Anthropological Life in Bush of Ghosts. Anthropology, Anthropologist and Cultural
Change in Transitiona Serbia
Bojan Žikić, Department of Ethnology and Anthropology, University of Belgrade
Celebrating centennial of Ethnology and Anthropology curriculum at the University
of Belgrade in 2006 happened to be not just another occasion to speak about
"glorious past", or even to employ self-reflexivity to our discipline. Review of
changes through which the discipline passed as the social and cultural
circumstances have changed in Serbia in more than a century posed questions on
how professional lives of anthropologists are affected by transitional occurrences of
last twenty years or so, alongside with consequences for better understanding of
Serbian society and its culture when knowledge is produced by those who live
within that particular social and cultural context.
It turns that if you want to understand what does transition really mean, or how
social institutions, norms, or behaviours are affected by one social system ceasing
to exist, while another is not fully established yet, and what does cultural change
stand for in everyday life of common people around, you must have expert and
whiteness in one person, the one confident in his/her own epistemic privilege, and
yet capable to join professional efforts in trying to establish the discipline able
enough to serve purposes of understanding and explaining the world we are living
in, being the tool of cultural critique and conceptual frame for implementing social
awareness at the same time.
So in a manner of speaking anthropologist is produced somehow by the
anthropology his/her professional work belongs to, where latter is shaped by social
and cultural influences by the community which gives a contextual frame for
whatever anthropology studies in certain social and cultural environment.
Anthropology and the 'War on Terror'.
Analysis of a complex relationship
Addaia Marrades Rodriguez - Departament d'Antropologia social I cultural - UAB
The 9/11 events in 2001 and the obsession of Western intelligence agencies to
counteract the radical Islamist threat have once more put anthropology in the front
line. Indeed, in the current context of 'War on Terror', anthropology methods and
skills are in demand, but the engagement of the discipline with the military is
creating heated debates at the heart of it. In this paper, I analyse the present call
from a historical perspective and I highlight its particularities especially in relation
to the emerging security-development nexus. In order to do so, I focus on
programmes appeared in the USA (Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program) and
the UK (Combating Terrorism by Countering Radicalisation). Both programmes
employ anthropologists and other social scientists aiming to grasp a better
understanding of what military agencies think the enemy is in order to combat it
more efficiently. Using internet resources and debates appeared in journals and
professional associations extensively, this paper analyses the engagement of
anthropology and the military in the twenty-first century taking into account the
consequences this relation has outside the discipline but also inside it.
Keywords: anthropology of war.
La Teología de la Liberación. Interrogantes sobre lo religioso y los procesos de cambio
María Carballo López y Carmen Salcedo Vereda - UAB
The study of changing religious movements, related with the emergence of social
movements, faces some pitfalls. Part of them can be explained for the same
complexity of the religious fact but also by the continuous use of simplifying
categories used for understanding it. In the text we present the conceptual
questions that arise using this category with the case-study of the Theology of
Liberation and its LatinAmerican development in the 70'.
Keywords: Theology of Liberation - religious movements.
De la difusión de tópicos a las estrategias auto-reflexivas: el caso de la
representación de las mujeres brasileñas en los medios de comunicación portugueses
Luciana Pontes Pinto - Departament d'Antropologia social i cultural - UAB
In this paper I comment on the representation of alterity at the audiovisual media,
emphasizing the representation of the "no-occidental", of women and of
immigration. Departing from this background, I analyze gender and nationality in
the representation of Brazilian women at the Portuguese media. I conclude this text
pointing to different forms of representation of alterity that try to overcome
prejudices, in what is usually called the reflexivity in the Visual Anthropology.
Keywords: Social Anthropology; migration; gender; audio-visual; alterity
Tipologías y clasisificaciones
José Luis Molina & Júlia Vich Bertrán
Departament d'Antropologia social i cultural - UAB
The cognitive anthropology has developed a set of methods and techniques for collecting folk classifications of nature (classifications made from different cultures) that have a wide range of applications throughout the Social Sciences. In this article we propose to introduce these techniques along with examples of implementation. What are the domains under which classifies a range of social and cultural phenomena by certain groups or populations? What categories are used to sort this domain? How varied knowledge and use of categories within each population? These are some of the questions that we intend to respond. Currently, these techniques are particularly relevant for the importance it is acquiring the identification and incorporation of the so-called indigenous or local knowledge in environmental management, among other applications.
Keywords: Cognitive Anthropology - classifications folk - indigenous knowledge - cultural domains
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