persons and theories | antropologi.info

Cultural lag, a lethal drag

Published on May 26, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, culture traditions, persons and theories, technology

The Globe and Mail

Cultural lag is the term first coined by anthropologists to describe the gap between an invention and society’s ability to actually use it. It took about 50 years for the typewriter to displace the pen. When electricity first came to my father’s Cape Breton village in the 1930s, it was viewed with distrust and adopted by few. But cultural lag is not just about machinery and inventions, it is also about ideas. >> continue

PS: The Cultural Gap – also an explanation for the reluctant active use of the internet by academics?

Scott London: Understanding Change: The Dynamics of Social Transformation

Culture Change: An Introduction to the Processes
and Consequences of Culture Change

Social Change (Anthropology) – overview by Intute social science

The Globe and Mail

Cultural lag is the term first coined by anthropologists to describe the gap between an invention and society's ability to actually use it. It took about 50 years for the typewriter to displace the pen. When electricity…

The Internet Gift Culture

Published on May 20, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, gift economy gift giving, internet, persons and theories, Us and Them, websites

Cultures of Exchange and Gift economies are traditional anthropological topics. Famous are the Kula exchange in Melanesia, the Potlatch in Northwestern America, the Moka and often cited books are among others Marcel Mauss: The Gift and Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.

Contrary to what many (esp. postmodernists) believe, modernisation and globalisation do not automatically lead to more individualism and “fluidity”. Internet and social software lead to the creation of new networks and to a revitalisation of cultures of exchange and gift economies.

As Judd Antin comments, Alireza Doostdar describes in his recent article “The Vulgar Spirit of Blogging” some of the ways that bloggers exchange links, trackbacks, and comments as a way of developing social networks and expanding blog readership.

Many of us know collaborative projects like the encyclopedia Wikipedia, photosharing at flickr and copyright based on sharing like Creative Commons. People help each other in online-forums and what should we all do without all the great freeware software, partly developed by the Open Source community?

One of the best places to stay informed on social software and networks is Dina Mehta’s Blog “Conversations with Dina”

There are many articles on internet gift economy.

Lars Risan: Open source movement is like things anthropologists have studied for a long time (Jill Walker)

Eduardo Navas: The Blogger as Producer. He reviews “The Hi-Tech Gift Economy” by Richard Barbrook who also has written “Giving is Receiving”

Steve McGookin: Politics, E-Mail And The Gift Economy (Forbes)

Eric Raymond: The Hacker Milieu as Gift Culture

Jem Matzan: The gift economy and free software (NewsForge) (updated link)

Howard Rheingold: The Internet and the Future of Money (see also Interview with Bernard Lietaer on complementary currencies and the Internet and info on LETS – local exchange trading systems)

David Zeitlyn: Gift economies and open source software: Anthropological reflections (pdf)

Eric Lease Morgan: Gift cultures, librarianship, and open source software development

Markus Giesler and Mali Pohlmann: The anthropology of file sharing: Consuming Napster as a Gift

First Monday – Internet Economics

Culture’s Open Sources (pdf, Anthropology Quarterly)

There are many more articles on the internet gift economy: http://opensource.mit.edu/online_papers.php

(post inspired by comments on More and more blogging anthropologists – but the digital divide persists)

UPDATE:

This post caused some funny comments in the Livejournal-community:

museumfreak writes:

*academictechgasm*
so . . . many . . . social . . . software . . . and . . . gift . . . economy . . . links . . .

Further down in in the comment-section apropos writes:
“all these new anthro blogs are freaking me out!” :)

New anthropology group blog: Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology

Published on May 17, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, persons and theories, politics, websites

Great! A new anthropology group blog! Something like an American version of the German Ethno::log. It was started the day before yesterday. We know some of the authors from other blogs. The authors are Alex Golub, Kerim Friedman, Dustin M. Wax, Nancy Leclerc, Antti Leppänen and Christopher M. Kelty.

From their self-description:

“Savage Minds is a collective web log devoted to both bringing anthropology to a wider audience as well as providing an online forum for discussing the latest developments in the field. We are a group of Ph.D. students and professors teaching and studying anthropology and are excited to share it with you. You can find out more about the contributors by clicking on the ‘about’ pages on the right for each of us.”

>> continue to Savage Mind

PS: Their newest entry deals with Anarchists in the Academy: Yale anthropologist David Graeber has been recently fired for his anarchist activism – something that was mentioned in Kerim Friedman’s blog before and shortly afterwards by Alex Golub. See some reviews of Graebers “Fragments of an anarchist anthropology”. Or download the whole book (pdf, 220kb) and visit the webpage Solidarity with David Graeber

Two Books Explore the Sins of Anthropologists Past and Present

Published on May 11, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, books, ethics, persons and theories, Us and Them

The Chronicle of Higher Education

In her new book, From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich, Gretchen E. Schafft, an applied anthropologist(George Washington University) explores how the principles of early-20th-century physical anthropology, were put to work by the Nazis. Several months after the invasion of Poland, Hitler’s aides established the Institute for German Work in the East, which employed scholarly anthropologists to complete such tasks as “racial-biological investigation of groups whose value cannot immediately be determined” and “racial-biological investigation of Polish resistance members.”

A few years after her discovery at the Smithsonian (75 boxes full of material produced in Poland by the Nazi anthropologists), Ms. Schafft was contacted by a physical anthropologist who wanted to use the Nazis’ data to shed light on “patterns of migration and population settlement.” She resisted, arguing that the information had been collected through cruel means and for evil purposes, and is in any case highly suspect.

Some related moral dilemmas are chewed over in Biological Anthropology and Ethics: From Repatriation to Genetic Identity (State University of New York Press), a collection edited by Trudy R. Turner, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. >> continue (link updated)

SEE ALSO:
Murray L. Wax: Some Issues and Sources on Ethics in Anthropology (American Anthropological Association, Handbook on Ethical Issues in Anthropology – Chpt 1)
Book review: Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (American Ethnologist)

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Introduction to “Media Worlds”: Media an important field for anthropology

Published on April 25, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, media, persons and theories

anthropologist Andrea Ben Lassoued, zerzaust

In their introduction to “Media Worlds” Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod and Larkin argue, that the anthropology of media is an important field of study, as the “ubiquity of media worldwide means, that anthropologists encounter it in the diverse places where we work.” They think that media anthropology will be able to advance theory and method in both anthropology itself and nearby fields that are concerend with the study of media. What anthropolgy can contribute to the study of media is a global, comparative perspecitve. >> continue to her post (incl many related links!)

anthropologist Andrea Ben Lassoued, zerzaust

In their introduction to "Media Worlds" Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod and Larkin argue, that the anthropology of media is an important field of study, as the "ubiquity of media worldwide means, that anthropologists encounter it in the diverse…