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The special thing about the Tibet protests

Published on March 24, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Asia, indigenous people / minorities, politics

Six months after the protests for democracy in Burma, we see similar things happen in Tibet. That’s of course not the first time but according to anthropologist Carole McGranahan, China has for the first time acknowledged that there is something like protests in Tibet. And that the protests are widespreead, committed by Tibetans from all backgrounds (monks, laypeople, and students, and by men and women, young and old) and not only by a few extremists.

“Knowing about it privately as they have for decades is one thing, but to acknowledge it publicly signals a turning point”, Carole McGranahan writes in her blog post at SavageMinds. For five decades, China has done everything they can to give the impression that resistance in Tibet is a rare and unwise exception to their benevolent rule.

>> read her whole post at Savage Minds

Savage Minds has collected more ressources on the situation in Tibet, see On Tibet. See also the Guardian special on Tibet and the overview by Global Voices

Additionally, Al Jazeera has a story about Xinjiang: China’s ‘other Tibet’

David Graeber: There never was a West! Democracy as Interstitial Cosmopolitanism

Do anthropologists have anything relevant to say about human rights?

Six months after the protests for democracy in Burma, we see similar things happen in Tibet. That's of course not the first time but according to anthropologist Carole McGranahan, China has for the first time acknowledged that there is something…

Launches new anthropology student e-journal

Published on March 11, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, journal articles / papers

The Association of Student Anthropologists (NASA) would like to have submissions from anthropology students worldwide for their new e-journal. The NASA will launch its first online publication under the banner of the 2008 American Anthropological Association conference theme: “Inclusion, Collaboration, and Engagement”, as Marc Hebert (University of South Florida) informs me in an email.

They seek scholarly submissions from undergraduate and graduate students worldwide about the application of anthropological theories and methods outside of academia or across disciplines for the purpose of exploring, problematizing, or addressing social problems.

The NASA also welcomes “innovative commentary submissions” that “express the next generation of anthropologists’ ideas, goals and beliefs of the direction our discipline should head, be it locally, nationally or globally.”

>> read the whole Call for Papers in the antropologi.info forum

Marianne Gullestad has passed away

Published on March 11, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, persons and theories

Yesterday, one of Norway’s most important anthropologists has passed away: Marianne Gullestad. I got to know it just a few hours ago, and MaterialWorld-blogger Daniel Miller has already made a post about her and has re-published the introduction he wrote to Gullestads book Kitchen Table Society:

Indeed, what made this such an important work when it first came out was, rather, that it was in many respects a conventional ethnography – though of the type of population that, on the whole, had not been the subject of conventional ethnographies. The topic was working class women in the town of Bergen on the West coast of Norway.

What made this special was that there was nothing special about these people. They were not being studied because they were a problem that academics were supposed to shed light on, such as drug-takers or the unemployed. They represented the neglected topic of the merely ordinary.

>> read the whole post “Marianne Gullestad (1946-2008)”

I have written severa posts on her work, one in English about her “best of” book Plausible Prejudice: Everyday Experiences and Social Images of Nation, Culture and Race. To understand the problems of the world today, we need to “decolonize anthropological knowledge”, she writes and lits five major challenges for the discipline of anthropology >> read the whole post “The Five Major Challenges for Anthropology”

Several papers by her are available online:

Marianne Gullestad: Blind Slaves of our Prejudices: Debating ‘Culture’ and ‘Race’ in Norway

Marianne Gullestad: Normalising racial boundaries. The Norwegian dispute about the term ‘neger’

Marianne Gullestad: Mohammed Atta and I. Identification, discrimination and the formation of sleepers

Marianne Gullestad: Invisible Fences: Egalitarianism, nationalism and racism

Yesterday, one of Norway's most important anthropologists has passed away: Marianne Gullestad. I got to know it just a few hours ago, and MaterialWorld-blogger Daniel Miller has already made a post about her and has re-published the introduction he wrote…

Ethnographic research: Why care about plagiarism?

Published on March 9, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, internet, journal articles / papers, technology, University / Academia

Educators complain about plagiarism. But it is not principally because material is too readily available that students copy and paste material from the internet to their papers. It’s because new forms of authorships are emerging online, anthropologist Susan D. Blum writes in Anthropology News March 2008.

Blum has done ethnographic research on plagiarism and college culture for three years at “Saint Pastoral’s” University.

Social websites like Wikipedia challenge the romantic notion of the author as the individual genius:

While the romantic notion of the author emphasized creation in a vacuum, without influence, touched only by inspiration from the individual’s genius, the new collectivized idea of the author celebrates the kind of creativity that comes from selecting, from accumulating a pastiche, a patchwork, a sample of others’ work. The line between creation and what “copyright fundamentalists” regard as theft is now completely— and consciously—fluid.

(…)

Collectively, one after another, contributors add to or edit Wikipedia articles, without directly requesting credit or payment. The living product is quite essentially collaborative, an accretion of many people’s words belonging to everyone and Common Sense and anthropological Sense no one simultaneously.

(…)

Sharing music, video, text and images is routine and simple on the “digital commons” with YouTube, Flickr and other file-sharing interfaces. Items often follow a circuitous path before they end up on some- one’s iPod or hard drive.

Maybe educators should care lass about plagiarism? Blum concludes:

Faculty can attempt to enforce traditional academic citation norms, but we are well advised to recognize that a large portion of the students we encounter do not share traditional academic values of originality, singularity and individualism in intellectual creation. In the area of authorship, educators’ common sense is not necessarily students’ common sense.

In some ways our students have become folk anthropologists, speaking out about the impossibility of singularity, the shared quality of discourse, the reality of fragments of texts incorporated into every utterance (or written document) and the collective nature of cultural creation. Now that’s a story!

>> read the whole article “The Internet, the Self, Authorship and Plagiarism” (pdf)

This is one of five articles on “Online Engagement” in Anthropology News March 2008.

New media and anthropology – AAA meeting part III

Plans to study anthropological online communities and Open Access movement

Educators complain about plagiarism. But it is not principally because material is too readily available that students copy and paste material from the internet to their papers. It's because new forms of authorships are emerging online, anthropologist Susan D. Blum…

The most compelling ethnographies

Published on March 8, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, books

We’ve been into this topic a few times before, but this might be the longest list of good ethnographies. CultureMatters-blogger Lisa Wynn not only lists her own favorite books but also several ethnographies that are particularily popular with students.

She writes that she only can think of a small handful of ethnographies that have affected her in the way that a good novel can. This is her list:

– Evans-Pritchard: Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic;
– Lila Abu-Lughod: Writing Women’s Worlds;
– Elizabeth Warnock Fernea: Guests of the Sheikh (not precisely an ethnography, more a memoir);
– Paul Willis: Learning to Labor;
– Philippe Bourgois: In Search of Respect;
– Amitav Ghosh: In an Antique Land;
– Joao Biehl: Vita;
– Levi-Strauss: Tristes Tropiques;
– Pierre Clastres: Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians.

She also reflects on some of her favorite examples of ethnographic fiction.

>> read the whole post on Culture Matters

UPDATE: For more suggestions and comments see the post on the blog Entertaining Research: Amitav Ghosh among most compelling ethnographies

Alex Golubs list on popular ethnographies

Good anthropological writing: “Nuclear Borderlands” and “Global Body Shopping”

Why is anthropological writing so boring? New issue of Anthropology Matters

We've been into this topic a few times before, but this might be the longest list of good ethnographies. CultureMatters-blogger Lisa Wynn not only lists her own favorite books but also several ethnographies that are particularily popular with students.

She…