Ethnographer's toolkit

For those planning on taking laptops with them, someone recommended evernote to me: http://www.evernote.com/

It's supposed to be a much more 'intelligent' programme that remembers notes you've made and links up key themes and words for you, thus filling in the blanks left by our addled and overloaded memories. I haven't got to grips with it yet but it's supposed to be really handy. Perhaps Michael can give us his verdict.

As for the classic hardback vs moleskine, I'm with moleskine every time. I don't care if it's more expensive and impractical, I want to feel like Hemingway!

Robots? Who needs 'em!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7654267.stm

Live internet streaming of Festival of Anthropological, Ethnographic Films

The 8th Festival of Anthropological, Ethnographic and Documentary Films - VISCULT 2008 will start today, on Thursday 2 October, continuing until Sunday, 5 October at the Cinema Center Tapio in Joensuu, Finland. 

The festival films, and the live event with director's introductions and discussions, will be streamed in the Internet.  It will be a real-time broadcast, all timetables following local time in Finland (still the daylight saving hour). The broadcast cannot be saved or downloaded afterwards, so you'd better be on-line when it happens in the theatre.

The full Viscult 2008 programme and the broadcast stream can be found at:

http://www.viscult net 

what do you call your informants?

A recent thread on the ASAO (Association for Social Anthropologists Studying Oceania) listerv, asked the question: 'in academic writing what do you call your informants?' - what followed was a really interesting dialogue suggesting anything from using the person's name to 'informant', 'friend', 'consultant', 'teacher', 'assistant', 'participant', 'mentor' etc etc....   

After a couple days of postings, what emerged was that: "this conversation regarding the term 'informant' really reveals more about how we think of ourselves as researchers than the ways in which the people we work with take risks to share knowledge and status with us  - knowledge that we eventually craft in varying degrees of collaboration with its original 'teachers' or owners".   Do we see and approach the people we work with as 'participants' in our work? 'collaborators'? (and really follow through with that) or do we focus only on data? evidence?

The other interesting question to emerge from this dialogue was "what do informants call us?'.  Someone told a nice story of how the elders of her village in Papua New Guinea saw her as just a student, that they were really engaged in an inter-cultural discussion with her teachers back at her school in the UK where she would be sharing all her information. 

here are just three of the exerts: 

From Dan Jorgenson (UWO)
I guess I would call them informants if we were talking about a particular context of imparting information, at least in situations where I don't (and/or shouldn't) refer to them by name; when I speak generically about Telefolmin (but don't use the word Telefolmin), I call them "the people I work with"; when speaking of particular individuals (as I do when relating a story or a life-incident or an event in which they played a part), I usually use their name and call them friends if they were indeed friends.

For what it's worth, I think in practice I use the word informant rarely, if at all (possibly only in my dissertation?). I don't find it offensive in the way that many do, and don't find the word consultant to be an improvement at all. My preference whenever possible is not to speak of people in terms of a role or slot, and instead in terms of themselves as particular individuals - by name. It is, as I think of it, perhaps also fitting as far as Telefol sensibilities are concerned.

Incidentally, I almost never say "the" Telefolmin, as opposed to Telefolmin (without the article). This was established early on in my graduate training by Burridge thirty-odd years ago, who thought that it took a certain kind of hubris to claim to speak about "the" Tangu in a way that suggested all-encompassing and encyclopedic scope. (Am away from my bookshelf right now, so can't confirm whether he followed his own precept or not - I know a lot of us fail to do so - but this was, at any rate, part of his sense of what was proper.)

From Rod Ewans

I have no problem with "consultant". It seems to lack the overtones some are determined to find in the other words - though the abandonment of "informant" seems to me to be the victory of fashion over common sense and time-honoured tradition. Attempting to inform the researcher is what these wonderful, generous people do, and I therefore don't find calling them informants either demeaning or pejorative. Perhaps there are those among us who watch too much crime tv, or (perish the thought) have things they do not wish others to inform the authorities about, hence the aversion to the word! An informant does not have to be thought of as a stoolie, snitch, rat or grass (depending on your crime fraternity) - to concede that as a necessary connotation would be to make yet another concession to the dumbing-down of our rich language.  I rather think it is up to all of us, collectively, to decide whether to be bullied by fashion or not. Do not go gentle into that good night!

From Alice Olseon

I prefer "teacher" or "mentor" rather than informant or even friend (since I am unsure if that was truly a reciprocal feeling shared between myself and the people I worked with during fieldwork). When I teach classes in anthropology and sociology at the small, midwestern university where I work, I find myself referring to Pohnpei, FSM (where I did Ph.D. fieldwork), and the people of Pohnpei as "the people I lived with and learned from."
      Teacher or mentor seems to capture the sense of unevenness in cultural knowledge between the researcher and "teacher" as well as the eventual responsibility of the "student" (or fieldworker) to go on to  make arguments and "knowledge" for which he or she is ultimately responsible. Using the term "teacher" or "mentor" also subverts older ethnographic paradigms of Western or Euro Scholar vs. Non Western "native" "informant"/other because it points to the idea that there are many different levels of insider/outsider cultural knowledge and we all take turns being the student and the teacher in different situations. In other words, it points to the shifting power relations of fieldwork and the different kinds of educational "power relations" that shift as the fieldworker moves from student (at University) to student (in the field) to teacher/professional back in academics (Think here, of Narayan's 1993 American Anthropologist article "How native is the 'native' anthropologist?" 95(3): 671-686).
      The more I think about it, this conversation regarding the term "informant" really reveals more about how we think of ourselves as researchers than the ways in which the people we work with take risks to share knowledge and status with us--knowledge that we eventually craft in varying degrees of collaboration with its original "teachers" or "owners." Perhaps Ph.D. committees should ideally include members of the cultural groups with which we studied? While I worked on Pohnpei, several of the elders with whom I studied often remarked, "Ah, Alice, your Professors back home will really find this study interesting." It seemed to me that these elders clearly saw me as a student and my Professors back "home" as the elders with whom they were really performing cross-cultural communication. This question and scenario becomes even more interesting when thinking about "native anthrpology/ists."

