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Interviews about moral cosmopolitanism, India-Pakistan, faith, populism, minoritiy-issues

Published on April 10, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, cosmopolitanism, Europe, interdisciplinary, religion cosmology, Us and Them

Recently, several of my interviews with researchers of the interdisciplinary research program Cultural Complexity of the New Norway (Culcom) have been translated into English. Here are the most recent ones:

Does the answer exist in human nature?
What is justice? Can research on infants give us new insight into global moral questions? Yes, according to Culcom’s Ph.D. fellow Odin Lysaker. Drawing on theory from psychology, sociology, and biology, the philosopher will try to find out what unites people on this earth with regard to moral questions

Taking the India-Pakistan-conflict to Norway?
A million and a half people were killed under the Partition of British-India into India and Pakistan. How has this conflict affected the relationship between Norwegian-Pakistanis and Norwegian-Indians and their integration into Norway? Lavleen Kaur is going to interview three generations of Indians and Pakistanis in Norway, Pakistan, and India.

– A symptom of large societal changes
It is important to understand the growth of these parties in connection with an elitist and normative judgment of populist parties, says Culcom Master’s student, Tor Espen Simonsen. In his Master’s thesis, the historian studied right-wing populism in Denmark and Norway.

– Focus on minority background undermines the principle of equality
Students who end up in the “minority language speakers” category risk receiving an inferior education. All students should receive an individually adapted education. But this principle does not seem to apply to everyone according to Nina Lewin.

Going their own way without breaking away from the family
The parents are concerned with status, relations with their home country, and job possibilities. Even though obedience and respect for the parents is important, the girls are concerned with choosing an education that they are interested in. This is shown in Culcom Master’s student Vibeke Hoem’s thesis.

Different life histories lead to different faiths
“Through studies of individual faith we can gain a better understanding of a religion,” says Culcom’s Master’s student Marie Toreskås Asheim. For her Master’s thesis she studied young Muslims’ personal relationship to Allah.

Forced to be a victim?
In doing research, start out with people’s experiences, not theory! Sociologist Helga Eggebø has put Dorothy Smith’s theories into practice. With the help of Smith’s “institutional ethnography” she shows how the victim discourse can help reproduce stereotypes and create a divide between “us” and “them”.

>> all interviews

Does the answer exist in human nature?
What is justice? Can research…

Now open access to 39 years of the journal Folklore Forum

Published on December 3, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, cyberanthropology, interdisciplinary, internet, journal articles / papers, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, websites

Folklore Forum, a journal that is produced by graduate students at the Folklore and Ethnomusicology Department of Indiana University, has gone Open Access. From now on, 39 years of scholarship, debate, and exchange of ideas are freely accessible for everybody in the freshly digitized archives of Folklore Forum.

Their most recent volum focuses on Folklore and the Internet and includes articles on urban legends that circulate in chain letter-form as anonymous emails, and on icons and avatars as cyberart and examples of the development of folkloric art forms online.

Folklore has has always had an ambivalent relationship with mass media, Editor-in-Chief Curtis Ashton writes in the editorial:

Salvage ethnography to recover oral texts would be unnecessary if print were not invading 19th century Europe and America and depriving the Folk of their lore. (…) Though the trend has been shifting in professional meetings and journal publications, folklorists do tend to avoid the world of computers as a field for enquiry, either because of a lack of technical training or just a lack of general interest.

But as this volume demonstrates, the web has much to offer for folklorists:

I encourage our readers to consider how we use the Internet in our work as folklorists, as a object of study in an of itself, with its own discourse of traditional motifs; as a field for ethnographic research into the virtual, networked community; as a means for scholarly communication and publication; as a storage facility for the digitally compressed knowledge of the past; as a presentation space for the mutual benefit of both ethnographer and informant; as a means for reflection, rethinking how we do our work, what draws us to it, and why.

>> visit Folklore Forum

As a sidenote: In the most recent entry here on antropologi.info I wrote about how folkore can enrich anthropology, see “Take care of the different national traditions of anthropology”

2006 – The Year of Open Access Anthropology?

antropologi.info survey: Six anthropologists on Anthropology and Internet

“Study how and why people wear denim around the world!”

Published on November 28, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, globalisation, interdisciplinary

The majority of the world’s population is wearing just one textile – denim. Why? On the Material World blog, anthropologist Daniel Miller announced the Global Denim Project. This scheme, he writes, is designed to bring together an increasing number of projects on the topic of denim:

The Global Denim Project is an attempt to persuade as many academics as possible to consider studying denim over the next five years. Hopefully these will include historians, people concerned with the economics of the industry, and the cosmological significance it represents as a tension between global ubiquity and the personalisation of distressing.

Miller and Woodward have now begun an ethnography of denim wearing in three streets in North London. Other projects range from a study of denim, sexuality and the body in Italy, to a study of trashed denim shoddy and its uses in recycling (until recently a third of US dollar bills were denim shoddy). Other proposals include denim in China, Japan and Korea, a study of how blue jeans record the movements of the body in their wear, and a proposal to work on the pressures towards ethical trade in denim in Turkey and Brazil. Brief outlines may be found on the global denim site.

The point is that this is a global phenomenon and would be much better understood through collaboration between many projects.

>> read the whole post on Material World

>> visit the project website (incl. descriptions of several projects!)

(The picture is taken from the project website)

Connecting Art and Anthropology

Published on September 15, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, art, interdisciplinary, websites

What happens when artists and anthropologists are asked to do something together rather than talk from the safety of their own practice? The result can be seen on the website Connecting Art & Anthropology: Transcripts of discussions, short reports, a video and even a sound notebook based on the workshop! Read also Anne Galloway’s comments on this website/workshop.

Last year we had a similar event in Oslo, see Cosmoculture: Preferably more art than books!. Thomas Hylland Eriksen said: “The most important thing the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said did was to establish a Jewish-Arabic youth orchestra. This was more important than writing 100 books.”

Cultures of Consumption: Re-thinking the relationship between consumer and citizen

Published on August 2, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, interdisciplinary, journal articles / papers, persons and theories

Inspiring research contradicts journalistic and academic presumptions. It seems that the multidisciplinary research program Cultures of Consumption has produced inspiring papers. Anthropologist Daniel Miller gives us a summary of a public presentation of the research results on the blog Material World:

As usual in such programme the highlights came from research that contradicts journalistic and academic presumptions. For example we heard evidence that international retailing firms find that they have to raise their standards to meet Chinese consumers who are more demanding than those in other areas. Another paper demonstrated that people have extended family meals in the UK just as much now as in the 1970s (though migrating from dinner table to kitchen table) and that in terms of food behaviour generally there is no evidence for global convergence e.g. becoming more like the US.

>> read the whole post

The research project has a great website. The snapshops from the projects provide reader-friendly summaries. Lots of working papers can be downloaded.