anthropology (general) | antropologi.info

Guest post: Review of the Moving Anthropology Student Network conference

Published on September 12, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Europe

What is it like being at a conference with anthropology students from many different countries? Daren Williams from Macquarie University in Sydney has written a review for antropologi.info about the 6th conference of the Moving Anthropology Student Network (Masn) in Sela pri Osilnici, a village at the Croatian – Slovenian border.

The students had much fun and the conference was very well organized by the MASN-team in Slovenia, he writes. And “anthropologists were much better looking than I expected”. But he had expected more and better discussions after the presentations and more participants from the UK and France.

An anthropology conference that gets results: Masn Slovenia 2008

By Daren Williams, Macquarie University, Sydney

Back in July I stumbled across a brief reference to an anthropology conference in Slovenia. A quick google search later and I found the website of the 6th conference of the Moving Anthropology Student Network (Masn). I was sufficiently impressed by the idea: a network of motivated students; and a grass-roots forum to discuss anthropological ideas. The conference was to be held over 5 days in a small town on the border of Slovenia and Croatia. I booked my ticket.

The Setup

A month later, I made my way from Italy to Slovenia by train and bus. The last bus was provided by the Masn Slovenia Team, since our final destination was obscure, to say the least (population 327). Upon arrival at the hotel, each participant was checked-in to their room and provided with a conference pack. The pack included the conference schedule, clipboard, notepad and the usual things, but what impressed me most was the inclusion of a tourist guide pack – with maps and event guides for Slovenia and the capital Ljubljana!

Conference facilities, accommodation, and food were all included in the participation fee of €80 (I understand that the fee was so affordable due to the Masn Slovenia Team’s excellent job of securing sponsorships from local government and non-government organisations). Needless to say, I was highly impressed with the preparation and foresight of the organising committee!

The programme

The days were filled with formal presentations and workshops, whilst the nights gave us an opportunity to socialise.

The first three days were straight to business: presentations and workshops. We attended three presentations each morning. Due to the location of the conference and the conference topic of “Boundaries, Borders and Frontiers”, most of the field work data focused on eastern Europe. However, there were also well-conceived ethnographic material from field work in Nicaragua, Malaysia, and South Africa.

I noticed two things about these morning sessions: firstly, this conference was a great opportunity for students and young scholars to present their work to colleagues, and secondly, the discussion afterwards was mostly uncritical or altogether absent. I see the two points as interrelated, both in a good and a bad way.

In the afternoon, participants were offered a choice of 3-4 workshops per session, so most people found something of interest. Some highlights were: the discussion on post-socialism and its definitions; field work conducted in a life insurance company in Ireland; and, a consideration of anthropologists whom choose to work for the military.

Again, these sessions were great opportunities for presenters to work through their own ideas or issues, this time in collaboration with a group of people whom I felt were constructive, considerate, and intelligent. And the activities did not stop at dinner-time… Each evening after dinner we were treated to ethnographic films, art exhibitions, a night tour of the border, and one night there was an interactive refugee game.

Many people were impressed with the eye-opening film ‘Wetback’, which followed the journey of illegal immigrants from Central America to the USA. Of course, music and alcohol kept participants entertained after the formal activities ended.

On the weekend, a group of us went white-water rafting, and there was also an opportunity to conduct field work. The Masn Slovenia Team organised visas for everyone to cross the border into Croatia, and offered translators to those people willing to meet local residents. I think most people were too exhausted to perform serious field work by that stage, but there was a group who explored the area with cameras, and reported back later to share their ‘perspectives’.

Mission accomplished?

I attended the Masn Conference with one goal in mind: to be mentally stimulated.

I can say, without doubt, that I achieved my goal. From the first night, I spoke to students about anything that came to mind – conversation was not limited to small-talk. Every conversation became a point of reflection for me. Throughout the week I noticed that everyone I spoke with was open-minded (we’re anthropologists after all) and most were able to, respectfully, give a viewpoint that in some way differed from my own (come to think of it, almost every one of my opinions was challenged in some way).

