Last week, the bi-annual conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) has taken place in Bristol. The theme sounds extremely interesting:

The theme [Europe and the World ]encourages us to consider the global dimensions of particular ethnographic encounters. The wider interconnections, the spread of ideas, the dynamic relationships and processes which shape the everyday activity of social life; these lie increasingly at the centre of our methodological and theoretical preoccupations as anthropologists. Mediated by individual, institutional, national developments of enormous complexity, this link between global interchange and local creativity deserves our systematic attention and analysis.

Around 1000 anthropologists from many countries in Europe (and other continents?) might have been there. I've searched the news and blogs but haven't find any information on what has gone on there.

I only found EASA-related posts on two blogs - on Erkan' Field diary (on lost luggage on his way home) and on Savage Minds (notes by Maia who is going to present a paper there). No newspaper has mentioned the largest European Anthropology conference about a topic that is in the news every day...

UPDATE: I've found this blog entry:

Things I learned at an anthropology conference in Bristol:
1) Apparently it is not important to say anything in conferences as long as you are talking.
2) There is nothing more depressing than a passionless tango. Especially when it is done to honor someone who has passed away. If I die, please do not ask to anorexic British anthropologists to dance the tango in honor of me. Or maybe do. It would be my last laugh as you would have to endure it and I wouldn't/
3) The surest way to not keep my attention for an hour long presentation is to begin with a paragraph overflowing with alliterations. You will think you are clever. I will not.

UPDATE 3:

Now online: EASA-conference papers on media anthropology

UPDATE 2:

A few more words by Erkan Saka:

Workshop based organization and network meetings in the evenings seem to be productive. However, I could not escape from thinking that compare to AAA, EASA has a really long way to go. I wasnt't thrilled with any theoretical development. AAA seems to be heading what is the newest in the field. EASA is yet working on the organization and deciding for near future research strategy.

SEE ALSO:

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

What's the point of anthropology conferences?

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

As many of us know, Yale anthropologist David Graeber has been fired for his anarchist activism. He's not the only one who was punished for leaving the academic ivory tower. More and more academics have started blogging, exposing their personal opinions to the world. The Yale Herald has an interesting story about "how profs' political advocacy outside academia can threaten their success within it":

The recent explosion of professors using their academic bully pulpits to expound on everything from federal sentencing law to the need for a Palestinian state raises questions of responsibility and consequence. Every year, more professors join the blogosphere, expanding into a medium that lets them write anything about anything and makes them advocates as well as teachers.

Mazin Qumsiyeh for example was hired by the Yale School of Medicine:

He had advocated locally and nationally for Palestinian rights under his title as a Yale professor. Five years later, he was looking for a new job.

Qumsiyeh is the editor of Qumsiyeh: A Human Rights Web.

Last year, Yale decided to woo Professor Juan Cole away from Michigan. Then it changed its mind:

The provost’s office refused to comment on the reasons for his rejection; Dr. Cole refused to comment on this story. But many eyes turned toward Cole’s blog as a factor in the decision, one that may have raised his profile and polarized opinion on his candidacy. On his site, “Informed Comment,” Cole has provided commentary on the news coming out of the Middle East since 2001.

And the popular anarchist anthropologist David Graeber was invited to give this year’s Malinowski lecture, an honor given only to the world’s most promising young anthropologists. His contract went up for renewal last year:

He had been a controversial figure, but now finds sleeping on couches in his friends’ New Haven apartments after giving up his lease.
(...)
When Graeber returned from a one-year sabbatical in 2002—having joined forces in the interim with anti-war and anti-globalization groups such as the Direct Action Network and Ya Basta — he said he found his welcome back much colder than his farewell. “I thought a ‘hello’ would have been reasonable,” he said. “All of the sudden, no one was talking to me.” He continued to be a prolific writer and researcher, but his future no longer looked so rosy.

>> read the whole story in The Yale Herald (LINK UPDATED 3.7.2022)

SEE ALSO:

Graeber drops appeal, leaves Yale this spring

Bush, "war of terror" and the erosion of free academic speech: Challenges for anthropology

Engaged anthropologists beaten by the Mexican police

From the exotic world of technology and culture: "I feel more comfortable texting friends, because face-to-face you run out of things to talk about," a 17-year-old American high school senior said. "When you're texting, the conversation doesn't have any awkwardness. And when you run out of things to say, it's over."

