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Five more interviews on cultural complexity!

Published on April 2, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, cosmopolitanism, Europe, fieldwork / methods, globalisation, interdisciplinary, migration, persons and theories, Us and Them

One of my jobs consists in interviewing researchers in the research program Cultural Complexity in the new Norway. Five of these interviews have been translated into English, I’ve just put them online:

Traveling to Turkey to Understand Norway
Anthropologist Therese Sandrup is interested on focusing on the strong emotional connection the second generation in Norway has to their parents’ native country: “It is important to look at the migration process in its entirety. Certain actions and decisions are the result of a dialogue between the past and the present, the country of origin and the Norwegian context,” she says.

Doing Fieldwork Among Poets and Rebels in Paris
Anthropologist Cicilie Fagerlid had actually intended to study peaceful cosmopolitan existence in Paris. But a month after she had relocated there, riots broke out in the suburbs. This research fellow now wants to find out why France ended up in this situation – in large part by studying the poetry slam scene.

Does the Labor Movement Tackle Cultural Complexity?
In the 1970s, The Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO) struggled with integrating women and new occupational groups. Margrethe Daae-Qvale believes the same is now happening with immigrants. In connection with her Master’s thesis, she has interviewed immigrants who have been active in the trade union, together with central participants within LO’s forum for ethnic equality.

Gender Roles Among Christians and Muslims: Shared Problems and Shared Solutions?
Do Christians and Muslims face common challenges, or are they so distant from each other that communication becomes impossible? In order to answer these questions, the theologian Anne-Hege Grung has formed a dialogue group with Christian and Muslim women. They are meeting to discuss texts from the Bible, the Koran and Hadith.

Revealing Media Habits Among Norwegian-Iranians
In studying media habits among Norwegian-Iranian people, sociologist Sharam Alghasi wants to comment on the relationship between Norwegians and Iranians. “You cannot consider yourself to be Norwegian if you feel you are excluded from Norwegian society through the media”, he says.

One of my jobs consists in interviewing researchers in the research program Cultural Complexity in the new Norway. Five of these interviews have been translated into English, I've just put them online:

Traveling to Turkey to Understand Norway
Anthropologist Therese Sandrup is…

Job offer: Anthropologists needed for development of tools for ageing populations

Published on February 22, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, interdisciplinary

Anthropologist Simon Roberts at INTEL in Ireland asked me to blog about this job offer (pdf) that actually is a good example of applied anthropology. “The jobs will suit people who are interested in working at the exciting intersection of technology, medicine, gerontology and policy”, he writes:

Successful candidates would undertake ethnographic research with three ageing cohorts, mainly in the Dublin area. They would also examine the wider contexts of ageing in Ireland – community services/projects.

Their research would inform the work of world class clinicians and technologists who are developing technologies of a preventative and diagnostic nature – for use both within a clinical and domestic setting.

The researchers will be expected to produce agenda setting research, which influences the design of tools and interventions suitable for ageing populations and communicate their work and findings to TRIL members and a broader audience through peer reviewed journals and other means.

The jobs are based in the Irish Centre for Social Gerontology in Galway.

The jobs have arisen due to the recent announcement by Intel and the Irish Government of a research collaboration, known as TRIL Centre. TRIL is a multidisciplinary research programme is underpinned by open source technology platform development and informed by ethnographic research of ageing and healthcare.

>> read the job advert (pdf)

We know Simon Roberts from his former blog Ideas Bazaar.

By the way, feel free to use the antropologi.info forum / pin board to announce job offers or call for papers

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Anthropologist Simon Roberts at INTEL in Ireland asked me to blog about this job offer (pdf) that actually is a good example of applied anthropology. "The jobs will suit people who are interested in working at the exciting intersection of…

Open Access to Indigenous Research in Norway

Published on November 27, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, indigenous people / minorities, interdisciplinary, journal articles / papers

More and more theses in Norway are published in digital archives and are freely available in full text. In MUNIN – the digital library of the University in Tromsø (Northern Norway), you can download eight master theses in indigenous studies. They look very interesting, so here they are:

Sargylana Zhirkova: School on the “move”. A case study: Nomadic schooling of the indigenous Evenk children in the Republic of Sakha Yakutia (Russian Far East)
Abstract: It seems strange that in a modern time the indigenous people decided to return not only to their traditional culture but also to the type of schooling which was used by their parents. The first nomadic school in Russia was created in the 1930s and now this kind of school starts to work again in nomadic communities. I have decided to write about the nomadic school because education is an important aspect of life of the indigenous people: it opens doors for indigenous people. Today the nomadic school is a new educational institution for the indigenous nomadic children.

