The International Herald Tribune writes about how European low-cost airlines "are drawing a new map of how people and money travel in Europe". An example:

Andrzej Majewski, a Pole who works as a thoracic surgeon in Britain, catches a ride to the airport in Wroclaw on Sundays and hops a Ryanair flight to his hospital in Nottingham, England. Most Fridays he commutes home to southwest Poland. The flights cost him about $50 each way. "It takes about three hours, and I'm eating lunch at my house," Majewski said.

"The low-cost airlines really facilitate a type of hypermobility for the public at large to do anything from leisure to business, to new careers", Steven Vertovec, a professor of transnational anthropology at Oxford University comments.

But not everyone is happy with Europeans' mobility. People in countries served by budget airlines complain that British bachelor and bachelorette parties are taking over Eastern European cities like Riga.

"I know about guys who go to Prague for a weekend of cheap beer, prostitutes and fighting. "People there really complain about it — and that's due to low-cost airline", Vertovec says.

>> read the whole story in the IHT (link updated)

The article is good PR for RyanAir as it is not mentioned that somebody has to pay for the low prices

Vertovec is director of the Oxford Center on Migration Policy and Society. The center has published lots of working papers online. I've written about one of them before “No Pizza without Migrants”: Between the Politics of Identity and Transnationalism by Susanne Wessendorf.

Anthropology in India is losing relevance. Many anthropology departments are shutting down, especially in Western India. "Gifted anthropologists" are also shifting to other professions. At the Second Indian Anthropological Congress, KK Basa, director of the anthropology museum Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya, said anthropological theory needed to keep pace with rapid globalisation.

“Anthropology as a discipline developed in the colonial period is fast losing relevance. It needs to adapt to the transition taking place today,” said Basa according to Express India.

Reading this I wonder what kind of anthropology is practiced in India?

SEE ALSO:

"Anthropology needs to engage in an activist way"

"Discuss politics!" - How anthropologists in Indonesia engage with the public

More and more anthropologists, but they're absent from public debates - "Engaging Anthropology" by Thomas Hylland Eriksen (1)

Why anthropology fails to arouse interest among the public - Engaging Anthropology (2)

Riots in France and silent anthropologists

Chronicles Women's Social Movements in India

The Rediff Interview/Nandini Chattopadhyay: Music and Protest

Why American shopping culture is rejected in India

Anthropologist Simon Roberts at INTEL in Ireland asked me to blog about this job offer (pdf) that actually is a good example of applied anthropology. "The jobs will suit people who are interested in working at the exciting intersection of technology, medicine, gerontology and policy", he writes:

Successful candidates would undertake ethnographic research with three ageing cohorts, mainly in the Dublin area. They would also examine the wider contexts of ageing in Ireland - community services/projects.

Their research would inform the work of world class clinicians and technologists who are developing technologies of a preventative and diagnostic nature - for use both within a clinical and domestic setting.

The researchers will be expected to produce agenda setting research, which influences the design of tools and interventions suitable for ageing populations and communicate their work and findings to TRIL members and a broader audience through peer reviewed journals and other means.

The jobs are based in the Irish Centre for Social Gerontology in Galway.

The jobs have arisen due to the recent announcement by Intel and the Irish Government of a research collaboration, known as TRIL Centre. TRIL is a multidisciplinary research programme is underpinned by open source technology platform development and informed by ethnographic research of ageing and healthcare.

>> read the job advert (pdf)

We know Simon Roberts from his former blog Ideas Bazaar.

By the way, feel free to use the antropologi.info forum / pin board to announce job offers or call for papers

SEE ALSO:

Ethnography, cross cultural understanding and product design

INTEL is hiring more than 100 anthropologists

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

Anthropologists find out why we (don't) buy organic food

Office Culture - good overview about corporate anthropology in Financial Times

(via del.icio.us) After his video about collaborative tools on the web (like blogs, wikis etc), Michael Wesch has become the most talked about anthropologist on the internet. In an interview with John Battelle's Searchblog, Wesch explains his interest in what geeks call web 2.0:

For me, cultural anthropology is a continuous exercise in expanding my mind and my empathy, building primarily from one simple principle: everything is connected.

(...)

For me, the ultimate promise of digital technology is that it might enable us to truly see one another once again and all the ways we are interconnected. It might help us create a truly global view that can spark the kind of empathy we need to create a better world for all of humankind.

He made his first website in 1998 and saw "a tremendous potential for transforming the way we present our research". Since then, he tells us, he has had a passion for exploring the latest technologies and how they an be used to communicate ideas in more effective ways.

Farther down in the comment field he explains:

The radically collaborative technologies emerging on the Web create the possibility for doing scholarship in the mode of conversation rather than argument, or to transform the argument as war metaphor into something that suggests collaboration rather than combat.

