search expand

Future Fields – New Issue of Anthropology Matters is out!

Anthropology Matters in one of the few anthropological online journals – and an excellent one! Finally, their issue 2 / 2004 (!) is put online. In this issue, they bring together eleven papers that were first presented and discussed at the Future Fields conference held in Oxford in December 2003.

From the Introduction by Tom Rice and Mette Louise Berg:
“As research interests of anthropologists have changed, so have the types of fieldworks that we undertake. Yet the ideal of long-term fieldwork in a rural location among non-Western peoples still exerts a powerful influence on the discipline. While traditional methods such as long-term site work and participant observation are still valid, they now must be complemented by innovative methods that respond to contemporary epistemological challenges. The very notion of ‘the field’ itself may need critical questioning.”

Among the articles we find:

The making of the fieldworker: debating agency in elites research.
Mattia Fumanti (University of Manchester)

Cyberethnography as home-work.
Adi Kuntsman (Lancaster University).

Finding a middle ground between extremes: notes on researching transnational crime and violence.
Hannah E. Gill (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford).

Devising a new approach to capitalism at home.
Kaori O’Connor (University College London).

Fieldnotes on some cockroaches at SOAS and in Stavanger, Norway.
Ingie Hovland (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London).

Under the shadow of guns. Negotiating the flaming fields of caste/class war in Bihar, India.
George Kunnath (School of Oriental and African Studies).

Studying-up those who fell down: elite transformation in Nepal.
Stefanie Lotter (University of Heidelberg).

>> continue

Anthropology Matters in one of the few anthropological online journals - and an excellent one! Finally, their issue 2 / 2004 (!) is put online. In this issue, they bring together eleven papers that were first presented and discussed at…

Read more

Beyond Ethnic Boundaries? Anthropological study on British Asian Cosmopolitans

Anthropologist Cicilie Fagerlid (University of Oslo) has recently published her thesis about young British Asians on the web. In her introduction, she writes:

“Society cannot remain a society if people feel excluded on basis of what characterises them as a category. The imagined category Britishness must not exclude the imagined category Asianness. How is the interface between recognition for difference, societal belonging and individual freedom played out?

This thesis is based on 11 months fieldwork among, roughly, 30 British Asians, aged 20 to 30, in London in 1999. With the anthropological focus on the micro level, on the experiences of socially and culturally embedded individuals, I hope to show how Britain, step by step, is moving in the direction of a cosmopolitan society.

By focusing on the individual negotiation, the diversity that appears indicates that their British Asianness can be contained by neither an old idea of Britishness nor essential traits of Asianness.”

>> download the thesis (459 kb, pdf) (updated with copy)

Anthropologist Cicilie Fagerlid (University of Oslo) has recently published her thesis about young British Asians on the web. In her introduction, she writes:

"Society cannot remain a society if people feel excluded on basis of what characterises them as a category.…

Read more

Ethnographic lecture confronts female gang myths

The Lantern, Ohio State University

In a presentation titled “The Politics of Representation,” ethnographer Marie “Keta” Miranda addressed the general misrepresentation of gang members, but focused largely on women. She discussed the knowledge she gained through her ethnographic collaboration with Chicana youths in Oakland, Calif., published in the 2003 book “Homegirls in the Public Sphere”.

It is important to recognize that women in gangs do have agency and they do make significant decisions. She said the gangs she studied in northern California were unique because they consisted entirely of young women. Miranda stressed the need for people in power to change their approach in order to provide more understanding of subculture groups. >> continue

SEE ALSO:
Homegirls in the Public Sphere – Reviewed by Ramona Lee Pérez, New York University (Association of Feminist Anthropology)

The Lantern, Ohio State University

In a presentation titled "The Politics of Representation," ethnographer Marie "Keta" Miranda addressed the general misrepresentation of gang members, but focused largely on women. She discussed the knowledge she gained through her ethnographic collaboration with Chicana…

Read more

Stories of an African Bar Girl – “an ethnography done by an illiterate”

Anthropologist Eric Gable, allAfrica.com

It is hard to decide what to call this remarkable book, the first of two volumes. It is for the most part a collection of stories told by a West African bar girl,”Hawa,” to anthropologist and musicologist John Chernoff in the mid 1970s. She tells about her life as a girl in a Muslim village and as a young woman in Accra, Lomé, and several other places, the lives of her fellow bar girls and about the men (mostly European but also African) she encountered, took from, gave to and left.

Chernoff wants the reader to approach Hawa’s stories as “an ethnography done by an illiterate.” Hawa is not only an ethnographic subject; she is also an observer, an ethnographer. Like all ethnographers her observations are partial, skewed, but also enlightening. >> continue

Anthropologist Eric Gable, allAfrica.com

It is hard to decide what to call this remarkable book, the first of two volumes. It is for the most part a collection of stories told by a West African bar girl,"Hawa," to anthropologist and musicologist…

Read more

Urban anthropology Inc. shares stories of Milwaukee’s homeless people

Greater Milwaukee Today

Over a three-year period of time from 2000-2003, Urban Anthropology Inc., a Milwaukee nonprofit organization, deployed a handful of anthropologists, anthropology interns and former homeless individuals to document 109 stories of homelessness. The subjects, who were paid $5 and agreed to be tape recorded described life before being homeless, the path that led to their homelessness, life as homeless and, where applicable, how they got off the streets.

Dr. Jill Florence Lackey, Urban Anthropology executive director, says the homeless study fits into her organization’s mission of preventing and abolishing racism/ethnocentrism and creating bridges among cultural groups >> continue

SEE ALSO:
Homepage of Urban Anthropology Inc. (UrbAn)

Greater Milwaukee Today

Over a three-year period of time from 2000-2003, Urban Anthropology Inc., a Milwaukee nonprofit organization, deployed a handful of anthropologists, anthropology interns and former homeless individuals to document 109 stories of homelessness. The subjects, who were paid $5…

Read more