Moving Forward
If there is one thing I really wish we’d had a class on when I was a fresh-faced, enthusiastic masters student three dim and distant years ago, it’s exactly how wrong fieldwork can go. They’ve introduced such a thing now in the anthropology department at UCL, giving post-field PhD students the opportunity to talk to those just beginning their MPhils about the moments they thought their...
Read MoreMaking Mess
Success stories are a powerful trope of international development and conservation work. They structure the way NGOs, governments and companies engage with powerful donors and public opinion. They also smooth over complexities, efface failures, and ignore contradictions. They present ongoing situations as if they are done, dusted, and thus can legitimately stand as a lesson to others who seek to...
Read MoreFinding My Forest Feet
The beautiful Lefini Reserve The first time I ever walked properly in the Congo Basin rainforest was two years ago. I felt like a huge, clumsy elephant – although that’s a terrible metaphor because elephants are actually pretty competent at walking through the forests here and just smash apart anything that gets in their path. But I got my head and my arms and my legs stuck on bushes and...
Read MoreLocal Contexts – Licensing and Labelling Traditional Knowledge
I went to a fascinating lunchtime talk last Thursday given by Dr Jane Anderson, a legal anthropologist at NYU who specialises in investigating the relationship between intellectual property law and indigenous knowledges. In her work with Aboriginal communities in Australia, in particular with Aborginal artists, one of the key problems she came across was that current international...
Read MoreWorlds Collide
(Gosh, that was all getting a bit emo there for a minute wasn’t it? Like a fleeting return to my early naughties LiveJournal days. What’s needed here is some decent deconstruction to chase the melancholy away. I know just the thing…) The tourists arrived in two open top safari cars, the sound of the over-powered 4×4 engines practically drowned out by the flickering of camera shutters...
Read MoreThe field and The Field: An Addendum
On Monday, I return to The Field. Now, since this basically involves me moving my books and computer equipment back to an office just over the road from the UCL Anthropology Department where I’ve been hiding out for the last six weeks, it doesn’t sound like too big a deal. But things are never quite what they appear in multi-sited ethnography. If I was feeling the dull ache of liminality when...
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