fieldwork / methods | antropologi.info

More and more anthropologists are recruited to service military operations

Published on May 28, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, ethics, fieldwork / methods, journal articles / papers, Northern America, University / Academia

The connections between anthropologists, military counterinsurgency experts and intelligence agencies are multiplying and deepening. It is well known that anthropologists work for the military. But government agencies may be only the tip of the iceberg. Contractors to the military are probably employing many more anthropologists as the privatization of the military grows apace, Roberto J. González writes in Anthropology Today June 2007 (to be published in a couple of weeks).

I quote his “small sample of military contractors currently recruiting anthropologists to service military operations”:

1. BAE Systems is advertising a ‘field anthropologist’ position for deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan for what appears to be counterinsurgency support work. The job is ‘designed to dramatically improve the collection, interpretation, understanding, operational application, and sharing of local cultural knowledge… [it] facilitates the collection, analysis, archiving and application of cultural information relevant to the unit commander’s operational decision-making process.’

2. Hicks & Associates (a subsidiary of the multinational Science Applications International Corporation) is advertising a ‘research assistant’ position for a project that ‘investigates the evolution of subnational identities within and across states, and the implication of culture on attitudinal perspectives of other groups… [in] Tunisia and other North African nations… the position requires a background in anthropology… Arabic language skills are a plus.’

3. L-3 Communications is advertising a position for ‘cultural expert – Middle East’. Duties include ‘technical intelligence data gathering and analysis skills and abilities to manage, develop, implement, and administer intelligence analysis programs and policies for customer applications’. Candidate ‘MUST be fluent in Arabic, Pashtu, or Persian-Farsi… MUST have knowledge of prevalent Sunni and Shia tribes in the Middle East… US Citizens applying must hold PhD in History or Anthropology’.

4. Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI) is advertising a ‘COIN operations specialist’ position in order to ‘provide Brigade Combat Team or Regiment, battalion and company-level leaders of Coalition units and brigade and battalion-level leaders of Transition Teams (MiTT/NPTT/BTT) and the Iraqi Security Forces (Iraqi Army and Iraqi National Police) with a fundamental understanding of COIN principles, lessons learned and TTPs required to execute full-spectrum operations in the Iraqi Theater of Operations… a Master’s Degree in Military Science, Psychology, Cultural Anthropology’ is preferred and military experience is a requirement.

5. Booz Allen Hamilton is advertising a position for a ‘war on terrorism analyst’ who will conduct ‘research into adversary and target country elements of power, including political, military, economic, social, infrastructure, and information (PMESII) systems to assist military planners… conduct evaluations of terrorist adversary and target country response to effects based activities… [and] work with joint military planners and the inter-agency community to determine planning options to achieve War on Terrorism efforts and objectives’. Qualifications include a BA or BS degree, with ‘knowledge of political science, economics, social anthropology, infrastructure, or information operations preferred’.

6. The Mitre Corporation is advertising a ‘sr. artificial intelligence engineer’ position ‘to play a role in applying modeling and simulation as an experimental approach to social and behavioral science problems of national significance… [and] to apply social sciences to critical national security issues.’ Desirable applicants will have a ‘PhD in a social science discipline (e.g. anthropology, sociology, sociolinguistics, medical anthropology, cultural geography, comparative social and cognitive psychology, cultural communication studies, science/technology studies, international labor/industrial relations, industrial/organizational psychology, comparative political science, public administration.)’

UPDATE:

Protests against British research council: “Recruits anthropologists for spying on muslims”

Summary of another article in Anthropology Today June 2007: >> The dangerous militarisation of anthropology

Anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani: “Peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention”

Embedded anthropology? Anthropologist studies Canadian soldiers in the field

Fieldwork reveals: Bush administration is lying about the “war on terror” in the Sahara

San Jose: American Anthropologists Stand Up Against Torture and the Occupation of Iraq and AAA Press Release: Anthropologists weigh in on Iraq, torture at annual meeting

“War on terror”: CIA sponsers anthropologists to gather sensitive information / see also debate on this on Savage Minds

Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relations

Bush, “war of terror” and the erosion of free academic speech: Challenges for anthropology

USA: Censorship threatens fieldwork – A call for resistance

Two Books Explore the Sins of Anthropologists Past and Present

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…

“A new approach to the collection of traditional Aboriginal music”

Published on February 28, 2007 by lorenz Posted in aboriginees, anthropology in the news, culture traditions, fieldwork / methods, music, technology

The days of anthropologists taking recordings away to Canberra where they might as well be lost to the community forever, are now gone according to ABC Radio (Australia) in a story about the National Recording Project. Its aim is to document the traditions of Indigenous Australia.

What’s different here is that performers, and language experts from the communities are recognised as co-researchers, alongside the university based musicologists, linguists and anthropologists. Instead of the music being recorded onto tapes and taken away to vast archives in the southern cities, it’s recorded digitally and is stored on solar powered local computers in remote communities.

>> read more at ABC Radio

In their paper The National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia: year one in review, the authors Allan Marett, Mandawuy Yunupingu, Marcia Langton, Neparrnga Gumbula, Linda Barwick and Aaron Corn write in the abstract:

Many Indigenous performers now keep recordings of their forebears’ past performances and listen to them for inspiration before performing themselves. In recent years, community digital archives have been set up in various Australian Indigenous communities. Not only can recordings reinforce memory and facilitate the recovery of lost repertoire, they can also provide inspiration for creative extensions of tradition.

