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Airport lamps light only option for studious Guinea kids

Published on August 1, 2007 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, development empowerment, politics, poverty, youth

When the sun has set in Guinea, one of the world’s poorest nations, and the floodlights come on at Gbessia International Airport, the parking lot begins to fill with children. It is among the only places where they can count on finding the lights on. The long stretch of pavement has the feel of a hushed library, according to ap-writer Rukmini Callimachi in an fascinating article in USA Today:

Groups of elementary and high school students begin heading to the airport at dusk, hoping to reserve a coveted spot under the oval light cast by one of a dozen lampposts in the parking lot. Some come from over an hour’s walk away.

“I used to study by candlelight at home but that hurt my eyes. So I prefer to come here. We’re used to it,” says 18-year-old Mohamed Sharif, who sat under the fluorescent beam memorizing notes on the terrain of Mongolia for the geography portion of his college entrance test.

Eighteen-year-old Ousman Conde admits that sitting on the concrete piling is not comfortable, but says passing his upcoming exam could open doors. “It hurts,” he says, looking up from his notes on Karl Marx for the politics portion of the test. “But we prefer this hurt to the hurt of not doing well in our exams.”

Only about a fifth of Guinea’s 10 million people have access to electricity and even those that do experience frequent power cuts. With few families able to afford generators, students long ago discovered the airport.

The lack of electricity is “a geological scandal,” says Michael McGovern, a political anthropologist at Yale University, quoting a phrase first used by a colonial administrator to describe Guinea’s untapped natural wealth. Guinea has rivers which if properly harnessed could electrify the region, McGovern says. It has gold, diamonds, iron and half the world’s reserves of bauxite, the raw material used to make aluminum.

>> read the whole story in USA Today

“Although Guinea’s mineral wealth makes it potentially one of Africa’s richest countries, its people are among the poorest in West Africa” >> more information on Guinea in the BBC country guide

Michael (Mike) McGovern is / was the West Africa project director for the International Crisis Group. He has appeared quite often in the media on Guinea related issue as a google search reveals

When the sun has set in Guinea, one of the world's poorest nations, and the floodlights come on at Gbessia International Airport, the parking lot begins to fill with children. It is among the only places where they can count…

Ethnographic reports about the uses of ICT in low-income communities

Published on August 1, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, development empowerment, internet, journal articles / papers, technology

Culture Matters points to “exciting” working papers by the Information Society Research Group about the social and economic benefits of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in low-income communities in Jamaica, India, South Africa and Ghana: “These working papers strongly re-enforce the benefits of an ethnographic approach for the wider world”.

One of the most convincing papers is according to Culture Matters written by Daniel Miller and Heather: Horst juxtaposes conventional ICT policy making in Jamaica with ethnographic findings and uncovers that the assumptions concerning internet use held by the government as well as international NGOs diverge hugely from the realities.

Culture Matters juxtapose some of the current policies with Miller’s and Horst’s recommendations:

Instead of more computers in secondary schools invest in post-educational training for young adults
Instead of investing into expensive high-end computers invest in low-price computers without gaming facilities
Instead of creating their own content at high costs, a lot of money can be saved by creating portals which identify useful and high-quality web resources
Instead of investing in community computers, offer Internet access via individual mobile phones

Also fascinating according to the blog: the reports from Ghana by Don Slater and Janet Kwami:

Again, ethnography unveiled a huge gap between policy assumptions and actual usage. On the one hand there is the widespread belief amongst governments and NGOs that the Internet is a tool of development through information distribution.

Yet all Internet users in the Accra slum studied used the internet only for chat with foreigners (as well as some diasporic family members and friends). “There was exceptionally low awareness of even the existence of websites”. In internet cafes everybody is chatting with unknown foreigners, largely in the North but also in Asia, with a view of accumulating actual and symbolic goods (either on IM (Yahoo or MSN) or in Yahoo chat rooms).

Internet access, although widespread and popular in Accra, is not cheap – one hour costs much more than the average kid’s lunch money – but many teenagers come several times a week, for several hours, solely to chat with foreigners.

