Yesterday, one of Norway’s most important anthropologists has passed away: Marianne Gullestad. I got to know it just a few hours ago, and MaterialWorld-blogger Daniel Miller has already made a post about her and has re-published the introduction he wrote to Gullestads book Kitchen Table Society:

Indeed, what made this such an important work when it first came out was, rather, that it was in many respects a conventional ethnography - though of the type of population that, on the whole, had not been the subject of conventional ethnographies. The topic was working class women in the town of Bergen on the West coast of Norway.

What made this special was that there was nothing special about these people. They were not being studied because they were a problem that academics were supposed to shed light on, such as drug-takers or the unemployed. They represented the neglected topic of the merely ordinary.

>> read the whole post “Marianne Gullestad (1946-2008)”

I have written severa posts on her work, one in English about her “best of” book Plausible Prejudice: Everyday Experiences and Social Images of Nation, Culture and Race. To understand the problems of the world today, we need to “decolonize anthropological knowledge", she writes and lits five major challenges for the discipline of anthropology >> read the whole post “The Five Major Challenges for Anthropology”

Several papers by her are available online:

Marianne Gullestad: Blind Slaves of our Prejudices: Debating ‘Culture’ and ‘Race’ in Norway

Marianne Gullestad: Normalising racial boundaries. The Norwegian dispute about the term ‘neger’

Marianne Gullestad: Mohammed Atta and I. Identification, discrimination and the formation of sleepers

Marianne Gullestad: Invisible Fences: Egalitarianism, nationalism and racism

Educators complain about plagiarism. But it is not principally because material is too readily available that students copy and paste material from the internet to their papers. It’s because new forms of authorships are emerging online, anthropologist Susan D. Blum writes in Anthropology News March 2008.

Blum has done ethnographic research on plagiarism and college culture for three years at “Saint Pastoral’s” University.

Social websites like Wikipedia challenge the romantic notion of the author as the individual genius:

While the romantic notion of the author emphasized creation in a vacuum, without influence, touched only by inspiration from the individual’s genius, the new collectivized idea of the author celebrates the kind of creativity that comes from selecting, from accumulating a pastiche, a patchwork, a sample of others’ work. The line between creation and what “copyright fundamentalists” regard as theft is now completely— and consciously—fluid.

(…)

Collectively, one after another, contributors add to or edit Wikipedia articles, without directly requesting credit or payment. The living product is quite essentially collaborative, an accretion of many people’s words belonging to everyone and Common Sense and anthropological Sense no one simultaneously.

(…)

Sharing music, video, text and images is routine and simple on the “digital commons” with YouTube, Flickr and other file-sharing interfaces. Items often follow a circuitous path before they end up on some- one’s iPod or hard drive.

Maybe educators should care lass about plagiarism? Blum concludes:

Faculty can attempt to enforce traditional academic citation norms, but we are well advised to recognize that a large portion of the students we encounter do not share traditional academic values of originality, singularity and individualism in intellectual creation. In the area of authorship, educators’ common sense is not necessarily students’ common sense.

In some ways our students have become folk anthropologists, speaking out about the impossibility of singularity, the shared quality of discourse, the reality of fragments of texts incorporated into every utterance (or written document) and the collective nature of cultural creation. Now that’s a story!

>> read the whole article “The Internet, the Self, Authorship and Plagiarism” (pdf)

This is one of five articles on “Online Engagement” in Anthropology News March 2008.

SEE ALSO:

Interview with Michael Wesch: How collaborative technologies change scholarship

New media and anthropology - AAA meeting part III

Plans to study anthropological online communities and Open Access movement

We’ve been into this topic a few times before, but this might be the longest list of good ethnographies. CultureMatters-blogger Lisa Wynn not only lists her own favorite books but also several ethnographies that are particularily popular with students.

