The Ideas Bazaar

Book Review: Doing Anthropology

I've got a book review out in the latest edition of Anthropology in Action (16:1), which is a Special Joint Issue with the Irish Journal of Anthropology. it is a review of Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research – Patricia Sunderland and Rita Denny (Eds). The bottom line is that it's a rather good book and if you're interested in doing anthropology in places other than academia, but not reducing your research to some sort of psycho-centric market research, this is a good place to look for inspiration...

As the nature of applied anthropology has evolved, and the number of applied practitioners has swelled, so the number of books charting these developments has grown. The authors, both anthropologists, locate their book within the overlapping domains in which their work is situated – applied consumer research, market research, the pre- and contemporary history of applied anthropology and academic anthropology. Their history of the early uses, and advocates of anthropological theory, methods and analysis within American business (such as Levy, Henry and Gardner) shines new light on the development of the discipline, prior to the schism which saw applied anthropologists cast out by their more purist academic colleagues. 

It is this schism, now waning, that provides one key context for Sunderland and Denny’s volume. However, it is to their credit that they do not allow the tired (and ultimately fruitless) tussle between academic and applied practitioners to beset their book. Instead, they provide what amounts to an ethnographic account of cultural analysis in the consumer research setting. They offer a strong and convincing argument for ‘anthropological ethnography’ (page 46) and provide a riposte to those who accuse applied anthropologists as lacking in theoretical sophistication. They achieve this through substantive chapters that detail projects they have conducted (such as explorations of the meaning of offices and identity in New Zealand) and which, taken together,  constitute a ‘long intertwined explorative ethnography of contemporary life’ (page 32). Newcomers to such applications of anthropology will find these accounts illuminating. Rather than simply focusing on the story of their projects, and how the research was conducted (though we learn of methodological innovation in the process), Sunderland and Denny explore their use of theory and analysis to make intelligible and meaningful their fieldwork. There is also much insight into the ways such work is used and received within their clients’ organisations. To this extent the book represents the first ethnography of commercially applied anthropology. Later chapters discuss the ‘entanglements’ – epistemological, practical and strategic – that their work involves. Their reflections and suggestions (for this is an eminently practical book) on the use of photography and video are especially timely given growing interest in visual strategies in anthropology. 

This book is not a ‘how to’ guide (like Hy Mariampolski’s Ethnography for Marketers) but it is a manifesto for cultural analysis. It speaks to a wide audience. One can imagine the book being useful and inspiring for many types of reader: those teaching research methods, students thinking about career trajectories, seasoned applied anthropologists looking to sharpen their thinking on current practices or market researchers wishing to develop their anthropological understanding. As a book that explores the politics and poetics of applied anthropology the volume is itself an intriguing ethnography of applied anthropology that anyone interested in the evolution of the discipline should consider reading. Sealing their achievement is the enthusiasm and commitment to their craft that the authors display which, in an eminently anthropological way, they temper with a sense of critical reflection on their  research practices. 

From the Air

There's a piece in this weekend's FT magazine about a project that was conducted in the last days of the Shah of Iran's rule - to photograph the country from the air: 

When Georg Gerster first flew over Iran on a business trip, he decided that he should somehow photograph the contours and colours that he saw passing beneath him. The Swiss aerial photographer bypassed officialdom by hand-delivering a request, in October 1975, to the Imperial Court in Tehran. Within weeks, Gerster was meeting an Iranian official anxious to know what kind of aircraft should be purchased. The Empress Farah, it seemed, had taken a liking to the project.

The pictures displayed in the piece are mesmerizing in a way that only pictures from the sky can be - but these seem to accurately portray the details of the landscape below and also to transform that landscape into a well detailed and slightly abstracted painting. For example:

Tabriz, June 13 1976
Tiered croplands in the highlands near Tabriz, the earthquake-prone home of the Blue Mosque

Some of the pictures put in mind of the Belfast-based artist Clement McAleer, one of whose pieces I was lucky enough to pick up for a rather good price at an auction last summer.