>> read the whole post on Culture Matters

>> all working papers by the Information Society Research Group

INTEL-ethnographers challenge our assumptions of the digital divide

How Media and Digital Technology Empower Indigenous Survival

Why cellular life in Japan is so different – Interview with anthropologist Mizuko Ito

Women in Cameroon: Information technology as a way out of the cultural cul-de-sac

Now online: EASA-conference papers on media anthropology

Culture Matters points to "exciting" working papers by the Information Society Research Group about the social and economic benefits of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in low-income communities in Jamaica, India, South Africa and Ghana: "These working papers strongly re-enforce…

“To know what’s happening around the world, you have to study the knowledge of local people”

Published on August 1, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, culture traditions, development empowerment, persons and theories, University / Academia

Recently, we cound find a portrait of anthropologist Melissa Leach in the Guardian. At the age of 35, Leach became professor of the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University. Now, at 42 and proficient in four African languages, she has been made director of a new global research hub known as the Steps centre (social, technological and environmental pathways to sustainability).

Her research has consistently challenged public policy and the stance taken by government authorities, the Guardian writes:

In the early 1990s, when Leach was a PhD student at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, she went to Guinea in west Africa with Fairhead, then her research partner.

The area was widely assumed to be experiencing a deforestation crisis, and experts held local villagers responsible. Leach, Fairhead and a Guinean researcher discovered – by talking to the villagers, researching the area’s history and “viewing things through an anthropological lens” – that the opposite was true. The forest was in fact growing, because farmers had worked out how to turn savannah into forest.

Leach and her colleagues had shown how experts can reach wildly wrong conclusions if local knowledge and history are not taken into account. Their findings became a book, Misreading the African Landscape, and a film, Second Nature: Building Forests in West Africa’s Savannahs. A decade later, they are still being used to illustrate the power of anthropological methods.

Her new centre opened in June and hopes to develop a new approach to understanding why the gap between the poorest and the richest is growing, and to doing something about it. It promises to question the “assumption that the world is stable, predictable and knowable through a single form of knowledge that assumes one size fits all”. “We are about producing scholarly research, and playing a public and intellectual role.”

At the Steps centre, there are 18 academics representing disciplines ranging from anthropology to ecology to medicine. Academic and policy debates, she says to the Guardian, are compartmentalised into areas as agriculture or health. Rarely do the different disciplines manage to speak to one another. “We urgently need new, interdisciplinary approaches to understanding and addressing situations that combine an understanding of social, technological and environmental processes.”

>> read the whole story in the Guardian

There are already several papers to download at the website of the Steps centre.

And the centre has of course its own blog “The crossing”

Leach has been interviewed by the Guardian before, see Ground rules for research. Technology won’t help developing countries if it is not tailored to local needs and Steps towards better development.

I also found an older paper:

James Fairhead and Melissa Leach: Webs of power: forest loss in Guinea

How to survive in a desert? On Aboriginals’ knowledge of the groundwater system

Thailand: Local wisdom protects hometown from the onslaught of globalisation

Culture and Environment – New issue of Pro Ethnologica is online

Collaborative Ethnography: Luke Eric Lassiter Receives Margaret Mead Anthropology Award

Teamwork, Not Rivalry, Marks New Era in Research

Nepal: Anthropologists, sociologists urged to build country

Published on December 17, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, Asia, development empowerment

“Anthropologists should actively cooperate in the building of new Nepal”, Subash Chandra Nembang said at the three-day international seminar on ‘social science in a multi-cultural world’, organized by the Nepal Sociological and Anthropological Society (NSAS).

“It is sad that most of the projects run in Nepal do not have participation of sociologists and anthropologists”, he said. Secretary of the Society Bhanu Timsina said the sector has been under shadows as the planners have not realized the utility of the sociologists and anthropologists, according to the website The Rising Nepal.

Unfortunately, neither the conference nor the organisation seems to have a website. Digital Divide?