Personally, I prefer the metaphor of the dance and that we are all here in this webscape dancing and playing around with ideas. The best dancers are those that find a way to “lose themselves” in the music – pushing the limits of the dance without fear of tripping or falling because they know that it is all part of the dance.

>> read the whole interview on John Battelle's Searchblog

>> watch the video

As said, his video was widely debated, for anthropological comments see among others: mike wesch rocks the video essay (Savage Minds), Mike Wesch's Web 2.0 video makes waves, expands our understanding of this digital phenomenon (Anthropology.net), Anthropologists on Web 2.0 (TechnoTaste) and Internet 6 or Web 2.0: Video Edition (Disparate, Alexandre Enkerli)

His video is part of his work at the Digital Ethnography working group at Kansas State University.

Last year, Wesch was guestblogger at Savage Minds and blogged about new teaching methods.

SEE ALSO:

antropologi.info survey: Six anthropologists on Anthropology and Internet

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

Ethnomusicologist uses website as an extension of the book

"YouTube clips = everyday ethnography"

Ethnographic Skype

Ethnographic Flickr

Ethnographic research on Friendster's online communities

Ethnographic Study on "Digital Kids"

2006 - The Year of Open Access Anthropology?

The Internet Gift Culture

How to understand religious experiences when you have not 'experienced' the experiences? What is the function of emotions in the anthropological research process? Do emotions operate as 'anthropology's taboo'? Or are they key tools in our understanding and openings to our 'informants'? And what are the effects of the emotional appeal of human rights activism on the resulting work?

The new issue of Anthropology Matters - one of the few online journals in anthropology - focuses an very interesting topic: Emotions - both as a state or research method during fieldwork and object of study. Editor Ingie Hovland writes in her introduction:

Emotions are inextricably tied up in our anthropological research and writing-in our apprehensive anticipation of the field, our feelings of helplessness once there, our anger at 'informants', our moments of panic, exuberance or exhaustion, our joy over the development of meaningful relationships and our excitement when we are 'struck' by something, and the despair, resignation or satisfaction that accompany writing up.

Yet these emotions are often dismissed in a number of curious ways: frequently left out of anthropological research methods courses, frequently edited out of ethnographic texts, admonished when they slip into PhD seminars, in general confined to personal fieldnotes, at times turned into jokes or asides, and at other times treated with uncertainty, embarrassment or silence.

How has this state of affairs come about? Is it only due to anthropology's over-reliance on the Western academy and its Enlightenment split between knowing and feeling, turning emotions into the dangerous 'other' of knowledge? Or does it go beyond the question of hierarchies of knowledge and probe into the regulatory regimes of the anthropological community itself, turning emotions into an object of discipline?

>> overview over all articles in Anthropology Matters 1/2007

As we remember, blogger Antropyton, currently on fieldwork in Nicaragua has been very open concerning her emotions recently.

How many Siberian anthropologists do you know? What are Chinese anthropologists engaged in? The discipline of anthropology is quite ethnocentric. It is dominated by research institutes in the U.S and Britain. Only a small elite interacts on a global level. It's time to globalize anthropology! To connect anthropologists from all over the world, to make anthropology more multivocal, richer and diverse. We need to create World Anthropologies.

That's the endeavor of the World Anthropologies Network.

One year ago, Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar published the book World Anthropologies. Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power. Now, you can read the whole book online, including more recent papers.

Among others, you can read Reshaping Anthropology: A View from Japan (by Shinji Yamashita), Anthropology in a Post-Colonial Africa: the Survival Debate (by Paul Nchoji Nkwi) or World Anthropologies. Cosmopolitics for a New Global Scenario in Anthropology (by Gustavo Lins Ribeiro) and many more.

"We intend this volume as a contribution to the making of a new transnational community of anthropologists", Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar write in their introduction. "Anthropologies everywhere will benefit from the scholarship already existing in globally fragmented spaces":

We see a tremendous transformative potential in embracing this project. Whether conceived in terms of diversifying anthropological practices while maintaining a unified sense of the field or adumbrating a ‘post-anthropological era’ in which the idea of a single or universal anthropology is put into question, we believe there are great gains to be made by opening up to new possibilities of dialogue and exchange among world anthropologies.
(...)
Eurocentrism can only be transcended if we approach the modern colonial world system from the exteriority, i.e. from the colonial difference (modernity’s hidden face). The result of this operation is diversality or the possibility of epistemic diversity as a universal project.

>> continue reading the introduction

>> overview over all papers of the World Anthropologies Network

The network already has quite a lot of members from all continents - except from Africa (typical somehow!)

In Anthropology News October Gustavo Lins Ribeiro wrote about the lacking globalisation of anthropology, see my summary How can we create a more plural anthropological community?

