... and no time to post! Too many anthropology blogs! No more time to check Google news for anthropology news and comment other bloggers' posts'.... thanks for all the recent comments, though! (written after having read the recent posts on Savage Minds and The Old Revolution among others)

Signs of activity at AnthroGlobe - one of the eldest anthropology web journals. Two new texts and they seem to work with the site layout, it seems:

Carmen Petrosian-Husa: Powerful & Powerless: The Rei Metau on the Outer Islands of Yap

Since 1982 I visited the islands of the rei metau several times. My main focus of research were the "rites de passage", weaving, structures of authority and medicine. In due course of my research I visited all their islands and atolls and analyzed the differences in the social structures of each single atoll. The way I will describe the rei metau in this paper represents the lives and self-esteem of the people as it can be experienced today. >> continue

Darrell A. Joyce: Modern Folklore: Cybermythology in Western Culture

Throughout the years, humans have used the oral tradition of folklore and legend to share stories, entertain, and to teach moral social lessons. The purpose of this paper is to briefly look at the evolution of urban legends from their “beginnings” in the turn of the 20 th century to present day, with specific attention to contemporary urban legends, and the application of internet/e-mail communications as a medium to further spread this modern form of folklore. Also, this paper attempts to answer the question of whether or not folklore continues to exist and be propagated in today’s society. >> continue

Pro Ethnologica (published by the Estonian Eesti Rahva Muuseumi in Tartu) is one of the few anthropology Open Access journals. Their recent volume is dated back in December 2004 but the articles haven't been onliner until now - probably due to copyright issues as Pille Runnel explained in an email to me. Runnell confirmed: "Pro Ethnologia is still an open access journal".

From the editorial:

The texts illustrate the fuzzy quality and interdisciplinary nature of the debate in the broad tradition of ecological anthropology. This situation is represented in this volume by the fact that the articles are written by ethnologists, folklorists, and human geographers who share the same concern for human beings relation to the environment although the interpretations are different.

>> continue (pdf)

>> to Pro Ethnologica 18: Culture and Environment

I've collected lots of articles on Corporate Anthropology but maybe this one here in the Financal Times, written by an anthrologist (Gillian Tett)who has "tried to incorporate what I learnt about “people watching” into financial journalism", can be used as the standard introductory text as it provides lots of examples of anthropologists in the business field.

Among others, she interviews Simon Robert, who many of us know from his blog at Ideas Bazaar. For his PhD, Robert had investigated the impact of satellite TV on households in an Indian city and on how they looked on the world (see Ideas Bazaar's website for some of his papers)

He explains how he is studying the Office culture at the company Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC):

“Studying PwC is like looking at a town - you try to see how the bits all interact, and you are looking for patterns,” he says. “What we try to do is describe what is happening, but we don’t present solutions. We let the company decide that.”

The article starts explaining that anthropologists ask unusual questions based on their unusual knowledge they gather via their unusual method - participant observation. Anthropologists "translate" as they have alwas done:

"“Many companies assume that if they want to have a global website, say, all they have to do is translate it into different languages,” explains Martin Ortlieb, an anthropologist who now works at a global software group. “But that isn’t true - what works in German can’t just be translated into Japanese with the same effect."

Here is a good explanation of the anthropologists' different way of asking questions. Anne Kirah, who was hired by Boeing to study passenger behaviour on flights, and is now the senior design anthropologist at Microsoft, is interviewed:

"Kirah does not ask much about technology per se - let alone about how people might use computers. But that is the whole point - and part of the defining nature of anthropology. A normal marketing person might approach a family with a barrage of highly directed questions about computers. But that way, Kirah argues, they are likely to just get the answers they expect to hear - and will only offer the consumers products that the software designers have already created. The anthropologist starts by observing everyday life, with all its odd little patterns, and then tries to work out how computers might eventually fit into that. Microsoft’s hope is that this will inspire entirely new applications for technology.

But I doubt everyone agress with Kirah here when she says:
"Yes, there have been periods in history when anthropologists have been abused by governments... but as long as I believe that I am helping the voice of the consumer to be heard, I am happy to do my job at Microsoft." >> continue

SEE ALSO:
The article was already commented by Anne Galloway, Dina Mehta and Alexandra Mack (another blogging anthropologist!!)

Cultures of Exchange and Gift economies are traditional anthropological topics. Famous are the Kula exchange in Melanesia, the Potlatch in Northwestern America, the Moka and often cited books are among others Marcel Mauss: The Gift and Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.

Contrary to what many (esp. postmodernists) believe, modernisation and globalisation do not automatically lead to more individualism and "fluidity". Internet and social software lead to the creation of new networks and to a revitalisation of cultures of exchange and gift economies.

As Judd Antin comments, Alireza Doostdar describes in his recent article "The Vulgar Spirit of Blogging" some of the ways that bloggers exchange links, trackbacks, and comments as a way of developing social networks and expanding blog readership.

Many of us know collaborative projects like the encyclopedia Wikipedia, photosharing at flickr and copyright based on sharing like Creative Commons. People help each other in online-forums and what should we all do without all the great freeware software, partly developed by the Open Source community?

One of the best places to stay informed on social software and networks is Dina Mehta's Blog "Conversations with Dina"

There are many articles on internet gift economy.

