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Anthropology and the World: What has happened at the EASA conference?

Published on September 25, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, University / Academia

Last week, the bi-annual conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) has taken place in Bristol. The theme sounds extremely interesting:

The theme [Europe and the World ]encourages us to consider the global dimensions of particular ethnographic encounters. The wider interconnections, the spread of ideas, the dynamic relationships and processes which shape the everyday activity of social life; these lie increasingly at the centre of our methodological and theoretical preoccupations as anthropologists. Mediated by individual, institutional, national developments of enormous complexity, this link between global interchange and local creativity deserves our systematic attention and analysis.

Around 1000 anthropologists from many countries in Europe (and other continents?) might have been there. I’ve searched the news and blogs but haven’t find any information on what has gone on there.

I only found EASA-related posts on two blogs – on Erkan’ Field diary (on lost luggage on his way home) and on Savage Minds (notes by Maia who is going to present a paper there). No newspaper has mentioned the largest European Anthropology conference about a topic that is in the news every day…

UPDATE: I’ve found this blog entry:

Things I learned at an anthropology conference in Bristol:
1) Apparently it is not important to say anything in conferences as long as you are talking.
2) There is nothing more depressing than a passionless tango. Especially when it is done to honor someone who has passed away. If I die, please do not ask to anorexic British anthropologists to dance the tango in honor of me. Or maybe do. It would be my last laugh as you would have to endure it and I wouldn’t/
3) The surest way to not keep my attention for an hour long presentation is to begin with a paragraph overflowing with alliterations. You will think you are clever. I will not.

UPDATE 3:

Now online: EASA-conference papers on media anthropology

UPDATE 2:

A few more words by Erkan Saka:

Workshop based organization and network meetings in the evenings seem to be productive. However, I could not escape from thinking that compare to AAA, EASA has a really long way to go. I wasnt’t thrilled with any theoretical development. AAA seems to be heading what is the newest in the field. EASA is yet working on the organization and deciding for near future research strategy.

What’s the point of anthropology conferences?

More and more anthropologists, but they’re absent from public debates – “Engaging Anthropology” (1)

Last week, the bi-annual conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) has taken place in Bristol. The theme sounds extremely interesting:

The theme [Europe and the World ]encourages us to consider the global dimensions of particular ethnographic encounters. The…

Blogging and Public Anthropology: When free speech costs a career

Published on September 25, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, ethics, politics, University / Academia

As many of us know, Yale anthropologist David Graeber has been fired for his anarchist activism. He’s not the only one who was punished for leaving the academic ivory tower. More and more academics have started blogging, exposing their personal opinions to the world. The Yale Herald has an interesting story about “how profs’ political advocacy outside academia can threaten their success within it”:

The recent explosion of professors using their academic bully pulpits to expound on everything from federal sentencing law to the need for a Palestinian state raises questions of responsibility and consequence. Every year, more professors join the blogosphere, expanding into a medium that lets them write anything about anything and makes them advocates as well as teachers.

Mazin Qumsiyeh for example was hired by the Yale School of Medicine:

He had advocated locally and nationally for Palestinian rights under his title as a Yale professor. Five years later, he was looking for a new job.

Qumsiyeh is the editor of Qumsiyeh: A Human Rights Web.

Last year, Yale decided to woo Professor Juan Cole away from Michigan. Then it changed its mind:

The provost’s office refused to comment on the reasons for his rejection; Dr. Cole refused to comment on this story. But many eyes turned toward Cole’s blog as a factor in the decision, one that may have raised his profile and polarized opinion on his candidacy. On his site, “Informed Comment,” Cole has provided commentary on the news coming out of the Middle East since 2001.

And the popular anarchist anthropologist David Graeber was invited to give this year’s Malinowski lecture, an honor given only to the world’s most promising young anthropologists. His contract went up for renewal last year:

He had been a controversial figure, but now finds sleeping on couches in his friends’ New Haven apartments after giving up his lease.
(…)
When Graeber returned from a one-year sabbatical in 2002—having joined forces in the interim with anti-war and anti-globalization groups such as the Direct Action Network and Ya Basta — he said he found his welcome back much colder than his farewell. “I thought a ‘hello’ would have been reasonable,” he said. “All of the sudden, no one was talking to me.” He continued to be a prolific writer and researcher, but his future no longer looked so rosy.

>> read the whole story in The Yale Herald (LINK UPDATED 3.7.2022)

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

Engaged anthropologists beaten by the Mexican police

As many of us know, Yale anthropologist David Graeber has been fired for his anarchist activism. He's not the only one who was punished for leaving the academic ivory tower. More and more academics have started blogging, exposing their personal…

Rather texting than talking, blogging instead of sex in the bedroom?

Published on September 24, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, technology

From the exotic world of technology and culture: “I feel more comfortable texting friends, because face-to-face you run out of things to talk about,” a 17-year-old American high school senior said. “When you’re texting, the conversation doesn’t have any awkwardness. And when you run out of things to say, it’s over.”

Anthropology Professor Jan English-Lueck, who with her colleague, Professor Chuck Darrah, is conducting the Silicon Valley Cultures Project, explains:

Teenagers and early 20-somethings would tell me that things like face-to-face and telephone and even e-mail are a cold medium and you can’t trust them, but the way you can really be authentic is through texting and instant messaging.
(…)
You are in more control when you’re doing the texting and instant messaging than when you’re in a group of people talking at once, with confusing messages that you have to unravel. In a group you’re not presenting the real you, you’re just reacting.

