Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents

This is an important chapter relating to the internet. Please read the handbook provided by the Reporters Sans Frontieres under this link: http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=542. Julien Pain is the head of the Internet Freedom desk at this organisation, he writes,

Bloggers need to be ananonymous when they are putting out information that risks their safety. The cyber-police are watching and have become expert at tracking down "trouble-makers".  [...] This advice is of course not for those (terrorists, racketeers or pedophiles), who use the internet to commit crimes. The handbook is ismply to help bloggers encountering opposition because of what they write to maintain their freedom of expression."

In the handbook follows a list of blog tools and platforms, some hints to promote a blog and a report about internet censorship. Reporters Sans Frontiers offer a blog service here.

Urban Dictionary

I found this Urban Dictionary, online. Every day, there are new definitions online, go watch the alphabetic list for September 28. The idea behind the service to be obtained via RSS, phone, web or API/program, is to build a slang dictionary by users. This is a very interesting thing from the anthropological view, because words are given an explanation and example. Plus, all the word creations are explained from an emic view, which means in this context: People, who are speakers of the English language, bring in their vocabulary of daily routine. For an overview what Linguistic Anthropology is, please read the Wikipedia article with a list of references. Directly related to Social and Cultural Anthropology is Ferdinand De Saussure, who supplied anthropologists with a model of language: Langage, langue and parole are the criteria for the theory of language as a set of symbols. This classification influenced Structuralism, whose most prominent Claude Lévi-Strauss provided for anthropology the binary pairs and triangles of relationship. Examples for binary pairs are: wet - dry, hot - cold, hungry - full, poor - rich.

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Quote of the Day:
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. - Herman Melville

SCAE: Social and Cultural Anthropology Efficiency Award

5 Blogs preferred in Social and Cultural Anthropology:

1. Antropologi.Info by Lorenz Khazaleh
2. AnthroBlogs by John Norvell
3. Ethno::Log by the Institute for cultural/social anthropology and african studies
4. Digital Ethnography by Michael Wesch
5. Schlau und Schoen? by Andrea Ben Lassoued

Congratulations, you won the Social and Cultural Anthropology Effiency Award!

Should you choose to participate, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging. Here are the rules:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the SCAE with a link to the post that you wrote. This is the image:

Please read this text on memetags and start your "5 Blogs preferred in Social and Cultural Anthropology" - list. The tag is - SCAE - to add as a blog tag.

Technorati Tags: SCAE, anthrotips, anthropology, ethnology

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Scientific Thought Production

1 Read, re - read, read again, and - !Bibliographies: Read everything your professors suggest. Many of the faculty publish bibliographies, librarians also provide services on questions. There are some kinds of reading being applied to science: Reading from top to bottom, looking for phrases, like my theory is... And, of course reading each line to get the deeper sense of a text. I read everywhere, I always did, but for scienctific reading newcomers I would suggest to carry a book with you, whenever, wherever. Read in the bus, in the subway, read waiting for somebody or on the couch. You will get used to it.

2 Collect Ideas: Always carry a notebook with you, or record your thoughts.
Collect these notebooks. Ideas and other notes might be seen from a different view weeks, months or years later. Watch TV or surf the net, browse book stores, talk to people you do or don´t know: Opinions and thoughts shared often produce a flow of thoughts in new directions. Brainstorm on paper at least once a week. Record association chains, write down your dreams. Keep these collected data safe, in boxes, books or store them on CD.

3 Write a blog: Writing a blog will give you the opportunity to write on a regular basis. Also, reflecting about style and developing an own style is supported by this kind of writing. There are many books out on the market about writing. Read them. Write. Otto Kruse wrote this fantastic book called Keine Angst vor dem leeren Blatt: In eight chapters he describes the obstacles often experienced and he explains how to start best. He says, that the prospective author has to be open to write down nearly everything. He then suggests to write for two weeks, every day. Clustering is a method commonly known in creative work. Pick a word, it does not matter which one, like fear, book, wood, picture, or research, and write it into the middle of a white sheet of paper. Then build strings around it by associating each string with more and more words, untile the sheet of paper ist full. I have an example for you, on poverty: See picture!

Train this weeks, months, this makes your thoughts visible. I have to admit, I was an excellent writer in High School, but not on scientific grounds. Scientific writing is learning and doing step-by-step, first collect ideas and thoughts. Then think about what you want to do with the text. Then - Kruse calls it - transform your structured notes, ideas, and thoughts into clauses. And so on. Thilo Baum´s walkthrough in thirty minutes serves another purpose of writing, namely Journalism. Free-Writing is offered by Lutz Werder in Kreatives Schreiben: This is a very easy technique, just write for five minutes without stopping. Whatever comes to your mind, consequently. Although I work on laptop often, paper gives me this feeling of having all collected information at once: Sheets of paper may be spread all over the table. More and mor blogs are suggested to support psychological work, too. I do not want to reaveal a list, please research yourself.