Lars Risan: Open source movement is like things anthropologists have studied for a long time (Jill Walker)

Eduardo Navas: The Blogger as Producer. He reviews "The Hi-Tech Gift Economy" by Richard Barbrook who also has written "Giving is Receiving"

Steve McGookin: Politics, E-Mail And The Gift Economy (Forbes)

Eric Raymond: The Hacker Milieu as Gift Culture

Jem Matzan: The gift economy and free software (NewsForge) (updated link)

Howard Rheingold: The Internet and the Future of Money (see also Interview with Bernard Lietaer on complementary currencies and the Internet and info on LETS - local exchange trading systems)

David Zeitlyn: Gift economies and open source software: Anthropological reflections (pdf)

Eric Lease Morgan: Gift cultures, librarianship, and open source software development

Markus Giesler and Mali Pohlmann: The anthropology of file sharing: Consuming Napster as a Gift

First Monday - Internet Economics

Culture's Open Sources (pdf, Anthropology Quarterly)

There are many more articles on the internet gift economy: http://opensource.mit.edu/online_papers.php

(post inspired by comments on More and more blogging anthropologists - but the digital divide persists)

UPDATE:

This post caused some funny comments in the Livejournal-community:

museumfreak writes:

*academictechgasm*
so . . . many . . . social . . . software . . . and . . . gift . . . economy . . . links . . .

Further down in in the comment-section apropos writes:
"all these new anthro blogs are freaking me out!"

The anthropology group blog Savage Minds is only five days old, but there are already lots of blog entries and even more comments - or you should rather call the entries for articles: they are well written, detailed - "ready to print". It looks like as if Savage Minds is on its way to be the most important anthropology site on the net.

These are at least my euphoric thoughts after reading today's posts Armchair Anthropology in the Cyber Age? (Topic: How the web changes anthropology and its methods) by Kerim Friedman and Alex Golub's answer Anthropology and the Clash of Civilizations where he draws the attention to the influence of popular ethnocentric online-videogames on the relation between "us" and "them" and Dustin M. Wax's reflections Nothing Is Just after an anthropology lecture he held. He discusses one of the most central issues in anthropology: "Nothing is Just. Filmmaking isn’t “just” making movies. Marriage isn’t “just” a marker of committment. Family isn’t “just” the people you are related to. Giving gifts isn’t “just” a form of exchange."

Savage Minds makes one (once more) think of the old-fashioned publishing conventions in social science where only paper publications are "accepted". Here in Norway, the Norwegian Anthropological Association has started to include debates on published articles in their journals. But how is discussion possible when you have to wait three months for the next issue? How up-to-date can paper journals be? Their reviews are about books that are at least two years old! In their last issue they were "happy to announce" that they are going to present some papers of their last years' annual conference in their next issue. Maybe Savage Minds can change their mind?

Call you call it prostitution if anthropologists work for the military? Opinions are divided on this issue. As a pacifist, my answer is obvious. Others will stress that they've done their job as an anthropologist if they have succeeded in teaching soldiers cultural awareness and respect to other customs (as stated on a conference in Norway last year).

In a long article in Red Nova, cultural anthropologist Montgomery McFate discusses anthropologists' possible role in the U.S. military. She criticizes anthropologists' "retreat to the Ivory Tower" after the Vietnam War. Does she want anthropologists to take up their questionable role they played role during the colonial era? It seems so. She writes:

"From the foregoing discussion, it might be tempting to conclude that anthropology is absent from the policy arena because it really is "exotic and useless." However, this was not always the case. Anthropology actually evolved as an intellectual tool to consolidate imperial power at the margins of empire."

On CENSA's website we read that McFate "has spent the past few years trying to convince the Department of Defense that cultural knowledge should be a national security priority".

>> read the whole article on Red Nova

UPDATE (20.5.05): I've only quickly scanned the article. Shortly after, Savage Minds' author Dustin M. Wax has written a detailed review (!) of the McFate's article:

"Her long article is a backhanded compliment to stubborn anthropologists whose knowledge and expertise is “urgently needed in time of war” but who, “bound by their own ethical code and sunk in a mire of postmodernism”, “entirely neglect U.S. forces”. I'll cut straight to the chase: a functioning anthropology can never be on the side of “U.S. forces”. This is a practical as well as an ethical argument—it simply is not possible, even were there enough anthropologists who shared McFate’s priorities.

>> continue

Savage Mind - the new anthropology group blog is big news and is being discussed in many blogs (interesting to see how fast the news is spread). Recently I mentioned several new anthro-blogs - Kerim Friedman has discovered even more, for example The Old Revolution by "tak", a cultural anthropologist and New Yorker and a Tokyoite who has compiled a list of Anthropology and Japan blogs - even more to explore.

I began to work with this blog (which also includes a kind of Norwegian anthropology journal), because I missed anthropological content on the web. Much has changed since then. But nevertheless, my impression is that Internet is still a quite new medium for many anthropologists - at leasts in Norway. People here do read the national and regional newspapers online, send mails and transfer money. But none of my friends and people I know at the University know what a blog is, let alone RSS. Only a few have heard about Wikipedia. They're not familiar with the gift economy principles on the Internet either (I heard of anthropologists who don't publish online because they don't want their ideas to be "stolen" (!) before they can elaborate them in a traditional paper-journal.

Those people (the majority) don't participate in discussions. They are the unknown passive readers. It's quite striking: All the (few) comments to entries in my Norwegian blog are made by people who already have a website or an own blog.

I think here we see another type of a digital divide - between those who know how to use the internet actively (or are interested in it) and those who don't.

UPDATE: See also the post by Alexander Knorr on xirdalim on academic blogging and its difficulties: "What struck us most was the fact that the vast majority of our institute's anthropology-students (and we have 1200+ !) never made good use of the ethno::log >> continue