Seminar: Indigenous Media 2016
Again, I have the pleasure to teach the Seminar “Indigenous Media” for the MA Program in Visual and Media Anthropology at the Free University Berlin. Find below a…
Tag: ethnography
Life in America
This is the first in a two-part post in which Lindsay A. Bell (SUNY Oswego) describes her attempt to organize a senior seminar course around producing a podcast…
What is "sensemaking"? Anthropology in marketing
Quantitative research — which has long been the market research standard — can provide insights into broad patterns and customer metrics. While this ‘big data’ can tell a…
Make Ethnography Better
Ethnography has grown in the last couple of decades from a moody, friendless method in the social sciences to the bell of the business ball. But clearly it has…
Revisiting field interviews
I’ve been going back lately to my interviews with French philosophy teachers and students. I just never had time to transcribe or work on most of them during…
On the Brazilian crisis, Pentecostalism and thinking out of the bubble
Pentecostal service in the Brazilian field site. Photo by: Juliano Spyer Brazil is in the midst of a heated national debate between people in favour of, and those contrary…
Are nuances like curry leaves?
The title of this post – and its contents – was inspired by an anecdote I wrote about in an earlier post in my field blog. Before I…
‘Every Day is a Copy-And-Paste’: Waithood Among Tunisian Men
This morning I felt that I couldn’t bear this passivity any longer. I was sinking in my red plastic chair without anything to do. In those moments, when…
The Construction of Anthropological Knowledge and the Construction of Research
To mark the publication of the newest ethnography in the Teaching Culture series, Merchants in the City of Art: Work, Identity, and Change in a Florentine Neighborhood, the…
Veterinary Anthropology Workshop – Edinburgh 18th-19th April
http://www.san.ed.ac.uk/edcma/events/workshops_and_conferences/2015_2016/veterinary_anthropology_workshop
Ancestral Lines, Second Edition
At the core of the Teaching Culture series of ethnographies is John Barker’s Ancestral Lines: The Maisin of Papua New Guinea and the Fate of the Rainforest. This…
Thinking with selfies
Kath Albury @KathAlbury continues our edition of ‘The Person in the (Big) Data‘ by talking about her research into young people and sexting. Instead of educating those who…
Origins and Scope of Thick Ethnography
Within a historical context, ethnography attempts to be holistic in nature based in part on emic views. It is written, observational science that provides an account of a…
Tanya Cassidy’s and Abdullahi El Tom’s “Ethnographies of Breastfeeding: Cultural Contexts and Confrontations” by Ben Kasstan
Ethnographies of Breastfeeding: Cultural Contexts and Confrontations Tanya Cassidy and Abdullahi El Tom (editors) Bloomsbury, 2015, 255 pages Ethnographies of Breastfeeding offers a timely insi…
The filmmaking case: the ethics of (mis)representation by Anna Wilking
As a visual anthropologist, I went to the field with the intent of making a documentary film about one of my informants, while also conducting ethnographic research with…
Trace ethnography: a retrospective
Stuart Geiger @staeiou continues our edition of ‘The Person in the (Big) Data‘ with a reflection on his practice of ‘trace ethnography’ that focuses on the trace-makin…
Why abstinence-only drug education doesn’t work—in fact, it backfires spectacularly.
I talked to a lot of middle-class recreational drug users for my research. None of them had any idea when they were younger that they’d end up dropping…
Geertzian moments (or, ‘when ethnographers lose their shit’)
Returning home from hunting on our Husband’s country, fieldwork (2008) There are certain moments during fieldwork that anthropologists refer to as ‘Geertzian moments’ o…
The Self at Stake: Thinking Fieldwork and Sexual Violence
[Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Alix Johnson] I don’t intend to write about surveillance and suspicion, but then I spend my first five months of fieldwork feeling watched. …
The Person in the (Big) Data
This edition of EM is jam-packed with methods for doing people-centred digital research and is edited by EM co-founder Heather Ford, newly-appointed Fellow in Digital Methods at the Universi…
Filming Empathy – Part 1
In their essay “Whatever Happened to Empathy?” Hollan and Throop1 cite the ambivalence that Franz Boas felt about the usefulness of the concept for ethnography: On the one…
The intangible narcotic: What does ‘vibe’ mean, really?
There’s a term that comes up pretty frequently when talking about electronic music events. A search within my interviews (excepts from which are quoted here) and field notes…
Neely Laurenzo Myers’ Recovery’s Edge: An Ethnography of Mental Health Care and Moral Agency by Ellen Rubinstein
Recovery’s Edge: An Ethnography of Mental Health Care and Moral Agency by Neely Laurenzo Myers Vanderbilt University Press, 2015, 192 pages “RECOVERY! GET IT, GET OVER IT, OR…