>> read the whole story in the San Francisco Chronicle

And according to The News & Observer, more and more technology is ending up in the bedroom, “laptops shares couples’ most intimate space”:

Dr. Enoch Choi, 36, and his wife, Tania, 33, who have been married 10 years, both take laptops to bed to write their blogs. “I suppose I started the trend,” said Choi, a physician in Palo Alto, Calif. “But now my wife is just as much the nighty-night PowerBook key-banger, blogging away for her friends.”
(…)
Sholes lies in bed and exchanges instant messages with her husband, who is elsewhere in the house on his own computer. “We discuss things, you might even say argue,” she said. “The IM will often eliminate a lot of the tone, and we can discuss things a little bit better.”

>> read the whole story in The News and Observer

How internet changes the life among the First Nations in Canada

From the exotic world of technology and culture: "I feel more comfortable texting friends, because face-to-face you run out of things to talk about," a 17-year-old American high school senior said. "When you're texting, the conversation doesn't have any…

“Good story about cannibals. Pity it’s not even close to the truth”

Published on September 22, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, culture traditions, indigenous people / minorities, Pacific Oceania, Us and Them

Great commentary (and a good example of engaged anthropology) by anthropologist Sarah Hewat about a recent TV story on Wa Wa, a Korowai boy in Papua, who should be “rescued” from “cannibals”. Hewat says, the journalists should have read some work by anthropologist Rupert Stasch before talking about cannibalism. Stasch did his doctoral research on the Korowai of West Papua in the mid-1990s:

If they did, they would learn that as a Korowai, Wa-Wa does not live as a member of a lost tribe, tyrannised by tradition. (…)
The Korowai may live in the forest, but that does not exclude them from having a certain style of modern life. Korowai may fly in planes, go to church, attend school, have meetings with government officials, or sell produce at the market — or gaharu (agarwood) to black-market traders. Even in the peripheries of Korowai territory, where Wa-Wa lives, people no longer kill and eat witches. Times have changed, and in any case, they fear the barbaric repercussions of the Indonesian police.

Part of the story is Paul Raffaele, who brought the TV-team to Wa-Wa. Raffaele has written this doubtful article I’ve mentioned two weeks ago “They still eat their fellow tribesmen”. Hewat writes about Raffaele:

His work does not enhance understanding of the KorowaI but panders to a Western public hungry to consume the primitive.

The Korowai, like other tribal groups portrayed by Raffaele, are presented by him through a series of either/ors: either they are bright-eyed upholders of a fragile Eden, or else they are darkly menacing, horrifying us with their cruel customs.

But if we pay attention to who they are rather than what we want them to be, then we will find ordinary people trying to come to terms with their place in the world. The Korowai, like other ethnic peoples in their position, are simply struggling to engage state and global forces in their own way.

In her view, the journalists should have rather talked with her and other people who have lived in Papua for years, about “the cannibalistic nature of the tourism industry” there. “Primitiveness” is, she writes, after natural resources, a prize commodity in Papua. Tour operators have perfected the art of selling “first contact tours”. She continues:

I have known locals who have been paid a measly sum to take off their clothes, brandish spears and speak of a barbaric past to satisfy the voyeurism of white tourists, journalists or filmmakers seeking a close encounter with our ancestral past. The cash-strapped locals who stage such performances are, unfortunately, adjuncts to people who get paid much more to bring Westerners to them.

(…)

Our debates about human rights should focus on real issues: supporting the growth of democracy and the rule of law in Papua, building a strong education system that extends to the villages, and, not least, interrogating the exploitative relations between the West and the “primitive other” in the international tourist industry.

>> read the whole story in The Age

PS: Thanks to Peter Keough for alterting me to this article and sorry for not having posted more often recently

UPDATE (24.9.06): I’ve just found an Sydney Morning Herald article where Raffaele conceded he did not know Stasch’s research, doesn’t speak Indonesian or any Papuan language and had spent less than six weeks of his life in the restive province. And Wa-Wa is apparently not Korowai after all. Anthropologist Chris Ballard says, says that Raffaele, two television networks and millions of viewers were misled: The Korowai depend on the tourism trade and have learnt to say what rich foreigners want to hear. “Most of these groups have 10 years’ experience in feeding this [cannibal] stuff to tourists,” Ballard said.

MORE ABOUT THIS ISSUE:

Savage Minds: Breaking News: Intrepid Explorer’s First Contact with a Vanishing Race of Noble Savages

Australian networks clash over cannibal boy (afp, 15.9.06)

Spears fly over ‘cannibal’ expedition (The Age, 15.9.06)

Experts decry cannibalism claims (The Age, 15.9.06)

“They still eat their fellow tribesmen”

Brief history of cannibal controversies

Our obsession with the notion of the primitive society

Ancient People: We are All Modern Now

On Savage Minds: Debate on the Construction of Indigenous Culture by Anthropologists

Great commentary (and a good example of engaged anthropology) by anthropologist Sarah Hewat about a recent TV story on Wa Wa, a Korowai boy in Papua, who should be "rescued" from "cannibals". Hewat says, the journalists should have read…

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…