The New Zealand Herald

For New Zealanders the land represents everything that is pure and authentic. It's. the essence of who we are. We love it so much that we fear losing it which is why we get so upset about foreign ownership and Maori claims to the foreshore. But Australians see the land as something to be tamed. The land is something to be observed, or crossed, not something to integrate with.

Buy it or not - and being from an advertising agency they hope you do - these are some of the results of an eight-month study by FCB New Zealand. Chief executive Nick Baylis analysed advertisements in both countries. "This piece of research gives us the jump on everyone else because it uses semiotic and anthropological studies that people in New Zealand just don't use" >> continue

ABC News

Robert Schrauf, associate professor of applied linguistics and an anthropologist at Penn State, says he was a bit puzzled when he began analyzing data he collected that shows that regardless of age or culture, we have far more words in our vocabulary that express negative rather than positive emotions.

Schrauf started searching the scientific literature to see if he could find an answer, but he found more questions. Studies of 37 different languages turned up seven words that have very similar meanings. They are joy, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, shame and guilt. "Seven words, and only one positive," Schrauf notes. "Isn't that awesome?" >> continue

Media Monitors Network

A valuable new contribution to unearth and interpret America's bizarre conduct is Mahmood Mamdani's study "GOOD MUSLIM, BAD MUSLIM". The author, a distinguished political scientist and anthropologist, explains that the book grew out of a talk at a church in New York after 9/11 when to bear an identifiably Muslim name was to be made aware that Islam had become a political identity in America.

Perhaps the heart of this book can be found in the first chapter titled "Culture Talk; Or How Not To Talk About Islam And Politics". The author is able to penetrate the limits of conventional discourse on democracy and dictatorship, poverty and wealth and also succeeds in locating "culture" within the chasm of globalisation. >> continue Link updated 29.5.18

SEE ALSO:

Interview with Mahmood Mamdani (Asia Source) Link updated 29.5.18

Detroit News

Portable music players create their own culture. iPod users, who also call themselves "iPeople," say they can't get enough of the music downloaded from computer hard drives, the Internet and CD collections. Cultural anthropologists and techno experts wonder what the impact of their actions will be. At this point, experts are still grappling for answers. >> continue (updated link, original no longer available)

SEE ALSO:
iPod Nation? (The Tufts Daily, updated link)

The Soth End Newspaper

It seems every aspect of American life is undergoing a “Globalization” except one — our literary culture. Explanations for this phenomenon vary, from lack of interest to lack of availability, but one thing is certain: A majority of Americans have a profound disinterest in the literary and cultural works of other countries. >> continue

Anthropologist Eric Gable, allAfrica.com

It is hard to decide what to call this remarkable book, the first of two volumes. It is for the most part a collection of stories told by a West African bar girl,"Hawa," to anthropologist and musicologist John Chernoff in the mid 1970s. She tells about her life as a girl in a Muslim village and as a young woman in Accra, Lomé, and several other places, the lives of her fellow bar girls and about the men (mostly European but also African) she encountered, took from, gave to and left.

Chernoff wants the reader to approach Hawa's stories as "an ethnography done by an illiterate." Hawa is not only an ethnographic subject; she is also an observer, an ethnographer. Like all ethnographers her observations are partial, skewed, but also enlightening. >> continue

BBC

(via weblogs in education) Until a few months ago, the attention paid to web logs, or blogs, focused mainly on politics and the media business. Now, the technology that has been an alternative source of news to many academics is being incorporated more fully into university life.

Esther Maccallum-Stewart, a Sussex University historian is one of the pioneering British academic bloggers who are using the technology to teach and carry out research. "I feel very strongly that information should be disseminated into the internet world, but I also feel that academics can become too insular, constructing their own language and cliques which do nothing to promote the getting of knowledge."

That need for knowledge provision is the reason why Warwick University is giving its students and staff free space on its server to start their own blogs. The blogging project at the university is arguably the largest of its kind in the academic world with some 2,600 users. >> continue

SEE ALSO:
Blog on Weblogs in Education

RedNova News

WHEN reality television show Malaysian Idol came under attack last year, Dr Wan Zawawi Ibrahim, a professor of social anthropology, was one of the few academics who came to its defence. He is optimistic of pop culture's positive effect on national integration and the creation of new identities among the young.

"Malaysian Idol is an example of pop culture which has created social spaces for youngsters of different ethnic groups to come together," says the 57-year old researcher. The notion of pop culture as a social binding tool is not new. It has proliferated in local films, music or theatre years before the Idol series was even conceptualised.

Wan Zawawi also wants more social spaces for youths to come together. "Malaysian Idol, the National Service programme, cybercafes and even designer coffee outlets like Starbucks and Coffee Bean are social spaces for youths of various ethnicities to interact with each other," he adds. >> les mer

SEE ALSO EARLIER ENTRY
Malaysian Idol - "a space for young people of different ethnicity to interact"