Anthropology Professor Jan English-Lueck, who with her colleague, Professor Chuck Darrah, is conducting the Silicon Valley Cultures Project, explains:

Teenagers and early 20-somethings would tell me that things like face-to-face and telephone and even e-mail are a cold medium and you can't trust them, but the way you can really be authentic is through texting and instant messaging.
(...)
You are in more control when you're doing the texting and instant messaging than when you're in a group of people talking at once, with confusing messages that you have to unravel. In a group you're not presenting the real you, you're just reacting.

>> read the whole story in the San Francisco Chronicle

And according to The News & Observer, more and more technology is ending up in the bedroom, "laptops shares couples' most intimate space":

Dr. Enoch Choi, 36, and his wife, Tania, 33, who have been married 10 years, both take laptops to bed to write their blogs. "I suppose I started the trend," said Choi, a physician in Palo Alto, Calif. "But now my wife is just as much the nighty-night PowerBook key-banger, blogging away for her friends."
(...)
Sholes lies in bed and exchanges instant messages with her husband, who is elsewhere in the house on his own computer. "We discuss things, you might even say argue," she said. "The IM will often eliminate a lot of the tone, and we can discuss things a little bit better."

>> read the whole story in The News and Observer

SEE ALSO:

Microsoft anthropologist: Let people be online at work or risk losing stuff!

How internet changes the life among the First Nations in Canada

Popular IT-anthropologists: Observe families until they go to bed

Great commentary (and a good example of engaged anthropology) by anthropologist Sarah Hewat about a recent TV story on Wa Wa, a Korowai boy in Papua, who should be "rescued" from "cannibals". Hewat says, the journalists should have read some work by anthropologist Rupert Stasch before talking about cannibalism. Stasch did his doctoral research on the Korowai of West Papua in the mid-1990s:

If they did, they would learn that as a Korowai, Wa-Wa does not live as a member of a lost tribe, tyrannised by tradition. (...)
The Korowai may live in the forest, but that does not exclude them from having a certain style of modern life. Korowai may fly in planes, go to church, attend school, have meetings with government officials, or sell produce at the market — or gaharu (agarwood) to black-market traders. Even in the peripheries of Korowai territory, where Wa-Wa lives, people no longer kill and eat witches. Times have changed, and in any case, they fear the barbaric repercussions of the Indonesian police.

Part of the story is Paul Raffaele, who brought the TV-team to Wa-Wa. Raffaele has written this doubtful article I've mentioned two weeks ago "They still eat their fellow tribesmen". Hewat writes about Raffaele:

His work does not enhance understanding of the KorowaI but panders to a Western public hungry to consume the primitive.

The Korowai, like other tribal groups portrayed by Raffaele, are presented by him through a series of either/ors: either they are bright-eyed upholders of a fragile Eden, or else they are darkly menacing, horrifying us with their cruel customs.

But if we pay attention to who they are rather than what we want them to be, then we will find ordinary people trying to come to terms with their place in the world. The Korowai, like other ethnic peoples in their position, are simply struggling to engage state and global forces in their own way.

In her view, the journalists should have rather talked with her and other people who have lived in Papua for years, about "the cannibalistic nature of the tourism industry" there. "Primitiveness" is, she writes, after natural resources, a prize commodity in Papua. Tour operators have perfected the art of selling "first contact tours". She continues:

I have known locals who have been paid a measly sum to take off their clothes, brandish spears and speak of a barbaric past to satisfy the voyeurism of white tourists, journalists or filmmakers seeking a close encounter with our ancestral past. The cash-strapped locals who stage such performances are, unfortunately, adjuncts to people who get paid much more to bring Westerners to them.

(...)

Our debates about human rights should focus on real issues: supporting the growth of democracy and the rule of law in Papua, building a strong education system that extends to the villages, and, not least, interrogating the exploitative relations between the West and the "primitive other" in the international tourist industry.

>> read the whole story in The Age

PS: Thanks to Peter Keough for alterting me to this article and sorry for not having posted more often recently

UPDATE (24.9.06): I've just found an Sydney Morning Herald article where Raffaele conceded he did not know Stasch's research, doesn't speak Indonesian or any Papuan language and had spent less than six weeks of his life in the restive province. And Wa-Wa is apparently not Korowai after all. Anthropologist Chris Ballard says, says that Raffaele, two television networks and millions of viewers were misled: The Korowai depend on the tourism trade and have learnt to say what rich foreigners want to hear. "Most of these groups have 10 years' experience in feeding this [cannibal] stuff to tourists," Ballard said.

