2013

Recent ethnographies of clinical research in Africa have described the impotance of "relatedness" to the successful conduct of trials. They have also revealed the tensions between such relatedness and the scentific and ethical rules of clinical trial work, and at the risks of mixing professional and private, erasing the "ordered separartions upon which formal ethics and scientific evidence rest". Among other colleagues, Ruth Prince and Paul Wenzel Geissler participate in this overviewarticle of HIV science in western Kenya.

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This chapter contributed by Knut Gunnar Nustad discusses notions of 'property' and 'rights' in the context of South Africa's land reform programme. Both concepts carry with them a heavy ideological baggage. This is evident in the policies on land reform, which have sought to reach a compromise between different and often contradictory histories of both rights and property.

In this article, Sindre Bangstad, Oddbjørn Leirvik and John R.Brown ask what  anthropology can tell us about the multiple ways in which European Muslims engage with liberal and secular laws and the state.

Read the whole article in Ethnos

Ruth Prince is following the development in the city of Kisumu in western Kenya since the late 1990s in her article. She is listening to experiences from several local women  who tell us about the changing conditions of living through the decades.

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Thomas Hylland Eriksen har blitt intervjuet av online-tidsskriftet AIBR, Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana. Intervjuet kan leses online både på spansk og på engelsk:

Antropología, humanismo y responsabilidades cívicas: una conversación con Thomas Hylland Eriksen.

Anthropology, humanism and civic responsibilities: a conversation with Thomas Hylland Eriksen

This article represents the situation as Signe Howell found it during her first fieldwork. Then, as Chewong have done for generations, they lived in small settlements scattered throughout an area of about 190 square miles, the Krau Wildlife Reserve of Pahang. This Chewong regard as their traditional territory.

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The debate over the mana concept has been simmering ever since its launch as a Melanesian. ethnographic term with the 1891 publication of Robert Henry Codrington’s The Melanesians. In this article, Thorgeir Kolshus  gives  a linguistic overview  of the concept of "mana" used in Polynesian cultures.

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This article written by Arnd Schneider represents an exercise in dialogical anthropology, based on a collaboration with contemporary visual artists in a specific fieldwork locale in Argentine

The article is open to the public in critical arts

Denne artikkelen skrevet av Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme tar for seg den ontologiske vendingen i antropologien og viser hvordan den tilsynelatende enhetlige vendingen rommer en rekke ulike tilnærminger til ontologi.

In this article, Sindre Bangstad has analysed some of the most central contributions to the Eurabia genre in Norway, as well as its popularization and mainstreaming in Norway in the past decade.

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Sindre Bangstad explores the recent application of the "racism paragraph" by higher Norwegian courts. Additionally, he provides a defence of the legislation forbidding grossly discriminatory or hateful public expression against the criticism of "freedom of speech" absolutists.

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This article has sought to shed light on processes of inclusion and exclusion in Norwegian mediated public spheres. Sindre Bangstad has argued that contemporary conceptions of freedom of expression among liberal media editors in Norway are suggestive of a hierarchisation of human rights in which freedom of expression is posited as an absolute and inalienable right,overriding all other rights and concerns, such as concerns relating to rights to non-discrimination.

Read the whole article in Social Anthropology

Den muslimske bevegelsen IslamNet har siden 2009 vært omgitt av intens medieoppmerksomhet. I april og mai 2013 avslo Universitetet i Oslo (UiO), og senere Høgskolen i Oslo og Akershus (HiOA) søknader om å registrere muslimske studentforeninger utgått fra IslamNet.

Cecilia G. Salinas i en artikkel i Norsk antropologisk tidsskrift drøfter sammenhengen mellom nyliberale økonomiske reformer og begrepet håp i forhold til tremasseindustrien i Uruguay. Artikkelen er basert på en empirisk studie av etableringen av en finsk tremassefabrikk i en landsby i Uruguay. Hun argumenterer for viktigheten av begrepet håp som analytisk verktøy i studier av kapitalisme, og understreker at håp har en narrativ struktur.

Artikkelen kan leses i fulltekst på idunn.no

Signe Howell begins her chapter to the anthology The handbook of contemporary animism by narrating an abbreviated version of a Chewong myth about frog People. The Chewong are a small group of hunter-gatherers and shifting cultivators who, at the time of Howells first fieldwork in the late 1970s, lived deep inside the Malaysian tropical Rainforest.

Dette temanummeret av NAT presenterer noe av den ANT-inspirerte antropologien fra Sosialantropologisk institutt ved Universitetet i Oslo. Det er et bredt spekter av artikler fra ulike regionale og tematiske felt, men alle benytter begreper og analytiske perspektiver inspirert av ANT-tradisjonen og beslektede teoretiske vendinger innen Vitenskaps- og Teknologistudier og materiell semiotikk.

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Sindre Bangstad gives an historical overview of political experiences which can be connected with attitudes of xenohphobia in Norway. One of his observations is that "it is not white Norwegians of working-class background in Oslo East who hold the most negative views of immigrants and minorities in Norway. Those white Norwegians who are most likely to hold the most negative views of immigrants and minorities are in fact those least likely to have everyday contact with people of immigrant and minority background"

Working in Africa with public health researchers— sharing goals, respecting science, enjoying company—Wenzel Geissler was time and again struck by our faculty to unknow our daily confrontation with inequality.

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Animal domestication is a dynamic and open-ended process which potentially transforms both the animal and its surroundings. Using the case of Atlantic salmon, John Law and Marianne Lien describes a series of scientific and fish-farming practices, based on fieldwork in West Norway. They show how different salmon are being enacted within those different practices, and explore the precarious choreographies of those practices, and the ways in which they enact agency and also work to generate Otherness. Their article is part of the project 'Newcomers to the farm, Atlantic salmon between the wild and the industrial'.

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Akronymet REDD står for «Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation in developing countries». På norsk altså «Redusere utslipp fra avskoging og skogforringelse i utviklingsland».

REDD-arbeid skal bidra til å redusere klimaendringene ved å bygge opp et insentivsystem der rike land skal kompensere utviklingsland økonomisk for å redusere CO2-utslipp fra skogsektoren.

Les om prosjektet i Norsk magsin for klimaforskning s.17-19

P. Wenzel Geissler compares the work and lives of local health workers in their everyday struggles to make a living and a meaningful life.

For more about the article and full access for subscribers visit Africa, the Journal of the International African Institute

Land continues to be a contentious issue in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Recently, a new form of conflict over land has received much attention. Knut G. Nustad and Frode Sundnes claim that in the case they study, the nature of the land itself is at stake. The wetland area, which served as hunting grounds in the past, was transformed into productive fields. This struggle over the nature of the land lies at the heart of the controversy surrounding the land claim.

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While the In Search of Europe? project involves several academic disciplines, anthropology in particular can lay claim to an important history of study of, as well as an ongoing engagement with, art. Arnd Schneider starts his intervention with a short observation on that history.

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