World music archive

The folk over at Open Culture have just posted about a new “world music archive” that has just been created by the BBC.  As noted in their article, the archive includes over 100 hours of recordings from 40 countries, and even includes some lesser-known traditions from North Korea.

This would no doubt be a great resource for researchers, students and teachers of ethnomusicology, globalisation and music and other similar subjects.

Rastafarians going home

Here’s an interesting little video on Rastafarians who are “returning” to southern Ethiopia in order to provide support their religious homeland. In some cases they are setting up businesses, bringing skills and no doubt capital to the town of Shashamane, which has apparently been set aside for black people who supported the struggle against Italian colonisers. Amongst other things, the video conveys well the importance of music for sustaining an emotional, and indeed embodied connectedness to Africa.

At just over four minutes, the video would make a nice teaching aid for a class on diaspora, religion and development.

The law and protecting informant confidentiality

Sticking with oil disasters for the moment, here is an interesting blog post regarding one of the pitfalls of anthropological research when lawyers become interested in your topic, or at least  in your informants. In the article anthropologist Lawrence Palinkas tells of how his research on the effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill were subpoenaed by lawyers interested in pursuing legal action related to the spill. Much to his surprise, he found that his promises of confidentiality meant nothing when his informants were approached by lawyers bearing intimate details they had shared with the anthropologist.  The article states that:

Palinkas wasn’t to blame for the confidentiality breaches in Alaska. In fact, he had no idea that his data would be subpoenable once the lawsuits started flying.

“Even raw data became subject to subpoena by courts, including names and addresses of research participants,” says Patrinkas, a social anthropologist at the University of Southern California. “Researchers cannot guarantee the confidentiality of the individual providing that data.”

Aside from the ethical issues, the article also details of some other negative methodological effects arising from the inability of researchers to guarantee confidentiality. These include the stifling of research and information flow, and the slowing of the publication process.  Obviously, identical issues are going to be at issue during the current oil disaster, and researchers wanting to explore the health and other human impacts of the event will need to be aware that they are entering a legal minefield.

This issue of confidentiality is equally an issue in Australia, where there is also no anthropologist-informant privilege as there is for doctors and their patients, or lawyers and their clients. I know that this problem is especially familiar to those anthropologists working with Indigenous Australian groups. Researchers always have to bear in mind that their field notes can be subpoenaed by the courts, most commonly in native title cases.  However this is not to say that there are no strategies available to maintain informant confidentiality. As far as I know, many anthropologists working in Aboriginal Australia take precautionary measures to protect the identity of their informants, for example by using pseudonyms or codes even in their notes. What is not so clear to me is whether the courts also have the right to demand the key to such encryption techniques.

Perhaps there are anthropologists out there who have had to interact with the courts and could share some of their experiences, especially how they go about dealing with the issue of informant confidentiality.

[Thanks to the AAA Blog for the link.]

Postdoc on the human dimension of the Gulf oil disaster

Well, I haven’t been too active on the blog of late but I do plan to get back into posting very soon. First of all though I’d like to circulate this announcement of a possible postdoctoral position with the Social and Environmental Research Institute investigating the human impact of the Gulf oil disaster. It would seem like a very worthwhile applied anthro topic.

In the near future SERI will possibly be getting involved in social science
research on the human dimensions of the Gulf oil disaster.  Depending on
grant and contract funding we may be looking to hire social science
researcher(s) at the post-doctoral or doctoral (post-candidacy) level. The
larger of these projects could be a full time job for one year. It would
require spending two week periods in the Gulf region 3-5 times in the coming
year. Work location is negotiable, but being accessible to the SERI office
is an advantage.

At this time we are soliciting statements of interest from qualified people.
Please send a brief letter and CV to:  Thomas Webler   twebler@seri-us.org

The Social and Environmental Research Institute is a 501(c)(3) public
foundation committed to research for the public interest.

Nikki Kuper reflects on her honours year in anthropology

Nikki Kuper was one of our fantastic honours students in 2009.  She did extensive research on anthropological debates around the Human Terrain System and what it means for the ways that anthropologists think about ethics.  Bits of her work on this topic have been published here on Culture Matters, include an often-consulted annotated bibliography of publications on the Human Terrain System and similar anthropology-military-intelligence initiatives.

Now, non-Australians may not realize how the degree system here works, so let me briefly explain this.  While bachelor degrees in North America take 4 years to complete, Australians can get their BA in only 3 years.  The fourth honours year is optional, and usually the only students who take it are the best and the brightest, and those who are considering going on to do a PhD or other higher degree.  In Macquarie’s Anthropology Department, the honours year involves an intensive weekly seminar to read and discuss anthropological theory and ethnography and one independent research project.  It’s an amazing chance to learn first-hand about ethnographic research methods and write a thesis, thus gaining experience towards the future PhD.  But it can also be a harrowing experience to go from a highly regimented system of classes to a year of completely independent research and writing — not just writing a few 3000- or 5000-word essays for class, but taking everything you are learning and wrapping it up into one coherent, 20,000-word thesis.

