Postmodern Anthropology Research Articles

Integrating design thinking and anthropology as enablers in addressing responsible innovation

This work explores the integration of design thinking (DT) and anthropology as enablers in addressing responsible innovation in a real-world project. We used a problem and project-based learning (PPBL) approach with transdisciplinary research to explore such integration. We implemented design thinking as a reflective practice, process and mindset and postmodern anthropology as an approach and interpretative anthropology as an instrument. The objective is to integrate both when teaching strategic innovation as they help secure profitability while being responsible for the negative implications of innovation and its hidden un(der)costed flows. We designed a project-based learning approach embedded in a problem-based learning approach to expose students to the complexity of responsible innovation and distinguish its different elements through a sustained period. We documented a semester-long project where an interdisciplinary undergraduate group (non-designers) and community members partnered to face a societal challenge. Students submitted reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action assignments throughout the semester, and we triangulated them with participative observation and physical artefacts to document their learning experiences. We used thematic analysis addressing recurrent themes, topics and relationships towards the experiential learning approach and instructional methodologies that facilitated learning DT, anthropology and responsible innovation. Students perceived that anthropology and DT helped them visualize unforeseen consequences, make the normative within the technical explicit, acknowledge plural viewpoints and promote collective learning. Second, they recognized human perspective, participatory tools, intentional actions and functional outcomes as approaches to attend to those external factors that discourage responsible innovation. Third, they discerned that a PPBL approach using transdisciplinary research enabled them to have a greater understanding of the topic, deeper learning and increased motivation to learn. It also facilitated taming ill-defined problems while producing new understandings and feasible solution-oriented outcomes. This work discusses the need for theories and pedagogies to teach contemporary innovation in business education. First, we contributed to the former by embedding anthropology and DT to discuss responsible innovation as an essential element in devising strategic innovation. It emphasizes the need for academics and non-academic participants to reflect on their role and power in developing integrated knowledge for science and society. Second, we explore the practical implications of integrating a PPBL approach in business education pedagogy. It allows students to work in real-world settings and produce workable contributions to (and with) society. This project provides a detailed and descriptive analysis of a PPBL approach that aims to address responsible innovation in a public project while documenting students learning experiences. This work contributes to empirical research addressing pedagogies and advancing new theories in business education.

Spatial narrative research with architecture as the media

Abstract With the development of economic globalization and the information age, architecture has gradually become a kind of seal of politics, capital and culture, and is divorced from the spirit and life experience of the existing places in the region. Therefore, the field of architecture constantly seeks new research paradigm from the interdisciplinary perspective and reconsiders the creative activities of architecture. From the late last century, with the introduction of architecture by postmodern philosophy, semiotics, geographical psychology, phenomenology and cultural anthropology, there has been a cross-research between architecture and narratology. The recent research hopes to conduct an in-depth analysis of the theory of architectural spatial narrative and its development in the context of complex disciplines, and to research spatial narrative as a design methodology for architecture.

Shamanism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

The present contribution offers a descriptive account of two recent books concerning shamanism, Homayun Sidky’s The Origins of Shamanism, Spirit Beliefs, and Religiosity: A Cognitive Anthropological Perspective (2017) and Sergio Botta’s Dagli sciamani allo sciamanesimo. Discorsi, credenze, pratiche (2018). The commentary starts by supplying a brief historical contextualization of the subfield of shamanic studies in both Anthropology and the History of Religions, highlighting the main trends and widespread approaches. Sidky’s neurocognitive account and Botta’s poststructural historiographical walk-through are then taken into consideration and reviewed. The conclusions under-score the need for an integration between these two perspectives and urge cognitive historians to collaborate with like-minded anthropologists in order to further the study of shamanism and prevent the subfield from becoming de novo monopolized by paranormal and postmodern anthropology.

DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Electronics, Coin-Operated Relic Boxes and Techno-Animist Shrines

Abstract The author uses creative practice and DIY electronics as the vehicle for a practice-led inquiry into the similarities between techno-animism and material agency. Combining technology with aspects of magic and religion, techno-animism is an emerging concept in postmodern anthropology used to discuss the sentient agency of objects and materials within the context of modern technological societies. This combination of seemingly disparate fields of knowledge is the basis of a postdisciplinary research into creative practices, attitudes and ethos using a series of artifacts that visualize the ideas of techno-animism, made by the author over a period of 30 years.

