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Young Muslims: Search for a True Islam – by Anthropologist Martijn de Koning

Published on March 28, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, religion cosmology, websites

Anthropologist Martijn de Koning (Leiden University, Netherlands)

Since the murder on Van Gogh radical Muslims are the centre of attention. However, it is still a minor group that is radicalizing. In this lecture the focus will be on the life of ordinary, not radical and not criminal, young Muslims and how they negotiate in different domains (especially internet) about what Islam is, what the importance of Islam is and how they should practice Islam. In the end some concluding remarks will be made on the relationship between ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ Islam. >> continue

SEE ALSO:
Anthropologist Martijn de Koning is one of the blogging anthropologists! I found his blog after he had left a message in my guestbook. He writes mostly in Dutch but has a huge collection of Islam-related links. Very interesting – and partly in English – is www.religionresearch.org, a blog by several academics who research religion including Martijn Koning. Check also their news aggregator with links to religion-related news stories from around the world!

Anthropologist Martijn de Koning (Leiden University, Netherlands)

Since the murder on Van Gogh radical Muslims are the centre of attention. However, it is still a minor group that is radicalizing. In this lecture the focus will be on the life of…

Book review: Reindeer People – Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia

Published on March 28, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Asia, books, culture traditions, indigenous people / minorities

Ronald Hutton, Times Online

Piers Vitebsky is one of a tiny number of British experts on the region and an internationally renowned anthropologist. This book “REINDEER PEOPLE: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia” is the record of successive visits that he has made over the past 17 years to live with members of a native people called the Eveny in the Verkhoyansk Mountains in the far north-east. Like his earlier work, it shows him to be both an excellent scholar and a gifted writer, with a feeling for landscape and character and a knack for metaphor and allusion. >> continue

SEE ALSO:
Piers Vitebsky: What is a shaman? – Worlds of the Shaman (Natural History, March 1997 / findarticles.com)
Peoples of the Russian North and Far East (Arctic Circle)

Ronald Hutton, Times Online

Piers Vitebsky is one of a tiny number of British experts on the region and an internationally renowned anthropologist. This book "REINDEER PEOPLE: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia" is the record of successive visits that…

The emerging field of commercial ethnography

Published on March 23, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology

SFweekly

Since October 2004 Jesse Kipp has been working at a top San Francisco advertising firm, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, where he operates simultaneously as an anthropologist, a market research assistant, and a documentarian. Kipp is the company’s answer to a burgeoning industrywide research movement called “commercial ethnography.”

The documentaries themselves are highly stylized romps into the inner lives of target audience members — everyone from football fans bitching about a cable outage during the big game to the unguarded talk of Lisa and Amanda, which will be used to inform a new advertising campaign for Britney Spears’ perfume, Curious. In the end, the agency uses the films both to woo new clients and to better understand and craft ad messages. >> continue

SFweekly

Book review: Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

Published on March 20, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, history, language

Martin Jacques, The Guardian

There are many ways of recounting the history of the world – via the rise and fall of civilisations, the fortunes of nation states, socio-economic systems and patterns, the development of technology, or the chronology of war and military prowess. This book tells the story through the rise and decline of languages. It is a compelling read, one of the most interesting books I have read in a long while.

Nicholas Ostler does not adopt a narrowly linguistic approach – based on the structure of languages and their evolution – but instead looks at the history of languages, the reasons for their rise and, as a rule, also their fall. While it is a history of languages, it is at the same time a history of the cultures and civilisations from which they sprang. >> continue

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

Martin Jacques, The Guardian

There are many ways of recounting the history of the world - via the rise and fall of civilisations, the fortunes of nation states, socio-economic systems and patterns, the development of technology, or the chronology of war…

Modern American family: Strained and losing intimacy

Published on March 20, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, culture traditions, Northern America, Us and Them

The intimate moments that once were the glue of American family life are disappearing amid job demands and nonstop activities. Scientists at UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families have spent the past four years observing 32 Los Angeles families in a study of how working America somehow gets it done. Day after day. “We’ve scheduled and outsourced a lot of our relationships,” says the study’s director, Elinor Ochs, a linguistic anthropologist. “There isn’t much room for the flow of life, those little moments when things happen spontaneously.

For Ochs, the most worrisome trend is how indifferently people treat each other, especially when they reunite at day’s end. In her view, the chilly exchanges repeated in so many of the study’s households suggests something has gone awry. >> continue