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Intel is using locally hired anthropologists in new development centers

Published on August 1, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, Asia, corporate & business anthropology, design anthropology, technology

RedHerring

In a bid to eventually sell more chips, Intel plans to announce Monday that it has set up four new offices around the world that are staffed with anthropologists and engineers to help design computers with features for emerging markets. Traveling from dusty rural villages in India to busy Internet cafés in Brazil, these Intel employees will collect data from weather to the content needs of people in regions where computers are not yet popular.

The company began sending ethnographers to study how people interact with technologies. One anthropologist spent a year living in rural China. With the creation of its new business unit and four development centers, Intel has set up permanent and locally hired staff to do ethnographic studies and engineering. The efforts appear to be paying off. >> continue

Comment by Judd Antin, Technotaste: What I particularly like about their approach is that they aren’t just sending Western researchers overseas, they’re hiring local folks to help understand their own communities

Anthropologist helps Intel see the world through customers’ eyes

When cultures shape technology – Interview with Genevieve Bell

RedHerring

Rituals – mechanisms for both creating solidarity and for increasing conflict

Published on June 20, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, Asia, culture traditions, politics, religion cosmology, Us and Them

Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research

Dutch-sponsored researcher Farsijana Adeney-Risakotta analysed the dynamics of the conflict between Muslims and Christians in the Molucca Islands. The anthropologist proposes that rituals play an important role in this. Ritual was found to unite and mobilise people in a confrontation with real or supposed outsiders, but it also helped them to reach an agreement after the confrontation. >> continue

Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research

Why American shopping culture is rejected in India

Published on June 6, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, Asia, corporate & business anthropology, culture traditions

Daily Telegraph

It is easy to see why multi-national giants such as Wal-Mart, French rival Carrefour and Tesco, all of which are active in China, are so attracted to India. The country has the world’s second largest population after China with over 1bn inhabitants. But the largest problem for Western retailers hoping to enter India is cultural, and stems from the disparate nature of the retail scene.

Simon Roberts, an anthropologist specialising in India and founder of Ideas Bazaar, a research consultancy, says that attempts to create a shopping mall culture – so established in the West – have so far failed. Although chain stores will appeal to certain bourgeois communities in India’s so-called “million cities” (those with more than 1m residents), Roberts says that the demand could be limited because of families’ lifestyles.

Many families have domestic staff who do the shopping, and the concept of the “weekly shop” simply does not exist. India is also a deeply religious society, with doctrinal conventions governing behaviour. “An Indian woman in Varanasi might not leave the house except to go to the temple, so do you expect her to suddenly pop off to Wal-Mart?” he says. >> continue

PS: Exciting to read an article about an anthropologist you know – or think you know, because you’re a reader of his blog. That’s the effect of blogging – as Andrea Ben Lassoued explains in “blogging and the “big men” in anthropology”

Daily Telegraph

“War on terror”: CIA sponsers anthropologists to gather sensitive information

Published on June 3, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, ethics, fieldwork / methods, Northern America, politics

“A CIA scheme to sponsor trainee spies secretly through US university courses has caused anger among UK academics, the BBC reports. The Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program pays anthropology students up to $50,000 (£27,500) a year. They are expected to use the techniques of “fieldwork” to gather political and cultural details on other countries. Britain’s Association of Social Anthropologists called the scholarships ethically “dangerous” and divisive.”

“Undergraduates taking part in the scholarship programme must not reveal their funding source and are expected to attend military intelligence summer camps.”

The CIAs activities are defended by an American anthropologist (Felix Moos, University of Kansas). He wrote according the BBC in Anthropology Today: “The United States is at war. Thus, to put it simply, the existing divide between academe and the intelligence community has become a dangerous and very real detriment to our national security at home and abroad.” >> read the whole article (BBC)

Let’s hope anthropologists say NO to the CIA!

This story reminds me on Montgomery McFate’s controversial article Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relations where she urges anthropologists to cooperate with the military and Dustin M. Wax’s comments: “a functioning anthropology can never be on the side of U.S. forces”.

UPDATE 2 (6.5.05): More on the return of spies to college campuses in the Kansas City Star

PS: By the way. Check what kind of definition of anthropology the BBC uses on their website: “the study of esp. primitive peoples”…

The CIA’s Campus Spies. Exposing the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (Dave H. Price, Counterpunch, 12.3.05)

Anthropologists as Spies (David Price, The Nation, 20.11.00)

"A CIA scheme to sponsor trainee spies secretly through US university courses has caused anger among UK academics, the BBC reports. The Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program pays anthropology students up to $50,000 (£27,500) a year. They are expected to…

Anthropology Matters – New issue out on anthropology of science and technology

Published on May 30, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, development empowerment, fieldwork / methods, journal articles / papers, technology

New methods in the anthropology of science and technology is the topic of the new issue of the anthropology online journal “Anthropology Matters” that was published these days. The papers developed out of a panel at the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) Decennial Conference at the University of Manchester in July 2003. I the introduction we read:

“On the basis of the papers published here, we suggest that not only does ethnographic research prove extremely adaptable to new environments, contexts and conditions, but it also serves to make important contributions to current debates and discussion, particular in the field of science and technology.”

We find articles on dynamics how to study and theorize environmental protest movements in West Bengal (by Amites Mukhopadhyay), the role of computers in Hungarian civil society (Tom Wormald), on the relationship of information technologies to anthropological fieldwork through a consideration of internet-based clinical trials (by Jenny Advocat), on fieldwork in a web design company (Hannah Knox) and on how anthropological fieldwork might rise to the challenge of the bureaucratized, ‘objective’ forms of evaluation that anthropological researchers are increasingly facing (Susanne Langer) >> continue to Anthropology Matters 1/2005

New methods in the anthropology of science and technology is the topic of the new issue of the anthropology online journal "Anthropology Matters" that was published these days. The papers developed out of a panel at the Association of Social…