Post Tagged with: "Cultural anthropology"

From a commentary on Owen Barder’s comment on Bob Zoellick’s speech on development discourse:

… if we really want to democratise the development discourse we should also publish, say, the minutes of Bank board meetings and other relevant internal documents to understand how ideas and statistics are translated into ‘reality’ through powerful interlocutors like the Bank and its staff. In other words, ‘democratising development’ is too important to be left to economists and large aid organisations alone; critical sociological and ethnographic research on the ‘life of numbers’ is needed as well.

If you knew where the commentator, Tobias Denksus, whose blog I just discovered today, is coming from, you would understand his desire for a discourse that aims to unpack black boxes like ‘development data’. This is from the summary of a PhD dissertation he is currently finishing:

Secular rituals in peace research, policy-making, consultancy and project management have lead to what Knottnerus describes as the ‘formation, reproduction and transformation of social structure’ away from critical aims of transforming societies through peaceful means to ritualised economy around virtual knowledge products. This growing industry, intertwined with the broader development industry has fostered the emergence and maintenance of ritualized spaces. Studying these rituals in workshops, meetings and conferences and complementing it by other ethnographic research helps us to understand better the micro-dynamics of what happens when the peacebuilding discourse or the peace industry come to a place like post-conflict Kathmandu or work around knowledge management in German development agencies. In Germany rituals and performances are often employed to maintain the perception of grounding in the peace movement of the 20th century and to maintain corporatistic ties between civil society, academia and policy-makers, de facto ignoring the global debates and local realities.

You definitely should check out his blog. Reminds me of a book titled The Paternalism of Partnership, by Maria Eriksson Baaz.

October 2, 2010 Read More

How useful is an approach that integrates institutional analysis with elements of cognitive science for anthropology?

Institutional analysis has been successfully used to study changes in property rights and the negotiation of the collective-action problem inherent in managing common-pool resources under a variety of property regimes. It is particularly well-suited to the analysis of socio-ecological systems, and is compatible with theories coming out of ecological and economic anthropology. Yet despite the pioneering work of James Acheson and Jean Ensminger, institutional analysis remains unfamiliar to most anthropologists, primarily because of its theoretical foundations in rational choice and game theory, which many anthropologists see as irreconcilable with anthropology’s humanistic, reflexive, and relativistic biases. Institutional analysts circumvent the problems inherent in strict definitions of rationality through the concept of bounded rationality. This is a necessary first step, but still assumes the existence of an abstract Rationality as the underlying motivation behind human behavior, and as the normative baseline from which to measure “deviations” in human behavior. This paper is a step toward elaborating a more nuanced understanding of situated bounded rationality, based on situated cognition, humans’ evolved reliance on heuristics, and the predominance of preferences over actions (means) as opposed to preferences over outcomes (ends). This approach combines the strengths of two dominant types of actor-based models – the microeconomic and the psychological (behavioral) – and integrates them with the analysis of social structure. In this way, the approach proposed here reconciles institutional analysis with processual, cognitive, practice-based, and perhaps most surprisingly, phenomenological approaches in anthropology.

That is the abstract of a working paper titled Situated Bounded Rationality: linking institutional analysis to cognitive, processual, and phenomenological approaches in anthropology [pdf] by friend and colleague Brian Donahoe.

May 8, 2010 Read More

“Ethnicity INC: or why ethnicity is not the bogeyman we were told it is”

… is the title of a review of anthropologists Jean and Jean Comaroff’s book, Ethnicity, INC. An excerpt of the review:

From the very beginning of their study, the authors ask us to take a step back and stop thinking about ethnicity only as a political tool. Rather, we should extend new attributes and opportunities to the social and economic entity that an ethnic group is. What if, the authors ask, the future of ethnicity lies in its capacity to incorporate identity (incorporate as in creating a legal corporation based on ethnic grounds) and couple this normative shift with the progressive commodification of one’s ethnic group culture? The authors think that the new product could efficiently represent the interests of its members. They argue that the commodification of culture doubled by the branding of the newly marketed entities could trigger the formalization and the institutionalization of the consumption of culture in ways that would be beneficial to those creating and generating culture in the first place. The Comoroffs go further in their analysis and suggest that this process and the subsequent cultural products would be managed by legal entities which will finally allow their members to reap the fruits of their culture’s commodification.

“Why not branding ethnicity instead of labeling it?” appears to be one of the extremely interesting questions that scholars interested in ethnic studies should ask themselves. The authors ask this and many more questions in an intriguing and refreshing manner, in times when ethnic studies (at least on Africa) are saturated by traditional discourses that mostly focus on the connection between violence, political / economic instability and ethnic warfare.

And:

While I agree with most of the arguments presented in this book, I have my reservations with respect to some of the issues presented in Ethnicity INC. Based on my understanding, one which is still in formation with respect to contemporary African realities, the biggest “fault” of the Comaroffs is that they implicitly suppose that humans are rational actors who play their part within a much larger framework which is laid out by the international political and economic order. If that were the case, then it would be unreasonable not to do your best as statesmen and public institutions to encourage the ethno-cultures the Comaroffs deal with in their book. After all, we are all consumers of cultures or, I would go even further and say, we are consumers of otherness. By exploring the others we rediscover our own roots, passions and ultimately the ideals we stand on. The others are just a reconfirmation of the self. And those who have a culture and seek to both preserve it and promote it should also find ways to capitalize on these cultures since, after all, nothing is for free. But this is not always the case.

