Where do anthropologists work outside the university? And how do you get a relevant job? Andreas Lloyd has been at the annual Career day at his old anthropology department (University of Copenhagen) and gives ut a great summary of eight presentations and eight ways to make an anthropology career.

He writes about both old and new careers. Inger Merete Hansen for example is now close to 60, has combined her anthropology degree with primary school teaching:

Anthropology gave her both a method and outlook which proved vital to her work, especially in order to work against the heavy-handed and indirectly racist school bureaucracy and work towards new ways of integrating immigrant children into the Danish society.

Kirsten Becker works to build relationships between the department and the “real world” outside. She told about the growing popularity of our discipline. Anthropology is being hyped at all of the conferences on innovation these days:

“Before, nobody really paid attention when I spoke at conferences, but now everybody shushes and listens to every word. Being an anthropologist is like being a shaman - the industry thinks we have some secret magic they need. My job is to maintain that impression.” Another grin.

Anne Weber is working as a recruiter. She argued that anthropology is just as much a way of personal development as it is an academic discipline. This is because anthropologists invest themselves so much in their work, learning new ways of being present, of observing and of being surprised. Thus, for an anthropologist, it is much more a matter of personality that it is about grades and recommendations when applying for jobs in the real world.

The most repeated and probably most important refrain was, Lloyd writes, mot offer up some easy and shrinkwrapped solution, but saying “I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know how to find out.”

>> read the whole text "Anthropology Careers" on Andreas Lloyd's blog

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Study: "Holders of social anthropology Ph.D.s are highly employable"

"Anthropologists should shed light on the violence in Balochistan Province in Pakistan, anthropologist Hafeez Jamali writes in Anthropology News May 2007. Balochistan is presently the scene of a bitter and violent struggle. Multinationals are exploiting the region’s mineral resources. Hundreds of ordinary Baloch died, some 84,000 civilians predominantly have been displaced and hundreds of political activists have been arrested and tortured.

Jamali criticizes the "apathy of the discipline and of anthropologists toward the appalling human rights situation" there: There is hardly any effort by anthropologists who have worked amongst Baloch people to raise this issue in their ethnographic work, he writes. Most of the current work on Baloch people does not address current political issues:

Indeed (...) much of the past and recent anthropological work on the Baloch people has tended to focus on pastoral-nomadic aspects of Baloch social organization by employing concepts of ecological adaptation and kinship networks. These ethnographic works (...) give the impression that the Baloch are pre-modern beings living in bounded cultural groups which are relatively unconcerned with larger geo-strategic and political developments in the region and the world.

This approach is misleading because Baloch tribes’ resistance movements against colonial rule of the British Raj as well as against inequities of postcolonial states such as Iran and Pakistan were intrinsically linked to regional anti-colonial struggles. The present day struggle in Balochistan also draws inspiration from contemporary movements for self-governance in other parts of the world and in that sense is comparable to the struggles being waged by Palestinians, Kurds and other marginalized ethnic groups.

In view of this situation, it is important that anthropologists who work in and study Balochistan take the influence of regional geo-strategic politics as well as the intrusion of neoliberal globalization in the Baloch people’s lives and the response of the Baloch to such intrusion more seriously in their work.

>> read the whole article in Anthropology News

MORE INFO:

Hundreds missing in conflict-torn Balochistan (IRIN, 10.5.07)

Pakistan's battle over Balochistan (BBC, 26.8.06)

By the way, in Anthropology News April 2007, there are several articles on the Oaxacan Rebellion (Mexico)

SEE ALSO:

Do anthropologists have anything relevant to say about human rights?

Engaged anthropologists beaten by the Mexican police

'War on Terror' Has Indigenous People in Its Sights

Riots in France and silent anthropologists

Anthropologists on the Israel-Lebanon conflict

In an article in Anthropology News May 2007, Bill Davis, Executive Director of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) explains why he doesn't embrace the arguments of open access advocates to make electronic versions of scholarly journals free to anyone.

He writes:

AAA’s publishing program financial structure is not unlike those of many scholarly society publishers in the social sciences and humanities. Library subscription revenues are critically important to maintaining the stability and viability of our publishing programs. Thus it is understandable that nonprofit society publishers fear losing library subscription revenue if their journal contents were available to all readers for free.