Embodied spatial practices in the field: critical ethnographies in village studies from India

ABSTRACT Postmodern anthropology has used the claims of reflexivity, inter-subjectivity and recognition of differences in individual experiences in its attempt to unsettle the authority of traditional anthropology. This has led anthropologists to assert that ethnography is a cultural construct, whereby ‘fieldwork’ is conceptualised as ‘embodied spatial practice’. Drawing on village studies from India, this paper argues that the recognition of different embodied practices of ethnographers from diverse social locations has not necessarily led to the democratisation of the discipline. Conversely, insufficient engagement with hierarchical, overlapping power relations within the ethnographic field, as well as within the disciplinary establishment, has led to the standardisation of disciplinary articulations of research ethics, the terms of which privilege hegemonic groups within the discipline. The articulation of the concerns of scholars from marginalised social groups often remains difficult within such disciplinary frameworks. This paper argues that establishing a critical tradition in ethnography in the true sense requires the postmodern sensibility of recognition of the differences in experiences, supplemented with feminist and subaltern critical interrogations of power and knowledge.

O retorno do autor e a representação do outro em os papéis do inglês e nove noites

Este artigo analisa a presença da figura autoral nas obras Os papéis do inglês (2007), de Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, e Nove noites (2006), de Bernardo Carvalho. Por meio de uma estratégia comparatista, apoiada nos postulados da antropologia pós-moderna, o lugar daquele que escreve e de sua linguagem na representação do outro, culturalmente diferente, é reconsiderado pela frequência do autor nos textos ficcionais, fato que aproxima ficção e não ficção.

“My Favorite Book!”: Voicing Mary Douglas for Twenty‐First‐Century Conversations

“My Favorite Book!”: Voicing Mary Douglas for Twenty‐First‐Century Conversations

Engagement Beyond Critique?

AbstractIN RESPONSE TO THE IDEALS OF CULTURAL CRITIQUE, COMPLEXITY AND MORAL RELATIVISM PROMOTED IN POSTMODERN ANTHROPOLOGY, DIFFERENT ATTEMPTS HAVE BEEN MADE IN RECENT DECADES TO MAKE ANTHROPOLOGY MORE ‘ENGAGED’ IN THE PROMOTION OF SOCIAL CHANGE. IN THIS ARTICLE, WE FOCUS ON THREE CENTRAL CONTEMPORARY POSITIONS ON ANTHROPOLOGICAL ENGAGEMENT: POLICY-ORIENTED ACTIVIST RESEARCH, FEMINIST-INSPIRED COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH, AND WHAT WE HAVE CHOSEN TO CALL RESEARCH FOR ALTERITY AND ALTERNATIVES. EACH OF THESE APPROACHES HIGHLIGHTS CERTAIN IDEAS OF PARTICIPATION AND THEREBY CONJURE UP PARTICULAR KINDS OF COMMUNITIES TO WORK WITH AND THROUGH. WE DISCUSS THE VALUE AND LIMITATIONS OF THE THREE POSITIONS ON ENGAGEMENT AND ARGUE THAT, IN ALL ITS DIVERSITY, ANTHROPOLOGICAL PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH CAN PLAY AN IMPORTANT ROLE IN CO-CREATING PLATFORMS FOR RESISTANCE AND PROTEST AGAINST VARIOUS FORMS OF DOMINATION AND OPPRESSION WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY CONTRIBUTING TO PREPARING THE GROUND FOR ALTERNATIVE IMAGINATIONS, DESIRES AND WAYS OF LIVING.

