Hi, I have looked around the OAC and have not found a place that someone is looking into visually mapping networks of interactions between people. If there is one please direct me. Otherwise I have picked to place this with Visual Anthropology as that is how I think of it, even though from my limited experience Visual Anthropology seems mostly to do with Video and Photography.

I have just finished a dissertation on fish, fishers, and fishing in Turkish Cyprus. I did not get enough to fully explore the aspect I was aiming for, however I am planning on continuing to do so with that data as an experiment in visual mapping as a complement linear text.

What I am interested in is whether anyone has/is or knows of attempts are directly applying ethnographic data into visual maps/models in a complex ways. Not to simply produce visualisations that all look like exploding networks, but actually using the specific ethnographic context to guide the type and style of visualization to be made, and then piecing it together as a either a partial frame-in-time or more dynamic temporal version. It would allow the viewer to see such things as complex systems that 'entitize' out of groups of interactions, depending on the ethnographic data and anthropologists approach one could visually trace things e.g. discourses in peoples conversation, proximity of people/actors by economic or social relation, extent of agency exertion between numbers of people within a certain context etc etc

Now I guess the classic kinship maps are/were something along these lines, but don't seem to have spawned much offspring themselves. I am aware that there are many implications of such representations, but no more than in text as expressed in 'Writing Culture'.

To give some visual background I am thinking somewhere in the region similar to stamens work but ethnographically sensitive. My personal inspiration comes from having studied Art for a year and then moving in to Genetics for a while where I had to play with stuff like molymod, then doing a module in chemistry on what this type of stuff means. I am now finishing up in socialanth, and got partly influenced by ANT. I did some coursework using mind-mapping software to lay out interviews and see some interesting relations. I also say PhD students tagging there interview transcripts for better recall in a software that escapes my mind at present, and not using the capability of dynamically visualising the tagging relations. Then during fieldwork ended up understanding things within complex sets of intersubjective relationships, with a particular emphasis on agency in the case of my study, and I now imagine a photo-text-network-temporally dynamic piece.

Anyways anyone get a similar vibe or suggestions...

The short lists for the Alan Paton Awards for nonfiction and fiction in South Africa have just been published. While I expected to find new writing from female writers that critically examines some of the deep-seated gender issues that wrack South African society, there is scarcely any. Mandy Weiner's Killing Kebble and Henrietta Rose-Innes' Nineveh almost look like tokens. Equally, the various reviews that feature the short lists make no mention of the gender imbalance in literary productivity. 

See The Alan Paton Literary Awards in Times Live and also Books Live. 

My research master job has proposed as an initial point a study about some specific political instititutions in Brazil which are responsible to construct the structural guides of clientelism and patronage in a way of elaborate a close connection between public and private spheres. Seeking this narrative propose, I study the judicial representative functions of the "Juízes de Paz" as well as its sociability models which are still permanent in the Brazilian political practices and imaginaries. In an anthropological parameters, I've adopted as conceptual references the imagined moral code in rural parishes where the "juízes de paz" had represented a strong model of order an respectability, the reputation as a strategic way to construct the clientele in political elections, and the representative/theatrical performance of this "laical" magistrates in its uses of mediation/conciliation.

I'd like to exchange ideas with you all in a way of receive suggestions and also colaborate with someone who has research aspects in common.

Hopefully to enlarge the debates at OAC!

Paulo Augusto Franco

Universidade Federal Fluminense (Master in Social Sciences and Justice)

Fundação Getúlio Vargas - Escola de Direito - Tutor

As a biographical main references, I'm adopting:

BAILEY, F.G, (1971). Gifts and Poison. The Politics of Reputation. New York: Shocken Books.

CAMPBELL, John K. (1964) Honour, family and patronage. A study of institutions and moral values ina Greek Mountain Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

FLORY, Thomas. Judge and Jury in Imperial Brazil, 1808-1871. Social Control and Political Stability. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

GLUCKMAN, Max. Gossip and Scandal. Current Anthropology, vol 4 no. 3, June.1963

GOFFMAN, Erving (1985) [1959] A representação do eu na vida cotidiana. Petrópolis: Vozes.