Furthermore, this informal discussion was complimented by the actual programme of morning, afternoon, and evening sessions!

On a personal level, I was able to clarify some of my ideas as well as generate new ones. For instance, simply stating that I was interested in ‘creativity’ was never sufficient – I was always pushed further, to explore my perspective (how is creativity socialised; can it be taught explicitly?) of which eventually became a two-way discussion of examples and experiences.

On a professional level, I now have access to an extensive network of like-minded individuals with information on ideas, universities, publications, or for just having fun.

Lastly, a note about demographics: anthropologists were much better looking than I expected, funky glasses are popular, and what is with guys and beards? Participants came from all parts of continental Europe, Scandinavia, Ghana, and there was also me, from Australia. I was, however, surprised about the low number of participants from the UK and France – two countries with rich traditions in anthropology. Hopefully more of them will get involved for the next one… and the rumour is Romania, October 2009…

Jack Goody: "The West has never been superior"

Published on September 7, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, books, cosmopolitanism, history, persons and theories, Us and Them

(LINKS UPDATED 8.9.2020)

Are democracy, capitalism, freedom and the concept of romantic love unique inventions of the West? No. In his new book, anthropologist Jack Goody shows that the superiority of the West is largely unreal, even if we look to the recent past.

In “The Theft of History”, Goody criticizes both Western historical writing and his own discipline anthropology, professor Alfredo Ascanio writes in a review at OhMyNews:

For example, it was always believed that democracy was born in Athens and in fact there appeared a particular form of democracy, but democracy existed first in Carthage, even in some cities in the Mediterranean, India, China and other “tribal” societies.

Karl Max and Max Weber were wrong in their thesis about capitalism, because capitalism — despite the industrial revolution — was far more widespread. It was first a product of sowing cotton and the exploitation of silk in India and China.

In another example, Goody explains how Elias and Braudel have overemphasized the European contribution in relation to modernity, when in fact this happened first in India and China. The concept of capitalism is rather a concept of the 19-century, says Goody, which should be used more carefully and has only been used for overvaluation of the differences between Europe and Asia.

And in Asia, the reality was always more advanced than the West in art and science, even in what was considered romantic love. It was not a Western invention but is a universal sentiment that already existed.

>> read the whole review at OhMyNews

In the introduction, Goody explains the title of the book:

The ‘theft of history’ of the title refers to the take-over of history by the west. That is, the past is conceptualized and presented according to what happened on the provincial scale of Europe, often western Europe, and then imposed upon the rest of the world.

The books is inspired by his research in Africa:

After several years’ residence among African ‘tribes’ as well as in a simple kingdom in Ghana, I came to question a number of the claims Europeans make to have ‘invented’ forms of government (such as democracy), forms of kinship (such as the nuclear family), forms of exchange (such as the market), forms of justice, when embryonically at least these were widely present elsewhere.

These claims are embodied in history, both as an academic discipline and in folk discourse. Obviously there have been many great European achievements in recent times, and these have to be accounted for. But they often owed much to other urban cultures such as China.

(…)

The closer I looked at the other facets of the culture of Eurasia, and the more experience I gained of parts of India, China, and Japan, the more I felt that the sociology and history of the great states or ‘civilizations’ of Eurasia needed to be understood as variations one of another.

>> read the whole introduction (Cambridge University Press)

The book has also been reviewed by The Canadian Review of Sociology and Keith Hart.

Amartya Sen: Democracy Isn’t ‘Western’ this text was also debated on Savage Minds

For an Anthropology of Cosmopolitanism

Ethnocentric anthropology and Working towards a global community of anthropologists

Anthropologists condemn the use of terms of “stone age” and “primitive”

(LINKS UPDATED 8.9.2020) Are democracy, capitalism, freedom and the concept of romantic love unique inventions of the West? No. In his new book, anthropologist Jack Goody shows that the superiority of the West is largely unreal, even if…

First reports from Europe’s largest anthropology conference (EASA)

Published on August 30, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, journal articles / papers, University / Academia

Today was the fifth and last day of the 10th Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) in Ljubljana, Slovenia. There are no news stories yet, but anthropology students at the University of Ljubljana have already written an impressive number of reports on workshops, plenaries and poster sessions.

