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Category Archives: anthropology
I just got notice that my proposal for a workshop ‘Cyberanthropology’ at the Conference of the German Anthropological Association (GAA aka DGV) – Halle / Saale, 4th – 7th October 2005 has been accepted, and that I am organizing it. Here is the first version of my description of the workshop: In the widest sense ‘cyberanthropology’ means the branch of sociocultural anthropology which aims to understand the culturally informed interrelationships between human beings and those technological artefacts which can be imagined and described as cybernetic systems. This interrelationships decidedly include the attempts to fuse technological artefacts with human and other … Continue reading
Susan D. Blum of the University of Notre Dame has taught a class in anthropology on Instant Messaging: “Teaching an upper-division undergraduate class on linguistic anthropology, “Doing Things with Words,” at the University of Notre Dame, nothing got my students so excited—not gossip, not gender, maybe accent—as the topic of Instant Messaging. This I learned when my students and I decided to study Instant Messaging as a form of student communication.” Read Susan’s paper on the class: Buzzing and Writing the Day Away Instant Messaging, and the paper which resulted from the class: Instant Messaging: Functions of a New Communicative … Continue reading
From 01 Dec 2005 through 03 Dec 2005 the ‘Digital Arts & Cultures Conference’ (DAC 2005) will take place at the IT University in Copenhagen, Denmark. The conference’s central topic will be ‘digital experience’. Have a look at the Call for papers. via the ludologist … Continue reading
Alex Golub just recently wrote: “A week or so ago I asked the question “what are the most popular ethnographies today that give you a sense of where the field is going, or at least what is popular right now?” With the help of a few friends, some commentors, a very large gin and tonic, and the internet, I came up with a few names I had never (or only vaguely) heard of before. Let me know if this makes sense or seems completely off to you.” Check out his Popular Ethnographies weblog-entry to get up-to-date. And don’t miss the … Continue reading
The last week was pretty much filled with two major tasks: Finally setting up this weblog and working on the map I am contributing to the Max-Payne-2 modification “Rogue-Ops”. Unfortunately I can’t show off any screenshots of my map yet, as looks and contents of it still are secrets to be kept inside the team. [Screenshots of my contributions to the mods Lightsaber 4.0, 5.0, the first chain map project, and the real world can be seen at the exhibition-section of maxmod, my project’s website.] To get an idea of Rogue-Ops visit the website and its media-section. The mod progresses … Continue reading
Since “Writing Culture” (Clifford & Marcus 1986) there is a lot of discussion about writing ethnographies in literary style(s). In my view the discussions inside visual anthropology deals with quite the same set of problems and issues transponed to the media still photography and moving image. Somehow hypermedia, the computer, and the Internet merge all this together. So every cyber/anthropologist doing work visibly online (like me here) sooner or later has to try to get wiser from writing culture and visual anthropology. Tobias Rees’ paper “Writing culture — Filming Culture” (Rees 1998) comes in handy, in my opinion. [One advantage … Continue reading
Nigeria, fraud, and counter-fraud Years ago, at the very beginning of my “journeys into cyberspace”, I was quite careless with my e-mail address. As a result I became the target of junk-mails, spam-mails and what you have. Meanwhile I’ve got a powerful firewall and filter which kicks all of them into killfile-oblivion. Only two categories of junk-mails still manage to sneak through: A heap of advertisement from Korea (Which I can’t even read—the bot ignores the most obvious of all ‘cultural borders’, the language-barrier-reef. ‘Cause of that those advertisements vanish into oblivion, too.) and mails from Nigeria which promise midean … Continue reading
↑Forarea, a bavaria-based, interdisciplinary community of about 200 scientists, concerned with the understanding of ‘other cultures’, has launched a computer game called ↑Xenophilia [=”the liking of the other”]. The game’s aim is to mediate an understanding of people who were socialized in cultures different from the ‘western’ one. Children and teenagers are to be reached by the game’s message. Xenophilia was presented at this year’s ↑Frankfurt Book Fair and instantaneously was awarded the ↑Giga-Maus, a german software award. Two versions of Xenophilia are available: One for everyone and one specially designed for the use in schools. original version at ethno::log … Continue reading