            __ (1970) Ritual de la interacción. Buenos Aires. Editora Tiempo Contemporáneo.

GRAHAM, Richard. Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

HOLANDA, Sérgio Buarque de. Raízes do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro, Record, 2000.

VIANNA, Oliveira. Populações meridionais do Brasil. Primeiro volume. Niterói: Editora da Universidade Federal Fluminense. 1987.

On the eve of St George Day celebrations, Romani people gather at the Carica wellspring in Visoko to make wishes for the coming year. It is their day, Ederlezi or Đurđevdan, the beginning of a new season reincarnated through the mystic potency of Saint George, Saint Elijah and Prophet al-Khidr, the Green One, but, in the words of Hasiba, a Romani woman from Visoko, it is everyone's day and all Bosnians celebrate. This tradition, well known beyond the Mediterranean basin, is embedded into the earliest memories of the Bosnian Roma. Toponyms argue towards medieval sources, and while the many clues seem to indicate a strong link to the yet impalpable schismatic Bosnian Church, these seasonal rituals certainly have a prehistoric heritage. 

Never was I welcomed as warmly as in this narrow passage of Carica bursting in greenery and fountains on both its sides and leading towards a grand field which spreads like an atrium to hold the merry congregation. Elderly attempt to keep up a pace with children in the mountaineering efforts to find the right branches of drijen (European Cornel) and žara/kopriva (nettle). Melina and Hasiba teach me to tie small red ribbons onto the unoccupied branches of drijen, repeating: 'I welcome health, forsake malady'. Each further ribbon imparts a well-defined wish for loved ones onto the thriving shrubs. Children run around stinging each other's legs with nettle leaves. Their games are sometimes interrupted by a quick visit to the spring, where they disappear into a crowd of women splashing their faces with water and throwing three driblets over their backs. For good luck... Young brides wanting to get pregnant gently lash themselves with sallow. I hear them rhyme: 'Ove godine s vrbom a dogodine s trbuhom', 'This year with sallow, and the next with a belly'. 

After a short visit home, dusk is beginning to settle over the Romani neighborhoods on the hill of Križ, a synthesizer and a couple of large speakers are  placed on the central intersection and the crowd slowly grows. 'I don't know why Roma people always live on hills', Melina ponders upon her native landscape, 'but we always do'. I conclude that it's a culture of 'basking in the sun', but the moon soon had a comment upon my thoughts. Tomorrow I will learn that it was the night of perigee, when the moon is closest to the Earth and thus seems substantially brighter and larger than usual. 

A few men start up a fire which instantly creates a circle of focused audience. Motion starts from the hips and follows the rhythm rather than the melody. A woman in a blue shirt and a few preteen girls with clusters of fake ducats around their waists await no invitation. Their dance is as heart-warming as the flames. My new friend Melvin, a 14 year old karate expert, proudly points to his sister: 'I taught her everything she knows'. It's not long before my friend Alma and I are dragged into the circle. We dance with the children. Kolo, the 'wheel dance' is too synchronized for us. Others join hands, revolve around the fire, as another full moon enters another good season. 

Hello colleagues, I am putting together a course on children and health, and wonder if anyone has suggestions for a child-centered ethnography, where a child's point of view or voice is incorporated as the narrator, author, or active participant in the text?

I have two examples, The Pull of The Earth by Laurie Thorpe, in which the children she works with author a chapter, and The Private Worlds of Dying Children by Bluebond-Lagner, in which a play explores the lives of the young cancer patients, and am looking for others, perhaps from a non-Western perspective, to use in the course as well.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

This morning's Japan Times carried an opinion piece titled "Inviting Economic Suicide?" by Hong Kong based journalist Kevin Rafferty. The occasion was the news that India has surpassed Japan to become the world's third largest national economy, pushing Japan, already surpassed by China, down to fourth place in GDP rankings. This morning's email included a long rant on the decline of America, couched in very similar terms: China is surging, we're in trouble. 

My instant reaction was to remark to myself that, given differences in population size, that if China and India raise per capita GNP to a part with Japan and the USA, of course they will be, by far, the biggest economies in the world. Having populations an order of magnitude bigger than their rivals makes that a sure thing—barring, of course, ecological catastrophe that wipes us all out. From this perspective, GDP rankings are, let's face it, insane. If your interest is human welfare, per capita GDP adjusted for local price structures is clearly the more important measure.

