development empowerment | antropologi.info

New blog: Blogging anthropological fieldwork in Brazil

Published on July 21, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, development empowerment, fieldwork / methods, Latin- and Central America, Us and Them, websites

(via Gumsagumlao.dk) One more Danish anthroblogger: Rune Kier Nielsen is doing research on the black consciousness movement in Brasil. In his first post (three months ago) he writes:

I am writing this blog for me to reflect on an upcomming challenge in my life: Anthropological Fieldwork, and later retrace my path of knowledge. Hopefully the challenge will be met, and maybe, just maybe, this can be of some use to other students of anthropology or related -ologies.

This blog may also be of some interest as to the region of my fieldwork: The city of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, or the subject of my study: Narrative constructions of race in the black consciousness movement (o movimento negro) and what that path of life offers in opposition to other possibilities.

I’ve just scanned a few entries, but it seems that the blog is a quite detailed and interesting account of his fieldwork.

In his most recent blog post he tells us that he has “come a long way since my initial frustrations with lack of participation and canceling informants”:

The last couple of weeks have been full of participation, the kind I prayed for in Denmark and thought impossible at first in Brazil. The kind of participation where you follow one activist around, from one social setting to the other and watch the changes that occur. Family, friends, parties, hobbies, introductions, trusted conversations and confidence – and all the other stuff.

This has been great and a important part of my study (and I predict, a big part of my final paper), but it cannot be the only part – it cannot stand alone. For this reason I have stepped up my interview activities to widen the study a bit.

Some days ago he wrote enthusiastically:

I praise my decision to do a urban fieldwork. At the moment I don’t know how people can live in a longhouse in a small village on Java for three months without the possibility to withdraw once in a while.

Here, he reflects about having one’s girlfriend in the field: Will she hold you back from full participation? Rather not, it seems:

[Trust] is an important word in Anthropology, especially as the trust people give our discipline rests on the trust we gain from our informants, which in turn rests on the trust we give them, although by no means in a deterministic relation.

When I think back, all the times I have mentioned that my girlfriend was coming to visit, there has been enthusiastic responses. People have liked to talk about it and have expressed (repeatedly) that they would like to meet her. The requests have been more insistent than I would expect from politeness or common curiosity. And maybe this is not so strange.

Anthropologists often are the stranger arriving from some unknown land. (…) The anthropologist is alone! He usually has no family in the field, making him ‘matter out of place’ in a kinship society with strong family solidarity and mutual help. I imagine that here as elsewhere there is a common sensical assumption that if you know someone’s family you can trust them. It is quite common to threaten about ‘telling’ the family (mother, father, brother or sister). Being part of a known family makes you trustworthy and sharing that family with others is a show of trust.

>> visit Rune’s Blog: Blogging anthropological fieldwork in Brazil

(via Gumsagumlao.dk) One more Danish anthroblogger: Rune Kier Nielsen is doing research on the black consciousness movement in Brasil. In his first post (three months ago) he writes:

I am writing this blog for me to reflect on an upcomming challenge…

How internet changes the life among the First Nations in Canada

Published on June 11, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, development empowerment, indigenous people / minorities, internet, inuit, technology

(via FieldNotes): These are the first words in an article on how the internet is changing life in First Nations communities in Canada:

“This year, the internet saved a child’s life.”

For Internet may mean different things to life up there in the North:

A broadband connection doesn’t mean downloading the latest Bedouin Soundclash album or “messengeing” a friend who lives down the street. For the aboriginal communities that are being wired, internet means school, family, health-care and job opportunities.
(…)
High-level physics courses are now available online, and bright aboriginal students who choose to stay in their villages … have the drive to take online classes and strive towards university.
(…)
First Nations leaders think keeping kids in the community — educating and mentoring them — might stem some social problems.

And previously isolated villages might cooperate and share news via the web:

Turtle Island Native Network has a forum page where aboriginals post essays, ideas and concerns. Chief Tommy Alexis of the Tl’atz’en Nation posted an essay on clean water issues on the afternoon of May 22. By 9:00 p.m. on May 30, it had been viewed 3250 times. Other communities facing water pollution problems now know that they are not alone. Maybe one of the communities new to the web will learn for the first time that other First Nations have similar land-rights issues, or water-quality issues. It is possible that isolation will no longer disempower nations.

>> read the whole story in TheTyee.ca

(via FieldNotes): These are the first words in an article on how the internet is changing life in First Nations communities in Canada:

"This year, the internet saved a child's life."

For Internet may mean different things to life up there…

The Kampala Project on Global Citizenship

Published on June 9, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, cosmopolitanism, development empowerment

At Vanderbilt University, students will work with health organizations in Uganda this summer as part of that country’s response to HIV/AIDS. They are part of a project called “The Kampala Project on Global Citizenship” that has a nice website and they will even run a blog as soon as they have arrived.

Anthropologist Greg Barz, who has studied the successful role music has played in the fight against AIDS in Uganda is the students’ academic adviser during the trip. He says:

These students will be immersed in a different culture, learn firsthand about a global health crisis and have the opportunity to interact with Ugandan political leaders, artists, doctors and non-profit leaders in an innovative human rights dinner seminar series. The experiences gained by these students will be invaluable to them and will enhance the university community once they return.

