I'm off to a one week holiday in Paris. As I'll attend two conference right afterwards, there won't be any updates here for around 10 days.

Happy Easter! Enjoy spring (or autumn, I should add as well)!

One of my jobs consists in interviewing researchers in the research program Cultural Complexity in the new Norway. Five of these interviews have been translated into English, I've just put them online:

Traveling to Turkey to Understand Norway
Anthropologist Therese Sandrup is interested on focusing on the strong emotional connection the second generation in Norway has to their parents’ native country: “It is important to look at the migration process in its entirety. Certain actions and decisions are the result of a dialogue between the past and the present, the country of origin and the Norwegian context,” she says.

Doing Fieldwork Among Poets and Rebels in Paris
Anthropologist Cicilie Fagerlid had actually intended to study peaceful cosmopolitan existence in Paris. But a month after she had relocated there, riots broke out in the suburbs. This research fellow now wants to find out why France ended up in this situation - in large part by studying the poetry slam scene.

Does the Labor Movement Tackle Cultural Complexity?
In the 1970s, The Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO) struggled with integrating women and new occupational groups. Margrethe Daae-Qvale believes the same is now happening with immigrants. In connection with her Master’s thesis, she has interviewed immigrants who have been active in the trade union, together with central participants within LO’s forum for ethnic equality.

Gender Roles Among Christians and Muslims: Shared Problems and Shared Solutions?
Do Christians and Muslims face common challenges, or are they so distant from each other that communication becomes impossible? In order to answer these questions, the theologian Anne-Hege Grung has formed a dialogue group with Christian and Muslim women. They are meeting to discuss texts from the Bible, the Koran and Hadith.

Revealing Media Habits Among Norwegian-Iranians
In studying media habits among Norwegian-Iranian people, sociologist Sharam Alghasi wants to comment on the relationship between Norwegians and Iranians. “You cannot consider yourself to be Norwegian if you feel you are excluded from Norwegian society through the media”, he says.

Why see uncertainty as a hindering aspect of human experience, instead of an enabling one? In her thesis Good Lives, Hidden Miseries: An Ethnography of Uncertainty in a Finnish Village, anthropologist Susanne Ådahl from the University of Helsinki argues that there can be something called "good suffering", a suffering which creates positive meaning and creative action:

There is a reason why people continue doing things, working, producing on the land, maintaining sociality and community although a lot of it goes against all economic logic. For farmers it is not only a matter of being engaged in practical action, but that the action has a quality of "meaningfulness" to it.

Her thesis is an ethnographic study, in the field of medical anthropology, of village life among farmers in south west Finland, based on 12 months of field work conducted 2002-2003 in a coastal village.

Ådahl asked people about their life histories, the meaning of the home, work, social solidarity and social interaction, notions of illness and well-being. She was primarily interested in finding out how people experience social change and what they do to deal with it. And by working with farmers she "came to understand the central symbols of farming life and the impetus that keeps these people going although outside forces are reducing their living space, both symbolically and literally".

When she started her fieldwork Finland had been a member of the European Union for seven years, and farmers felt the EU had substantially impacted on their working conditions, she writes:

Perhaps one of the greatest losses they are experiencing is that of their autonomy, the freedom to decide over life which seems to be equivalent to a loss of honour, and an honourable way of dealing with the dependence on structures beyond their control. It is also a potential loss of the home. There was complaint of other pressures in life such as work related stress, the fast pace of life and strained inter-personal relationships. Informants expressed worry over the ingestion of artificial foods and other harmful substances in the environment.

Felt uncertainty in their lives is brought about by increasing social isolation, feelings of depression, anxiety, guilt and distress. A concrete sign of the structural changes that are taking place in society is the emptying of villages.

(...)

The introduction of on-farm inspections and with it the issue of doubt and distrust that is inherent in this practice is perhaps one of the hardest blows to farmers' pride. They feel that a bureaucratic entity has penetrated into the sanctity of the home, transgressing boundaries of intimacy. Many also equate the present subsidy system with social welfare, living off a system, losing your independence. This has resulted in a loss of motivation to produce, because the reward for being a good farmer, one that strives to maximise his or her yields, is gone.

(...)

They feel that decision makers and representatives of the EU cannot understand, nor recognise the significance of local level knowledge, based in the reality of farming in Finland as well as the geographically specific areas of the country that "good farming practice" is based on.

