Ethnography, modernity, globalisation

Contact
Hogne Øian, Department of Social Anthropology, e-mail: hogneo@sv.uit.no, phone: 776 44 398.

Lecturers
Professor Leif Manger, University of Bergen
Knut Nustad, University of Oslo

The course
6.-7. October 2005
The course will last for two days and combine lectures and presentation of student papers. The course aims mainly at doctoral students.

Venue
University of Tromsø, Room B-1004 in Breivika III, Faculty of social science.

Credits
With presented and approves essay: 5 points (ECTS)

The essay
Maximum 5000 words

Introduction
The course will attend to questions of how the anthropological focus upon diversity and plurality combines with study of modernity and globalisation. Students are encouraged to present papers that relates to questions like those presented below.

Modernity and globalisation are said to pose unprecedented challenges to anthropological research practice, in particular the tradition of long-term and localized fieldwork. Many have proposed multi-sited fieldwork and methods alternative to participant observation in localised fields. If the long-term localised fieldwork, and the situated knowledge it produces, is not the relevant method anymore, what kind of knowledge should provide for the wider context for interpretation and explanation of local practices?

The concepts of globalisation and modernity can be said to have their origin in liberal-evolutionist assumptions of the universality of modernisation. In particular within anthropology, concepts like other, plural or alternative modernities and glocalisation have been introduced, partly in order to overcome an eurocentric stance. These alternatives could however be criticised for treating the modernities of others as nothing else than local variations of a prototypical western modernity. How should we eventually proceed to treat plurality of modernities as modernities in theirs own right? And is it, on ontological and epistemological grounds, fruitful to speak of modernity as plural? How could ethnographic research contribute to less eurocentric definitions or uses of the concepts of modernity and globalisation?

Program:
Room: B-1004 in Breivika III, Faculty of social sciense

THURSDAY October 6.
9.15. – 11.00
Knut Nustad
State formation: an ethnograpic approach
(- Abrams, Philipp. 1988. Notes on the difficulty of studying the state. Journal of Historical Sociology 1: 58-89.
- Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2001. The anthropology of the state in the age of globalisation. Current Anthropology 42: 125-38.)

11.00 - 12.15
Lunch

12.15 - 14.00
Knut Nustad
Anthropology and post-development
(- Nustad, K.G. 2001. Development: the devil we know? Third World Quarterly 22, 4
- Green, M. 2003. Globalizaing development in Tanzania- Policy franchising through participatory project management. In Critique of Anthropology 23 (2) pp 123 - 143.)

14.30 - 15.15
Leif Manger
Understanding inter-civilizational encounters. Cultural reification and place-based practices in the Indian Ocean within the context of global capitalism, diasporas, and state-sponsored identities.

15.30 - 18.00
Presentation of student papers

FRIDAY October 7.
10.15 - 12.00
Leif Manger
In search of power constellations. Nation state, lobal governance, iolence and bio-politics in the Sudan.

12.00 - 13.00
Lunch

13.15 - 14.00
Leif Manger
“Historicizing globalization ?” Issues from a new project called “Global moments in the levant: Towards and understanding of a contact zone between peoples, cultures and states”

14.15 - 15.00
Leif Manger
An anthropologist among macro-historians and sociologists of the long dureé. Disciplinary betrayal or productive schizophrenia?


Reading list:
Argyrou, Vassos
2005. The Logic of Environmentalism: Anthropology, Ecology and Postcoloniality. Oxford:
Berghahn Books.

2005 [1996]. Tradition and Modernity in the Mediterranean: The Wedding as
Symbolic Struggle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2003. ‘Reflexive modernization" and Other Mythical Realities’. Anthropological Theory 3: 27-41
2002. Anthropology and the Will to Meaning: A Postcolonial Critique. London: Pluto Press

Comaroff, John and Jean Comaroff
2003. “Ethnography on an Awkward Scale: Postcolonial Anthropology and the Violence of Abstraction,” 4 Ethnography 291 (2003).

2003. “Transparent Fictions, or the Conspiracies of a Liberal Imagination: an Afterward,” in H. G. West and T. Sanders, eds., Transparency and Conspiracy: Power Revealed and Concealed in Global Villages, Duke University Press.

Englund, Harri
2002. ‘Ethnography after globalism: migration and emplacement in Malawi’, American Ethnologist, 29(2), 261-286.

2000. ‘Ethnography and the meta-narratives of modernity’, Current Anthropology, 41(2), 225-248.

Leif Manger et.al.
2004. “Global Moments in the Levant: Towards and Understanding of a Contact Zone Between Peoples, Cultures and States” Application for the Norwegian Research Council

Leif Manger
2004. “Reflections on War and State in the Sudan.” In ‘Forum’ (edited by Bruce Kapferer), Social Analysis, vol. 48, no. 1.

2004a. “Empires, World Systems and Globalisation. And Anthropologist among macro-historians and sociologists of the long duée”. (Unpublished paper)

2003. “Civil War and the Politics of Subjectivity in the Nuba Mountains, Sudan”. Paper presented at The XV ICAES Congress Humankind/Nature Interaction: Past, Present and Future, Florence, July 5-12, 2003. Workshop on “Anthropology and Its Applications”, organized by F. de Beer.

2001. “A Hadrami diaspora in the Indian Ocean – historical Reality or contemporary rhetoric” ? Paper presented at conference: The Concept of Diaspora and the Theorising of Identity, University of Bergen, September 5, 2001.