applied anthropology | antropologi.info

INTEL is hiring more than 100 anthropologists

Published on February 23, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, technology

LINKS UPDATED 19.4.2022

(via Gumsagumlao and anthropology.net ) It has become so commonplace to read about INTEL using anthropologists, that I’ve overlooked this news: INTEL in the process of hiring more than 100 anthropologists and other social scientists to work side by side with its engineers according to Technology Review.

The reason is simple: Anthropological research pays off – although Pat Gelsinger, a senior vice president at Intel, was sceptical in the beginning: “It’s much harder to justify and measure the qualitative research.”

Anthropologists had useful insights into a variety of emerging markets:

Intel viewed China and India as countries where people were simply too poor to buy its products — until anthropologists showed them that extended families in Asia will invest in a PC if it’s viewed as helping their children to succeed.

Intel has already released several products shaped by anthropological research:

In February 2005, it worked with a Chinese PC maker to release the China Home-Learning PC; and in October 2005 it launched the iCafe initiative in China, which involves a platform for improving how Internet café owners deploy and manage their technology. Intel has also repeatedly demonstrated early production versions of a Community PC, which is aimed at markets where infrastructure is not as well developed as in the West.

(…)

The rise of the anthropologists may come just in time for Intel. Its traditional Western markets are largely saturated, while many parts of the developing world use cell phones for e-mail and other forms of communication. And Intel’s efforts to gain share in the cell-phone market have not been strong. Thus, developing new approaches to potentially huge markets like India and China may help Intel grow faster in the future.

>> read the whole story at Technology Review

INTEL-ethnographers challenge our assumptions of the digital divide

Anthropologist helps Intel see the world through customers’ eyes

INTEL and Microsoft conference “a coming-out party” for ethnography

When cultures shape technology – Interview with INTEL-anthropologist Genevieve Bell

Research at INTEL

LINKS UPDATED 19.4.2022

(via Gumsagumlao and anthropology.net ) It has become so commonplace to read about INTEL using anthropologists, that I've overlooked this news: INTEL in the process of hiring more than 100 anthropologists and other social scientists to work…

Approaches to Indigenous Knowledge – conference papers in fulltext

Published on February 19, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, culture traditions, indigenous people / minorities, journal articles / papers, websites

For some reason, information on what is going on on anthropology conferences is difficult to obtain. Accidentally, I stumbled upon the website on a conference by the Association of Social Anthropologists on Approaches to Indigenous Knowledge that was held six years ago. Strangely enough, all papers are published in full text.

From the introduction:

Anthropology’s enduring interest in people’s knowledge systems has recently attracted the attention of development policymakers and practitioners. ‘Indigenous knowledge’ has emerged with the focus on popular participation and planning-from-below. It has opened up opportunities for anthropology to engage practically as never before. How might it further contribute to, and learn from this current burgeoning of interest, which has taken it somewhat by surprise?

>> overview over all papers

SEE ALSO:

“Aboriginal knowledge is science”

Who owns native culture?

“The White House should hire an anthropologist”

Published on February 7, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, ethics, politics

Anthropologist Fazia Rizvi points to an article by Maureen Dowd where she argues that the White House should hire an anthropologist:

Corporations have begun hiring anthropologists to help them improve product designs and interpret markets. And clearly, the Bush foreign policy team doesn’t understand any of the markets where it is barging around ineptly trying to sell America and democracy.

(…)

It’s stunning that nearly four decades after Vietnam, our government could be even more culturally illiterate and pigheaded. The Bushies are more obsessed with snooping on Americans than fathoming how other cultures think and react.

One smart anthropologist reinforcing the idea that “mirroring” – assuming other cultures think like us – doesn’t work would be a lot more helpful than all of the discredited intelligence agencies that are costing $30 billion a year to miss everything from the breakup of the Soviet Union to 9/11 to no WMD to Osama’s hiding place to the Hamas victory.

>> read the whole story in the SGVTribune

Anthropologist Fazia Rizvi points to an article by Maureen Dowd where she argues that the White House should hire an anthropologist:

Corporations have begun hiring anthropologists to help them improve product designs and interpret markets. And clearly, the Bush foreign…

The emerging research field of medical ethnomusicology: How music fights AIDS

Published on January 25, 2006 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, books, interdisciplinary, medical anthropology / ethnobothany, music

In a new book, Gregory F. Barz, professor of ethnomusicology at Vanderbilt University documents the effective role music and the arts are playing in the fight against AIDS in Uganda. It’s according to the official press release the first book of an emerging research field – medical ethnomusicology – that seeks to combine efforts of anthropologists, music specialists, public health policy makers and doctors and other health care workers to fight disease.

The book is called Singing for Life: HIV/AIDS and Music in Uganda. It collects lyrics to songs and performances inspired by the HIV/AIDS pandemic in that country, and includes a CD sampler of Ugandan music.

Barz says:

“Music and medicine, when they’re coupled together, bring about the greatest effect in many parts of the world in combating disease. While Americans tend to think of music as entertainment, people in countries like Uganda consider it as being life itself.”

According to the press release, HIV infection rates have fallen from 30 percent to 5 percent in Uganda in the past decade, and Barz argues that efforts to convey good information by storytellers, dancers, musicians and other artisans have played a prominent role. The typical mass media options don’t work in a country where many people have no access. “Music is often education in Africa, passing along information. I call it ‘dancing the disease’”, Barz says.

>> read the whole story

In an article in the Vanderbilt Register, we read that Barz originally went to Uganda to document native drumming patterns. But:

“The more I listened to songs and observed dances, I began hearing that people were making meaning out of the disease and out of the virus through music and dramas and dancing. They were singing about social problems caused by AIDS – children not having parents, a missing generation – about the sickness that was everywhere.

When I came back, I decided I could no longer close my ears and turn off my fancy recording equipment to these voices anymore. I don’t want to just document the exotic and the local and the indigenous. There has to be some kind of intervention.”

>> read the whole story in The Vanderbilt Register

medical anthropology news archive

Capitalism and the problems of “High speed ethnographies”

Published on January 18, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, design anthropology, fieldwork / methods, technology

“If armchair anthropology was a product of colonialism, then design ethnography is a product of capitalism”, writes Anne Galloway, inspired by Jan Chipchase’s post on Tour Bus Ethnography:

Looking at my travel schedule for the next few months I’m left wondering what can I expect to learn from the relatively short amounts of time spent the field in different countries? At what point does spending a few days in a culture become nothing more than tour bus ethnography?

Galloway comments:

When I read posts like the one above, I remember being taught how the discipline of anthropology really only emerged when we gave up the colonial past-time of “armchair” anthropology and actually got out in the field ourselves.

But spending too much time analysing data outside the field might have some other implications:

When scholars were tasked with making sense of all the data brought back from the colonies, they had plenty of time to reflect on it. (In fact, I’ve always suspected that the sheer amount of “down” time and distance from the people studied actually encouraged anthropologists to come up with those complex hierarchies of cultural traits that became so instrumental in the administration of the colonies and the oppression of so many people. You know, idle hands and all…)

>> read her whole post “Design ethnography and the crisis of time”

Jan Chipchase (seems in fact to be his real name) reveals some of his field technics >> read his post “Tour Bus Ethnography”

"If armchair anthropology was a product of colonialism, then design ethnography is a product of capitalism", writes Anne Galloway, inspired by Jan Chipchase's post on Tour Bus Ethnography:

Looking at my travel schedule for the next few months I'm left wondering…