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How internet changes the life among the First Nations in Canada

Published on June 11, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, development empowerment, indigenous people / minorities, internet, inuit, technology

(via FieldNotes): These are the first words in an article on how the internet is changing life in First Nations communities in Canada:

“This year, the internet saved a child’s life.”

For Internet may mean different things to life up there in the North:

A broadband connection doesn’t mean downloading the latest Bedouin Soundclash album or “messengeing” a friend who lives down the street. For the aboriginal communities that are being wired, internet means school, family, health-care and job opportunities.
(…)
High-level physics courses are now available online, and bright aboriginal students who choose to stay in their villages … have the drive to take online classes and strive towards university.
(…)
First Nations leaders think keeping kids in the community — educating and mentoring them — might stem some social problems.

And previously isolated villages might cooperate and share news via the web:

Turtle Island Native Network has a forum page where aboriginals post essays, ideas and concerns. Chief Tommy Alexis of the Tl’atz’en Nation posted an essay on clean water issues on the afternoon of May 22. By 9:00 p.m. on May 30, it had been viewed 3250 times. Other communities facing water pollution problems now know that they are not alone. Maybe one of the communities new to the web will learn for the first time that other First Nations have similar land-rights issues, or water-quality issues. It is possible that isolation will no longer disempower nations.

>> read the whole story in TheTyee.ca

(via FieldNotes): These are the first words in an article on how the internet is changing life in First Nations communities in Canada:

"This year, the internet saved a child's life."

For Internet may mean different things to life up there…

The Birth of a Cyberethnographer: The MU5 is to Blame

Published on May 25, 2006 by Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, cyberanthropology, GUEST BLOGGING, internet, media, technology

In 1974, fascinated, I pressed my nose to the window at UMIST and watched huge tapes turning on large metal boxes that filled the ground floor of the building – yes – it was that big! Operators and programmers were hurrying around wearing white lab coats, anti-static caps and shoe covers. My awed guide informed me in hushed tones of the need for a dust-free, climate controlled environment. It was a computer (I believe it was the MU5).

Twenty four years later I had one of my own, albeit slightly smaller, sitting on a table in the corner of my living room at home. What’s more it was connected to the Internet. I was still fascinated, I could go anywhere in the world and speak to anyone in the world. I had to know more: who was out there; what were they doing; why were they doing it and how. So I turned up in the Anthropology Department at the University of Hull in September 1998 and announced that I was going to do an ethnography of the Internet. Little wonder then that they didn’t quite know what to do with me!

Academic works on the subject were pretty thin on the ground, and the approach was mainly that the Internet would revolutionise social relationships. Turkle (1995 Life On The Screen) and Stone (1991 Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?) both wrote extensively about how the perceived anonymity provided by Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) would allow people to explore alternative aspects of their identity and of themselves like never before. Even Benedikt (1991 Cyberspace: First Steps) and Rheingold’s (1991 Virtual Reality) early assessments of the revolutionary nature of the Internet led them to believe that it would bring about immense transformations in social life. However, the text that influenced my own work the most was Markham’s 1998 book Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space.

At the time I wrote for the RCCS:

The focus of Annette Markham’s book, Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space, is the “lived experience of what it means to go and be online” (18). It constitutes a useful resource for students who like Markham find the writing of online ethnography “more slippery than I ever imagined” (19). Whilst acknowledging the fragmentation of a field that is experienced ‘more by individuals that by collectives,’ she succeeds in constructing an account that combines scholarly text and narratives into a reflexive ethnography that is eminently readable, both as a scholar and as an Internet user. Although the format of the book is laid out in chapters, Markham adopts the strategy of weaving Interludes into her narrative. These Interludes not only allow the reader to engage with her thoughts as she confronts the interplay of our fundamental, constructing relationships in both the real and the Virtual worlds. Interjected into the narrative are smaller parcels of text that represent her lived experience of her research enabling the reader to understand what she was thinking and feeling at the time. Both strategies act as signposts on the journey to discover how users make sense of their experiences in computer-mediated contexts. Along the way she asks new questions about the issues of self, identity, and embodiment that illustrate how her understanding of these concepts shifts and develops along the journey. Indeed, the notions of shifting contexts, shifting reality, and changing perspectives are dominant themes as the project progresses.