MORE ABOUT THIS ISSUE:

Savage Minds: Breaking News: Intrepid Explorer’s First Contact with a Vanishing Race of Noble Savages

Australian networks clash over cannibal boy (afp, 15.9.06)

Spears fly over 'cannibal' expedition (The Age, 15.9.06)

Experts decry cannibalism claims (The Age, 15.9.06)

SEE ALSO:

Rubert Stasch: Giving up homicide: Korowai experience of witches and police (West Papua) (Oceania, Sep 2001)

"They still eat their fellow tribesmen"

Brief history of cannibal controversies

Our obsession with the notion of the primitive society

Ancient People: We are All Modern Now

On Savage Minds: Debate on the Construction of Indigenous Culture by Anthropologists

How to do research on migration? Lots of interesting papers in the recent issue of the multilingual and interdisciplinary Open Access journal Forum: Qualitative Social Research.

"Qualitative Migration Research in Contemporary Europe" is the topic of the recent issue, and most papers deal with methodolocial questions

Maren Borkert and Carla De Tona for example write about "Issues Faced by Young European Researchers in Migration and Ethnic Studies" , especially when rearching abroad as "academic migrants":

The term academic migrant refers to European academics, like the authors of this paper, who become more and more transnational while researching migration in Europe. As migrant European researchers we move to and settle in third-countries, often having to speak a new language, and learning to adjust to new social and cultural normativities, feeling the migration's uprooting and re-grounding and, in short, becoming "foreigners" as the people who participate to our researches (who may or may not be from our home country). Although we may not call ourselves migrants, we end up experiencing migration in similar ways to the participants of our research.

The emerging issue for us is how does this particular transnational aspect of our positionality (of researching migrants as academic migrants) influence us as researchers, the dynamics we establish with our participants and the ultimate shape of our research?

>> read the whole paper

Similar questions are raised in the papers Cultural "Insiders" and the Issue of Positionality in Qualitative Migration Research: Moving "Across" and Moving "Along" Researcher-Participant Divides by Deianira Ganga & Sam Scott and Doing Qualitative Research with Migrants as a Native Citizen: Reflections from Spain) by Alberto Martín Pérez.

There are also case studies about Somali migrants in Finland, Greek musicians in Germany, cultural capital during migration and Reflecting Upon Interculturality in Ethnographic Filmmaking where Laura Catalán Eraso claims that ethnographic film is still very much an under-utilised research technique. Films may illuminate the "intercultural" dynamics between minority (participant) and majority (researcher) and challenge the traditional power relations between the researcher and his/her "subjects":

[T]he filmmaker(s) will loose authority in the film and that authority will tend to get decentralised and shared among subjects. Ways of doing this include allowing subjects to: manage the camera; choose the shots that are used: and, give feedback on the end results. These techniques, not dissimilar to those advocated in other forms of qualitative enquiry, will hopefully create new possibilities for ethnographic film by allowing space for greater equality between, and more reflection by, researchers and participants.

In the introduction, the editors remind us of that...

migration is not a new phenomenon: human beings have always been moving to other places, other regions and other countries. What is "new" is the relatively recent invention and creation of national borders and the "imagining" of nation-states (ANDERSON, 1983, pp.5-7). These ideological processes make migration "international" and thus problematise the natural behaviour of people attempting to improve their everyday lives.

>> overview over all articles in Forum: Qualitative Social Research on Qualitative Migration Research in Europe

We all know the directory SOSIG, but now it has been relaunched as Intute: Social Sciences. It combines two databases of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN): Altis and SOSIG. It is edited by the University of Manchester and the University of Kent at Canterbury.

Intute: Anthropology provides free access to high quality resources on the Internet. Each resource has been evaluated and categorised by subject specialists based at UK universities. We aim to match resources to the anthropology curriculum and the needs of researchers. Our target audience is students, staff and researchers in higher and further education.

The overview over anthropology sites has been updated recently.

>> Intute Anthropology

>> Intute Social Science

A similar service is EVIFA - Virtual Library of Social Anthropology, edited by the University Library of the Humboldt University Berlin (both in English and German)

In one the recent additions in the anthropology journal AnthroGlobe, Grace Keyes examines "how hearing loss impacts an individual’s enculturation". Enculturation, she explains, is in anthropology textbooks defined as "process by which people acquire their culture (the social norms, symbols, customs, cultural knowledge, meanings, etc.)".

