anthropology (general) | antropologi.info

“Audio podcasting won’t take over the world”

Published on August 6, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, University / Academia

Podcasting – publishing mp3-interviews on websites – has become more popular in the social sciences, including anthropology. But as Paul Ayres writes in an article for ALISS Quarterly, the journal of the Association of Librarians and Information professionals in the Social Sciences, content producers have already started to move on to video.

Audio podcasting won’t take over the world, he explains:

Audio as a format has a number of limitations. It can be inefficient, as it takes 10 minutes to listen to a 10 minute audio file, plus time to download it as well. Much of this information could be summed up in a short piece of text that is easier to scan and retain. Plus, some content does not lend itself to being read out loud, such as complex URLs or detailed instructions.

In the Higher Education context, providing only the audio of a lecture leaves out PowerPoint slides, data, charts or diagrams that may illustrate a point and it also limits the presenter to a chalk and talk approach, which excludes problem based learning techniques and active learning strategies, which require interaction in the lecture theatre or classroom.

Information Professionals may find audio only user education assets very limiting. With an increasing number of online services available, screencasts that offer commentary on a video walkthrough of a service, website or database, will give a visual cue and a more meaningful learning experience to students.

So users and content producers have already started to move on to video and it’s clear that audio podcasting won’t take over the world. Awareness of podcasts has only increased marginally in the last 18 months, and some say that it suffers from the “try me” virus effect, where something may be cool or interesting to sample, but not be engaging enough to return to.

>> read the whole article “Podcasting and Audio in the Social Sciences”

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Podcasting - publishing mp3-interviews on websites - has become more popular in the social sciences, including anthropology. But as Paul Ayres writes in an article for ALISS Quarterly, the journal of the Association of Librarians and Information professionals in the…

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

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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

National Geographic Channel Is Going Anthropology?

Published on July 31, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, culture traditions, media, Us and Them

Michelle Shildkret from the National Geographic Channel writes to me and informs about a new TV-program called taboo. This season of Taboo premieres Sunday, August 5th.

Taboo is an hour-long program that challenges the way we look at other cultures and ourselves, by exploring practices that are completely normal to their participants but seem brutal, disgusting or even immoral to many of us today.

For those of you who – in contrast to me – have a TV, it will be interesting to check what kind of perspectives they have chosen – if it’s mainly exoticism or if they manage to challenge stereotypes and give deeper insights into the many ways we live on our planet.

National Geographic Channel has just posted three video preview clips on Google Video. One of them (see below) explores a ritual that brings boys into manhood, by having their skin sliced thousands of times to create scars that resemble alligator skin

[video:google:5622871516732076641]

More information: I’ve posted Michelle Shildkret’s email in the forum

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Michelle Shildkret from the National Geographic Channel writes to me and informs about a new TV-program called taboo. This season of Taboo premieres Sunday, August 5th.

Taboo is an hour-long program that challenges the way we look at other cultures…

Paternalistic anthropology

Published on July 10, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, indigenous people / minorities, Pacific Oceania, Us and Them

Quote from an article about tourism in Papua New Guinea (reads more like advertising, though):

Tourism is good for PNG,” asserts Dr Nancy Sullivan, a Madang-based anthropologist with an abiding affection for Papua New Guineans. “It brings much-needed funds to these remote communities, encourages them to maintain a traditional lifestyle and prevents the young men, in particular, from having to seek work in the cities where they are subject to many dangerous influences.”

Paternalistic anthropology?

Nancy Sullivan owns an anthropology consulting company based in Madang, Papua New Guinea:

Nancy Sullivan Ltd. provides Ecotourism Consulting, Leadership Training Consulting and Social Science Consulting. We also prepare Participatory Rural Appraisals (PRAs) and Rapid Rural Appraisals (RRAs) tailored to a client’s needs, including economic, social, legal and project-specific investigations.

>> visit Nancy Sullivan Ltd’s website (lots of articles, reports and pictures)

[links updated 11.6.2015)

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Quote from an article about tourism in Papua New Guinea (reads more like advertising, though):

Tourism is good for PNG," asserts Dr Nancy Sullivan, a Madang-based anthropologist with an abiding affection for Papua New Guineans. "It brings much-needed funds to…