New Scientist

Every year, the people of the Trobriand Islands in the Solomon Sea off Papua New Guinea exchange ornamental seashell armbands and necklaces. It is a social ritual that according to Malinowski cements social bonds between fishing communities. Strange as it may seem, this tradition has inspired a recent new service from communications company Vodafone.

Anthropologist Richard Harper has been working for Vodafone in the UK since 2003, where he has adapted kula-style gift-giving rules to encourage social bonding among groups of people in phone-texting networks. Under his guidance, Vodafone has launched its Postcard service. You send an MMS picture-and-text message to Vodafone, who will print it as a postcard and mail it to whomever you want. Like the islanders' gifts, Vodafone's postcards are permanent - unlike text messages.

The idea is that the recipient will then want to send a postcard of their own, perhaps to a third party, and so draw more subscribers into the network. Exchanging more valuable artefacts, such as music or video files, may be next. >> continue

(link via Purse Lip Square)

READ ALSO
>> Critical comment by anthropologist Alex Golub: "Contemporary america’s obsession with the idea of selfless giving has once more led it to misappropriate anthropological theories of reciprocity and distort some well-known ethnographic facts."

LINKS UPDATED 21.9.2022

BBC News

St Petersburg's Museum of Ethnography has decided to illustrate the history of ethnic groups living in Russia with an exhibition of trousers worn as part of their traditional costumes.

On display there are 70 pairs of trousers representing Turkic, Finno-Ugric and Baltic groups who inhabit the area from the Baltic Sea to the southern Urals.

The style of trousers reflects the environment people lived in and their daily routine, so they tell you more about the given culture than, say, a jacket or hat that often serve decorative rather than practical purposes, says the curator, Yelena Kolchina >> continue

SEEKING REFUGE, SEEKING RIGHTS, SEEKING A FUTURE 3rd Annual International Forced Migration Student Conference will take place 13-14 May 2005, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford (UK) >> continue

Four of this year's conference papers are available online

Liana Lewis (Nottingham Trent University):
“What is to be a Refugee (and) Child in the Island? How do Refugee Children experience their lives in the 21st Century England.”

Anastasia Dimitriadou (The Institute of Education, London):
“An exploration of refugees’ experiences as English language students in Further education colleges.”

Nida Bikmen (University of New York):
“Memories of homeland, residues of ethnic violence. How different discourses about the history of ethnic relations in Bosnia affect interethnic attitudes and contacts in exile.”

Alexander Betts (Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University):
“The International Relations of the 'New' Extra-Territorial Approaches to Refugee Protection: Explaining the Policy Initiatives of the UK Government and UNHCR.”

>> continue

NPR (Radio)

In the third and final part of his series, NPR's Joe Palca talks to two anthropologists about how men are coping with changes in modern society and whether they're sliding down the social ladder as women make their way up. >> continue

One more film to be viewed on the website of Visual Anthropology in Tromsø/Norway - Independent by Espen Marius Foss:

"This story is about two young Norwegian men with physical handicaps who seek the good life in a technological world. Dagfinn runs his own computer-enterprise, but dreams about a job in a bigger company. Geir Ove has a sound assistance-system, but lacks necessary aids to write another novel.

The film addresses the new possibilities and limits for participation and creative existence within the "Information Society". It also questions our craving for individual independency." >> continue and watch the video (Broadband only)

SEE ALSO:
More anthropological Films online

Alireza Doostdar, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, American Anthropologist

This article is an ethnographic study of Persian-language weblogs (blogs), focusing on a divisive argument among Iranian bloggers that came to be known as the "vulgarity debate."

Sparked by a controversial blogger who ridiculed assertions that Islam was compatible with human rights, the debate revolved around the claim that biogging had a "vulgar spirit" that made it easy for everything from standards of writing to principles of logical reasoning to be undermined. >> continue (pdf) (Link updated)

(via Global Voices)

Ideas Bazaar reports from an interesting seminar about - among others - ethnography and product design and points to aviable conference papers online.

The Global Watch Mission Report Innovation through people-centred design - lessons from the USA emphasises that people in their social context rather than task-centric users should be considered a fundamental source of innovation. Furthermore it states that "cross-cultural understandings are becoming increasingly important for companies such as Intel who are using multi-sited worldwide research as part of the innovation process" >> download the report

>> to Ideas Bazaar's comments

>> Anne Galloway's comments / summary of the report

>> Louise Ferguson's comment: "The user/human/people agenda is hitting the mainstream rather than being the preserve of a niche community."

>> Press release University of Surrey: Innovation Through People Centred Design - Lessons For UK Business From the USA

>> Corporate Anthropology

>> Social Software: Video presentations of a conference in Oslo

NPR (Radio Interview)

NPR's Eric Weiner reports on the emerging field of corporate anthropology, where researchers dissect consumer appetites and help engineers build user-friendly products. >> continue