Today, the inhabitatants of a village in Malta have descended into a field close to Dahlet Qorrot Bay for a massive tomato fight. For two hours, two teams will hurl huge amounts of ripe tomatoes at each other. This tradition was borrowed from Spain, and the newspaper Malta Today raises the question how ‘right’ is it for traditions to be borrowed. Anthropologist Ranier Fsadni answers. Read more in >>Malta Today
Nordic Anthropological Film Association (NAFA)
Explore the Chea-villagers' traditional "Kuarao"-fishing in the Solomon Islands - in an interactive presentation based on professor Edvard Hviding and SOTFilm a/s filmproject "Chea's Great Kuarao" (1996).
We also have an interactive presentation of The Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico, based on films made by Frode Storaas. >>continue
Nepal News
Martino Nicoletti, an Italian anthropologist, explains Kulunge Rai’s practice of shamanism in Nepal in his book "Shamanic Solitudes. Ecstasy, Madness, and Spirit Possession in the Nepal Himalayas". Shamanism is widely practiced among the Tibeto-Burman ethnic groups living in most parts of the mid hills of Nepal. Unlike the world’s two old religions – Buddhism and Hinduism - the Shamanism has its own root and unique rituals.
This is what one can find in detail in the book. Nicoletti has completed the book following his long stay in the region observing the practices side by side with the Kulunge Rai community. >>continue (LINK UPDATED 12.8.2020)
Monterey County Herald
Men are absent from the streets. It is often several years before they return from their farmworking, gardening or construction jobs across the border. Sometimes they don't return at all, leaving their wives and children to live in shame.
The rural Mexican town of Ayutla is like so many other pueblitos (villages) -- where economic opportunities are so lacking that men leave their families to try their luck in the United States.
The compelling story of Ayutla's economic flight has been put to film -- a work called simply "Ayutla" -- by CSU-Monterey Bay students Annalisa Moore, Jessica Schorer and Jaymee Castillo. The students came across the town while doing ethnographic field research as part of a CSU-Monterey Bay anthropology class last year.
"We wanted to show the human side, the sacrifices people make to be part of the globalized marketplace," said Moore, who is shopping it around various film festivals. >>continue
Nunatsiaq News
Nunavik performers had enthusiastic audiences at last week's Riddu Riddu festival in Arctic Norway, where attendance at the circumpolar arts, music and culture bash broke all previous records.
Some Sámi now consider Riddu Riddu to have more political importance than Norway's Sámi Parliament or the Nordic Sámi Council. This year Sámi political leaders, including Sven Roald-Nystø, president of the Norwegian Sámi Parliament, and Ole-Henrik Magga, who heads the United Nations Permanent Forum for Indigenous Issues, were both on hand to underline the festival's importance to the North. >>continue
Fast Company Magazine
Girl walks into a bar. Says to the bartender, "Give me a Diet Coke and a clear sight line to those guys drinking Miller Lite in the corner." No joke. The "girl" is Emma Gilding, corporate ethnographer at Ogilvy & Mather, one of the world's top advertising agencies. Her assignment is to hang out in bars across the country, watching guys knock back beers with their friends.
Since at least the mid-1990s, the advertising industry has been fighting a war on multiple fronts. Some larger firms believe that ethnographic research such as Gilding and Shapira's can help identify consumers' emotional hot buttons, allowing them to craft messages with more resonance.
But ethnographic research is not a panacea. For one thing, it's expensive. The process is time-consuming. Paco Underhill, whose books Why We Buy and Call of the Mall are classics of modern retail ethnography, confesses to a bigger concern: How does this research translate into sales? >>continue
(via Ideas Bazar Blog)
Currents online, University of California
In an invited lead article in the current issue of the influential journal Human Development, UCSC psychology professor Per Gjerde challenges his colleagues to reconsider popular ideas about the role of culture in human development.
Much of the trouble stems from the use of nations as proxies for cultural units, said Gjerde. Notions of culture are linked to national boundaries and geographical areas, like “East” and “West,” fueling generalizations about “American individualism” and “Asian collectivism,” said Gjerde.
Gjerde is critical of the fieldwork that forms the basis for most notions of culture, saying it has been conducted in “limited and bounded social contexts” and that the fixation on groups has obscured the exploration of variation and complexity within and between human beings.
Gjerde’s model would take a more interdisciplinary approach to the study of culture, incorporating the writings of anthropology and other fields, and it would consider the influence of power, coercion, and class differences on individual psychological development. >>continue
Main theme for the annual meeting is conflict resolution, the UNPO (Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation) writes.
A report was launched at the meeting in Geneva that states the potential for indigenous people to help curb the destruction of forests is being overlooked by the international community, according to a report, the BBC reports.
- The Guaraní community of Tentayapi, in southern Bolivia, one of the last bastions of the indigenous group's traditional way of life, is fighting to keep a foreign oil company out of its ancestral territory. One of the community's leaders, Saúl Carayury, told the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations, meeting this week in Geneva, that Maxus Energy, a subsidiary of the Spanish-Argentine firm Repsol-YPF based in Spain, intends to explore and drill for hydrocarbons on communally-owned indigenous land in Tentayapi according to One World England
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