So what happens when a person cannot hear? Researchers, however, have largely neglected to take into account how biological factors such as hearing may affect enculturation, she writes:

It is generally assumed that language is a major vehicle of enculturation and that most people experience the process in much the same way if they belong to the same culture or society. The role of hearing in language acquisition and enculturation is taken for granted. Thus, works that examine the role of hearing in the enculturation process are non-existent in the anthropological literature. In fact, there exits very little literature on enculturation itself in anthropology.

>> read the whole paper "Incomplete Enculturation: The Role of Hearing" by Grace Keyes

SEE ALSO:

New Ethnography: The Deaf People - A Forgotten Cultural Minority

(via del.icio.us) If you miss "good old-style" stories about cannibals in far away places like Papua or New Guinea, read this story by Paul Raffaele in the Smithsonian Mag. It starts like this:

For days I've been slogging through a rain-soaked jungle in Indonesian New Guinea, on a quest to visit members of the Korowai tribe, among the last people on earth to practice cannibalism.

And about cannibalism: A local guide with "dark eyes" explains:

It's because of the khakhua, which comes disguised as a relative or friend of a person he wants to kill. "The khakhua eats the victim's insides while he sleeps," Boas explains, "replacing them with fireplace ash so the victim does not know he's being eaten. The khakhua finally kills the person by shooting a magical arrow into his heart." When a clan member dies, his or her male relatives and friends seize and kill the khakhua. "Usually, the [dying] victim whispers to his relatives the name of the man he knows is the khakhua," Boas says. "He may be from the same or another treehouse."

I ask Boas whether the Korowai eat people for any other reason or eat the bodies of enemies they've killed in battle. "Of course not," he replies, giving me a funny look. "We don't eat humans, we only eat khakhua."

The killing and eating of khakhua has reportedly declined among tribespeople in and near the settlements. Rupert Stasch, an anthropologist at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, who has lived among the Korowai for 16 months and studied their culture, writes in the journal Oceania that Korowai say they have "given up" killing witches partly because they were growing ambivalent about the practice and partly in reaction to several incidents with police.

(...)

Still, the eating of khakhua persists, according to my guide, Kembaren. "Many khakhua are murdered and eaten each year," he says, citing information he says he has gained from talking to Korowai who still live in treehouses.

The travel writer even meets "true cannibals":

Two men approach through the gloom, one in shorts, the other naked save for a necklace of prized pigs' teeth and a leaf wrapped about the tip of his penis. "That's Kilikili," Kembaren whispers, "the most notorious khakhua killer." Kilikili carries a bow and barbed arrows. His eyes are empty of expression, his lips are drawn in a grimace and he walks as soundlessly as a shadow.

The other man, who turns out to be Kilikili's brother Bailom, pulls a human skull from a bag. A jagged hole mars the forehead. "It's Bunop, the most recent khakhua he killed," Kembaren says of the skull.

The story ends like this:

Three years earlier I had visited the Korubo, an isolated indigenous tribe in the Amazon, together with Sydney Possuelo, then director of Brazil's Department for Isolated Indians [SMITHSONIAN, April 2005]. This question of what to do with such peoples—whether to yank them into the present or leave them untouched in their jungles and traditions—had troubled Possuelo for decades. "I believe we should let them live in their own special worlds," he told me, "because once they go downriver to the settlements and see what is to them the wonders and magic of our lives, they never go back to live in a traditional way."

So it is with the Korowai. They have at most a generation left in their traditional culture—one that includes practices that admittedly strike us as abhorrent.

>> read the whole story in The Smithsonian

>> BBC about the Kombai (Korowai)

>> Rupert Stasch: Giving up homicide: Korowai experience of witches and police (West Papua) (Oceania, Sep 2001)

On Papua Adventures we read:

Due to this very recent exposure to outside influences, the Korowai tribes are not as open and welcoming to tourists as the Yali, Dani and Lani for example. They remain on guard and suspicious of ways different to their own. This does of course make for an exciting and truly adventurous visit flying in by chartered Cessna from Jayapura to Yaniruma and trekking into Korowai country by foot and canoe.

UPDATE: Anthropologist Sarah Hewat comments: "Good story about cannibals. Pity it's not even close to the truth"

SEE ALSO:

Disney-Film depicts indigenous people as involved in cannibalism

Inuit cannibalism?

Brief history of cannibal controversies

Our obsession with the notion of the primitive society

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

Ancient People: We are All Modern Now

Primitive Racism: Reuters about "the world's most primitive tribes"