Now that Nikki has finished her honours degree, she is off working in a remote Aboriginal community in the Northern Territories where, she tells me, the quiet and the community spirit and being close to the land are all good for the soul.  (She doesn’t say it, but I wonder if getting away from uni for a spell is also good for the soul?!)  But because she’s the kind of person who always wants to give back, Nikki has been kind enough to reflect on her honours year in anthropology and write some words of advice for how to get through it. Below is her account.

_____________________________

A month out from the new, new deadline for my thesis and I sat fretting on my back porch in a bubble of stress, numb to the beautiful sunset casting an orange glow on the gum trees. I had calculated and re-calculated how many marks I needed to get the only acceptable result (in my mind): first class honours. I was nervous, indeed petrified that if I did not get this mark, the last two years of abstemious behaviour, hours of research, reflective thought and writing would all have been fruitless. This thought circled around my head intermittently overwhelming my mind rendering me paralysed to any productive or positive thought for the next few days.

But I could not ignore how much my research skills had developed, all that I had learnt and all the positive experiences I had along the way. The hours of research, reflective thought and writing had paid themselves in dividends in ways that I had not foreseen when I decided to complete my honours in anthropology. I had thrown a pebble into a pond by undertaking honours and I was pleasantly surprised by the ripple effect it created.

The purpose of this little ditty is to share some reflections on my honours year; the perks and the pitfalls, the things I would change and the things I would do again with pleasure. I offer it in sympathy and as advice to other students stuck in their own ‘stress bubbles’ or who are just beginning their own projects.

As I see it there are 7 deadly sins when undertaking extensive research of this kind. They’re not mortal sins or even characteristic of immoral behaviour but when committed they are liable to deleteriously affect the outcomes of ones work. They include:

Academic professionalization workshop: part 2

As part of our attempt at Macquarie University (and Culture Matters) to get our students ready for the wide, weird world of professional anthropology, Lisa Wynn put together an Academic Publishing Workshop for grad students and more, which she also graciously posted online. Following suit, we recently had a workshop on ‘professionalization,’ the process of preparing for, getting, and eventually successfully filling some sort of job in our field: Academic professionalization workshop for grad students and more.

This post is the second half of that last workshop. It’s still very much a work in progress, so I’d welcome any feedback. The advice is going to sound more assertive than I might normally write, but I think that we should, at the very least, get some strong provocation to think ahead of time, rather than force ourselves to learn everything through trial and error. Like the first professionalization workshop post, this is not really my own creation: I simply pulled an old folder I had from my days at the University of Chicago, with advice from John Comaroff, John Kelly, and others, and found some other information in old handouts (and some new stuff online). This post focuses on interviewing and thinking about the transition from being a grad student into an academic position. I’ll try to follow up soon with a discussion of early teaching, and, if we’re lucky, we might be able to persuade Jaap Timmer to write a bit about his experience in consultancy anthropology, and how one goes about cracking into that field.

Like the previous posts, this material is licensed for free non-commercial use and adaptation, so long as you (a) acknowledge your source, and (b) license derivative materials under the same conditions. (c) Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0.

Professionalization workshop by Greg Downey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0.

Academic professionalization workshop for grad students and more

A while back, our colleague Lisa Wynn put up the text for her academic publishing workshop: Academic Publishing Workshop for grad students and more. She graciously shared a lot of great advice for getting things published on the previous post, including some strategies that I’m going to have to put into practice. Anyway, because she raised the bar here at Macquarie, I put together the first version of a ‘professionalization’ workshop for our students to complement the publishing workshop during our recent Research Week.

Below, you’ll find some of the materials for that workshop. I’m trying to put together a more comprehensive version, including some sample job letters, CVs and the like, but in this post I’m just going to share some of the advice that I circulated. Like Lisa’s material, it’s licensed for free non-commercial use and adaptation, so long as you (a) acknowledge your source, and (b) license derivative materials under the same conditions. (c) Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0.

Professionalization workshop by Greg Downey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0.

My sources
Many of the ideas in this posting started life as things I heard from my teachers, mentors, and role models while at the University of Chicago. Everything we write and think is, in part, borrowed from other people, but that truth is even more pronounced in the case of passing on wisdom amassed through hard lessons over long careers. I especially need to acknowledge that Profs. John Comaroff and John Kelly provided a substantial about of my ‘professionalization’ mentoring while at Chicago.