I loved the book (and still do) – it was one of a series of ethnographic alternatives – I almost ran around the department shouting ‘look! see! A real ethnography! I am not the only one!’ It is still the first text that I advise anyone to read, both inside and outside of academia.

Join me over the next few weeks as a guest blogger here as I chart the changes in perspectives that have informed both my own work and anthropology as a discipline, and discuss the challenges currently facing anthropologists in cyberspace. The Internet has not changed anything. Instead we use the Internet to change the ways we do things.

Popular IT-anthropologists: Observe families until they go to bed

Published on April 4, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, culture traditions, technology

Intel recently advertised four anthropologist openings and had more than 300 applicants, including top-notch researchers from the best schools according to Union Tribune San Diego. The newspaper portrays several IT-anthropologists, among others Anne Kirah who is heading a team of eight anthropologists at Microsoft:

She focused on immigrants and refugees in her anthropology graduate studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. Today, she takes notes on people’s daily lives, from Japan to France and Australia, in her role as Microsoft’s chief anthropologist. Data from the families she studies led the company to add several features to the Vista operating system, due out next year.

Much of the team’s research is conducted without a link to a specific product:

The anthropologists will typically spend two days with people, or families, who have agreed to let them into their lives. Kirah will knock on the subject’s door at the hour when they wake up and stay with them until they go to bed.

For anthropologists who wonder if they need to be a computer geek in order to work as an IT-anthropologists: When Anne Kirah was ansked if she was interested to work for Microsoft she “thought Microsoft made chips, and I didn’t really know what a chip was.”

INTEL-anthropologist Genevieve Bell compares academic and business life:

One of the biggest differences between her Intel research and university studies is that she doesn’t have to spend a lot of time writing grant proposals, she said. And instead of teaching in a Stanford classroom, she’s introducing social science to engineers in meeting rooms, she said. “I’m doing vibrant, rich, rewarding work that’s intellectually exciting,” Bell said. “I’m giving a voice to people who otherwise wouldn’t be in the conversation.”

Also a former suicide-prevention counselor (Kelly Chessen) were engaged by a computer company – that actually specializes in data-recovery:

While the counseling of computer-crash victims might sound humorous, a hard-drive meltdown can create despair on the same level as the suicide hotline, Chessen said. She has taken calls from people who have just been fired over lost data or who are facing the loss of years of work or the demise of an entire small business.

“We’ve had people talk about taking their lives if their data can’t be restored,” Chessen said. “A lot of my job is really just listening to people, even when they’re angry and yelling. I help give them hope.”

>> read the whole story in the Union Tribune

>> Microsoft and the Australian tribe – Interview with Anne Kirah (ABC Radio Australia)

(all links updated 3.1.17)

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

INTEL-ethnographers challenge our assumptions of the digital divide

Office Culture – good overview about corporate anthropology in FinancialTimes

New Ethnography: The Deaf People – A Forgotten Cultural Minority

Published on April 2, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, culture traditions, globalisation, indigenous people / minorities, language, technology, Us and Them

It is insufficient to understand deaf people as disabled. Most deaf people rather see themselves as members of a cultural and linguistic minority. They are proud of their culture. And they face identity obstacles similar to those faced by many other minority members. Therefore is it important to change the attitudes from the medical definitions and into an understanding of the deaf as a linguistic cultural group. These are some of the main findings in a new book by Norwegian anthropologist Jan-Kåre Breivik called Deaf Identities in the Making. Local Lives, Transnational Connections.

As deaf-activist Asbjørn puts it:

“Why fix healthy deaf children through CI surgery? We do not need that. What we need are more hearing people that want to play on our team – as we are – as Deaf people. we need more people willing to use the key to our culture – the sign language.”

See among others this quote by one of Breiviks informants – it might have been told by Native Indians, black people, Saami people etc:

“I did not accept myself as deaf. My family and the local environment did not give me the means to appreciate that side of my self. I was the only local deaf person and what I head about deaf persons was almost exclusively negative. The “deaf and dumb” stereotype was around me and became part of my own experience. I was constantly trying to be part of my hearing environment, but of course I couldn’t pass as a hearing person. I was constantly frustrated, never getting access to what the others were speaking about.
(…)
At the age of eighteen, (…) I stated to visit the deaf club. Here I also found a new friend. I began to accept my deafness, and gradually I aquired a sense of pride for being deaf.
(…)
I felt as if I had been given a new life, when I began accepting myself as deaf. I got more out of life and the companionship with other deaf persons. We shared the same identity, the same culture, that we were facing the same problems of communication and language in society.