(Thanks to the journal Ethnologic at the University of Munich for the link. The World Anthropologies website has been down for several month, but now it's up and running again)

SEE ALSO:

Ironies regarding "Establishing Dialogue among International Anthropological Communities"

Open Source Anthropology : Are anthropologists serious about sharing knowledge?

For an Anthropology of Cosmopolitanism

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

More and more anthropologists, but they're absent from public debates - "Engaging Anthropology" (1)

The Five Major Challenges for Anthropology

It's a privilege to be an anthropologist on fieldwork. Reading Cicilie's field blog from Paris and now also Antropyton's field blog from Nicaragua makes me wonder: Why am I still sitting on my messy desk (picture) in Oslo?

A few weeks ago, Antropyton has arrived in Nicaragua, and has now started blogging about her experiences including her mixed feelings before she left Norway:

I was terrified by where we were supposed to live, by not understanding Nicaraguan Spanish (especially my hosts!), by not having a will to get to know them, by the scorching heat and by all my ideas dying in the shadow of volcanoes! I wasn’t on cloud nine at that time. Frankly speaking, excitement that was accompanying me for so long, disappeared as if by magic.

But then in Latin-America, everything changed:

Once I landed in San Jose in Costa Rica, I did realize that reading anthropology is something totally different than DOING anthropology.
(...)
I knew at once that this was going to be hard. But I was excited. Still, I had the will to conquer the world and carry out what I had planned the last few months. The world was new and beautiful and waiting for me.
(...)
It’s much better now, as one could suppose. I’ve started classes and tamed the city. Usually I don’t need much time to adapt myself to new environments. Albert Camus has a point in one of his essays (...) Like me, after a night in a hotel, the next morning he goes out on the street and click! you feel at home.

>> read the whole entry "Bienvenido"

Her most recent entry is about Nicaraguan conference culture:

The event was inaugurated with a national anthem, something that gave a dignity to the event. And the opening words seemed to go on endlessly. Every member of the organizing committee was welcomed and mentioned by name, academic title, organisations and institutions one belongs to and a post one has.

(...)

Every presentations was followed by a discussion that almost always ended with talk about politics, the new government and changes in policy that are essential to improve the health condition for the people. (...)What I observed was that presentations from Sweden (the conference was organized in cooperation with Lund University) were more “society friendly”. I mean that they presented not only results from their research, but also suggestions for how to apply this knowledge into society.

>> read the whole post " III Conference on Multidisciplinary Environmental Research, Managua"

Also take a look at her pictures of volcano Cerro Negro and her new hometown Leon.

UPDATE (14.2.07): What happened? In her newest post she asks us Do we need/have to like our informants?

SEE ALSO:

New blog: Blogging anthropological fieldwork in Brazil

Open Source Fieldwork! Show how you work!

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

Fieldwork in Papua New Guinea: Who are the exotic others?

On fieldwork: "Blogging sharpens the attention"

Fieldwork as cab-driver: "An amazing other world"

"Anthropology needs to develop a listening capacity and to engage in an activist way, to become involved with the problem, not just to observe it from a distance", says Brazilian anthropologist João Biehl in a portrait on the website of his university (Princeton University).

Biehl has conducted fieldwork in Vita, a site in Porto Alegre that is populated by the sick, mentally ill and poor who have passed beyond the care of families and social institutions. He wrote about his experiences in "Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment" which revolves around an ethnographic study of Catarina, a young women who was considered by her family and various doctors to be insane. With no one to look after her, she had ended up at Vita. Se died in Vita in 2003.

Working with Catarina taught Biehl anthropology in a new way, he says.

Describing the impact of the book, Princeton anthropologist Carolyn Rouse said, "In addressing social policy and ethics, 'Vita' demonstrates how one person's life can be a basis for thinking about complex issues."

According to Biehl, places like Vita are emerging everywhere in urban Brazil, and the book shows "how economic globalization and state and medical reform coincide and impinge on a local production of social death."

>> read the whole portrait on Princeton University's website

Unfortunately, I couldn't find more texts by or about Biehl. His anthropology department looks like one of the worst faculty website on the web. But you'll find three papers on the website of Anthropology, Art, and Activism Series (Brown University).

UPDATE (9.2.07): Read the comment by Anne Galloway (Space and Culture)

SEE ALSO:

Professor studies society's poor by picking through trash

"Discuss politics!" - How anthropologists in Indonesia engage with the public

More and more anthropologists, but they're absent from public debates - "Engaging Anthropology" (1)

Interview: Anthropologist studied poor fast food workers in Harlem

Collaborative Ethnography: For Luke Eric Lassiter "among the most powerful ways to advance a more relevant and public scholarship"

Poverty and health policies: Listening to the poor in Bangladesh

Too engaged anthropology? The Lumpenproletariat on the US-Mexican Border