Modernità devianti tra antropologia e storia: Mickey Mouse, navi da combattimento in fiamme al largo dei bastioni di Orione, angeli della storia

The article focuses on Niccolo Zapponi’s interest for cultural anthropology through the analysis of his book La modernita deviante published in 1993. It makes reference to the theories of prominent scholars and key concepts in anthropological studies, as well as the importance given by Zapponi to Levi-Strauss’ thought. The purpose of this article, however, is to look beyond the explicit and frequent references to this author and highlight, instead, the affinity between Zapponi’s thought and interpretative anthropology on the one hand, postmodern critical anthropology on the other. The article suggests, in particular, that there is a methodological connection between Zapponi’s analysis of modernity and Clifford’s. A sense of loss of purity and authenticity, moreover, characterizes Zapponi’s approach to modernity. In this essay, three perspectives are suggested to read Zapponi’s relation with anthropology as it is expressed in La modernita deviante: a symmetrical, a methodological and an iconographic-imaginative interpretation.

Metaphors of change

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore how a study of a practice can lay the foundation to describe this very practice whilst transformations of it were taken place. Descriptions of changes to the practice of social work which was observed empirically serve as a starting point for experimenting with how social scientists, though often exploring transformative study objects, can remain focused on describing the object, under study.Design/methodology/approachThe study was done through circa one year of fieldwork conducted with participant observation in two Danish municipal units offering services to socially marginalized people and interviews with social workers and employees in drug/alcohol treatment and psychiatric units.FindingsThe object of study within social sciences, though changing, is able to be described. Through the theories of “Social Navigation” (Vigh) and “Strategy and Tactics” (de Certeau), the practice of social work can be described as one concrete bounded practice but one which is performed within a transformative/changeable environment that are capable of influencing it. In this case, the experience of a changeable seascape might serve as a metaphor for how study objects change within an environment of change; how they can be viewed as “motion within motion” (Vigh).Originality/valueEven though fields such as anthropology and organizational studies seem to rid themselves from their objects of study (culture and organization, respectively) and dissociate themselves from descriptions thereof these objects might still be of value to us. Even though the objects of study in postmodern anthropology and organizational studies are defined as unbounded, anti-essential, ephemeral, ever-changing non-objects, this might not be the entire picture. Despite their ever-changing shape, we might still be able to study and describe them if we take their changeable form and environment into account.

Toward Theological Anthropology: Tracing the Anthropological Principles of John Webster

AbstractJohn Webster rooted his doctrine of the human creature in a thick portrait of the living God in and of himself as well as in his works wherein he creates, sustains, redeems and perfects them unto life in him. This essay will seek to unfold, introduce and assess his methodological principles for pursuing a distinctly theological anthropology by attending to his engagement of external threats in postmodern anthropology and internal challenges from christocentric anthropologies. We will suggest ways in which his anthropological project suggests a way forward for those doing systematic work today in as much as it not only offers a confident approach on distinctly Christian terms but slowly ponders the fundamental facets of such a schema, tending to theology and creation prior to a focus upon incarnational Christology as a necessary means of engaging in ‘biblical reasoning’.

Antropólogos, turistas, confusiones y reflexiones

The birth of the anthropology of the tourism a few decades ago, and the emergence of the postmodern anthropology, they have made the reflection concerning the identities of tourists and anthropologists, their activities, their purposes, almost unavoidable. The obvious similarities play their role and the practices of trip, the cultural identity, the ludic elements, the production of records (photographic, written, etc.), their peculiar status in the visited communities, and even their neocolonialist role are frequently mentioned. On this text I will try to highlight their differences. I will call into question that there are valid and general criteria of comparison and also that, in spite of superficial appearances, their activities and behaviour present deep similarities.

Visual and Experiential Knowledge in Observational Cinema

This article examines observational filmmaking methods, which have been influential in shaping ethnographic cinema. It offers a theoretical discussion of the techniques of observational filmmaking and their exploratory function, providing an analysis of the general features of observational films. The paper examines observational cinema with respect to the degree of control exerted over the filmmaking process, camera style and editing, the role of subjectivity and the interaction of words and images. The article concludes with an analysis of the contribution of observational cinema in the creation of corporeal and experiential forms of knowledge foregrounded in postmodern anthropology.

