Ideas Bazaar Weblog

An article about a book I retrieved from the shelves before I went away on the Raj in India and Hill Stations. The Magic Mountains examines the importance of these settlements as a means of racial separation and a subsuquent demonstration of superiority. More convincely, the author shows how much of 'home' was recreated up the hill rather than down on the plains. Fascinating stuff. >>continue

Mercury News

For a summer, Dev Patnaik and his team of researchers hung out with teens preparing to go away to college. Trained in anthropology and sociology, they observed while the teens and their parents shopped for the essentials of college life. Some of the students struggled with doing their own laundry and worried about dorm living.

The strategists took it all in. Then they came up with a line of products for dorm rooms. Now items like a kitchen-in-a-box kit and a hamper with laundry instructions are marketed to the back-to-school crowds at the chain store Target.

Patnaik's firm, San Mateo-based Jump, is part of a growing trend in which anthropologists are helping to design new products and business ventures, as well as organize the inner workings of companies.

Work done by anthropologists -- who observe people in real-life settings -- has translated into products including Yoplait's portable Go-Gurt, Whirlpool's "refrigerated oven" and Yahoo's photo service. >>continue

Daniel M.T. Fessler, Asst. Prof. of Anthropology at the
University of California, Los Angeles, writes to me and tells about his research method. Together with his students, he runs anthropology studies and experiments on the Web. He writes: "Folks generally find participation in our studies thought-provoking, fun, or at least better than a poke in the eye with a number 2 pencil." You can take a look at his site here

Haaretz, Israel

Mary Douglas:

"Today too much dominance is given to the anthropologists themselves within the research. This is strange, as it used to be that the main criticism was that anthropologists kept themselves invisible in the research in a way that was really artificial. This accusation - pretending to be anonymous on the part of the writers - changed, and in its stead there has been an opposite phenomenon: dominance of the writers over the research material. Thus, today we are exposed far more to the experiences and thoughts of the writer, while the methodology and the orderly method have declined considerably."

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AP/ The News-Sentinel

Tyson Foods Inc. introduced what company officials said would be the largest ad campaign in its history to analysts Wednesday, making major changes in its advertising approach and highlighting its lines of prepared food products.

Bob Corscadden, Tyson's chief marketing officer, said the company worked with cultural anthropologists to understand the food wants and needs of different demographics to better know how to market its full range of products and highlight the importance of protein as body fuel. >>continue

OneWorld Southeast Europe

The overall goal of this project is to provide information, data and instruments to NGOs and policy makers about the persistence of high-quality folk know-hows on local plant foods and herbal medicines, which could be used in the future for promoting and implement eco-touristic activities and for improving bio-cultural conservation and rural development of Northern Albania, especially in the framework of the initiative "Balkan Peace Park" project..

It will be used traditional methodologies of the social and cognitive anthropology, and ethnobiology as well. >>continue

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:
Kirkpatrick's website about The Ricksha Art of Bangladesh (great pictures!)

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

(via ethno::log)