The students have done a real great job and I hope they will inspire other conference organizers. There are exciting things being told and discussed at conferences. But until now, these stories have stayed inside a small community of scholars. Things are changing: The Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) has started podcasting from their annual meetings.

EASA has started an ambitious project. Read this:

You have reached the online database of texts on the 10th Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). During this event, the site is hourly updated, bringing you fresh reports on the venues (workshops, plenaries and poster sessions) as well as several interviews with the lecturers, EASA officials and other guests. All texts will be published in English language.

The reports and interviews are written by students at the Department for Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. Since human resources are scarce, not all venues are covered and are therefore not reported or commented. We are trying, however, to present as much material as possible by covering as much events as possible.

The reports give a great overview over current anthropological research in Europe.

Tjaša Selič and Goran Karim for example write about Michael Carrithers who is interested in the question: How can so many differences between cultures, groups of people and individuals still inspire participation, cooperation, solidarity? (pdf) Tjaša Zidarič also mentions Panayiota Toulina Demeli who is interested in how being in prison effects the social meaning of motherhood (pdf).

Nikolas Kosmatopoulos seems to have given an interesting paper in the workshop “Imagining and Constructing “Terrorism” and “War on Terror”. “Being an anthropologist in the Middle East feels almost like being a spy”, he said according to Vasja Pavlin:

(I)t is possible to be objective in such an intense field as Lebanon. There is a grey zone between the attackers and the attacked into which an anthropologist enters in order to do his or her research. By entering into this zone one immediately becomes a suspicious person.

An anthropologist has to tell his or her informants some of the intimate stuff about what he or she is doing in order to be accepted by them. The situation forces you to take a position but you cannot please everyone; if you do so you are just like a clown. He concluded that being an anthropologist in the Middle East feels almost like being a spy.

(pdf)

“Crowd crystals and birdwatchers: charismatic leadership in volunteer organisations” was the title of Dan Podjed‘s paper. In her summary, Tina Mučič informs us that the meaning of charisma and charismatic leadership is “a black hole in anthropological research” (pdf).

She also writes that “his presentation was very good and in some parts funny”.

I was surprised over the open and honest comments on the papers and the presentations. Maybe these reports may inspire some anthropologists to rethink their way of giving papers.

Tina Kranjec comments on a presentation by Elke Mader at the workshop Happiness: Anthropological Engagements:

I must say this was a very interesting paper. The author explores how fans experience, express, communicate and circulate happiness in relationship with Shah Rukh Khan. There was a lot of visual material, which was also very representative.

(pdf)

But the workshop On ‘Souvenir’: experiencing diversity, objectifying mutuality was less exciting, she writes:

After visiting two other workshops, I can say that this last one was more oriented on giving as much information as possible and not so much on trying to provoke us and making us participate by commenting and asking questions. Almost all of the lecturers were reading as fast as possible, which made the comprehension of the papers quite difficult.

(pdf)

Tina Mučič has also reviewed several presentations. An anthropologist “was reading her paper very quietly so it was difficult to understand everything”, another one “was speaking and reading very fast, almost too fast to understand the meaning of the paper.”

She liked Gillian Evans‘ presentation best:

This introduction was the most likeable. Dr. Evans was speaking aloud and her tone was resolute. She was trying to explain some terms which we did not understand and was aware that there were not only experts on this topic in the room.

It seems that more and more paper givers have used PowerPoint presentations than for two years ago when I attended the conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth in Keele. Then, most presentations were so boring that I decided to stay at home. According to the students’ reports, the conference in Slovenia must have been very interesting. Their reports are very inspiring. Maybe I should have gone though?