How to read a job ad

First, consider how the ad came to be…

When you read a job ad for an academic position, you may wonder what sort of person the search committee actually seeks to find. The ad may describe a person so broad, so versatile, so multi-faceted. Do they have someone specific in mind? Do they really think that they will get a candidate with all these skills? Aren’t some of these qualifications incoherent?!

Expanding the Influence of Applied Social Science

Not a member of the society myself I received the invitation below and thought that some following this blog might be interested to attend The 2011 Society for Applied Anthropology meeting that will be held at the Grand Hyatt in Seattle from March 30 to April 2, 2011.

The Conference theme will be:

Expanding the Influence of Applied Social Science

The world has changed in many ways since the Society for Applied Anthropology last met in Seattle over a decade ago.  Our members and those we work with have met enormous new challenges with renewed energy and remarkable resourcefulness. In 2011, we will gather to examine our recent efforts and tool for the future. Where and how have we been successful using our methods and concepts to help solve problems? Where have we helped turned conventional wisdom on edge? What policy changes has our work informed and how have we done communicating our findings?  Where have we not been successful and why?  Looking inward, what have we learned about ourselves, how have we contributed to social science theory, and what adjustments might we make to improve our work in the future?

The Pacific Northwest, an exciting and dynamic region where tradition and innovation are intertwined, is the perfect place to meet and address these questions. Throughout the region, applied social scientists work on important initiatives both locally and across the globe.  We continue to work with communities that have long been a focus of applied social science, such as American Indians, and are engaging new groups, including corporations in industries from biomedicine to retail and technology. We continue to work on long-term problems in areas such as health care and education, and we innovate in new areas such as fisheries management and heritage protection. We continue to use our time-tested methods for engaging people and developing context, and we continually develop new ways to collect, analyze, and portray information in our drive for applied knowledge and wisdom.

We invite you to Seattle for invigorating discussions and presentations about experiences and approaches to solving contemporary cultural problems. We solicit case studies that bridge practice and theory, application and evaluation, tradition and innovation. In our quest to build a sustainable, relevant, and vibrant discipline, we seek sessions that incorporate the voices of our senior, junior, and student colleagues; our partners; our clients; and the people we are trying to help.

Not ready to present? We encourage you to come listen, engage, ask questions, collect ideas, and take them to discuss with your students, professors, and colleagues at home.

In recognition of our gathering in the Pacific Northwest and in the spirit of SfAA’s long history of working with North American indigenous communities, we will dedicate several sessions to the process of cultural perpetuation. For indigenous groups and others who chose to maintain their cultural identity, perpetuation of lifestyle through education, language, protection of cultural and natural resources, and access to traditional foods are ongoing struggles. Action agendas that emerge from these sessions will be compiled in a special publication and distributed proactively.

On behalf of the Society for Applied Anthropology and 2010 program committee, I look forward to seeing you-in one of the most innovative and interesting cities in North America-to help prepare for the challenges of the 21st century.

Australian researchers and practitioners interested in attending and participating are encouraged to contact Dr Darby Stapp, the Conference
Organiser at dstapp@pockinet.com.

Cognition and Culture Grants

Dan Sperber sent us the following announcement of research funding in the are of cognition and culture.  I’m sure it would be of interest to many readers.

The International Cognition and Culture Institute (www.cognitionandculture.net) organizes a mini-grant competition funded by the Programme in Culture & Cognition at the London School of Economics. Up to five grants, each of the value of £1000, will be awarded to encourage anthropologists with good ethnographic knowledge of their field sites to perform an experimental study that will help provide comparative cross-cultural data on children’s and adults’ reasoning about human social kinds. Deadline: April 30, 2010. For details, go to www.cognitionandculture.net.

Thanks Dan!

Greg Downey in The Australian

I was interested to see Greg Downey’s name popping up as I browsed The Australian’s Higher Education Section online today.  He appeared in a short article to discuss his work and more general thoughts on the nature of anthropology.  As well as using his experience learning Capoeira in Brazil to comment on sports and the socialisation of boys in Australia, Greg also raised the problem of anthropology’s lack of public recognition.  In essence he argues that one of anthropology’s key strengths — it’s diversity — is also one of its weaknesses in this regard:

… the diffuse nature of the field is the source of an image problem. “Name recognition,” he says of anthropology. “No one knows what it means.” Asked what they do, anthropologists tend to identify themselves by their specific interest. “We tend to focus on the area of our specialty and not the big picture, such as `migrants in Thailand from Burma’, instead of saying, `I study human diversity’: if you add us all up, that’s what we do.”

So a hat tip to Greg.  Nice to see him getting his work out there and doing his bit to raise anthropology’s public profile somewhat.