Anthropology

Katalogbeitrag zur Ausstellung  JO, L'ARXIDUC. El desig d'anar més lluny. CASA SOLLERIC 28.02.-14.06.2015, PALMA DE MALLORCA.
Un arxiduc amb mètode. Lluis Salvador el cientific pp.112-125; Un archiduque con método. Luis Salvador el científico pp. 278-286; An Archduke with Method. Ludwig Salvator, Man of Scienze pp. 277-284 (CD). in: Jo, L'Arxiduc. El desig d'anar més lluny. Catàleg. Institut d'Estudis Baleàrics, Palma de Mallorca 2015.

In this presentation, I explore what happened to the official tourism marketing of Egypt, in the turbulent years following the January 25 revolution that pushed Egypt’s lucrative tourism industry into crisis. The crisis was partly framed as an ‘image problem’ by official tourism actors in the country, and it was blamed on the narrow focus on violence and protests along global news media networks. As a response to these challenges, the standardized glossy tourism imagery and the aesthetically sanitized promotion material were replaced by advertisements that focused on Egyptians enjoying the ‘New Egypt’. As 2012 was coming to an end and the return of tourism was nowhere in sight, unconventional and unromantic live stream footage from tourist sites became part of the new marketing strategy, since, as one official marketing agent expressed it at the time, “no ad campaign can correct the misperception [of Egypt as a violent place]; only reality can”.

This study employs utopia as a method to explore the desires of five jobseekers; and the implications of these desires for discipline, productivity and resistance. The Jobcentre, which is effectively the jobseekers’ workplace, plays a structurally ancillary role within an economy for which positive affect and the investment of the whole self in work are vital assets. The Jobcentre’s function is to re-make individuals and reshape their desiring investments to be adequate to the needs of the labour market. I explore the products of this process by investigating the ways in which desire both adhered to and escaped from its ideal locations, through conversations with jobseekers about what they wanted the world to be like in the future. The contents of the utopias outlined by jobseekers were also in themselves also a focus of investigation. Contrary to my expectations, and the suggestions of previous theoretical and empirical work on this topic, every person I spoke to expressed critical glimpses of a radically different world. In some cases this was partial and faltering, in others this was systematic. However, the ways in which the utopian impulse broke down, or remained quiet were also instructive. Despair, atomisation, ressentiment and post-Fordist bargaining with normativity all counteracted utopianism. These counter-utopian affective products of the Jobcentre, and of precarious work, whilst in some ways contributing to docility, in others blunted the utility of the individuals I spoke to as workers. I suggest that this ambivalence contributes to the instability of contemporary modes of capitalist production.

Phenomenological approaches can lend empirical rigour and subtle insight to narratives of the immediate, by rooting ethnographic accounts in people’s lived presents. However, the lived present should not be mistaken for a site of authentic facticity. Thomas Csordas’ phenomenological study of charismatic healing demonstrates the explanatory and persuasive efficacy of a methodology which begins with experience; as contrasted with one which forgoes attending to experience in favour of abstraction. Yet Csordas’ ethnography is cross-cut with abstraction from, and interpretation of, the immediate. This raises questions about the degree to which phenomenological ethnographers can make claims to pure empirical authenticity.

In his ethnography of the Yukaghir, Rane Willerslev takes immediate, lived experience to be radically incontestable. An exploration of the constructed nature of experience, however, demonstrates that Willerslev’s commitment to the authenticity of experiential immediacy constitutes the “smokescreen” (Gay y Blasco and Wardle 2007) with which which narratives of the immediate can obscure experience. As an alternative to Willerslev’s insistence on the authenticity of experience, Robert Desjarlais’ ethnography of the political and rhetorical construction of immediacy is discussed as an approach to the rehabilitation of phenomenology: one which urges the politicisation and historicisation of a focus on the present.

This piece examines the ethical process of building Tinn, a data tracking app designed through research collaborations with communities of color in Portland, OR living with Tinnitus. If the entangled histories of self-help and racial uplift weren’t fraught enough in a project that revolves around health improvement via data tracking, then the tracking of indigenous and underserved users' phone use habits and behaviors as a supplement if not replacement for participant-observation pushes us into ethically and politically dangerous territory.

Edited by Karen Jacobs, Chantal Knowles and Chris Wingfield

The British Missionary movement, which began in earnest in the early 19th century, was one of the most extraordinary movements of the last two centuries, radically transforming the lives of people in large parts of the globe, including in Europe itself.

By exploring a range of artefacts, photographs and archival documents that have survived, or emerged from, these transformations, this volume sheds an oblique light on the histories of British Missionaries in Africa and the Pacific, and the ways in which their work is remembered in different parts of the world today.

Short contributions describing the histories of particular items, accompanied by rich visual imagery, showcase the extraordinary items that were caught up in histories of conversion, and are still controversial for many today. By focusing on the varied forms of missionary heritage, this volume aims to question the often used categories of trophies, relics or curios, and highlight the complexity involved in the missionary encounter.

This volume is the result of a research networking project bringing together specialists of missionary collections, i.e. artefacts, photographs or archival documents. These specialists are academics of various disciplines, museum curators and indigenous stakeholders who aim to show to a wide audience what missionary heritage constitutes and how varied it is. The heritage in focus is based in museums, archives, churches and archaeological sites in Britain, the Pacific and Africa.

