anthropology in the news | antropologi.info

“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

How do low-cost airlines influence how people and money travel?

Published on February 28, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Europe, globalisation, migration, tourism

The International Herald Tribune writes about how European low-cost airlines “are drawing a new map of how people and money travel in Europe”. An example:

Andrzej Majewski, a Pole who works as a thoracic surgeon in Britain, catches a ride to the airport in Wroclaw on Sundays and hops a Ryanair flight to his hospital in Nottingham, England. Most Fridays he commutes home to southwest Poland. The flights cost him about $50 each way. “It takes about three hours, and I’m eating lunch at my house,” Majewski said.

“The low-cost airlines really facilitate a type of hypermobility for the public at large to do anything from leisure to business, to new careers”, Steven Vertovec, a professor of transnational anthropology at Oxford University comments.

But not everyone is happy with Europeans’ mobility. People in countries served by budget airlines complain that British bachelor and bachelorette parties are taking over Eastern European cities like Riga.

“I know about guys who go to Prague for a weekend of cheap beer, prostitutes and fighting. “People there really complain about it — and that’s due to low-cost airline”, Vertovec says.

>> read the whole story in the IHT (link updated)

The article is good PR for RyanAir as it is not mentioned that somebody has to pay for the low prices

Vertovec is director of the Oxford Center on Migration Policy and Society. The center has published lots of working papers online. I’ve written about one of them before “No Pizza without Migrants”: Between the Politics of Identity and Transnationalism by Susanne Wessendorf.

The International Herald Tribune writes about how European low-cost airlines "are drawing a new map of how people and money travel in Europe". An example:

Andrzej Majewski, a Pole who works as a thoracic surgeon in Britain, catches a ride to…

In India: Many anthropology departments are shutting down

Published on February 28, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Asia, University / Academia

Anthropology in India is losing relevance. Many anthropology departments are shutting down, especially in Western India. “Gifted anthropologists” are also shifting to other professions. At the Second Indian Anthropological Congress, KK Basa, director of the anthropology museum Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya, said anthropological theory needed to keep pace with rapid globalisation.

“Anthropology as a discipline developed in the colonial period is fast losing relevance. It needs to adapt to the transition taking place today,” said Basa according to Express India.

Reading this I wonder what kind of anthropology is practiced in India?

“Discuss politics!” – How anthropologists in Indonesia engage with the public

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

Why anthropology fails to arouse interest among the public – Engaging Anthropology (2)

Riots in France and silent anthropologists

Chronicles Women’s Social Movements in India

The Rediff Interview/Nandini Chattopadhyay: Music and Protest

Why American shopping culture is rejected in India

Anthropology in India is losing relevance. Many anthropology departments are shutting down, especially in Western India. "Gifted anthropologists" are also shifting to other professions. At the Second Indian Anthropological Congress, KK Basa, director of the anthropology museum Indira Gandhi…

Job offer: Anthropologists needed for development of tools for ageing populations

Published on February 22, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, interdisciplinary

Anthropologist Simon Roberts at INTEL in Ireland asked me to blog about this job offer (pdf) that actually is a good example of applied anthropology. “The jobs will suit people who are interested in working at the exciting intersection of technology, medicine, gerontology and policy”, he writes:

Successful candidates would undertake ethnographic research with three ageing cohorts, mainly in the Dublin area. They would also examine the wider contexts of ageing in Ireland – community services/projects.

Their research would inform the work of world class clinicians and technologists who are developing technologies of a preventative and diagnostic nature – for use both within a clinical and domestic setting.

The researchers will be expected to produce agenda setting research, which influences the design of tools and interventions suitable for ageing populations and communicate their work and findings to TRIL members and a broader audience through peer reviewed journals and other means.

The jobs are based in the Irish Centre for Social Gerontology in Galway.

The jobs have arisen due to the recent announcement by Intel and the Irish Government of a research collaboration, known as TRIL Centre. TRIL is a multidisciplinary research programme is underpinned by open source technology platform development and informed by ethnographic research of ageing and healthcare.

>> read the job advert (pdf)

We know Simon Roberts from his former blog Ideas Bazaar.

By the way, feel free to use the antropologi.info forum / pin board to announce job offers or call for papers

INTEL is hiring more than 100 anthropologists

Study: “Holders of social anthropology Ph.D.s are highly employable”

Anthropologists find out why we (don’t) buy organic food

Office Culture – good overview about corporate anthropology in Financial Times

Anthropologist Simon Roberts at INTEL in Ireland asked me to blog about this job offer (pdf) that actually is a good example of applied anthropology. "The jobs will suit people who are interested in working at the exciting intersection of…

Interview with Michael Wesch: How collaborative technologies change scholarship

Published on February 19, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, cyberanthropology, globalisation, internet, technology, Us and Them

(via del.icio.us) After his video about collaborative tools on the web (like blogs, wikis etc), Michael Wesch has become the most talked about anthropologist on the internet. In an interview with John Battelle’s Searchblog, Wesch explains his interest in what geeks call web 2.0:

For me, cultural anthropology is a continuous exercise in expanding my mind and my empathy, building primarily from one simple principle: everything is connected.

(…)

For me, the ultimate promise of digital technology is that it might enable us to truly see one another once again and all the ways we are interconnected. It might help us create a truly global view that can spark the kind of empathy we need to create a better world for all of humankind.

He made his first website in 1998 and saw “a tremendous potential for transforming the way we present our research”. Since then, he tells us, he has had a passion for exploring the latest technologies and how they an be used to communicate ideas in more effective ways.

Farther down in the comment field he explains:

The radically collaborative technologies emerging on the Web create the possibility for doing scholarship in the mode of conversation rather than argument, or to transform the argument as war metaphor into something that suggests collaboration rather than combat.

Personally, I prefer the metaphor of the dance and that we are all here in this webscape dancing and playing around with ideas. The best dancers are those that find a way to “lose themselves” in the music – pushing the limits of the dance without fear of tripping or falling because they know that it is all part of the dance.

>> read the whole interview on John Battelle’s Searchblog

>> watch the video

As said, his video was widely debated, for anthropological comments see among others: mike wesch rocks the video essay (Savage Minds), Mike Wesch’s Web 2.0 video makes waves, expands our understanding of this digital phenomenon (Anthropology.net), Anthropologists on Web 2.0 (TechnoTaste) and Internet 6 or Web 2.0: Video Edition (Disparate, Alexandre Enkerli)

His video is part of his work at the Digital Ethnography working group at Kansas State University.

Last year, Wesch was guestblogger at Savage Minds and blogged about new teaching methods.

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

Ethnomusicologist uses website as an extension of the book

“YouTube clips = everyday ethnography”

Ethnographic Skype

Ethnographic Flickr

Ethnographic research on Friendster’s online communities

Ethnographic Study on “Digital Kids”

2006 – The Year of Open Access Anthropology?

The Internet Gift Culture

(via del.icio.us) After his video about collaborative tools on the web (like blogs, wikis etc), Michael Wesch has become the most talked about anthropologist on the internet. In an interview with John Battelle's Searchblog, Wesch explains his interest in what…