But no, even that is crazy. Per capita GDP is an average. It doesn't take account of the range of incomes—If Bill Gates walks into a coffee shop, what does it do to the average income of those having breakfast there.

Then, it just occurred to me, that if Amartya Sen is right and there are fundamentally only two ways to measure economic output, in units of wealth, a.k.a., currency, and value to human lives, the financial press is insanely obsessed with only the former, regarded primarily as a score keeping mechanism in what amounts to a World Cup of money making calculated on a national team basis. Is life really all and only about pecking orders and bragging rights?

Hi everybody,

I need to put together a course entitled Writing Workshop addressed to undergraduate students in social anthropology. I would like to know what texts you consider key and have helped you learning how to write in this field. References could be in English or in Spanish.

Thank you,

Ana

A chance to extend the seminar conversation around John Conroy's "Intimations of the informal economy".

by Logan Sparks on March 14, 2012 at 3:12pm

The Nature of Heritage: The New South Africa, Wiley-Blackwell (October 25, 2011) - a groundbreaking work by archaeologist Lynn Meskell that examines the conflicts inherent in natural versus cultural heritage. The author brings archaeological and ethnographic evidence to bear on a holistic understanding of one nation's self-identification by developing its protected areas and cultural heritage sites.

Post-apartheid South Africa is a classic example of how nations attempt to overcome negative heritage through past mastering. The case study of Kruger National Park vividly demonstrates this process through both cultural and natural resource development, as it becomes enmeshed in the interventions of the state and private sectors, salvage, conservation, and notions of social good. Meskell argues that cultural heritage has emerged as secondary to the conservation of nature, but that the idea of heritage as therapy provides a potential ongoing strategy for socio-economic empowerment and development.

This is a call for papers for one proposed panel session at the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM) 14, in Kolkata, India, January 6-9, 2013. RETURN MIGRATION TO CONFLICT OR POST-CONFLICT COUNTRIES This panel explores a broad range of aspects related to return migration to countries that are experiencing, or have recently experienced violent conflict. We understand return migration as both temporary and permanent return and are interested in all stages of the return process; from the stay/return decision-making process to post-return (re)integration. Many migrants are considering return, whether it is to a localized 'home' or the country of origin. In most cases, return is a future option rather than an immediate plan. The idea and possibility of eventual return can nevertheless be an important aspect of migrants’ lives in another country, even if the return never takes place. Experiences of marginalization can stimulate plans for return, whilst some suggest that planned return may lessen commitment to integration. The possibility of return can also be central to migrants’ transnational relationships with people in their country of origin. For forced migrants return may also be forced, through deportation/removal, or blocked by a lack of appropriate travel documents, resulting in 'forced immobility'. As with the possibility of return, the reality of actual return can often be characterized as ambiguous. Possible comforts of being ‘back home’ are challenged by changes in both the country of return and the migrants themselves; making return a future-oriented project. Returnees face many challenges, exacerbated or mitigated by their own experiences of migration, the accuracy of pre-return information, aims, and the socioeconomic contexts to which they return. These challenges are intensified in conflict-affected countries. Paper proposals may consider empirically and/or theoretically (but not be limited to) aspects of the following themes: - Factors involved in the stay/return decision making process - Degree of voluntariness in return e.g. deportations, ‘voluntary’ return, retirement return - Opportunities and challenges of (re)integration after return - Relationship between return migration and development, including social remittances - The impact of gender, age and/or class on return migration - Connections between return migration and transnationalism - Connections between return migration and integration - Duty and return in a post-conflict context Please submit a title and abstract (maximum 250 words) by email to c.j.oeppen@sussex.ac.uk, tovsag@prio.no and erlpaa@prio.no. DEADLINE: **25 April 2012.** This panel is organised by members of the PREMIG project (www.prio.no/premig) who are currently researching return to Afghanistan, Burundi and Iraq, from Norway and the UK. However, we welcome submissions based on other empirical or theoretical contexts

I am writing a paper on Role of Anthropologist in Resettlement & Rehabilitation process for the development induced displacement, I need some references. Please send me available literature links for the references..I would appreciate those who volunteer to provide input to this topic.