The contour of a post-postmodern missiology

Missiology has been based on the notion of an objective description of another culture and the notion that culture is homogeneous, coherent, and integrated. Such notions have faced serious challenges from globalization and postmodern anthropology, which is a product of poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism. The post-postmodern missiology proposed here is built on the epistemological foundation of critical realism and recent social theory. In this missiology the concept of culture is reoriented to the diversity of intra-cultural variations, conceived in spatial terms as mobility, and embedded in power. The diversity in culture leads us to question the validity of much theological contextualization. In its place a polythetic and progressive contextualization is proposed.

Book Review: Soul, Self, and Society: A Postmodern Anthropology for Mission in a Postcolonial World

Book Review: Soul, Self, and Society: A Postmodern Anthropology for Mission in a Postcolonial World

Vittorio De Seta's Banditi a Orgosolo: An ethnographic film

ABSTRACTThis article explores to what extent Vittorio De Seta's Banditi a Orogosolo (1961), a film made by a film-maker lacking academic training in the discipline of anthropology, is an ethnographic film and what is meant by ethnographic in this regard. This article maintains that Banditi is a film that produces understandings emerging through the process of film-making rather than an illustrative device to popularize existing anthropological ideas. The film will be placed in the broad international cinematic context of ethnographic film-making, adding a different dimension to discussions of the film. The features of the film that make it especially unique in the Sardinian context will be given. The article suggests that any understanding of the distinctive qualities of film itself should take into account the ways in which this experimental artistic form produces knowledge in its own right, expanding the arena of postmodern anthropology.

Book Review: Soul, Self, and Society: A Postmodern Anthropology for Mission in a Postcolonial World

Book Review: Soul, Self, and Society: A Postmodern Anthropology for Mission in a Postcolonial World

Współczesne kierunki antropologiczne w jednoczącej się Europie

The term “anthropology” is from the Greek (gr. aνθρωπος), “man”. It is the academic study of humanity. It deals with all that is characteristic of the human experience, from physiology and the evolutionary origins to the social and cultural organization of human societies as well as individual and collective forms of human experience. The idea of modernism concerns the phenomena which appeared in the European culture and thought in the end of XIX and beginning of XX century. In the end of XX century emerged idea of postmodernism which critizes and questions existence of the objective truth and doubts all the systems of values as being arbitral and restraining human freedom. According to the theory of postmodernism even the moral and ethical rules must be of human choice. The hypothesis of postmodern anthropology attained the dominant function in the united Europe. Likewise the notion of postmodernism contains in itself such popular undercurrents as popular culture, lifestyle, secularization, consumption, tolerance, marketing and laicizations. They all have found its place in the modern European society and in evident sense try to fulfill spiritual vacuum which appeared whilst modern European men questioned and rejected an idea of the objective Truth it means rejected Christian values and Christian tradition so much rooted in the European history.

Native Communities, Museums and Collaboration

Although this article concerns itself primarily with the relationship of contemporary American Indians to American museums, I want to place it within a larger historical frame than is commonly done. Americans generally have a poor sense of history and we often reinvent the wheel in the name of innovation and creativity. In the atmosphere of postmodern anthropology this is often the case as personal experience trumps orthodoxy or convention. Accordingly, I will provide some background information that provides greater context to modern situations.

Do We Need a Postmodern Anthropology for Mission in a Postcolonial World?

Abstract There was a time when mission studies benefitted from a symbiotic relationship with the social sciences. However, it appears that relationship has stagnated and now is waning. The argument is made here, in the case of cultural anthropology both in Europe and the United States, that a once mutually beneficial though sometimes strained relationship has suffered a parting of the ways in recent decades. First, the article reviews the relationships between missionaries and anthropologists before World War II when it was possible to be a ‘missionary anthropologist’ with a foot in both disciplines. In that period, the conversation went two ways with missionary anthropologists making important contributions to anthropology. Then, the article reviews some aspects of the development of the two disciplines after World War II when increasing professionalism in both disciplines and a postmodern turn in anthropology took the disciplines in different directions. Finally, the article asks whether or not the conversation, and thus the cross-fertilization, can be restarted, especially since the youngest generation of anthropologists has recognized the reality of local Christianities in their fields of study.