Lime Quarry - Clement McAleer, image courtesy of James Wray and Co. Gallery

The book ‘Paradise Lost: Persia from Above’ by Georg Gerster (Phaidon, £35) is published on March 21. 

Today

This book is a perfect little addition to that pile of books next to the toilet which require little concentration but demands something absorbing (if not also absorbent): Indexed.

It joins that ever-growing section of the bookshop which is 'Books that were formerly read as Blogs' (anyone remember Belle de Jour?)

Indexed is a one-a-day index card with a ideograph. Simple idea, cleverly and executed regularly i.e., daily. Here's a few which seem to nicely summarise things.

First today in my bit of Intel towers

Second, my area of interest as seen from the perspective of this point in the economic cycle:

And finally, a nice take on recent state intervention in the banking sector

A Recommendation

Read this book. It is difficult to put down and at time like this when tectonic plates are shifting underneath us it feels like an appropriate book somehow. This piece explains a little bit about it (but is fuill of spoilers so beware). Apparently Nick Cave and Warren Elliss are writing the score for the movie, and I'm eagerly awaiting its release.

Big Job, Good Job

Thinking Allowed (10th Sept 2008) alerted me to this fascinating looking book on, well, poo. It appears to adopt the now familiar 'social life' approach examining a substance and set of practices which, for reasons that are as obvious as they are inexplicable, have largely avoided academic or even pseudo-scholarly, popular approaches. 

As author Rose George's website puts it,this is a pressing topic indeed:

2.6 billion people lack the most basic thing that human dignity requires. Four in ten people in the world have no toilet. They must do their business instead on roadsides, in the bushes, wherever they can. Yet human feces in water supplies contribute to one in ten of the world’s communicable diseases. A child dies from diarrhoea - usually brought on by fecal-contaminated food or water - every 15 seconds.

Meanwhile, the western world luxuriates in flush toilets; in toilets that play music or can check blood pressure, where the flush is a thoughtless thing, and anything that can go down a sewer...

there are mutliple aspects to this hidden world which, at least in the developed West, we partake of in near Fort Knox like security and privacy. There's the economics of the waste - flushing poo down a loo with potable water, then cleaning the water again so that is potable; there are cultural and gender issues to accessing places to go to the toilet; there's the technological issues of re-using waste and extracting gas from it - and the cultural issues of embedding this technology into pre-existing ecosystems of waste removal and farming. There's geographical issues too - as the world urbanises so creating the space, and the infrastuctures for poo-ing becomes an ever bigger challenge. It pout in mind of anthropologist Francesca Bray's work on toilets - American Modern

Data Data Everywhere

Reading Future Reading today, an essay in the New Yorker on the history of technologies for creating, publishing, organising and consuming the written word, from Mesopotamia to Google's ambitious project to digitise the world's books I was put in mind of Walter Ong's startling conjecture. This was commented upon by Ulf Hannerz in Cultural Complexity - "at the beginning of history, it may have taken ten or a hundred thousand years for human knowledge to double, while at the time of his writing it took about fiftenn years. If this is true, knowledge has more than doubled again since then, and probably the speed of growth accelerated further yet" (Hannerz 1992:31).

Makes it feel hard to catch up, let alone keep up, doesn't it?

The New Yorker article contains some other fascinating nuggets:

• Some estimate that 32 million books have been published but Google reckons that number is nearer 100 million - why such an enormous disparity?
• It is estimated that between five and ten per cent of known books are currently in print, and twenty per cent—those produced between the beginning of print, in the fifteenth century, and 1923—are out of copyright. The rest, perhaps seventy-five per cent of all books ever printed, are “orphans,” possibly still covered by copyright protections but out of print and pretty much out of mind.
• Sixty million Britons have a hundred and sixteen million public-library books at their disposal, while more than 1.1 billion Indians have only thirty-six million. Poverty, in other words, is embodied in lack of print as well as in lack of food