With contributions by Ben Burt of the British Museum, Sagale Buadromo of the Fiji Museum, Ghanaian artist, art historian and curator Atta Kwami, Jack Thompson of the University of Edinburgh, Steven Hooper of the Sainsbury Research Unit, Joshua Bell of the Smithsonian Institute, Samoan artist Greg Semu and many more.

By Laura van Broekhoven

Los mercados de la Mixteca son colectividades vibrantes y dinámicas que funcionan y forman parte del macrocontexto de la globalización, desde el consumismo hasta el movimiento mundial de productos y personas.

Por lo general, la historia económica más formal deja mudos a los actores que definen esta economía: los comerciantes. Por medio de sus relatos, este libro documenta una historia informal que ha sido poco registrada. Cincuenta entrevistas, hechas entre 2004 y 2006 en algunas de las plazas principales de la Mixteca Alta, forman el eje central del libro. Son las historias de emprendedores mexicanos, que por ser tan personales y reales son estimulantes, alarmantes y atractivas a la vez. Por un lado, son analizadas desde la perspectiva del mercader individual, su agencia local y personal, y por otro lado, desde un punto de vista diacrónico, ya que se presentan, en la medida de lo posible, datos históricos que documentan historias de la vida de los mercaderes y de los mercados de la época precolonial, colonial y del siglo XIX.

Además, se han incorporado una serie de mapas detallados de varios centros comerciales locales importantes de la Mixteca, como por ejemplo el mercado de Tlaxiaco, Chalcatongo, Yanhuitlán, Teposcolula y Coixtlahuaca.

Edited by Luitgard Mols & Marjo Buitelaar

Every year, in the last month of the Islamic calendar, millions of Muslims from around the world come together in Mecca to perform the Hajj, the pilgrimage that all capable Muslims should perform at least once in their lives. In 2013, the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden organised the exhibition Longing for Mecca. The Pilgrim’s Journey. The chapters in this volume are the outcome of the two-day symposium on the Hajj, which was held at the museum in connection to the exhibition.

The central theme that runs through the book is how Hajj practices, representations of Mecca and the exchange of Hajj-related objects have changed over time. The chapters in the first part of the book discuss religious, social, and political meanings of the Hajj. Here the relationship is addressed between the significance of pilgrimage to Mecca for the religious lives of individuals and groups and the wider contexts that they are embedded in. Together, these anthropological contributions provide insights into the effects on Hajj practices and meanings for present-day Muslims caused by current dimensions of globalisation processes. The second part of the book takes material expressions of the Hajj as its starting point. It explores what Hajj-related artefacts can tell us about the import of pilgrimage in the daily lives of Muslims in the past and present. The contributions in this part of the volume point out that Mecca has always been a cosmopolitan city and the nodal point of global interactions far exceeding religious activities.

Together, the chapters in this book depict the Hajj ritual as a living tradition. Each with its own focus, the various contributions testify to the fact that, while the rites that make up the Hajj were formulated and recorded in normative texts in early Islam, details in the actual performance and interpretations of these rites are by no means static, but rather have evolved over time in tandem with changing socio-political circumstances.

Contents

The Hajj and the Anthropological Study of Pilgrimage
Marjo Buitelaar

Sacrifice, Purification and Gender in the Hajj: Personhood, Metonymy, and Ritual Transformation
Pnina Werbner

Pilgrimage, Performativity, and British Muslims: Scripted and Unscripted Accounts of the Hajj and Umra
Seán McLoughlin

The Hajj and Politics in Contemporary Turkey and Indonesia
Robert R. Bianchi

Islamic Reformism and Pilgrimage: The Hajj of Rashid Rida in 1916
Richard van Leeuwen

Gifts, Souvenirs and the Hajj
Venetia Porter

Hajj from China: Social Meanings and Material Culture
Oliver Moore

The Uppsala Mecca Painting: A New Source for the Cultural Topography and Historiography for Mecca
Mehmet Tütüncü

Hajj Murals in Dakhla Oasis (Egypt)
Remke Kruk and Frans Oort

Souvenir, Testimony, and Device for Instruction: Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Printed Hajj Certificates
Luitgard Mols

Appearances Belie. A Mecca-Centred World Map and a Snouck Hurgronje Photograph from the Leiden University Collections
Arnoud Vrolijk

Hajj Music from Egypt, Syria and Lebanon: Some Reflections on Songs for the Pilgrimage
Neil van der Linden

This expanded edition of my translation of AL-MURAJA`AT, one of the hottest books in the Islamic library, contains three Appendices one of which details the presence of Islam and Muslims in America, a report prepared by Harvard University, and my comment on it.

This blog was posted by SPRING COLLEGE which has been created by Li An Phoa. Spring College is a particularly wonderful collaborative learning experience that I have participated in twice. Each time I've met people who have stayed in contact and with whom I have collaborated in various projects.

The growth of awareness about how academic authors use authority of publishers is one of the directions for rebuilding of the 21st science as a science of innovative research which helps society and brings keys to make it sustainable, intellectual, without poverty and terrorism. Unfortunately, some authors only expand the meaning of terrorism adding a level of terrorism at which the academic status has been used for participation with old texts, old theses, non-sense statements, and corrupted approach to historiography.