What do you call your informants?

Oh, Chicago

As some of you may have heard, a new Milton Friedman Institute is being established at the University of Chicago

Economists to focus on pioneering research in new Milton Friedman Institute
The University of Chicago is establishing a center for path-breaking research in economics to build upon the strengths of economists throughout the University and to honor the contributions of Milton Friedman, considered by many to be the leading economist of the 20th century.

The University’s investment in the Institute will be about $200 million, with half of that amount establishing an operating endowment and the remainder allocated for facilities and other start-up costs. The majority of the funds will be raised in donations from alumni and business leaders around the world.

“The goal of the Institute is to build on the University’s existing leadership position and make the Milton Friedman Institute a primary intellectual destination for economics by creating a robust forum for engagement of our faculty and students with scholars and policymakers from around the world,” said President Robert J. Zimmer. “The Milton Friedman Institute will continue Chicago’s extraordinary tradition of creating new ideas that stimulate the academic world and innovative approaches that influence policy.”

Well, that is not a thrilling thought in the least. And neither for Marshall Sahlins in his Chronicle of Higher Education article

Indeed, given its aims and scope, the Milton Friedman Institute would be the vanguard of an intellectual coup d'état in the academy of the same nature as the one the Chicago Boys helped pull off in Latin America. The two projects come down to one and the same, insofar as the Friedman institute is analogously devoted to making the university safe for free enterprise. By rendering the production of knowledge dependent on the highest financial bidders, the institute would literally transform the university into a free market in ideas — wherein those ideas backed by the most capital will be the most true. That is not intellectual diversity but academic perversity because it fundamentally subverts the disinterested pursuit and dissemination of knowledge for which universities were founded. Nor are such objections relevant only to the Milton Friedman Institute. They would apply equally to a George Soros Institute for the Study of Economy and Society, and as much to a Rabbi Schneerson as to a Louis Farrakhan Center for Religious Studies. If we allow the university to be outsourced to extra-academic, partisan interests, it will become a money-based political economy of truth values.

And some economist bloggers chime in...

What I think is most amusing about the last post is

Sahlins's claims http://www.appropriate-economics.org/materials/Sahlins.pdf that hunter-gatherers lived in "the original affluent society" where all their wants were easily satisfied seemed to me a dishonest evasion of the fact that many people in all societies want to see their grandchildren grow up--and relatively few hunter-gatherers do.

I imagine he has done extensive research on hunter-gatherers. Oh wait, probably not. That part is just ignorance (about life expectancy and work hours). I don't quite remember the exact numbers, but I think life expectancy only returned to pre-agricultural revolution numbers sometime in the last 150 years or so. Anyway, apart from that, I do not see how they just can't GET such an easy and obvious argument. Wants don't just appear in a vacuum. You think everyone, throughout history, woke up wishing they had a BMW and an iPod? But, alas, ideology...

Anyway, I think about the last thing the world needs is a Milton Friedman Institute. About the best thing I can think to say about the guy is he is very consistent. But this and this? Come on! On the other hand, while I agree with Sahlins pointing out about the excessive talk about 'freedom,' I think that is what is behind his view too. It's actually funny, because we do run on a kind of meritocratic ideology, the best ideas, the smartest people survive. Obviously this is not necessarily the case. So the fact that there is a Milton Friedman Institute with a certain ideology is hardly unusual, I think most departments in a University end up being the same kind of thing. We all know there is a pressure to do certain kinds of work that the (completley hypothetical!!!) Department thinks is good (which is because that is the kind of work they have done). But... A MILTON FRIEDMAN INSTITUTE????

Batman and Empire

A non-standard film review of The Dark Knight..

Few movies have been so adept at providing easy metaphors for their own incompetence. But The Dark Knight, while doing this, eagerly does more: it presents itself as not just a comic book movie (though it is decidedly that); it is also an allegory, as thick as the Divine Comedy, for the present condition of America's debilitated relationship to the world.

It makes some interesting points, basically arguing that a lot of what happens in the movie (I think most of us have seen) has clear parallels in America's international relations, particularly the "War on Terror". I didn't really think about it this way, though I did notice (and feel a bit uncomfortable) by the use of the word "terrorist" to describe the Joker in the film...

To fight anarchy is to lose one's bearings, and to move one's own soul dangerously close to evil. Ah, but such is the price of superhero-dom—or, as The Dark Knight would also like us to believe, the War on Terror. The Joker is repeatedly referred to as a "terrorist," and he is made to resemble the men and women the United States calls terrorists. He captures police officers, tortures them, and then forces them to explain his own purpose on camera, much like the video of Daniel Pearl made by Khalid Sheikh Muhammed (KSM's video, it should be said, was more professional). The Joker's goal is to spread chaos amidst liberal civilization, to show the cultivated that their wealthy ideals can vanish when confronted by evil such as his.

And so the Joker, like other criminals in the film, is treated by Batman the way America treats terrorists: he is tortured.