Regards,

Madhulika

University of East London

A new short documentary in the Archive. Urban Indians

http://www.antropologiavisual.net/2012/indigenas-urbanos/

http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/air-mw/

Editors: Sandra Dudley, University of Leicester and Kylie Message, Australian National University

Museum Worlds: Advances in Research is a new, multi-disciplinary, refereed, annual journal from Berghahn Journals that will publish work that significantly advances knowledge of global trends, case studies and theory relevant to museum practice and scholarship around the world.

Responding to the need for a rigorous, in-depth review of current work in the broad field of Museum Studies, Museum Worlds: Advances in Research will contribute to the ongoing formation of Museum Studies, as an academic and practical field of research which is rapidly expanding and alive with potential, opportunity and challenge that parallels the rapid growth of museums in just about every part of the world.

Museum Worlds: Advances in Research aims to trace and comment on major regional, theoretical, methodological and topical themes and debates, and encourage comparison of museum theories, practices, and developments in different global settings. Each issue includes a conversation piece on a current topic, as well as peer reviewed scholarly articles and review articles, book and exhibition reviews, and news on developments in museum studies and related curricula in different parts of the world. Drawing on the expertise and networks of a global Editorial Board of senior scholars and museum practitioners, the journal will both challenge and develop the core concepts that link different disciplinary perspectives on museums by bringing new voices into ongoing debates and discussions. Articles will be of exceptional quality and general interest from around the world. 

How long has it sat on my bookshelf, this volume titled Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World, authored by Michael Burawoy, Joseph A. Blum, Sheba George, Zsusa Gille, Teresa Gowan, Lynne Haney, Maren Klawiter, Steven H. Lopex, Sean O Rian and Mille Thayer and published in the year 2000?

The introduction by Michael Burawoy is a tour de force, situating the origins of ethnography in Thomas and Znaniecki's Polish Peasant in America and the work of Chicago School sociologists in the 1920s and 1930s alongside Malinowski and the Manchester School in Great Britain. The tone is friendly, yet sharply critical. Thus, for example,

"Where Thomas and Snaniecki sought to locate the subjective, lived experience of the Polish peasant in its widest historical and geographical context, Malinowski, reacting against evolutionary theory, was militantly opposed to history and consideration of the extra local context. Thomas and Znaniecki's rich tapestry of traveling and dwelling is in sharp contrast to Malinowski's solitary confinement. Yet they do share one feature. Like Malinowski's isolation of the Trobriand community, Thomas and Znaniecki searched for an original, self-contained 'peasant community'.....

If, he later writes, Malinowski produced ethnography that studiously disregarded imperialism, Thomas and Znaniecki produced an account of subjective experience that studiously disregarded capitalism and the origin and larger agendas of the capitalist institutions that shaped the Polish peasant immigrant to America's life experience.

Anyway. It looks like a great book. If nothing else, reading a sociologist's take on the history of ethnography definitely widened my perspective.

Thoughts and comments are welcome.

This link is for further discussion of Thomas Sturm's working paper on Kant's Cosmopolitan view.

http://openanthcoop.net/press/2012/03/08/what-did-kant-mean-by-and-why-did-he-adopt-a-cosmopolitan-point-of-view-in-history/

I have also added here a short intervention by philosopher Allen Young, originally posted as part of the seminar discussion, which deserves attention in its own right. His conclusion:

"Herder’s fans are often in a state of denial about his idea of Humanität, because they want to see him as ‘relativist’ or ‘historicist’ in some later sense of those words, perhaps thinking that they are doing him a favor by seeing him that way, and ignoring the way in which he always remained close to his teacher Kant (despite the personal quarrel between them, which led Herder into sterile anti-Kantian polemics in some of his later writings). This has led to a common image of Herder that is as far from the truth as is the image of Kant as having shoved human freedom off into a supernatural noumenal heaven, condemning our poor bodily selves to be causal automata in the world of sense."

Allen Wood Kant Anthropology seminar.doc

European Society for Family Relations Congress at Lillehammer, Norway Sept 26-29 2012http://www.congrex.no/esfr2012/

List of open symposia and calls for abstracts: http://www.congrex.no/esfr2012/abstracts_submission/list_of_open_symposia/

Call for abstracts. Abstract deadline: April 15, 2012.

