. Participation in voodoo ritual reaffirms one's relationships with ancestors, personal history, community relationships—and the cosmos.
>>continue
Wednesday, July 07, 2004, 22:45
Hmong: An Endangered People
University of California, Center for Southeast Asian Studies
There are more Hmong people today than Tibetans, yet the campaign to "Free Tibet" is widely popular in the U.S. and is internationally recognized, while the plight of Hmong people is relatively unknown. With this challenge, Dr. Eric Crystal introduced his lecture for the Center for Southeast Asian Studies on the UCLA campus. Eric Crystal is an anthropologist who has researched highland Southeast Asian cultures for over three decades.
The Hmong have had a long and distinctive history in China. Over the centuries they migrated south so that today they are dispersed throughout the highlands of southern China and northern Southeast Asia, including in Laos and Vietnam
>>continue
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