Global identity politics and The Emergence of a Mongol Race in Nepal

Festivals and Cultural Change in Kathmandu, Nepal

“No Nepalese Can Dare To Challenge Centuries Old Religious Harmony”

Stefanie Lotter: Studying-up those who fell down: elite transformation in Nepal (Anthropology Matters 2/2004)

"Anthropologists should actively cooperate in the building of new Nepal", Subash Chandra Nembang said at the three-day international seminar on 'social science in a multi-cultural world', organized by the Nepal Sociological and Anthropological Society (NSAS).

"It is sad that most…

“Discuss politics!” – How anthropologists in Indonesia engage with the public

Published on August 28, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, Asia, development empowerment, University / Academia

Crossroads is the name of a new blog by anthropologist Fadjar I. Thufail, currently completing his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In an interview (from 2001), he tells us that Indonesian anthropologists continually attempt to link themselves to the non-academic world – and they succeed. When anthropologists in Indonesia are interviewed by newspapers, their comments are not squeezed into tiny sound bites, instead they are written up in long, detailed articles. Anthropologists often appear on television or on radio:

What makes anthropology as a discipline different than the discipline in the United States is that from the beginning, Indonesian anthropologists are supposed to be able to talk to the public and get involved in development practices.

The first anthropology department in Indonesia was established in 1957 and that was after the Indonesian independence when the people were eager to develop the country. Part of the institution of Indonesian anthropology is that the anthropologists were asked to contribute to development practices and that makes what in the U.S. called “applied anthropology” a part of Indonesian anthropology. There is no distinction like in the U.S.

He also explains the differences between “public anthropology” and “applied anthropology”:

Public anthropology is supposed to involve in a critical position. It should be a reminder, no…not a reminder. It should involve engaging the public, but by criticizing projects or challenging the dominant paradigm.

To me, applied anthropology is not the same as public anthropology because they (applied anthropologists) do government development and journal writing etc. Applied anthropologists are just technicians or sponsors of the government and hence are not ‘public anthropologists’ because there is not a critical component to it.

In Indonesia, most of the anthropological scholars are engaged in such a critical function. (…) That is why lots of anthropologists in Indonesia are invited to various seminars, give public talks, probably invited to TV talk shows, or interviewed by newspaper journalists.

So, basically, in Indonesia, it’s not only the scholars who want to go public, but also the journalists. A connection exists between the community of scholars and the media. That I don’t see in the United States where academics are beyond the reach of the public.”

This has to do with the specific Indonesian context:

Most of the media think of themselves as opposed to the government. They have a function to criticize the government. Most of the scholars also think of themselves as critics. They [the scholar’s] use media to launch critiques of the government, especially the ‘New Order’ [Suharto’s regime – 1966-1998]. So that is why whatever scholars say, the media accepts it without saying ‘too difficult’ – nothing is ‘too difficult’ for the story…they feel this is something we must publish because we must criticize.”

Therefore, anthropology is much more involved in politics in Indonesia – that’s why it’s so relevant for people:

Anthropologists in the U.S. think of politics as separate from academics. To do academic work, one must be free of politics. I think this is a legacy of colonialism, of the Enlightenment or something.

(…)

In Indonesia, as I said earlier, Anthropologists from the beginning actively pursued involvement in public/political events. Some chose to be part of the government, some put themself against the government.

(…) I think that is the most important message I want to get across. Anthropology is political – I want to remind you that as an anthropologist you must talk about politics. You can’t talk about culture as separate from politics. In order to put yourself in a more public sphere, you must discuss politics. There are different ways to do this. One is by not talking about cultural systems anymore, or semiosis, but instead discussing politics. Then realize that anthropology has critical power.

>> read the whole interview

>> visit Fadjar I. Thufail’s blog

Why anthropology fails to arouse interest among the public – Engaging Anthropology (2)

Riots in France and silent anthropologists

“Anthropologists Should Participate in the Current Immigration Debate”

Bush, “war of terror” and the erosion of free academic speech: Challenges for anthropology