The program director for the Kampala Project is Mark Dalhouse. He explains:

Our aim is to foster lifelong civic involvement among our students. Their academic coursework helps them become even brighter students, but we encourage them to take that a step further to explore how they can apply that knowledge to promote social justice and public awareness as active citizens serving the community.

>> read the whole article at Vanderbuilt

>> Homepage of The Kampala Project

At Vanderbilt University, students will work with health organizations in Uganda this summer as part of that country’s response to HIV/AIDS. They are part of a project called "The Kampala Project on Global Citizenship" that has a nice website and…

A Solar power equipped school as gift to the Maasai: Good or bad?

Published on May 10, 2006 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, culture traditions, development empowerment, indigenous people / minorities

Journalists often draw strict lines between “us” – the modern – and “them” – living in the stone age – although, as anthropologist Kerim Friedman put it we’re all modern now.

According to a recent story by Knight Ridder Newspapers, a gift to Maasai people in Kenya “adds fuel to debate on tribe’s future”. The article starts like this:

For centuries, the Masai people of Kenya have lived in huts without power or running water, used plants and minerals to heal themselves, and survived on a diet of cow milk, meat and blood.

So when Patrick O’Sullivan, a visitor from Silicon Valley entered one of their villages and left behind a school equipped with solar power, laptops and a projector, he sparked an old debate about the tribe’s desire to preserve its culture while surviving in a modern world encroaching on its way of life.

What follows is a typical debate that might have taken place in so called modern socities when Internet was introduced: The elder people are rejecting changes:

But with the light came questions for the entire village. Elders – who had spent much of their lives resisting assimilation into the modern world, fighting British colonizers, and lobbying the Kenyan government for the tribe’s right to self-sufficiency – felt their work was being lost in the tide of support from parents and teachers for O’Sullivan’s school.

“Mostly elder people don’t absolutely want the change. They want people to be as they were before,” David Ole Koshal, leader of Oloolaimutia village, said on O’Sullivan’s video footage.

What is so special about it? Why focus on the resistance by the elder people? As we read, most people embrace the changes:

Most Masai parents and teachers were delighted with the new tools for their children. The school’s enrollment doubled from roughly 200 to 410, partly because children tending cattle during the day were able to attend classes at night thanks to solar-powered lights.

But as anthropology professor Lea B. Pellett said:

The more information and knowledge the better, but the Masai will have to take ownership of the change and preserve what is most important to them from their culture.

>> read the whole story in the Central Daily

Cultural lag, a lethal drag

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

“Aboriginal knowledge is science”

Journalists often draw strict lines between "us" - the modern - and "them" - living in the stone age - although, as anthropologist Kerim Friedman put it we're all modern now.

According to a recent story by Knight Ridder Newspapers,…

Do anthropologists have anything relevant to say about human rights?

Published on April 9, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, development empowerment

Anthropology News April focuses on the topic anthropology and human rights. Both anthropologists and non-anthropologists have been asked to answer the question: Do anthropologists have anything useful or relevant to say about human rights?

In Gerald F Hyman’s view (Director, USAID Office of Democracy and Governance), anthropologists contribute little to the development of human rights themselves or a human rights regime because anthropologists are skeptical of normative claims.

Sheila Dauer from amnesty international makes a similar point, criticizing the idea that human rights are a Western idea and than introducing them might even be a neocolonial act:

When anthropologists support the idea that the changes the changes people are working for on the ground that are based on human rights standards are “Western” or “neocolonial,” they are using the same argument used by governments and others in power to repress less powerful sectors of society—ethnic and racial minorities, women and other groups. Within the human rights movement, conceptualizing human rights standards as universal is now thought of as bringing local meanings into dialogue with human rights standards to mutually reinterpret them and to find ways they can apply locally—a kind of cultural negotiation.

(related see Democracy Isn’t ‘Western’ by Amartya Sen that also was debated on Savage Minds)

Victoria Sanford calls for “activist scholarship”:

It is not uncommon within the academy for lived experience to be dismissed as unscientific or not relevant to real, objective scholarship. This is completely backwards because it is the academy that needs to be relevant to the reality of lived experience.

Advocacy and activism do not diminish one’s scholarly research. On the contrary, activist scholarship reminds us that all research is inherently political—even, and perhaps especially, that scholarship presented under the guise of “objectivity” is often little more than a veiled defense of the status quo. Anthropologists can do better than that. We can and should use our expertise to support rights claims in the communities where we work.

She has a nice homepage with lots of pictures and several articles about her conflict and peace research in Guatemala and Colombia.

Veena Das is sceptical. Institutional transformations in the universities in the US and elsewhere are threatening the kind of free inquiry on which critical understanding rests:

I see a far greater threat to anthropology’s capabilities for engaging politically difficult questions based upon good evidence from everyday practices that govern research in universities than from direct censorship.

~~>> read the whole article in Anthropology News~~ (removed, no longer available)

UPDATE (9.10.06):
The October 06 issue of Anthropology News asks the question ~~Do Anthropologists Have an Ethical Obligation to Promote Human Rights?~~ (removed)

“We have a huge responsibility to give back to the places we study from”

Annelise Riles: Anthropology, Human Rights, and Legal Knowledge: Culture in the Iron Cage

Sally Engle Merry: Human Rights Law and the Demonization of Culture (And Anthropology Along the Way)

Links updated 12.5.2018

In Gerald F Hyman's view (Director,…