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“We want children to be their own ethnographers”

Published on March 23, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news

How to study children? “You can’t just interview children because most children will find interviews boring and walk away. So we need to facilitate a way for children to explain their own lives with you. We want children to be their own ethnographers, so children can reflect on their own lives and examine them”, anthropologist Pamela Reynolds and Veena Das explain in The Johns Hopkins Newsletter.

Pamela Reynolds studied children in a shantytown in South Africa. Veena Das did fieldwork among young girls infected with HIV. Together in 2003, Reynolds and Das created the Child On The Wing Fellowship. The message of Child On The Wing is that children are far from only victims; they have agency and ability to create change in their worlds.

Reynolds explains:

“In some ways, when you’re a child in these situations, you’ve got to invent your roots, your manner of coping, and often that invention is very creative, surprising and successful, given the circumstances.”

So how can we grasp the childrens’ point of view?

She [Das] gave an example of a participant who wanted to study the experience of children growing up as dalit, the untouchable caste in India, but from a new angle that hadn’t been examined. He chose to study their paintings, bringing in aspects of psychoanalysis in his work. It was a perfect melding of anthropology and the field of psychology, which rarely interrelate. In Das’ words, it “bridged the humanities and social sciences gap.”

>> read the whole story in The John Hopkins Newsletter

I remember from a conference on children research that several anthropologists used digital cameras in their studies: They let the children document their own daily life and explain it to the researchers by talking about the photos.

UPDATE: Charu at Mindspace points to more relevant links, among others The Conflict in Darfur Through Children’s Eyes, using drawings and The Kalleda photoblog project by kids at Kalleda Rural School in Andhra Pradesh, India – “glimpses that would otherwise never be available to the outsider”. >> read Charus post: Children as ethnographers

SEE ALSO:

Child on the Wings: Two anthropologists are taking a child-centered approach. (Arts and Science Magazine, John Hopkins University)

Pamela Reynolds: Where Wings Take Dream: On Children in the Work of War and the War of Work (The Journal of the International Institute, Univ of Michigan)

Veena Das: Stigma, Contagion, Defect: Issues in the Anthropology of Public Health (Conference Paper)

Seeing Children and Hearing Them, Too: Anthropologists now realize that transmitting values is a two-way street (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

Ethnographic Study on “Digital Kids”

Technologies of the Childhood Imagination- new text by anthropologist Mizuko Ito

How to study children? "You can't just interview children because most children will find interviews boring and walk away. So we need to facilitate a way for children to explain their own lives with you. We want children to be…

The Secret Society of Anthropologists

Published on March 12, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, University / Academia

In the book Engaging Anthropology, Thomas Hylland Eriksen writes:

In spite of its considerable growth, anthropology still cultivates its self-identity as a counter-culture, its members belonging to a kind of secret society whose initiates possess exclusive keys for understanding, indispensable for making sense of the world, but alas, largely inaccessible for outsiders. (…)Anthropologists simply did not want their subject to become too popular.

Recently, I had to think of this quote several times. As noted, I’ve registered for the conference Cosmopolitanism and Anthropology. As the conference fee is cheaper for members of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth, I thought: Why not have a look at the organisation.

On the homepage section Membership, the first thing you read is this here:

Not a member? Why not lend your support to the discipline? If you would like to join, and fulfil the requirements below, use the NEW online form to apply.

Requirements?? Read on:

The ASA offers membership to persons of academic standing who, by virtue of their training, posts held and published works can be recognised as professional social anthropologists. Nominations and applications are considered once a year, at the Annual Business Meeting of the Association. These must be submitted by December 31st in the academic year in which they are to be considered.

But that’s not enough. You can’t just apply by yourself:

Applications may be made by nomination through a member of the Association or by a person applying in their own right. In the case of the latter the names of two members of the Association should be provided to whom the committee may refer if necessary.

You should also take a look at the detailed membership application form

In contrast, there are no such “requirements” when applying for membership in the American Anthropological Association (AAA) or in the Norwegian Anthropological Association.

