Anthropological stories and insights from vrije universiteit amsterdam
By Vivian Mac Gillavry During the first year of my Bachelor study in anthropology, we were told that the best field research should take at least a year. You might just find out that the two days in which you can collect very relevant information, are in July and in January. It might be obvious that you would not like to miss those days. Unfortunately we only get three months to collect all our data for our master thesis.
1 CommentDoor Zeger Polhuis In the first week of April my fellow students in the master Social and Cultural Anthropology returned from their three months of fieldwork abroad. I was one of the students who stayed…
3 CommentsMasters student, Gijs Verbossen, talks about the Master’s in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the VU, which focuses around the theme of Human Security. Check out the video…
In the most recent quality assessment, the Master’s programme was judged to be the best anthropology programme in the Netherlands by the Accreditation Organisation of the Netherlands and Flanders. The programme is challenging, tightly organized, and enjoys a high success rate.
For more information visit: www.vu.nl/sca
See also our series in which Master’s students write on their fieldwork: Fieldwork 2010 and Fieldwork 2011.
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By Ursula Cats When I started my fieldwork as a Master’s student last year, I had many ideals and I mainly wanted to represent the women I was researching as “agents of change”. What I actually experienced was different. As I wrote in an e-mail to my supervisor Ellen Bal towards the end of my fieldwork: “I can clearly see the restrictions these young women have. I can see that they are active agents, but their impossibilities are also becoming painfully obvious.”
I have always had the motivation to support people who have fewer opportunities than I do. To gain more knowledge on developmental work, I decided to enroll in the Master’s program in anthropology in September 2009. It was not complicated to find a focus for my fieldwork: the women who had fled from Burma to Thailand. The anthropological theories I used, however, did not correspond directly with what I actually saw and experienced. Eventually I was able to gain a perspective based on the stories of the women themselves, which I used in my thesis to shed light on the situation of unrecognized refugee women from Burma.
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