Abdul Hoque: Radio and indigenous peoples. The role of radio in the sustainable livelihoods of indigenous peoples: A case study of the Rakhaing and the Garo people in Bangladesh
Abstract: Radio has the strong role in the sustainable livelihood of indigenous people. Promoting the recognition and practice of mother language media, especially radio, has its distinctive role. (…) Rakhaing has no radio programme of their own. So their language and culture has no significant development, even diminishing day by day. Study findings showed that the Rakhaing feel them excluded from the world; and only a single programme in radio can give them a feeling of being a member of the world.

Gilbert Ansoglenang: Rural women and micro-credit schemes. Cases from the Lawra District of Ghana
Abstract: The study concluded that micro-credit schemes help reduce rural poverty and empower women. Despite the enhanced and visible roles assumed by these women due to the credit schemes, there were serious operational lapses. (…) In the light of this, inter alia, the study made the following recommendation towards the empowerment of women: an appreciable increase in the loans, prioritizing girl-child education, developing and encouraging the use of appropriate technology, and engendering the loan scheme or helping rural women side-by-side their men folk.

Priscilla Felicity De Wet: “Make our children proud of the heritage”
A case study of the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic communities in SA with specific reference to the emerging Khoe and San indigenous peoples in the Republic of South Africa

Victoria Phiri: When knowledge is not power. The integration of traditional midwifery into the health system. The case study of a traditional midwife among the Toka of Zambia
Abstract: In this thesis, I argue that what the traditional midwife practices is knowledge. Based on the local experiences and traditions, this knowledge may be different from what is commonly called “western” knowledge.

Sundar Bhattarai: The bola or parma of the Newar in Manamaiju Village. The significance of a farm labor exchange system among indigenous peasants in Nepal
Abstract: The key queries of this study are: what does the bola system look like in the village; and, how are they maintaining it as a successful living practice when there is a liberal economic policy in front of them?

Ciren Yangzong: The household responsibility contract system and the question of grassland protection. A case study from the Chang Tang, northwest Tibet Autonomous Region
Abstract: I attempt to demonstrate how common property systems have traditionally served and benefited the Shenchen nomads, and how they have traditionally co-existed with the wildlife using this system. (…) I analyze how HRCS is working in my particular area; especially in the Chang Tang conservation area and whether it is having an effect on nomad’s culture and environment.

Abebe Gizachew Abate: Contested land rights. Oromo peasants struggle for livelihood in Ethiopia
Abstract: Based on the contemporary ethnographic and historical data from Oromia regional state of Ethiopia the study examines complex relationships and contradictory processes of the effects of resource based-development policies of the Ethiopian regimes on land rights related to Oromo peasant livelihoods, environment and development. (…) Analytically, a new ethnographic paradigm of approaching the notions of land rights, power and resistance that problematize custom as static culture vs. dynamic understanding of culture opens up a more dynamic, practical , contextual and relational understanding of ` rights`.

>> overview over all theses

>> information on the Master Degree in Indigenous Studies

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More and more theses in Norway are published in digital archives and are freely available in full text. In MUNIN - the digital library of the University in Tromsø (Northern Norway), you can download eight master theses in indigenous…

Neuroanthropology: “Different cultures produce different brains”

Published on October 8, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, culture traditions, interdisciplinary

It might sound deterministic (and essentialising – maybe one should replace “cultures” with “societies”), but Juan Dominguez, a PhD student at the University of Melbourne, believes “different cultures” produce “different brains” and that cultural differences reflect different neurological functioning. He discussed the effects of ‘enculturation’ on the human brain at a recent anthropology conference in Cairns, according to ABC Australia. He said:

In certain societies and cultures there are certain patterns of behaviour, people may make certain evaluations, have certain opinions, there are certain tasks that are culturally specific. We should be able to find that … the brain would have some sort of bias acquired through exposure to culture.

