Not much dialogue here: When trying to read the Anthropology News Article "Establishing Dialogue among International Anthropological Communities", logged in with my University account, I get following message by AnthroSource:
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In Anthropology News November, Susanna M Hoffman (co-editor of Catastrophe and Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster) rises the question how anthropologists could help people who are ravaged by the recent hurricanes:
Disasters and their effects on culture and society have been largely disregarded by anthropologists. (...) In the aftermath of Katrina and Rita, another aspect of anthropology, also often ignored, rises to the forefront, or should rise. That is, what we can do to help people who are ravaged.
This is the area of our study usually called applied anthropology, but in such cases as Katrina and Rita, becomes, in fact, aid. We are the sort who participate directly with people in such a way that we might learn what survivors actually want and work to provide it. I not only suggest that we incorporate the effects of disaster into our studies, but I also implore that if anyone should converge after such a calamity, it should be us.
MORE DISASTER ANTHROPOLOGY IN ANTHROPOLOGY NEWS NOVEMBER:
SherriLynn Colby-Bottel: Doing Anthropology in New Orleans, Before and After Katrina
Dick Gould: Identifying Victims after a Disaster
SEE ALSO:
Anthropology News October: How Anthropologists Can Respond to Disasters
New website: Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences
A recent post by Alex Golub on Savage Minds is interesting for several reasons: Even a scientific project on a very narrow topic might suddenly be relevant for a wider audience. Golub has studied the relationship between indigenous people in Papua New Guinea and the white senior management of a gold mine. He writes:
I’ve been really amazed to see the New York Times’s series on the impact of gold mining that has been running recently—suddenly my area of expertise is literally news.
Furthermore, Golub reminds us that - when doing fieldwork, it's not always clear who "the exotic other" actually is. In Golub's case it's not the indigenous people, but the white mining employees, although, as he writes "mine management were supposedly ‘from my culture.’":
Learning to like and respect these men (they were almost entirely men) was one of the hardest parts of my fieldwork. They were mostly Australian and Canadian, and had the usual Commonwealth suspicion of Yankees. I was an artist and an intellectual, and over-educated to boot. And they were MEN in a way that I was not—they talked about rugby and worked with their hands and had pictures of naked (or nearly naked) women on their walls, in there calendars, on their screen savers. And, of course, in the struggle between landowners and company, I was sympathetic to my indigenous hosts.
Golub also draws our attention to the consequences of our consumption of metals:
It is commonplace these days for people who drive cars to lament the way they are destroying the environment. Very few people realize what the set of silverware in their kitchen cupboard makes then an accessory to. (...) Look up from your computer screen for a moment and look around the room—how much metal do you see? Imagine the copper wires and metal pipes and lines of nails that stretch around you for thousands of miles. Where did they come from?
After two years of persuading New York City officials, anthropologist Robin Nagle began her job as garbage collector. She has many concerns about garbage, but she is most concerned about trash collectors, she told the student newspaper The Brown and White: What is it like to wear the uniform? How are you treated when you are in that field in New York City? Are you proud of it or ashamed of it?” She found that while working on the job, “You are very much invisible once you put on the uniform.” >> read the whole story
When she recently gave a series of talks, she wore garments she had plucked from the trash. She said:
The most important uniformed force on the streets of New York is sanitation. But when you look at literature on urban studies, urban anthropology, planning and things like that, there's nothing about sanitation workers as a workforce, as a community, as a group of people with a civic identity.
In her weeklong diary of her work as sanitation worker she writes:
Sanitation workers will learn to read a neighborhood more closely than the most sophisticated sociologist just by observing what it discards, but no one will care about their insights. In fact, no one will care much about them at all, and I want to shield them from this insult most of all.
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(via GlobalVoices)Fascinating photo story by Rashid Farah on BBC News of librarians who travel the Kenyan desert with a mobile camel library to improve literacy rates in the north-east: "A static library would be of no use to nomads and so instead we follow them, wherever they go", Rashid Farah writes:
We start early in the morning and work Monday to Thursday. Each box contains 200 books. One camel carries two boxes of books. Another carries the tent and the third one carries our things. We have nine camels - three caravans. From our two headquarters, Garissa and Wajir, the caravans go to 12 different sites.
An extinct fishing village, the Polish flats, German Heritage, the Homeless of Southeastern Winsconsin, and the African American neighborhood of Bronzeville: Anthropologists offer Cultural backstreet tours! (source).
These tours are arranged by Urban Anthropology Inc. (UrbAn), an American non-profit organization, "a community based membership association dedicated to the celebration of cultural diversity and a holistic approach to urban problem-solving". Their website provides lots of information incl presentation of the tour guides and their study on homeless people
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Urban anthropology Inc. shares stories of Milwaukee's homeless people
Anthropology professor Luke Eric Lassiter has received the 2005 Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology. The Margaret Mead Award celebrates the tradition of bringing anthropology to bear on wider social and cultural issues. Lassiter received the award in part for his book, The Other Side of Middletown: Exploring Muncie’s African American Community as well as for his explorations of race relations and collaborative, community-based research and writing, according to Huntington News.
On his website, Lassiter explains the concept of Collaborative Ethnography. In his opinion, Collaboratice Ethnography is "among the most powerful ways to advance a more relevant and public scholarship". Collaborative Ethnography, he explains,
(...) seeks to make collaboration an explicit and deliberate part of not only fieldwork but also part of the writing process itself. Community collaborators thus become a central part of the construction of ethnographic texts -- which shifts their role from "informants" (who merely inform the knowledge on which ethnographies are based) to "consultants" (who co-interpret culture and its representation along with the ethnographer).
(...)
Such an approach also shifts the role of ethnographers: they are no longer the sole authorities on culture, but facilitators who use their skills to address community-centered questions and issues.
Lessiter has published extensively on this subject. Five articles on collaborative ethnography and public anthropology are available as pdf-documents on his website.
(via Bits and Bytes Interesting story by INTEL-etnographers Tony Salvador and John Sherry (one of them - Sherry - is actually an anthropologist!) on their work in India, Peru and Hungary. They summarize some of their findings after four years circling the world to find out how computers are being used by typical people in different cultures.
One of their main points:
The split between those with and those without access to digital technologies is referred to as the digital divide. But that phrase hides the complexity of the problem, because it focuses on the "having" and the "not having" of technology. Instead, what really matters is the ability to benefit from technology, whether or not that technology is personally owned.
They go on with various examples, among others they show how even the computer illiterate reap the advantages of the Web, made possible by public Internet facilities. The ethnographers remind us of that only about 10 percent of the people on the planet are familiar with the Internet and what it can do.
>> read the whole story in Spectrum Online
UPDATE Kerim Friedman comments:
I believe we can better understand the impact of new communications technologies if we emphasize the similarities, rather than just the differences, with older technologies.
>> read his post on Savage Minds
SEE ALSO
Internet and development in India
"How Media and Digital Technology Empower Indigenous Survival
Intel is using locally hired anthropologists in new development centers
More and more blogging anthropologists - but the digital divide persists
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