Stewart Anderson is an Assistant Professor at Brigham Young University and holds a doctorate from SUNY Binghamton. He is the author of A Dramatic Reinvention: German Television and Moral Renewal after National Socialism, 1956–1970, new from Berghahn Books. In addition, he is the co-editor of Modernization, Nation-Building, and Television History (Routledge 2014).
by Davydd Greenwood, editorial board member of Learning and Teaching
The following is an interview with Andrés Barrera-González, Monica Heintz and Anna Horolets (editors of European Anthropologies which was recently published by Berghahn). Andrés Barrera-González is tenured Profesor Titular in Social Anthropology at Universidad Complutense, Madrid. Monica Heintz (PhD Cambridge 2002) is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Paris Nanterre. Anna Horolets is an Associate Professor at the Chair of Social Anthropology, University of Gdańsk.Continue reading “Interview with the Editors: European Anthropologies ”
Hans Steinmüller’s Communities of Complicity: Everyday Ethics in Rural China is now available in paperback. The ethnography explores the moral uncertainties experienced by the people of the village of Zhongba in Central China as they navigate and balance the expectations of capitalism and their traditional culture. The author offers a reflection on his fieldwork in rural China and insights into Chinese culture in the following post.
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The main idea of ‘Communities of Complicity’ has to do with the delicate relationship between vernacular practices and official discourse in rural China. In regards to geomancy (fengshui), rituals, gifting, and corruption discourse, for instance, official representations are often inconsistent with local practice. While it is very common to invite ritual masters for family celebrations and to give money gifts at such occasions, these practices are often described in public discourse as backwards and corrupt.
Continue reading “Tradition Taboo: Disagreements between Common Practice and Public Discourse”
Author Emma Kowal explores the “good” that well-meaning White Australians are doing for Indigenous Australians. This path to help is charted in Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia, a recently published book that asks the question: How can one help without harming? Following, Kowal explains the origins and reception of her work studying this group of “White anti-racists.”
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‘You’re an anthropologist and you study… White people?’ I regularly receive a puzzled look from people when I tell them what I do. Anthropologists are supposed to study Indigenous tribes in remote locations, aren’t they? Or at least something exciting, like drug addicts or slum dwellers.
Continue reading “Helping without Harming and Minding the Balance”
Where do Switzerland and Madagascar meet, and what do the people of each place think of those in the other? Eva Keller, in her recently published Beyond the Lens of Conservation: Malagasy and Swiss Imaginations of One Another, in seeking to connect these two places winds up highlighting the disconnect between them. Following, the author offers a brief glimpse into the volume from two directions: from a Swiss classroom looking at Madagascar and from a Malagasy man looking at a national park.
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Read the following extract of a conversation which took place in a Swiss classroom with pupils aged between 11 and 12. My questions are in italics.
What do you know about Madagascar?
Takschan: I think there are cannibals there, I think, the people, like they eat the flesh.
Continue reading “Visions of The Other: Swiss & Malagasy See, But Do They Understand?”
The healing powers of a plant in sub-Saharan Africa, long used for indigenous medicine, are now being harnessed as a pharmaceutical to be more widely produced and sold. Author Julie Laplante follows this path of production of Artemesia Afra from a wild-growing bush to a processed, controlled substance in her soon-to-be-published monograph, Healing Roots: Anthropology in Life and Medicine. Following, Laplante shares how her own path led her from researcher to author.
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The journey told in the book began in August 2006 within the Biomedicine in Africa research group at the Max Planck Institute für etnologische forshung in Halle (Saale), Germany, as we were invited to explore how biomedicine is both shaping and being shaped through its practices in Africa. My own research project entitled ‘South African Roots towards Global Knowledge’ namely intended to find out how this is done through the practices of clinical trials as they aim to ‘recognize’ indigenous medicine.
Continue reading “‘Healing Roots’: Author Traces Life of Wild Plant from Farm to Pharm”
Paul Clough spent many years studying the economic situation of the Marmara village, in Hausaland, northern Nigeria. His work there began in 1977-1979, then was followed by stints in 1985, 1996, and 1998. In Morality and Economic Growth in Rural West Africa: Indigenous Accumulation in Hausaland, his book based on that fieldwork, the author explores the economic growth and accumulation of this non-capitalistic, polygynous society through boom and bust periods. Following is the author’s reflection on his book, fieldwork, and forged relationships.
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What drew you to the field of African studies? Specifically, what drew you to Hausaland in Nigeria?
All of this happened by accident when I was very young. I wanted to be a volunteer, to work in the field of development. Since the Peace Corps in early 1970 would not send me to Latin America (perhaps because I had no Spanish), I managed through other channels to find a teaching post in northern Nigeria. I arrived at Kano Airport in late 1970, when I was only twenty-two, knowing next to nothing about Africa or Hausaland.
But I fell in love immediately.
Continue reading “Prose and Economic Development in an African Village”
In Gavin Smith’s Intellectuals and (Counter-) Politics: Essays in Historical Realism, which was published earlier this month, the author takes a look at the role of the intellectual (specifically the social scientist) in three important areas — studying capitalism, making histories, and producing places. According to the author, “Reflexivity for the social scientist, Bourdieu argued, involves an objectivist ethnography of ethnographers,” a task Smith himself undertook in both Spain and Peru. Following, he reflects on his time spent conducting ethnographic research in Peru.