>> read the whole paper (pdf, 596kb)

There are several related papers in the Sydney eScholarship Repository

“Aboriginal knowledge is science”

How internet changes the life among the First Nations in Canada

Multimedia Music Ethnography of Yodelling and Alphorn Blowing

Aboriginees in Australia: Why talking about culture?

The emerging research field of medical ethnomusicology: How music fights AIDS

On the Roots of Ethnic Music: Identity and Global Romanticism – Open Access Musicology Journal

Panic, joy and tears during fieldwork: Anthropology Matters 1/2007 about emotions

Published on February 19, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, fieldwork / methods, journal articles / papers, Us and Them

How to understand religious experiences when you have not ‘experienced’ the experiences? What is the function of emotions in the anthropological research process? Do emotions operate as ‘anthropology’s taboo’? Or are they key tools in our understanding and openings to our ‘informants’? And what are the effects of the emotional appeal of human rights activism on the resulting work?

The new issue of Anthropology Matters – one of the few online journals in anthropology – focuses an very interesting topic: Emotions – both as a state or research method during fieldwork and object of study. Editor Ingie Hovland writes in her introduction:

Emotions are inextricably tied up in our anthropological research and writing-in our apprehensive anticipation of the field, our feelings of helplessness once there, our anger at ‘informants’, our moments of panic, exuberance or exhaustion, our joy over the development of meaningful relationships and our excitement when we are ‘struck’ by something, and the despair, resignation or satisfaction that accompany writing up.

Yet these emotions are often dismissed in a number of curious ways: frequently left out of anthropological research methods courses, frequently edited out of ethnographic texts, admonished when they slip into PhD seminars, in general confined to personal fieldnotes, at times turned into jokes or asides, and at other times treated with uncertainty, embarrassment or silence.

How has this state of affairs come about? Is it only due to anthropology’s over-reliance on the Western academy and its Enlightenment split between knowing and feeling, turning emotions into the dangerous ‘other’ of knowledge? Or does it go beyond the question of hierarchies of knowledge and probe into the regulatory regimes of the anthropological community itself, turning emotions into an object of discipline?

>> overview over all articles in Anthropology Matters 1/2007

As we remember, blogger Antropyton, currently on fieldwork in Nicaragua has been very open concerning her emotions recently.

How to understand religious experiences when you have not 'experienced' the experiences? What is the function of emotions in the anthropological research process? Do emotions operate as 'anthropology's taboo'? Or are they key tools in our understanding and openings…

Fieldblogging from Nicaragua

Published on February 9, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, fieldwork / methods, Latin- and Central America, University / Academia

desk It’s a privilege to be an anthropologist on fieldwork. Reading Cicilie’s field blog from Paris and now also Antropyton’s field blog from Nicaragua makes me wonder: Why am I still sitting on my messy desk (picture) in Oslo?

A few weeks ago, Antropyton has arrived in Nicaragua, and has now started blogging about her experiences including her mixed feelings before she left Norway:

I was terrified by where we were supposed to live, by not understanding Nicaraguan Spanish (especially my hosts!), by not having a will to get to know them, by the scorching heat and by all my ideas dying in the shadow of volcanoes! I wasn’t on cloud nine at that time. Frankly speaking, excitement that was accompanying me for so long, disappeared as if by magic.

But then in Latin-America, everything changed:

Once I landed in San Jose in Costa Rica, I did realize that reading anthropology is something totally different than DOING anthropology.
(…)
I knew at once that this was going to be hard. But I was excited. Still, I had the will to conquer the world and carry out what I had planned the last few months. The world was new and beautiful and waiting for me.
(…)
It’s much better now, as one could suppose. I’ve started classes and tamed the city. Usually I don’t need much time to adapt myself to new environments. Albert Camus has a point in one of his essays (…) Like me, after a night in a hotel, the next morning he goes out on the street and click! you feel at home.

>> read the whole entry “Bienvenido”

Her most recent entry is about Nicaraguan conference culture:

The event was inaugurated with a national anthem, something that gave a dignity to the event. And the opening words seemed to go on endlessly. Every member of the organizing committee was welcomed and mentioned by name, academic title, organisations and institutions one belongs to and a post one has.

(…)

Every presentations was followed by a discussion that almost always ended with talk about politics, the new government and changes in policy that are essential to improve the health condition for the people. (…)What I observed was that presentations from Sweden (the conference was organized in cooperation with Lund University) were more “society friendly”. I mean that they presented not only results from their research, but also suggestions for how to apply this knowledge into society.

>> read the whole post ” III Conference on Multidisciplinary Environmental Research, Managua”

Also take a look at her pictures of volcano Cerro Negro and her new hometown Leon.

UPDATE (14.2.07): What happened? In her newest post she asks us Do we need/have to like our informants?

Open Source Fieldwork! Show how you work!

Paper by Erkan Saka: Blogging as a Research Tool for Ethnographic Fieldwork

Fieldwork in Papua New Guinea: Who are the exotic others?

On fieldwork: “Blogging sharpens the attention”

Fieldwork as cab-driver: “An amazing other world”

It's a privilege to be an anthropologist on fieldwork. Reading Cicilie's field blog from Paris and now also Antropyton's field blog from Nicaragua makes me wonder: Why am I still sitting on my messy desk (picture) in Oslo?

A few weeks…