But Davis is no opponent of Open Access. He discusses several options:

Maybe there are options not yet widely discussed. For example, the proposed legislation requiring that any federally supported research be published through an open access repository could be accompanied by a requirement that every federal research grant include in its amount the costs of such publication. Another possibility would be for colleges and universities to provide supplements to faculty compensation to cover the costs associated with their faculty’s scholarly publishing work.
(...)
For all scholars, authors and readers, the challenge is to figure out how to provide as much content as possible free to those who we want to have access to it without losing our ability to continue to publish that content.

>> read the whole article in Anthropology News

In Anthropology News April, Alex Golub claimed that the pay-for-content model has never been successful and that we ought to move beyond the idea that our current reader-pays model is somehow more “realistic” than open access alternatives.

UPDATE:

Interesting comment by Peter Suber at Open Access News. In his opinion, Bill Davis is wrong in several points. The study that he refers to (that shows that Open access archiving will lead to journal cancellations) is flawed. And even when the AAA-Director discusses possible options he doesn't seem to be well informed according to Suber:

But he misunderstands a key fact about OA archiving when he suggests that FRPAA (which would require OA archiving for most federally-funded research) "could be accompanied by a requirement that every federal research grant include in its amount the costs" of such OA archiving. OA repositories never charge deposit fees. There are modest upkeep costs for the repository but no costs for authors or readers.

Suber encourages anthropologists to publish their journal articles online - as it is already allowed:

Finally, the AAA is a green publisher (according to SHERPA). Its journals already allow authors to self-archive their peer-reviewed postprints. Hence, even if the AAA can't find a way to convert its non-OA journals to OA, or to provide gold OA, authors should provide green OA on their own initiative and take advantage of the opportunity the AAA has already created.

>> read the whole comment by Peter Suber

SEE ALSO:

2006 - The Year of Open Access Anthropology?

American Anthropological Association opposes Open Access to Journal Articles

Open Access: "The American Anthropological Association reminds me of the recording industry"

Open Source Anthropology : Are anthropologists serious about sharing knowledge?

New Open Access Anthropology Website, mailinglist, chat and t-shirts!

Another anthro-blogger has published his dissertation. Antti Leppänen has been on fieldwork among neighborhood shop keepers in South Korea. His interest in this toipc was "aroused by the visible ethnographic difference between my native Finland and the Korea of neighborhoods and marketplaces with its multitude of shops and the colorfulness, restlessness, disorder, and shabbiness of the urban scenery marked by shop signboards, from which my interest moved to people behind the visual façade".

But that's not the whole story as he writes:

The article that particularly directed my attention to the keepers of small businesses in South Korea in the first place was Laurel Kendall’s study (1996) of shamanism in Seoul in the 1990s, in which she discusses the phenomenon that the majority of the patrons of shaman rituals she encountered were shop owners, restaurateurs, and proprietors of small companies.

She suggests that the apparent ease with which the shamanistic rituals, earlier practiced mainly to cure illnesses, have now turned to ensuring entrepreneurial success and providing wealth, lies in a “calibration” of those practices to meet the contemporary arbitrariness of the market and the political economy (ibid: 521–2)

He conducted his field research during the aftermath of the Asian currency crisis, colloquially termed at the time as the “IMF crisis,” which highlighted the social and cultural circumstances of small businesskeeper in a specific way.:

The livelihoods of small-scale entrepreneurs became even more precarious than before; self-employment became an involuntary choice for many middle-class salaried employees who were laid off; and the cultural categories and concepts of society and economy – South Korean capitalism – were articulated more sharply than before.

Although the keepers of small businesses occupy approximately one fourth of the population in active work force, the livelihoods of these people and their cultural and social worlds have according to Leppänen rarely been in the focus of social science inquiry.

>> download Antti Leppänen's dissertation "Neighborhood Shopkeepers in Contemporary South Korea: Household, Work, and Locality"

>> Antti Leppänen's blog

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"But We Are Still Native People" - Tad McIlwraith's dissertation is online

Thesis: How does EU influence the life of farmers in Finland?

Available for download: Alex Golubs dissertation on mining and indigenous people

Jen Cardew has done a great job in recording and publishing speeches held at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA). Several new podcasts (mp3-files from the session "Global Health in the Time of Violence") can be downloaded. She has even written an introduction in podcasting and blogging.

The podcasts received lots of attention as you can see on the page Buzz Around the Web. Even a blog about internet marketing found something interesting there.