The full review. The book is going on my to-read list for the year.

January 14, 2010 Read More

Keith Hart on A Cosmopolitan Anthropology

The rapid development of global communications today contains within its movement a far-reaching transformation of world society. ‘Anthropology’ in some form is one of the intellectual traditions best suited to make sense of it. The academic seclusion of the discipline, its passive acquiescence to bureaucracy, is the chief obstacle preventing us from grasping this historical opportunity. We cling to our revolutionary commitment to joining the people, but have forgotten what it was for or what else is needed, if we are to succeed in helping to build a universal society. The internet is a wonderful chance to open up the flow of knowledge and information. Rather than obsessing over how we can control access to what we write, which means cutting off the mass of humanity almost completely from our efforts, we need to figure out new interactive forms of engagement that span the globe and to make the results of our work available to everyone. Ever since the internet went public and the World Wide Web was invented, I have made online self-publishing and interaction the core of my anthropological practice. And recently I have stumbled into what may turn out to be the most powerful vehicle for this project yet: the Open Anthropology Cooperative.

It matters less that an academic guild should retain its monopoly of access to knowledge than that ‘anthropology’ should be taken up by a broad intellectual coalition for whom the realization of a new human universal – a world society fit for humanity as a whole — is a matter of urgent personal concern. Read in full.

September 10, 2009 Read More

Anthropologists blog on the financial crisis

At the blog of the Association of Social Anthropologists. The full announcement:

The ASA blog’s attempt to discuss the financial crisis currently occurring around us seeks to bring together anthropologists, sociologists, who work on the cultural political economy, anthropology of money, class, labour, industry, economic anthropology, informal economy, wall street as an ethnographic site, micro finance, the nature of capitalism and the modern state so as to comment and examine the current situation. Seemingly an ‘unanthropological’ topic this blog (from mid September 09 to mid December 09) is not about personal opinions of the bloggers only. This discussion would also highlight how ethnographic techniques can be applied to explore such dynamic issues in the modern world. Gillian Tett, an anthropologist who is the Assistant Editor of Financial Times predicted the credit crisis two years ago when she was largely ignored by the banking world. She felt how her training in social anthropology alerted her to the danger and the need to listen to ’social noise’ as well as ’social sciences’. To quote Tett (Barton 31st October 2008, The Guardian):

“I happen to think anthropology is a brilliant background for looking at finance,” she reasons. “Firstly, you’re trained to look at how societies or cultures operate holistically, so you look at how all the bits move together. And most people in the City don’t do that. They are so specialised, so busy, that they just look at their own little silos. And one of the reasons we got into the mess we are in is because they were all so busy looking at their own little bit that they totally failed to understand how it interacted with the rest of society.

“But the other thing is, if you come from an anthropology background, you also try and put finance in a cultural context. Bankers like to imagine that money and the profit motive is as universal as gravity. They think it’s basically a given and they think it’s completely apersonal. And it’s not. What they do in finance is all about culture and interaction.”

These and other related issues will be discussed by the following group of bloggers from mid September 09 till mid December 2009:

Mid September – end September: Dr. Alexander F. Robertson, Anthropology, Edinburgh University
Early October – Mid October: Dr. Gillian Tett, Anthropologist and Assistant Editor, Financial Times
Mid October – End October: Prof. Stephen Gudeman, Anthropology, University of Minnesota & Dr. Massimiliano Mollona, Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, London University
End October – Mid November: Prof Karen Z. Ho, Anthropology, University of Minnesota
Mid November – End November: Prof. Keith Hart, Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, London University
Early – mid December: Prof. Bob Jessop, Sociology, Lancaster University

Please visit the blog, participate, comment and take part in the discussions.

September 10, 2009 Read More

Anthropologyworks

A new blog by anthropologist Barbara Miller.

In its About page:

This blog is a project of the Culture in Global Affairs (CIGA) research and policy program of the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Along with several colleagues at GW and anthropological professionals working in the Washington area, I founded CIGA in 2002. Its mission is wide-ranging: to promote awareness of the relevance of anthropological knowledge to contemporary issues and to enhance discussion and debate within and beyond anthropology about contemporary issues.

While centered on cultural anthropology, CIGA’s mission, and that of this blog, encompasses all four fields of anthropology as defined in anthropology: archaeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology (in alphabetical order).

From the little I’ve read of it, it is a site to keep returning to.

September 1, 2009 Read More

Loomnie Friday Link Love 8

First things: For those who don’t know – and I would expect that that is a large chunk of the readership – until recently, I used to have another blog called Native Anthropologist.It is a blog where I discussed my research as an anthropologist. I have decided to close that down and move the content over here (actually, the right term would be to duplicate, since the content is still there and I just copied it to Loomnie.com). From now on I will have only one blog, which is Loomnie.com, and I will be discussing the issues I discussed on Native Anthropologist here as well. Those who don’t know much about anthropology or what anthropologist do will find some discussions around here. Of course, Loomnie.com is still about my experiences, thoughts, ideas and opinions; I have only added some more to it.

Now, to the link love:
Check out the blackboard blogger of Monrovia at White African’s.
My friend Oz guest-blogs at Nigerian Curiosity on the Economics of Nollywood.
Guess who would make the best journalists? Anthropologists, of course.
The political economy of urbanization in contemporary Africa, from the anthropologist who coined the term ‘informal economy’.

March 13, 2009 Read More

Connect

Search