>> overview over all reports

>> conference website

UPDATE (12.9.08) : Guest post: Review of the Moving Anthropology Student Network conference

UPDATE (3.9.08): Martha Jiménez-Rosano has written a few notes about the conference of the Moving Anthropology Student Network (MASN) that took place before the EASA conference (in Slovenia as well) and has uploaded her paper “Projectionists of Reality. When researchers project images of their own boundaries.”

UPDATE 10.11.08) Another EASA-report by Martha Jiménez-Rosano: A feeling about EASA 2008

How To Present A Paper – or Can Anthropologists Talk?

Academic presentations: “The cure is a strong chairman and a system of lights”

Norwegian anthropology conferences are different

Anthropology and the World: What has happened at the EASA conference?

Conference Podcasting: Anthropologists thrilled to have their speeches recorded

This is conference blogging!

AAA Annual Meeting: Are blogs a better news source than corporate media?

First news from the AAA-conference?

Military spies invade anthropology conferences?

Open Access: New alliances threaten the American Anthropological Association

Published on August 18, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, journal articles / papers, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing

(via media anthropology) What is the purpose of organisations like the American Anthropological Association? What is the point of publishing articles? The free software movement forces anthropologists to rethink these questions, Christopher Kelty says in a conversation about anthopology and open access to scholarship.

The discussion between seven anthropologists was published in the journal Cultural Anthropology. The article Anthropology of/in Circulation: The Future of Open Access and Scholarly Societies is of course available online.

They talk among other things about new divisions between scholary organisations like the AAA and anthropologists who want to engage with the wider world by making their research more accessible online. Now, the largest part of anthropological research is locked behind login forms that only members of subscribed institutions can pass through. The AAA has not taken side with the open access movement but with the commercial publishing industry.

“All anthropologists who want to be part of the revolution in scholarly communication must do so outside of the AAA”, Alex Golub says. The AAA has “made exactly the wrong allies”.

One common argument against free access to scholarship has to do with economics: Journal subscriptions are an important part of the budget of organisations like the AAA.

But Jason Baird Jackson explains:

(I)f we want to think seriously about “sustainability” we must realize that sustaining anthropology means more than sustaining the AAA budget—it means sustaining the viability of research libraries and of our not-for- proﬁt university press partners as well.

More and more research libraries today are responding by partnering directly with scholars to “publish” (…) research, and thus they are expanding the library’s role in new ways. They are trying to make scholarship more open and more sustainable by cutting out the middleman, the publishing companies. In doing so, they might make commercial publishing less proﬁtable and scholarly societies built around toll access publication proﬁts less sustainable.

So whose interests do you align with?

I’d like my efforts to help sustain the AAA, but the association’s interests are now more congruent with those of the publishing industry, not my library or the university presses. As a result the interests of my ethnographic consultants, my university library, my students, and my colleagues are increasingly in conﬂict with those of my professional society.

Alex Golub adds:

One of the key things about Free Software and Open Access (…) is that it allows things to get done extremely cheaply if you have the people who know how to work the technology. The AAA has failed to develop low-cost solutions using these methods, it has alienated much of a generation of younger scholars willing to devote their time to developing these solutions, and as a result it has thrown up its hands and outsourced this work to institutions like WB (Wiley-Blackwell).

WB then doubles the price of American Anthropologist, and makes money off of the AAA’s inability to manage its own publications program. We are all literally paying the price of the AAA’s inability to keep our house in order.

The AAA has developped AnthroSource where AAA members can browse through hundreds of journals. Jason Baird Jackson says we do not need AnthroSource anymore because of all the blogs, open access and other online initiatives that he calls the “Shadow AnthroSource”:

(I)n a way what is happening now outside of the AAA is a “shadow AnthroSource” that fulﬁlls the ambitions of the original AnthroSource. In its visionary phase, AnthroSource was going to have a subject repository in which we could have put our ﬁeld notes, white papers, unpublished book manuscripts, etc. I saw this vision die during my ﬁrst year as an editor.
(…)
However, we do not actually need AnthroSource anymore because we have already built it up out of various bits and pieces outside the AAA framework. We have a subject repository (Mana’o), we have a constellation of weblogs and key metablogs (such as antropologi.info), we have people like Mike Wesch and Chris showing us how to mix and match readily/freely available tools to build powerful research collaboratories (like Digital Ethnography and Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory / ARC
(…)
We have organizations like the EVIADA project (Ethnomusicological Video for Instruction and Analysis Digital Archive; ) and individual researchers like Kim building powerful, innovative database tools for use in our research and our collaborations with students and communities, there are people (like Rob Leopold at the National Anthropology Archives) in many archives and museums building great projects to make the archival database more accessible, we have folks like the team organized by the American Folklife Center and the American Folklore Society building metadata tools like the new ethnographic thesaurus, and as Chris noted recently in a SavageMinds blog post, we have more and more OA journals spanning the topical and international diversity of world anthropology.

Will all this stuff somehow function better if it is centralized and put under the control of the home ofﬁce?

Chris Kelty has recently published a book that is also available online. He compares the internet with a bookstore:

The Open Access argument is simply that making the book available on line was in my interest, because it will mean that it will be easy to ﬁnd, easy to cite, and easy to use in classes.

But it might also be in Duke’s interest; I made the argument that people are more likely to buy the paper book if they can get a look at the book in its entirety digitally (Harper Collins buys this argument, and has just begun a similar experiment)

I told Duke to think of the website as a bookstore with a huge number of potential visitors, and the on-line version as the browseable version of the book. If a million people download my book, but only 1 percent of them then go on to buy a copy, Duke will still be selling far more copies then they ever dreamed. And what if I sell 5 percent? I’ll be a superstar!

>> read the whole article

>> blog of this publication

UPDATE See also Owen Wiltshire’s comments

SEE ALSO:

AAA: “Open access no realistic option”

American Anthropological Association opposes Open Access to Journal Articles

Open Access: “The American Anthropological Association reminds me of the recording industry”

For Open Access: “The pay-for-content model has never been successful”

Danah Boyd on Open Access: “Boycott locked-down journals”

Is it time to boycott SAGE?

The unacknowledged convergence of open source, open access, and open science

Why were they doing this work just to give it away for free? Thesis on Ubuntu Linux hackers

Plans to study anthropological online communities and Open Access movement

2006 – The Year of Open Access Anthropology?

(via media anthropology) What is the purpose of organisations like the American Anthropological Association? What is the point of publishing articles? The free software movement forces anthropologists to rethink these questions, Christopher Kelty says in a conversation about…

New anthropology group blog, forum

Published on July 22, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, interdisciplinary, medical anthropology / ethnobothany, websites

Somatosphere – Science medicine and anthropology is the title of a new medical anthropology blog by researchers at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

It will be an interdisciplinary blog as Eugene Raikhel writes in his first post:

The core of this blog is medical anthropology – the majority of the authors are anthropologists who work on medical topics; however, we’re particularly interested in the borders between anthropology and a number of neighboring disciplines: namely, science and technology studies (STS), cultural psychiatry and bioethics.

In his second post, he reviews some medical anthropology related journals (special issues).

Raikhel is currently a postdoc at the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry and the Department of Social Studies of Medicine – “fairly unique interdisciplinary units in which foster some very interesting research and discussions between anthropologists and psychiatrists, neuroscientists, sociologists and historians of science.”

His dissertation is an ethnographic study of addiction and the therapeutic market in contemporary Russia. He’s been on extensive fieldwork in addiction and psychiatric hospitals, clinics and rehabilitation centers in St. Petersburg (source).

>> visit Somatosphere – Science medicine and anthropology

I was also asked to announce a new social science forum www.socialtalks.net. It is run by Espen Malling, student of anthropology at the University of Aarhus, Denmark.

At the same I want to remind of recent activity (not much, though) in the antropologi.info forum. It is also a pin board that you can use to post announcements
http://www.antropologi.info/anthropology/forum/

Somatosphere - Science medicine and anthropology is the title of a new medical anthropology blog by researchers at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

It will be an interdisciplinary blog as Eugene Raikhel writes in his first post:

The core…