As she explains in a comment on Savage Minds, her project was "quite easy and cost effective".

>> visit the website Podcasts from the SfAA

EARLIER COVERAGE

Conference Podcasting: Anthropologists thrilled to have their speeches recorded

Anthropologists no longer a primitive tribe?

We've read a lot about the consequences of climate change for the Inuit. But it's people in poor countries who will suffer most and they already do. Lots of people from these countries live as migrants in countries like Norway or the U.S. Because of personal knowledge and experience, immigrants from poorer countries have a special motivation to circulate information both ways. Therefore, immigrants in Norway have started a new organisation Global Migrants For Climate Action:

The organization will seek cooperation with other immigrant organizations in Norway and internationally, in order support all demands for stronger reduction of emissions. We are also focusing on how important the issue of social justice is regarding the consequences of climate change.

Poor countries in Africa and Asia that are emitting a small part of greenhouse gas emissions are likely to bear the brunt of rising temperatures.

On their website they provide lesser known information about global activism against climate change, among other things about a film festival by Exiled Tibetans in Dharamsala about global warming.

Around 200 people attended the opening conference, most of them were immigrants.

>> visit the website of Global Migrants for Climate Action

SEE ALSO:

Time to reframe the climate issue? “It’s time to ask questions about equal rights, fairness, vulnerability, and the balance of power,” researcher Karen O’Brien argues (CICERO - Center for International Climate and Environmental Research Oslo)

Bangladesh: A nation in fear of drowning (The Independent, 18.4.07)

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): Billions face climate change risk (BBC, 7.4.07)

A new word For June - or: When is the Arctic no longer the Arctic?

Our fellow anthro-blogger Tad McIlwraith has successfully defended his dissertation "But We Are Still Native People’: Talking about Hunting and History in a Northern Athapaskan Village" that now can be downloaded from his website (The graduates in his year are the first who are able to request open access publication)

His dissertation is a study of hunting in the northern Athapaskan village of Iskut, British Columbia, Canada. Iskut hunting is a source of pride for Iskut people. Yet, hunting is sometimes stigmatized by outsiders with interests in the lands and natural resources of northern British Columbia. For some outside observers, he writes, modernization and acculturation are one-way processes. Traditions are better left in the past. At times, he found out, Iskut talk about hunting conveys those sentiments too. At other times, Iskut people strongly reject the stigma of labels like ‘impoverished’ or ‘nomadic’ that resonate in the words that have been written about Iskut people.

Tad McIlwraith indicates that the ethnographic inquiry into an Iskut culture was a profitable way to identify the importance of hunting to Iskut people and, thus, to offset the racism and stereotypes that are frequently associated with native lives.

He also argues that ethnoecological research and the Ethnography of Speaking both contribute useful methodological alternatives to Traditional Use Studies particularly when the documentation and interpretation of the varied expressions of hunting in Iskut Village is of concern.

>> download the dissertation

>> visit his blog

Bob Geldof is to team up with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on a project to digitally catalogue all known human existence. They want to create the "largest ever living record" of films, photographs, anthropological histories, philosophies, theologies, economies, language and art, as well as people's personal stories, according to afp

Might sound good but reading Geldofs statements ("In an age of globalisation, we face the growing homogenisation of cultures") and their plans to "capture all 900 of the separate groups of people anthropologists believe exist in the world", one begins to doubt: It seems that Geldof and the BBC are going to reproduce old fashioned racist anthropology ("Völkerkunde"). Although they call it an "anthropological project", they can't have read much anthropology.

>> BBC: Geldof unveils earth series plans

>> afp: BBC, Geldof join forces to draw up a map of mankind

>> Guardian: Geldof plans the definitive record of mankind

UPDATE: Over there at Culture Matters, Joana Breidenbach comments:

Here we see again the widely popular notion of “cultures” as distinct, static and unchanging entities threatened by Western-led globalization.

It seems a pity that this outdated view should be perpetuated by the BBC who in its reportages so often manages to portray a very different image of the cultural dynamics in globalization: i.e. in which a new diversity is created by the encounter between global consumer goods, media, ideas and institutions with local ways of doing and thinking.

>> read the whole comment

SEE ALSO:

Is this anthropology? African pygmies observe Britains in TV-show

In Detroit and London: More African Villages in the Zoo

Geldof's Live8 and Western myths about Africa