4 Research
I research all the time. I have this software called History Collector, it help. I tend to suffer information overload. If this happens to you, urge yourself to rest for two to four days.
The internet, books, catalogues and databases serve information gathering very well. Try to find out, what services your local library or University offer. Talk to colleages, and record or write the most important issues into your notebook.

5 Sources
Baum, Thilo (2005) 30 Minuten fuer gutes Schreiben. Offenbach: Gabal (2nd edition)
Kruse, Otto (2005) Keine Angst vor dem leeren Blatt. Frankfurt / New York: campus concret (11th Edition)
Werder, Lutz von (1992) Kreatives Schreiben von Diplom- und Doktorarbeiten. Berlin: Schibri

© Amber, Sybil 2007 Anthropo Logic Journals.

 

              

                                                                                                                                        © Sybille Amber: Intellectual Property 2005/2006/2007

Anthropology goes public?

Which sense does it make to transport scientific knowledge to a wider audience? What are public intellectuals? What do public intellectuals do?

As for me, the answer is surprisingly simple: I write Blogs and I publish my (undergrad) work on my u:net website (the University webspace for students in VIE). What happens to me oftentimes is, that people in the subway, in the bus or on the street address me directly (yet, I don´t know why this is so). Today while going to work, an elderly woman blurt out in the subway elevator, she wouldn´t be able to cope with this or that. This happens every day. It became a kind of task of mine to listen and advice.

Blogging, posting to newspaper lists or forum discussions are also a mode to go public. I endorse media work: Perhaps more anthropologists should “come out” in TV debates, like they have them in the ORF – here my question is why the directors or producers would not invite anthropologists for themed discussions on i. e. magic, religion, environment et cetera. I definitely miss this, not personally I, but it seems that only a sample of scientists would be employed by media.

What would public intellectuals attempt to transport in understandable terms and speech? Anthropology is a key science to me and public intellectuality has little to do with theory, I think, but is more a question of comprehensibility and tangibility. Intellectualitiy itself does not run for publicity for some reasons, by portability and inimitability. Scientific language needs information, like vocabulary, well-chosen verbalization and efficient restatements. Only a small percentage of the world population studies and belongs to the academic ivory tower. So academics should think about the dialectics of information translation, I should call it, a. to the academic community and b. for the averagely,  in the sense of acquired knowledge, educated public.

How could academics acquire competencies in communicating verbaly skilled? In my opinion, each student of Anthropology - talking of Social and Cultural Anthropology - should go through psychological tests, like having analyzed structures of personality or psychological disposition. This and the new tenets, i. e. at the University Vienna, for a so-called orchid-like science would help to strengthen its position and status. As a consequence Social and Cultural Anthropology would produce a greater effect on society by generating pools of interest and knowledge of people, about people. The better the training for acceptance and tolerance, the better promotion of democratic assets will mesh.

This short text was inspired by the EAnth mailing list. I hope, that as an undergrad I understood well and produced scientific comment and thought sharing in respect of what I am able to read and learn by participating. The idea of Public Anthropology I found first some two years ago on this site: Public Anthropology.

Ethnomusicology

What an incident! Joe Zawinul´s Syndicate is out and about again. I have collected some Jazz vids, old and new, like Weather Report´s music, and a short history about how Jazz evolved in America out of slavery, poverty, dispair, sickness, depression, and diaspora:



In Professor Kubik´s book Africa and the Blues the student learns:

"Historically oriented research on the blues embraces several disparate areas of inquiry:
1. The study of musical, literary, and social factors leading in the late nineteenth century to the grdual development of a new, distinct genre of accompanied solo song in rural areas of the South - a genre that would later be labeled `blues`.
2. The study of the remote history of this previously unnamed genre´s musicostructural and literary characteristics with regard to their origins in African and other cultures.
3. The study of the developments and changes that took place in the blues after the first publication of sheet music versions in 1912 and commercial gramophone records beginning in 1920.
4. The study of influences exerted by the blues and its contemporary rural and urban derivatives upon other types of American music and upon other musical cultures of the world from the 1920s to the present." (Kubik 1999: 3)

Kubik, Gerhard (1999) Africa and the Blues. U. S. A.: University Press of Mississippi

© Sybille Amber: Intellectual Property 2005/2006/2007

© Sybille Amber U, A. L. J., Anthropo Logic. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Thru Out The World: warehouse of artifacts

Thru Out The World: warehouse of artifacts: This is a videolist dedicated to art work. I update at least one month, suggestions are welcome. With this channel on YouTube I try to find art related videos. I thought this was a good idea to hear about art and an easy way to deliver art experience. Of course, the questions arises about what is an art video and whose videos would be eligible: I started with little gems, I found inspiration, too. The warehouse of artifacts represents the idea of random found objects in the internet, these obejcts are listed like in a warehouse, but they cannot be bought by itself. These objets trouves were not posted to be sold on purpose, they are published by individuals, who want to find a bigger audience to expose their art related work. Classics, like Yoko Ono´s vids, are added because of their singularity. Please feel free to notify me about your video.