She writes that she only can think of a small handful of ethnographies that have affected her in the way that a good novel can. This is her list:

- Evans-Pritchard: Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic;
- Lila Abu-Lughod: Writing Women’s Worlds;
- Elizabeth Warnock Fernea: Guests of the Sheikh (not precisely an ethnography, more a memoir);
- Paul Willis: Learning to Labor;
- Philippe Bourgois: In Search of Respect;
- Amitav Ghosh: In an Antique Land;
- Joao Biehl: Vita;
- Levi-Strauss: Tristes Tropiques;
- Pierre Clastres: Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians.

She also reflects on some of her favorite examples of ethnographic fiction.

>> read the whole post on Culture Matters

UPDATE: For more suggestions and comments see the post on the blog Entertaining Research: Amitav Ghosh among most compelling ethnographies

SEE ALSO:

The Secret of Good Ethnographies - Engaging Anthropology Part III

Alex Golubs list on popular ethnographies

Good anthropological writing: “Nuclear Borderlands” and “Global Body Shopping”

Why is anthropological writing so boring? New issue of Anthropology Matters

Visual Anthropology of Japan” is the name of the blog by anthropologist Steven Fedorowicz (Kansai Gaidai University). All of his students in his class with the same name are required to blog. He links to more than a dozen student blogs.

He explains:

The blog was set up in the Fall of 2006 when I began teaching the class “Visual Anthropology of Japan” at Kansai Gaidai University in Hirakata City, Osaka, Japan. Originally it was set up as a place where links to student project blogs were posted. Every semester the class, blog and student projects have changed, evolved and hopefully improved.

The blog is done in the spirit of collaboration, discussion, dialogue, open text and open access. It is my hope that people will check out my students’ blogs, leave feedback and advice and take part in the dialogue of visual anthropology in Japan.

Students have various backgrounds (both international and Japanese students), interests, levels and experience in anthropology. Their common goal is to explore how to represent Japanese culture through visual means, and their individual blogs serve as the medium where they present their work. Visual Anthropology of Japan also includes resources, announcements, photo essays and other information that might be of interest to a wider audience.

His own blog has blog posts with titles as Globalization Visual Anthropology Photo Essay: Japan in Hawaii, and Can you do visual anthropology with your cell phone? and Visualizing Terror in Japan.

In his most recent post, he asks:

What do all the photos in this post have in common? At least part of the picture is blurry. And why? The Japanese people pictured here are deaf. That means part of their body is being used to communicate while I was attempting to photograph them. Japanese Sign Language entails more than movements of hands and arms - it uses the entire body.

>> visit the blog “Visual Anthropology of Japan

It is getting crowdy in my blog overview, the antropologi.info Anthropology newspaper, so I’ve removed some inactive blogs. Links to blogger-blogs are corrected.

SEE ALSO:

Professor lets students blog their field experiences: More than 20 new blogs online!

On fieldwork: “Blogging sharpens the attention”

Paper by Erkan Saka: Blogging as a Research Tool for Ethnographic Fieldwork

New Ethnography: The Deaf People - A Forgotten Cultural Minority

Anthropology of anthropology: How do anthropologists form online communities? How are open access publishing and other developments that have sprung up online changing community boundaries? Soon, an anthropologist will do fieldwork among us online anthropologists. http://nodivide.wordpress.com/ is the address of the blog by anthropologist Owen Wiltshire, grad student at Concordia University, Montreal, where he writes:

I am interested in collaborative research methods, and the growth of anthropology online. (…) I’m particularly interested in open-access journals, and feel that opening up academic publishing is an enormously important step for anthropology.

(…)

Delving into the interesting colonial history of anthropology, and into discussions of globalization and neoliberal economic injustice, it’s pretty easy to see how it makes sense to make anthropological work freely available to the world that it studies.

In this way I’ll be exploring ways to study online communities - in this case communities of anthropologists. Its an exciting time for anthropology online. I’ve been following anthropology blogs for a year now, and its amazing how fast its growing. Its quite inspiring, and I think reflects a very vibrant community thats just itching to work (and fight) with each other!

So while my research proposal is extremely vague, and I’ve been made aware of this, I’m absolutely confident that the internet, blogs, and the desire to liberate anthropological knowledge from the world economy are fueling a change in anthropology, and that within this excitement I’ll find an interesting “field” of study.

