An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in fronts of TVs, computers and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Auge calls "non-space" results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner.'
... says David Harvie before starting to criticize Marc Augé's book, "Non-Lieux".
Anthropology's gone mad too, in the post-modern "era". While I'm still thinking about to fieldwork or not to fieldwork in a village using hardcore modern ways, anthropologists started to do fieldworks in strange places. Augé's airport is only one of the normal ones when people like Robin Hamman are conducting research on the "internet" within the framework of rhizomatic structure* (from Deleuze & Guattari). There is some"thing" like cyberanthropology now! Hallelujah!
Please check out http://www.nomadology.com/ to see a miniature rhizomatic structure.
* rhizome is like the root of potato. water (and other things) can enter the root from various points. Deleuze and Guattari's application to social sciences signifies a non-hierarchical order; just like the internet.
Sunday, January 11
Monday, January 5
fieldwork: to do or not to do ?
Dear laypeople, doing fieldwork is not easy as it looks. As a baby anthropologist trying to figure out what kind of a master thesis i should/could/would write, my main concern is to get over with without going places. (including my own country!) Yeah... Shame on me!
Even one of the founding fathers Bronislaw Malinowski - who invented "participant observation" (long-term type) - wasn't that happy being on the field, living in a hut in the middle of a Trobriand village, although he had all that fancy white outfit. "He often felt homesick, despondent, and sick and tired of 'the natives'." (A History of Anthropology, 43)
This kind of stuff made anthropology a well-respected discipline actually. But I must add, you must have balls in order to be involved with it... The question is, do I have 'em?
Even one of the founding fathers Bronislaw Malinowski - who invented "participant observation" (long-term type) - wasn't that happy being on the field, living in a hut in the middle of a Trobriand village, although he had all that fancy white outfit. "He often felt homesick, despondent, and sick and tired of 'the natives'." (A History of Anthropology, 43)
This kind of stuff made anthropology a well-respected discipline actually. But I must add, you must have balls in order to be involved with it... The question is, do I have 'em?
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