As today the people here in Norway celebrate the National day you might want to take a look at the essay collection SOMETHING ROTTEN IN THE STATE OF NORWAY, written by anthropologists and other social scientists four years ago.

From their introduction:

"In spite of the fact that the country possesses enormous financial resources, Norway is unable to administer this capital in an appropriate manner on behalf of the population. It is not invested in education, either at school or university, the health service is deteriorating, cultural institutions are not regarded as important and become balance sheet items.

We have brought about a country that stigmatises and excludes those inhabitants who do not conform to an increasingly uniform and standardised citizenship ideal. In the Norway of today market liberalism is the dominant attitude among the people and leaders."

>> continue to Something Rotten in the State of Norway

See also:

Sámi flag will not fly in Oslo
Oslo Municipality will not hoist the Sámi flag on Constitution Day, 17 May, the Oslo Municipal Board decided. “We are not one people with two flags, but rather one people with one flag,” stated Labour Party member Runar Gerhardsen. >> continue

Of course you can read an official description of the National Day with typical Norwegian statements like "there's no celebration quite like it anywhere else in the world." or take a look at some 17.may-pictures with lots of people in their national costumes. There are also some photos on flickr. Or check Aftenposten (newspaper) for today's photos.

RELATED:
Thomas Hylland Eriksen: Immigrants - The Norwegians who don't exist
Thomas Hylland Eriksen: Being Norwegian in a shrinking world. Reflections on Norwegian identity

Great! A new anthropology group blog! Something like an American version of the German Ethno::log. It was started the day before yesterday. We know some of the authors from other blogs. The authors are Alex Golub, Kerim Friedman, Dustin M. Wax, Nancy Leclerc, Antti Leppänen and Christopher M. Kelty.

From their self-description:

"Savage Minds is a collective web log devoted to both bringing anthropology to a wider audience as well as providing an online forum for discussing the latest developments in the field. We are a group of Ph.D. students and professors teaching and studying anthropology and are excited to share it with you. You can find out more about the contributors by clicking on the ‘about’ pages on the right for each of us."

>> continue to Savage Mind

PS: Their newest entry deals with Anarchists in the Academy: Yale anthropologist David Graeber has been recently fired for his anarchist activism - something that was mentioned in Kerim Friedman's blog before and shortly afterwards by Alex Golub. See some reviews of Graebers "Fragments of an anarchist anthropology". Or download the whole book (pdf, 220kb) and visit the webpage Solidarity with David Graeber

Spring (or summer) has finally arrived in Oslo, so just a short note about another anthropology blog. Just saw it in my site statistics: Antti Leppänen is cultural anthropologist, a Ph.D. candidate at the University in Helsinki, Finnland, working on a thesis about Korea. In an earlier post he explains:

"I have been making net notes on Korea since last spring, to keep up with the developments since my last visit in summer 2002 and make notes of what interests me. Beginning this year I finally decided to change to a blog format. As my anthropology thesis is about keepers of small neighborhood shops, and that kind of an environment is where I've spent the longest periods of time in Korea, my blog entries are mostly about small businesses, "ordinary people", social categories, urban space, and the like."

>> continue to Antti Leppänen's notes on Korea

In his most recent entry he links to a beautiful website: Cycles of Life in a Bengali Town based on the fieldwork of the anthropologists Ákos Östör and Lina Fruzzetti. (I see that also Ideas Bazar commented on this website yesterday)

(via my site statistics) FieldNotes is a brand new anthropology blog, the first entry was written only two weeks ago by its author Thomas ‘Tad’ McIlwraith, PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, NM, USA. Seems to focus on Native Northern America / First Nations. Good to know that there are anthropology-bloggers who are not mainly interested in media and technology stuff. There are many links to other bloggers with related interests to explore. This is good news! >> continue to "Field Notes"

The Chronicle of Higher Education

In her new book, From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich, Gretchen E. Schafft, an applied anthropologist(George Washington University) explores how the principles of early-20th-century physical anthropology, were put to work by the Nazis. Several months after the invasion of Poland, Hitler's aides established the Institute for German Work in the East, which employed scholarly anthropologists to complete such tasks as "racial-biological investigation of groups whose value cannot immediately be determined" and "racial-biological investigation of Polish resistance members."

A few years after her discovery at the Smithsonian (75 boxes full of material produced in Poland by the Nazi anthropologists), Ms. Schafft was contacted by a physical anthropologist who wanted to use the Nazis' data to shed light on "patterns of migration and population settlement." She resisted, arguing that the information had been collected through cruel means and for evil purposes, and is in any case highly suspect.

Some related moral dilemmas are chewed over in Biological Anthropology and Ethics: From Repatriation to Genetic Identity (State University of New York Press), a collection edited by Trudy R. Turner, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. >> continue (link updated)

SEE ALSO:
Murray L. Wax: Some Issues and Sources on Ethics in Anthropology (American Anthropological Association, Handbook on Ethical Issues in Anthropology - Chpt 1)
Book review: Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (American Ethnologist)

Mizuku Ito has published a new text, a keynote speech she gave at “Digital Generations: Children, Young People and New Media”. Ito is involved in the new research project on "Digital Kids".

From her introduction:

"I've been trying to develop ways of studying, from an ethnographic perspective, processes that are more commonly pursued from a macro sociological perspective, such as the relationships between production, distribution, marketing and consumption. The work I'll be describing for you today is based on several years of fieldwork in Tokyo, focused on the period between 1999 and 2001."

"Rather than see centralized and highly capitalized sites as the sole sites of cultural production, I have been looking at the activity of children and young adults as sites of not only consumptive activity -- that is, buying, watching, and reading centrally produced media -- but also productive activity – not only reinterpreting these texts, but actually reshaping and recreating related media content and knowledge and selling and trading those locally created products."

From her conclusion:

"I would suggest that media mixes such as Pokemon and
Yugioh are tied to a changing politics of childhood. I think part of the appeal of these media mixes for children and young adults is that it explicitly recognizes entrepreneurism and connoisseurship in children's culture, traits that, by some cultural standards, are not considered appropriate for children. In part, these media mixes are becoming ambassadors for a Japanese vision of childhood internationally."

>> continue

SEE ALSO:
Ethnographic Study on "Digital Kids"
Introduction to "Media Worlds": Media an important field for anthropology

UPDATE (5.6.05): Link is corrected. They have moved the article to an earlier issue of the journal

Tom WILSON: Globalization, Differenciation and Drinking Cultures: an anthropological perspective. Drinking culture in Ireland, at home or in more public domains, has not been a major interest in the ethnography of Ireland, but it should be. The pub, or public house, is a particularly important ethnographic arena, wherein drinking practices and other aspects of Irish culture merge, and where the questions of identity and identification continually matter. >> continue (pdf)

(via delicious)Karen Nakamura is a cultural anthropologist who focuses on disability and minority identity issues in contemporary Japan, currently in Kyoto for fieldwork. While you'll find many camera reviews on her blog, her homepage lists many links related to photoethnography and discusses some techniques. There's also a very interesting photo gallery. Nakamura is also mentioned in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle on Asian Blogging.