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Month: May 2018

Papa D. and the Privacy Law: New dilemmas for researchers*

By Fridus Steijlen

Last April, I visited the mountain village of Bittuang in Tana Toraja, Sulawesi, Indonesia for the fourth time. This is one of the eight locations in which we record daily life for our audiovisual project Recording the Future. On each of our visits to Bittuang, we stay at Mama D.’s house. Visiting Bittuang and Mama D.’s makes me feel at home in the village and also within the family. We had already interviewed Mama D. and Papa D. a couple of times, along with their children and their partners.

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Try a Little Legal Tenderness

By Jane M. Ferguson

This financial speculation essay acknowledges the inspiration of the Dick Jensen version of the song, “Try a Little Tenderness,” in its principal guiding pun; it is a suggested pairing to savour while reading.

Oh, they may be weary. You’ve reached the end of your stay at a small hotel in Myanmar. Your bags are packed; you’re ready to go. The manager at the desk, Ma Thuzar presents you a carefully handwritten invoice in English, with the total amount written at the bottom in US dollars. Fishing into your billfold, you retrieve your US cash and present the friendly woman with a $100 note. Ma Thuzar receives it in her right hand (her right forearm supported her left hand) and within the moment her polite expression transforms to a gaze of scrutiny. She holds the note three inches from her eagle eyes, verifying the year of issue and series. Her brow furrows as she visually traces the edges of the paper, studying its material integrity. Flipping the note over, her scanning eyes stop at a soybean-size ink stain in the lower right-hand corner. She flips the note again and sees that the stain has permeated both sides of it. Ma Thuzar places the banknote on the counter, “I cannot take this one. Do you have another one?”

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De sjamaan en de sofa

door Peter Versteeg

Hoe vreemd is vreemd? Waarom noemen we sommige dingen gek en andere niet? Het zijn de bekende vragen waarmee antropologen graag hun publiek vermaken en onderwijzen. Het vermogen om het perspectief vanuit andermans werkelijkheid te kiezen kunnen we wel het unique selling point van de antropologie noemen. Maar een ander perspectief kiezen betekent nog niet dat we automatisch ook onze eigen bril hebben afgezet. Dat viel me onlangs op in een interview met organisatieantropoloog Danielle Braun.

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The representation of Africa in Hollywood movie Black Panther.

By Rhoda Woets
Almost every month, I join a small group of anthropologists from the VU to go to the movies. Last month, we went to the action movie Black Panther to do a little bit of fieldwork from a soft, lazy cinema chair. Combining a relaxing evening with collecting data for a blog post has little in common with the hardship of fieldwork that anthropologist write about in their ethnographies. No mud on my boots, thank you very much. Let the arm chair anthropologist return, this time freed from an ethnocentric view on culture and armed with 3D glasses.

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The Magnificent Indians: Sebastião Salgado’s studio in the Amazon forest

by Barbara Arisi

The Javari Valley has always attracted cameras and documentarists. The beauty of the Indians living in this high forest is irresistible. As I learned from Txema Matis, such beauty is so exuberant that it can even kill an unwary person if the indigenous persons exhibit themselves in all their splendor. The photographs taken by Sebastião Salgado and published by Folha de S.Paulo’s newspaper show the beauty of the Korubo in a studio set with a seamless background amid the magnificent canopy of samaúma and many other  trees. With their clubs, dressed in palm leaf hats, painted with annatto, they exhibit their piercing look.

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