fieldwork / methods | antropologi.info

Trying to catch up… (notes)

Published on June 6, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, corporate & business anthropology, ethics, fieldwork / methods, indigenous people / minorities, internal notes

(post in progress) Threatening deadlines prevented me from updating this blog as often as I should/ would like to and I haven’t checked the news for a while. Here are at least some of recent blog posts:

Alex Golub: Article on the Ipili in the Ottowa Citizen

We’re at War: Savage Minds about anthropology and the CIA, discussing a recent article by John Gledhill

Cicilie Fagerlid: Politics in the banlieues… encore

New paper by Mizuko Ito: Kids’ participation in new media cultures

MindSpace: Notes on corporate ethnography

Mindspace: The ethnographer as an outsider and Fieldnotes: Insiders and Outsiders in Ethnography

FieldNotes: Recent News Stories: East Africa and Corporate Ethnography

(post in progress) Threatening deadlines prevented me from updating this blog as often as I should/ would like to and I haven't checked the news for a while. Here are at least some of recent blog posts:

Alex Golub: Article on…

USA: Censorship threatens fieldwork – A call for resistance

Published on May 12, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, fieldwork / methods, politics, University / Academia

Not so easy to be researcher in the USA: There’s more and more censorship. Not long ago I wrote about Iranians not allowed to publish papers. Another form of censorship are the Internal Review Boards (IRB ). In Anthropology News May, James Boster calls for a three graded stages of response: Reform, Resolve and Resist:

The faculty head of the University of Connecticut IRB recently told me that the IRB would not now permit me to do the field work I have recently completed with the Waorani, because she considered Waorani as far too belligerent for me to have risked my own safety in doing research with them. It was a shock to learn that I could be regarded a human subject of my own research.
(…)
Many human scientists, anthropologists included, have experienced ever-increasing burdens of regulation and oversight by IRBs in their research with human subjects. Most of what is onerous about the regulation has nothing to do with providing protection to human subjects and has everything to do with requiring human scientists to submit to the arbitrary exercise of power and authority.
(…)
IRBs at a number of universities have instituted policies that have no foundation in ethics or law, ones that violate our most sacred academic freedoms and civil rights. The first amendment to the constitution states: “Congress shall pass no law abridging the freedom of speech.” Yet what is regulated here is speech—the freedom of investigators to speak with other members of the society. The freedom to find things out is a basic human right, not a privilege to be licensed, especially when the obstacles to inquiry have never been demonstrated to prevent any actual harm to human subjects. The unconstitutionality of these restraints on free speech are clearly and comprehensively laid out by Philip Hamburger in a 2005 article for the Supreme Court Review, “The New Censorship: Institutional Review Boards.”

>> read the whole text in Anthropology News May 2006 (link updated)

Another anthropology-specific problem is mentioned in an article by As Rena Lederman: IRBs are comprised mostly of researchers from non-ethnographic disciplines “folks whose picture of “real research” looks nothing like ethnographic fieldwork.” Therefor this advice (!):

So it is crucial that your board view participant observation as a sound, productive research method. This cannot be taken for granted. If IRB members are mystified or horrified by participant observation—if they imagine that it is useless or even itself unethical—then your proposal may be denied even if your project’s topic is completely innocuous!

>> read the whole story in Anthropology News

>> Blog: Censorship and Institutional Review Boards

Not so easy to be researcher in the USA: There's more and more censorship. Not long ago I wrote about Iranians not allowed to publish papers. Another form of censorship are the Internal Review Boards (IRB ). In Anthropology…

Anthropologist observes native academics in their natural habitat

Published on March 26, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, fieldwork / methods, interdisciplinary, University / Academia

Anthropologists seem to get more interested in academic culture. Not long ago we heard about anthropologists studying students. Now, anthropologist Rena Lederman is doing fieldwork among her her fellow academics. She is writing a book called “Anthropology Among the Disciplines,” which will examine the distinctions among several academic fields and explore how and when those borders become important, according to News at Princeton.

In an era when academia is emphasizing interdisciplinarity, Lederman sees significant differences in how anthropologists, sociologists, historians and social psychologists approach their fields, she says:

“My topic is not conventional perhaps, but my approach is classic participant observation: I attend closely to how disciplinary distinctions come up in everyday conversations. I pay attention to how scholars in one field talk about other fields or how they might defend their own if they feel it’s being challenged.”

“She’s one of a handful of people who’s taking the opportunity to reflect ethnographically on the kinds of institutional lives that academics live,” said Don Brenneis, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Santa Cruz. “It’s complicated for different reasons when you’re working with your own tribe.

>> read the whole story in News at Princeton

To provide better services at the library: Another anthropologist is studying college students

Fieldwork as cab-driver: "An amazing other world"

Published on March 20, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, fieldwork / methods, Northern America

(LINKS UPDATED 15.9.2022) It seems as if anthropologist Robert Leonard has written a fascinating book according the Des Moines Register. It’s called Yellow Cab:

When anthropologist Robert Leonard took a second job as a cab driver out of economic necessity, he found an “amazing other world.” He learned about capitalism from drug dealers and prostitutes and hope from carnival workers; he learned about broken families from businessmen and thankfulness from broken vagabonds.

The cab as an ideal place to conduct fieldwork? Leonard says:

“People, in general, are unappreciated. No one says, ‘Tell me about yourself.’ We don’t ask each other that. But people want to talk about themselves. They don’t want to be in a cab, so they talk, knowing they are not likely to see you again.”

“You develop a sixth sense about people just by how they look at you. I’m an observer. I’m used to looking at things closely. I could sense danger by the way they approached the cab. But it really reinforced my positive view of humanity. I met a lot of the smartest people I’ve met in my life.”

>> read the whole story in the Des Moines Register

(LINKS UPDATED 15.9.2022) It seems as if anthropologist Robert Leonard has written a fascinating book according the Des Moines Register. It's called Yellow Cab:

When anthropologist Robert Leonard took a second job as a cab driver out of economic necessity,…

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)