In the midst of constraints and the demands to mould oneself to the social order there are also minimal forms of resistance, like writing "No EU" in bricks of contrasting colours on the roof of one's barn. Or being active in a producers' organisation, in municipal or party politics so as to influence the outcome of political decisions that impact on one's life:

One of the most obvious forms of resistance is related to the "cancer talk" that people engage in. It is used as a political commentary of the state of affairs, of people's fear of something foreign controlling their lives. It is a form of blaming society for making their living environment dangerous to dwell in and their food contaminated, and yet they keep on living in this environment.

So why can suffering be good and meaningful? The anthropologist explains:

For farmers it is natural to think that the importance of producing food makes their suffering meaningful, valuable and honourable. This positive, meaningful suffering produces wholesome food that feeds the nation and maintains our independence in terms of food security.
(...)
It is through working and being active in associations and other social activities that farmers can fulfil the central values of the farming life, those of continuity regardless of how economically unprofitable it has become to engage in farming especially for small holders. Farmers make the ambiguity of their lived realities understandable by referring to these core values that spring from the local context.
(...)
I believe that the central role of agency in the lived experience of human subjects emerges precisely because it is set against the backdrop of suffering, of the idea that those things which are at stake in one's life are threatened.

>> download the thesis

Her reserach was part of the research project Ethnographies of Illness Experience in Contemporary Finnish Contexts that has published three medical anthropology papers online.

The picture was taken from her thesis.

SEE ALSO:

Local Foods - New issue of Open Access journal "Anthropology of Food"

Crop Diversity Continues Thanks to Modern, Traditional Practices

Thailand: Local wisdom protects hometown from the onslaught of globalisation

In a recently published doctoral dissertation at the University of Helsinki, anthropologist Perpetual Crentsil provides 13 recommendations on how to fight AIDS. Crentsil has been on fieldwork among the Akan in the coastal south and forest zone of Ghana:

It seems reasonable to expect that where deaths from AIDS are common, people would be worried and would attempt to prevent infection by abstinence or protecting themselves. However, new infections indicate that campaigns to educate and create more awareness are not having the optimal effect.

The ill effects of the disease necessitate a radical approach, Crentsil writes and suggests among other the following measures:

- Campaign strategies need radical changes in order to portray their urgency in sending strong messages about the seriousness of the disease. Alternative modes of educating people could be adopted, such as the use of traditional or supernatural concepts — ‘bad’ death and non-creation of ancestors.

- There should be more posters and billboards about the disease. Owing to the high level of non-Western education in the rural areas, the posters should be more pictorial than textual. Again, as this study found, the posters seem to be concentrated in the cities and major towns. More need to go to the rural areas too.

- It is important that pharmaceuticals make the medication for HIV/AIDS cheap enough for poor countries; in this way biomedicine would claim more control over other medical systems.

- Traditional healers are an untapped resource of great potential, as I have suggested elsewhere (Crentsil 2002). They could be integrated into the country’s medical system, properly regulated and redefined to provide important outlets for networks dedicated to the campaign against HIV/AIDS in remote areas. After all, the model of the ‘health care system’ is meant to be universally applicable.

(...)

- The role of the media is important. (...) My observations in the field were that even in the urban areas where many people have television sets, the majority choose to watch music and drama instead of HIV/AIDS programmes. Although not statistically proven, it is believed that people find HIV/AIDS programmes too boring. Soap operas on HIV/AIDS could be encouraged by the media houses. (...)

- The family needs to reform itself as a socialising unit. Parents should be able to speak against their children’s questionable lifestyles. In this period of risks of infection, the lineage needs to assume its role as what I call an informal ‘health promotion agency’ by conducting thorough investigations of prospective partners for their young members. This, in my opinion, could be a major deterrent to many young people who may be engaging in unhealthy lifestyles.

(...)

- I support the churches’ insistence on HIV test before they conduct marriage between couples, if that will make people sit up. I suggest that churches (the spiritualist ones and others) should make issues about the disease a major part of their preaching in worship sessions. (...) I support abstinence by those who are not married (not merely because I am a Catholic). For married couples, being faithful should be a strong message to them. It is only when abstinence and fidelity cannot be practised that people would need to adopt the condom culture.
(...)

>> download the thesis

SEE ALSO:

Male circumcision prevents AIDS?