Douglas Lewis, a senior lecturer at anthropology who is supervising the work, acknowledges this is a controversial area. He explains that the emerging science of neuroanthropology suggests that brains within a group can be ‘wired’ by common experience, just as individual brains become ‘wired’ by individual experiences. “What we’re looking for are correlates in the brain that anthropologists have in the past thought of as being cultural or culturally mediated,” he says.

>> read the whole story in ABC

>> coverage in the Neorophilosopher’s weblog

John Walter, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Saint Louis University comments:

This kind of work makes some of us in the liberal arts really nervous, but that’s because we don’t understand cognitive studies and neuroscience well enough. (…)

My sense is that there’s a fear that if we accept or find that difference is part of our neurological wiring we’ll be taking a step back to past racist practices of essentializing and differentiating groups. This fear is, I think, rooted in the assumption that there’s some kind of culture-biology duality, that if something is wired into us it is unchangeable, because (…) wiring doesn’t change. Those familiar with cognitive science, however, know that brains are adaptive.

>> read the whole comment in Machina Memorialis

It might sound deterministic (and essentialising - maybe one should replace "cultures" with "societies"), but Juan Dominguez, a PhD student at the University of Melbourne, believes "different cultures" produce "different brains" and that cultural differences reflect different neurological functioning.…

Qualitative Migration Research in Europe: New issue of “Forum Qualitative Social Research”

Published on September 11, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Europe, fieldwork / methods, interdisciplinary, journal articles / papers, migration, Us and Them

How to do research on migration? Lots of interesting papers in the recent issue of the multilingual and interdisciplinary Open Access journal Forum: Qualitative Social Research.

“Qualitative Migration Research in Contemporary Europe” is the topic of the recent issue, and most papers deal with methodolocial questions

Maren Borkert and Carla De Tona for example write about “Issues Faced by Young European Researchers in Migration and Ethnic Studies” , especially when rearching abroad as “academic migrants”:

The term academic migrant refers to European academics, like the authors of this paper, who become more and more transnational while researching migration in Europe. As migrant European researchers we move to and settle in third-countries, often having to speak a new language, and learning to adjust to new social and cultural normativities, feeling the migration’s uprooting and re-grounding and, in short, becoming “foreigners” as the people who participate to our researches (who may or may not be from our home country). Although we may not call ourselves migrants, we end up experiencing migration in similar ways to the participants of our research.

The emerging issue for us is how does this particular transnational aspect of our positionality (of researching migrants as academic migrants) influence us as researchers, the dynamics we establish with our participants and the ultimate shape of our research?

>> read the whole paper

There are also case studies about Somali migrants in Finland, Greek musicians in Germany, cultural capital during migration and Reflecting Upon Interculturality in Ethnographic Filmmaking where Laura Catalán Eraso claims that ethnographic film is still very much an under-utilised research technique. Films may illuminate the “intercultural” dynamics between minority (participant) and majority (researcher) and challenge the traditional power relations between the researcher and his/her “subjects”:

[T]he filmmaker(s) will loose authority in the film and that authority will tend to get decentralised and shared among subjects. Ways of doing this include allowing subjects to: manage the camera; choose the shots that are used: and, give feedback on the end results. These techniques, not dissimilar to those advocated in other forms of qualitative enquiry, will hopefully create new possibilities for ethnographic film by allowing space for greater equality between, and more reflection by, researchers and participants.

In the introduction, the editors remind us of that…

migration is not a new phenomenon: human beings have always been moving to other places, other regions and other countries. What is “new” is the relatively recent invention and creation of national borders and the “imagining” of nation-states (ANDERSON, 1983, pp.5-7). These ideological processes make migration “international” and thus problematise the natural behaviour of people attempting to improve their everyday lives.

>> overview over all articles in Forum: Qualitative Social Research on Qualitative Migration Research in Europe

How to do research on migration? Lots of interesting papers in the recent issue of the multilingual and interdisciplinary Open Access journal Forum: Qualitative Social Research.

"Qualitative Migration Research in Contemporary Europe" is the topic of the recent issue, and…