In an email to me he tells that he’ll be handing in a proposal in April and hopefully be doing fieldwork over the summer. He has already been investigating the ways faculty at Concordia University use the internet in classroom, and is working on getting access to an anthropological journal to investigate the publishing world “face to face".

Owen Wiltshire worked as a web developer for a number of years prior to studying anthropology: “I’ve always followed developments in open source - so I’m excited to see how similar developments work their way into academic culture", he writes.

>> visit Owen Wiltshire’s blog “Just another anthro blog”

SEE ALSO:

Interview with Michael Wesch: How collaborative technologies change scholarship

antropologi.info survey: Six anthropologists on Anthropology and Internet

What do all humans have in common? My interview with anthropologist Christoph Antweiler in German about his book on cultural universalisms has been translated into Portuguese and will be published in the journal Revista ANTHROPOLÓGICAS. You can download the Portuguese translation here.

The text was translated by Peter Schröder, one of the editors of Revista ANTHROPOLÓGICAS. The journal is open access.

Open Access, he tells me, is supported by the Brazilian government. The best scientific journals are freely available on the Portal Scielo http://www.scielo.br Via the subject list, I found three more anthropology journals: Horizontes Antropológicos, Mana and Revista de Antropologia. Most of the articles are in Portuguese, only a few of them in English.

SEE ALSO:

Museum Anthropology Review goes open access

Already lots of publications in the open access anthropology repository Mana’o

Book and papers online: Working towards a global community of anthropologists

Anthropology professor Joe Rubenstein has started an interesting project: Students in his course “Field Methods” are expected to blog their field experiences (it seems). Their research topic is teens and adolescence.

“The purpose of writing on our blogs is to keep each other and ourselves informed and up to date on what is going on for *Adolescent* field work project", Danielle explains.

The students are about to meet their first informants. Take a look at the long list of student field blogs on Rubensteins blog (at the bottom of the left sidebar).

Lots of interesting posts in the professor’s blog as well, for example On Doing Fieldwork where he helps us organizing one’s thoughts for the Weblog methods reflections and lists some useful fieldwork websites.

SEE ALSO:

Open Source Fieldwork! Show how you work!

On fieldwork: “Blogging sharpens the attention”

Paper by Erkan Saka: Blogging as a Research Tool for Ethnographic Fieldwork

“Knowledge of the bigger context is crucial for successful fieldwork”

antropologi.info survey: Six anthropologists on Anthropology and Internet

This morning, the journal Museum Anthropology Review was launched as an open access journal. The content that was published during 2007 (the journal’s first year) is now available in both HTML and PDF format - free for all readers all over the world.

Editor Jason Baird Jackson said that making scholarly work more easily and affordably accessible is especially important in fields like folklore and anthropology that are rooted in the study of local cultures worldwide:

“If, for instance, a scholar spends months documenting the work of an elderly woodcarver living in a small American town and then writes about what she learned in a peer-reviewed research article, I have an obligation as her editor to make it as easy as possible for the schoolchildren of that town – or the artist’s grandchildren – to gain access to her writing. Open access repositories and journals, in their varied forms, help make this possible.”

>> read the press release

>> more information on the Museum Anthropology Blog

>> website of the Museum Anthropology Review

UPDATE: Inside Higher Ed reports:

There are hundreds of scholarly journals published online, plenty of them free. But what makes Museum Anthropology Review’s launch notable is that it is being led by the same editor as the traditional journal, Museum Anthropology, using the exact same peer review system.

For years, the criticism of the free, online model has been that it would be impossible for it to replicate the quality control offered by traditional publishing. When online journal publishers have boasted of their quality control, print loyalists have said, in effect, “well maybe it’s good, but it can’t be as good as what we’re doing.”

To this subjective criticism, open access advocates can now point to someone who knows exactly what the standards are at both journals, as he’s leading them both.

>> read the whole article in Inside Higher Education

SEE ALSO:

Danah Boyd on Open Access: “Boycott locked-down journals”

Anthropology News February about Open Access Anthropology

2006 - The Year of Open Access Anthropology?

Why should anthropologists care about open access?

Open Access News