Open symposium: Families and memories of traumatic historical events in a changing Europe

Families incorporate historical events. Through verbal or non-verbal communication, memories of such events may be shared, disputed, or silenced within the family. Especially in the case of major and traumatic events, not just the events themselves but the memories of them have a great impact on families. If history had taken a different course, the family would have been different today: family members and family or individual properties may have been lost, all or some family members displaced, the patterns of communication almost certainly changed.

We are particularly interested in how families are shaped through memories of traumatic historical events. Central examples of such events are the Holocaust and genocides of other continents, wars, refugee situations, and the (end of the) Cold War. The session will give an opportunity to explore and discuss the impact of memories of such events in sedentary and migrant families. Contemporary migration and globalization processes form an important dimension.

Some questions raised and addressed will be:

• Which historical events continue to have an impact on families in contemporary Europe?

• How are mechanisms and processes of remembering, silencing, secrets and forgetting connected?

• How are public memory cultures, memory politics and private memories interlinked?

• What are the links between memories and identities?

• How do surviving family members and later generations actively or passively embrace, transform and transmit such memories?

• What are the lines of conflict and power in family disputes about memories and memory management?

• How do families relate to historical events that did not affect them directly, e.g. how do families with a background outside Europe relate to public memories of the Holocaust, or how do sedentary and migrant families relate to different colonial historical memories embodied in immigrant families from outside Europe?

"By closely attending to the people who lived under the appalling conditions of the Russian penal colony on Sakhalin, Chekhov showed how empirical details combined with a literary flair can bring readers face to face with distant, different lives, enlarging a sense of human responsibility.

Highlighting this balance of the empirical and the literary, Narayan calls on Chekhov to bring new energy to the writing of ethnography and creative nonfiction alike. Weaving together selections from writing by and about him with examples from other talented ethnographers and memoirists, she offers practical exercises and advice on topics such as story, theory, place, person, voice, and self.

A new and lively exploration of ethnography, Alive in the Writing shows how the genre’s attentive, sustained connection with the lives of others can become a powerful tool for any writer."

Kirin Narayan: Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov. University Of Chicago Press, March 1, 2012.

At this year's Sunbelt conference, several participants asked me if I had read a paper on network effects on success or failure by the teams that put together Broadway musicals. One of the co-authors is Brian Uzzi, a Professor of Organizational Behavior, at the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University. Going to his site in search of the paper, I stumbled on a motherlode of interesting research that develops ideas that Uzzi began to formulate following ethnographic research in the New York apparel industry. Fascinating stuff, with all sorts of relevance to applied anthropology and the human economy.

I'm attaching a PDF of the Broadway musicals paper to give you a taste of Uzzi's research. Anyone care to join me in discussing it?

This post is inspired by a review of the life and work of literary critic Frank Kermode. The reviewer contrasts Kermode with his near contemporary Harold Bloom, who obsessively devoted his life to one big idea, "the anxiety of influence." I was struck, in particular, by the following remarks.

"Set Bloom’s revelations alongside this formative moment from Not Entitled, which comes after a young Kermode has unsuccessfully dabbled in theology. It amounts to a sort of anti-epiphany:

Now, as the smoke dropped onto Mr. Shave’s church on that evening of newspapers, buckets, and damaged fruit, the street-long cable-slot still gleaming in the shoplights, I ended my career as best philosopher, seer blest, eye among the blind, and so forth. The next step was, as might be foretold, to enter the prison house of my own incommunicable intuitions, and soon to be committed to the long labor of learning how to know something a little better than I did and to know how to say it with apparent clarity to others…. It is an acceptable condition, in which we are able to believe that we communicate, that we may be distincts yet not divided."

To a younger me, Kermode's modest ambition, "to be committed to the long labor of learning how to know something a little better than I did and to know how to say it with apparent clarity to others" would have seemed too small. Like the metaphysician in Nietzche's parable of the two men watching Salome perform the dance of the seven veils, I wanted to see the whole thing, bare naked, now. Now I prefer the scientist, content to be tantalized as one veil after another is slowly removed and not at all eager to see exploration end. Now Kermode's ambition seems grand, indeed.

What say you, friends?