Has anybody heard of the "Corporate Anthropology Center"? "The Global Hub for Cultural Business Anthropology"? They offer "Training and Certification - Consumer Research and Database - IntraCorporate Services - Competition Analysis" etc (extremly business-like rhetoric!).

They claim to have been in business since 1979, but a google-search returns no results, the website seems to be new, lacks a title and looks quite unprofessional (one page with lots of text, no menue). The domain was registred only one month ago and is owned by Sally Austin.

>> continue to Corporate Anthropology Center

You can download several articles and papers on Anthropology of Mongolia on Christopher Kaplonski's website. He is currently doing research on concepts of democracy in Mongolia and political Violence and its legacy.

He writes:

Among other things, I have looked at how different political parties confronted the issue of rehabilitation and compensation for the victims of political repression. Exactly who is a victim and who is not a victim raises important questions about identity and politics. Given the importance of this category to work on human rights, reconciliation, truth commissions and memory studies, it intrigues and puzzles me that it has been left almost completely unexamined in existing research. I thus see an integral part of this larger project on political violence being the problematization of the label of "victim."

(...)

It is very interesting and important to me that any discussion of the concept of democracy that I've read in Mongolian explains the concept in terms of its Greek origins and Western theories. As an anthropologist, I'm pretty convinced that this is not the most useful approach. Rather, I think it is important not to just to look at how people respond to surveys, or understand European and American political theory but how they actually talk and act in different situations. My current thinking is that in many ways, the textbook definition of democracy is irrelevant in the daily life of people. People seem to be thinking of democracy as a form of 'anti-socialism.'

>> read more on his website

The layout is clean and friendly, but the navigation is quite confusing. Here some shortcuts:

>> conference papers to download

>> more articles to download

>> section about Mongolia incl lots of pictures

>> his general section on anthropology, fieldwork and data-analysis

More and more anthropologists have started blogging and discussing their research interests with a wider audience. They use the internet as a library, as a tool for learning and teaching, as a space where they conduct fieldwork. They exchange knowledge, build networks across disciplines and continents. Last but not least, the internet is perfectly suited to inform the general public about what anthropology is about.

Nevertheless, the symbolic capital associated with the Internet and Internet publishing fairly low: "It should be a political cause for academics to heighten it, both through using the Internet for one's own publications and by increasing the prestige of the Internet by using it actively", anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen writes. Kerim Friedman agrees and adds: "The biggest challenge is to get Anthropologists to embrace Open Access in the same way that physical scientists have."

I've asked several anthropologists about their views on anthropology and internet and if all papers should be freely available online: Kerim Friedman, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Annariitta Grzonka, Judd Antin, Brigt Dale, and Tad McIlwright

Read more »

Interesting article in the International Herald's Tribune on recent research on Gossip. If there's a list of universal human traits, gossip must be part of it:

"Long-term studies of Pacific Islanders, American middle-school children and residents of rural Newfoundland and Mexico, among others, have confirmed that the content and frequency of gossip are universal: People devote anywhere from a fifth to two-thirds or more of their daily conversation to gossip, and men appear to be just as eager for it as women."

"Gossip has long been dismissed by researchers as little more than background noise, self-serving blather that serves no useful function", the article tells us. "But some investigators now say that it belongs front and center in any study of group interaction" - among them an anthropologist (Kevin Kniffin) who has studied gossip among a university crew group for more than 18 months. >> read the whole story

PS: I remember vaguely that anthropologists have already conducted several other studies on gossip. See among others Kate Fox: Mobile(phone) Gossip

From the current issue of the online journal First Monday an article by John Willinsky, Professor of Literacy and Technology at the University of British Columbia. He argues for a better cooperation between the Open Source - and the Open Access - movement:

"What is currently missing among these open movements, whether in software development, scholarly publishing, or science more generally, is what was missing a few decades ago, Peter Suber recently pointed out to me, from the environmental movement. In those days, people were deeply concerned with local issues, or with particular aspects of the environment, be that water quality or air pollution, or with specific approaches to conservation issues, such as recycling. With time many of those involved in what we now call the environmental movement come to realize the common cause among all of their different efforts. Through such a realization, they were able to build make environmentalism into a popular movement and an everyday reality, and this served, of course, to further all of the original goals."

>> read the whole article

SEE ALSO:
>> antropologi.info special: Open Access Anthropology
>> All posts on Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing

(via Vizuális Antropológia.lap.hu) A critical article by Patrick Harries, University of Cape Town, dealing with the history of visual anthropology in South Africa. "Many early practitioners thought photographs reflected reality in an objective and unbiased manner", he writes. But this was a far too idealistic view as he shows.

"One of the major reasons for undertaking extensive anthropological studies in Africa, according Junod (one of the earlier anthropologists), was to provide Europeans with a picture of their own prehistoric, primitive past. The view that Europe's past could be found in Africa's present drove Henri-Alexandre Junod to produce a form of salvage anthropology that uncoupled "traditional" society from any form of change.

(...)

Although almost 100,000 workers drawn from southern Mozambique were employed in the mines, farms, plantations and ports of South Africa by the turn of the century, not one photograph of a migrant worker appeared in his anthropological monographs."

He not only influenced the way Europeans looked at Africans but also local people's identity:

Towards the end of the 19th century, the linguistic and anthropological work of Junod and his colleagues played an important part in the creation of Thonga (or Tsonga) ethnicity and race consciousness. Early photographs helped create this identity by presenting people as objects to be classified according to racial and ethnic taxonomies. Photos of "native salt manufacture" or "consulting the bones" turned individual behavior into general roles while "the Thonga hut," "Thonga carvings" or "Thonga warriors" transformed individual creations into tribal types.

>> read the whole text (website removed, link updated with copy)

PS: This paper was presented at the conference "Encounters with Photography - Photographing people in southern Africa, 1860 to 1999 in Capetown. All the papers can be read on the conference website (website removed, link updated with copy)

RELATED:
Book review: Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the 'Native' and the Making of European Identities. - Review (Australian Journal of Anthropology, The, April, 2001 / findarticles.com) Link updated with copy

Peter Suber from Open Access News tells us about a new academic search engine called BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine). It discloses - according the press release he quotes - "more than 2,3 Mio. documents of 130 online - resources, incl. many scholarly full text archives, accessible through the international protocol of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). Documents are mainly freely available and can be searched by bibliographic data or full text."

If you search for "anthropology" you get a list of 406 free content sources, incl texts about Discipline and Practice. The Anthropology of Marketing and Marketing Anthropology or Entangled anthropology: the problematic practice of gendered anthropological analysis of development or Software Anthropology: Performing Field Studies in Software Companies and many more.

The service seems to in beta-state, several of the search results went to pages with no files to download. >> continue to BASE

Another great article on the Open Access philosophy, written by Shankar Iyer in the Financial Expressvia del.icio.us)

"The big question on everyone's mind is, "Why would someone open source an idea that they obviously struggled to work so hard for?" Open sourcing your innovation to the community doesn't imply bankruptcy. In fact, open sourcing an idea invites "immediate" attention and sparks community interest. And when this interest reaches the brim, the services and support opportunities that exist around that knowledge just explode, allowing the innovator to not just make money - but give birth to a whole new economy. (...) The very success of science in the last 2500 years has been due to the open publication and peer review of scientific results. (...) I am of the firm belief that money should never be made at the expense of restricting knowledge and innovation"

>> continue

SEE ALSO
>> Earlier posts on Open Access Anthropology
>> Multilingual Special on Open Access Anthropology