Deaf people’s identity politics also resemble those of other minority groups. To create a collective identity, borders have to be drawn. But where? This is of course an widely debated issue. There is some kind of hierarchy: Some people are regarded as “more deaf” than others according to Breivik:

Within the Deaf signing community, deafened people are often viewed as suspect figures. This is because they are not accepted as being really deaf, and they are often accused of being too willing to pass as hearing people.

An informant says:

“In the United States, there are extremely deaf conscious, and where you must be second- or third-generation deaf to be counted as a real deaf person.”

Many informants fear for sharper boundaries between the deaf and the hearing world. One of them says:

“Deaf Power can be compared to being proud to be from Norway, and be extremely conscious of that. Such self-consciousness can turn into nationalism. This scares me, and I experience this constantly. At each youth camp, there are always some extreme types. Their messages do not differ from other extreme nationalists. It is always us vs. them.”

Many deaf people live transnational lives: They travel a lot in order to meet other deaf people. In contrast to many hearing people, deaf people don’t link equality and sameness, Breivik found out:

One of the key lessons I have learned, as a hearing person who has been immersed in deaf life through my anthropological research, is that the phrase “being at home among strangers” (Schein 1989) goes to the heart of the identity question. This is about deaf people’s frequent departure from biological roots and the hearing, settled world, and their search for “equals” in distant places.

Their language – the sign language is of great help. It is much more suitable for transnational lives than spoken languages. It’s quite easy to learn foreign sign languages. Albertine from Norway tells about her time in the USA:

“I was present one month before school started up, and by that time I was able to make myself understood and I could capture most of what they told me. After three months, I was almost fluent in American Sign Language.”

Japanese, she tells, is totally incomprehensible. Nevertheless she’s convinced that she would have managed Japanese “after a few weeks.”

Deaf people embrace the new communication technologies like internet and email. For many of them, the Net is a window toward the world, several informants met their husbands/wives there. On the internet, they are able to communicate with strangers freely without any consideration of hearing status.

I’m halfway-through the book that actually qualifies to become one of my favorite anthropology books. It describes a – for hearing people – totally unknown world and turns some of our assumptions upside down. The book is also an example for good anthropological writing!

>> more information on the book by the publisher

>> read the first chapter of the book

‘I hoped our baby would be deaf’ Most parents would be distressed to learn that their child had been born unable to hear. But for Paula Garfield and Tomato Lichy, it means daughter Molly can share their special culture (The Guardian, 21.3.06)

UPDATE:

Anthropologist Karen Nakamura is going to publish a new book called Deaf in Japan. It will be out in August 2006.

Grace Keyes: “Hearing has been neglected in studies of enculturation and personality development”

Ladakh: Emmigration is threatening sacred weaving traditions

Published on March 26, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Asia, books, culture traditions, technology

Weaving is a tradition dear to the Rupshupa of Ladakh. But the craft is at the crossroads because many youngsters are leaving in search of a better lifestyle, says anthropologist Monisha Ahmed in The Hindu. “There are very few ethnic communities in the world where both men and women weave, and that’s what makes the Rupshupa special,” she says. She was so intrigued by their weaving tradition that in 1992 she decided to do her doctoral dissertation on the Rupshupa:

In the years since, Ahmed has spent a lot of time roaming and camping in their stark Changthang highlands with the Rupshupa, studying the fabric of their life. She has seen them moving 10 times a year, observed them herding and shearing their livestock, weaving their hair and fleece, playing traditional games, celebrating marriages, mourning the dead and offering worship at their monasteries in Thugje and Korzok, the tiny towns where they have their storehouses.

She has learned their songs and understood their prayers. Her first book, Living Fabric: Weaving among the Nomads of Ladakh, Himalaya, won the Textile Society of America’s Shep Award in 2003 for best book in the field of ethnic textile studies.

>> read the whole story in The Hindu