The emerging research field of medical ethnomusicology: How music fights AIDS

"There's no AIDS here because men and women are equal"

Cultural values and the spreading of AIDS in Africa

Open Access to anthropology journals? "How to find the money to publish journals if one doesn’t make readers pay?", opponents of Open Access would ask. But as Alex Golub explains in an article in Anthropology News April: The “reader-pays” model for funding publications (f.ex. membership fees) by the American Anthropological Association has been broken for a long time. "The choice we are facing", he writes, is not that of an unworkable ideal versus a working system. It is the choice between a future system which may work and an existing system which we know does not":

The AAA can develop a publishing program that can run in the black, but in order to do so it must take on board the central insight of the open access movement—that journals become more affordable (and open access becomes a more realistic option) when you lower production costs.
(...)
Advocates of open access argue that we can reduce the production costs of journals by up to two orders of magnitude by using free open source software to edit them, and using small-run printon-demand solutions. These cost savings could then be used to free journals from having to charge readers to view their content.
(...)
In order for us to develop less costly and more open publishing, we need to question some of our assumptions about how our publishing program works and how successful it has been.
(...)
It means moving beyond the idea that our current reader-pays model is somehow more “realistic” than open access alternatives.

Golub also criticizes the decision making process within the AAA. Although the AAA should have redesigned their website in time for the San José meetings in November 2006, nothing has happened yet:

If we can not redesign our website in a timely manner, how are we to reinvent our publishing program in a electronic age?

>> download the article (pdf, 125MB )

>> discussion on this article Savage Minds

SEE ALSO:

2006 - The Year of Open Access Anthropology?

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

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

Success in publishing defined by quality? Anthropology Matters on "The Politics of Publishing"

Are we on the way to "Open Access Conferences"? As already announced, several sessions at the conference of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) will be published as podcasts. Jen Cardew who has taken the initiative to this project reports that all presenters (except for one) were very happy to have their speeches to be recorded:

Presenters were; Paul Farmer, Phillipe Bourgois, Merrill Singer, Linda Whiteford, Carolyn Nordstrom, Barbara Rylko-Bauer, Didier Fassin, and Jame Quesada, all of whom were excellent speakers with excellent things to say. The room was packed and I believe there was 300+ people at any given time. These are the rockstars of anthropology. All of the presenters were thrilled to have their speeches recorded for the podcasting project and they even had me announce the project to the group. The fact that all of these presenters were excited about the opportunity to be recorded made the project worth it to me in itself. It actually was quite an honor
(...)
It was very reassuring to see that the anthropologists were open to new technology, as we are not known as a "techy" or "progressive with new technology" field

There are also some students doing informal interviews and some minimal coverage of the conference, which will be published on the web, she writes. Their goal was to seek out how anthropologists are using technology.

Read more on her blog

>> SfAA Day 2

>> SfAA Day 1

SEE ALSO:

Podcasting: Anthropologists no longer a primitive tribe?

The Future of Anthropology: "We ought to build our own mass media"

AAA Annual Meeting: Are blogs a better news source than corporate media?

Anthropology and the World: What has happened at the EASA conference?

This is conference blogging!

It's only a few weeks ago that anthropologist Michael Wesch explained in an extremly popular YouTube-video how collaborative web technologies change scholarship. Now Jen Cardew at Synthesis of Thoughts tells us that several sessions at the conference of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) are set to be recorded and published as podcasts.

A new website is set up: http://www.sfaapodcasts.net/ The first podcast will be up by April 7th.

That's good news. Last summer, anthropologists were criticized for being the last primitive tribe on earth because they didn't embrace the possibillities provided by the digital era. Several times, I've written about how difficult it is to get information about what's going on on conferences.

Laura Fortunato from the Department of Anthropology at the University College London is writing to me telling about the Ethnographic Database Project. She is currently looking for anthropologists with fieldwork experience to take part in this project:

The Ethnographic Database Project (EDP) is a web-based tool for the collection of comparative ethnographic data. The EDP allows anthropologists to enter data about their field research using a set of standard codes developed for cross-cultural application; the codes relate to a society’s organization, kinship and marriage practices, subsistence economy, and pattern of sexual division of labor. The EDP is in the form of a web-based questionnaire, which can be accessed from any computer connected to the internet.

The EDP aims to complement widely-used comparative ethnographic datasets such as the Ethnographic Atlas and the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample by: (i) obtaining data directly from anthropologists who conducted field research in the societies of interest, (ii) using standard codes developed for cross-cultural application for all societies, (iii) expanding the range of societies for which coded ethnographic data are available.

Visit the EDP website where you also can view a sample version of the EDP.