By the way, some days ago, the first conference papers were published on the website. Try to download them and see what happens when you (try to) open them…

In the book Engaging Anthropology, Thomas Hylland Eriksen writes:

In spite of its considerable growth, anthropology still cultivates its self-identity as a counter-culture, its members belonging to a kind of secret society whose initiates possess exclusive keys for understanding, indispensable for…

Online: On the Margins – An Ethnography from the US-Mexican Border

Published on February 19, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news

The field: The city has 14312 inhabitants, more than half are unemployed, 53% of the under 18 years old are officially living under the poverty line. The main source of income for the town: Smuggling of people and drugs.

Social anthropologist Johannes Wilm has written an ethnography of the town Douglas in Arizona, a border town to Mexico. It builds on his master thesis at the University of Oslo. He looks “at the complex influence that the two involved countries have on individual actors and how community and identity are shaped thereof.”

The book has been published these days, it looks very interesting and written with the reader in mind. I’ll write more about it the coming days / weeks.

The whole book can be downloaded as pdf (30MB!)

UPDATE: SEE ALSO:

Too engaged anthropology? The Lumpenproletariat on the US-Mexican Border

The Anthropology of Biopolitics and the Laboratory for the Anthropology of the Contemporary

Published on February 7, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, fieldwork / methods, journal articles / papers, Northern America, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing

Judd Antin at TechnoTaste recently informed us about two new anthropology centers. One of them Laboratory for the Anthropology of the Contemporary seems to take knowledge sharing more seriously than other research centers. You can click on and read every article on their list over publications.

The introductory paper Steps toward an anthropological laboratory by Paul Rabinow starts promising:

The challenge is to invent new forms of inquiry, writing, and ethics for an anthropology of the contemporary. The problem is: how to rethink and remake the conditions of contemporary knowledge production,
dissemination, and critique, in the interpretive sciences?

They continue explaining the background for their research methods at the new center, dedicated to the invention of new modes of collaborative work among and between social and natural scientists:

Given that the social sciences and humanities disciplines in the U.S. university system are essentially those of the nineteenth century, and there is little motivation from within the disciplines to abolish themselves, we are not optimistic that new work can be exclusively based in the university. The university (or restricted parts of it) remains a source of employment, of resources such as libraries, and of pedagogy. In that light, we imagine new hybrid organizations, adjacent to and in many parasitic on, the university.

(…)

It is quite remarkable that the contemporary self-understanding of anthropology includes few examples of collective work. (…) New forms of collaboration and coordination among and between anthropologists (and other knowledge workers) is unquestionably going to be required to adequately address the scope, complexity, and temporality of contemporary objects and problems.

>> read the whole text by Paul Rabinow (pdf, 19pages)

>> overview over all publications (much on biosecurity)

“The White House should hire an anthropologist”

Published on February 7, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, ethics, politics

Anthropologist Fazia Rizvi points to an article by Maureen Dowd where she argues that the White House should hire an anthropologist:

Corporations have begun hiring anthropologists to help them improve product designs and interpret markets. And clearly, the Bush foreign policy team doesn’t understand any of the markets where it is barging around ineptly trying to sell America and democracy.

(…)

It’s stunning that nearly four decades after Vietnam, our government could be even more culturally illiterate and pigheaded. The Bushies are more obsessed with snooping on Americans than fathoming how other cultures think and react.

One smart anthropologist reinforcing the idea that “mirroring” – assuming other cultures think like us – doesn’t work would be a lot more helpful than all of the discredited intelligence agencies that are costing $30 billion a year to miss everything from the breakup of the Soviet Union to 9/11 to no WMD to Osama’s hiding place to the Hamas victory.

>> read the whole story in the SGVTribune

Anthropologist Fazia Rizvi points to an article by Maureen Dowd where she argues that the White House should hire an anthropologist:

Corporations have begun hiring anthropologists to help them improve product designs and interpret markets. And clearly, the Bush foreign…