That was quick. It´s already 2006.

When I got inspired by zeph´s blog and started the weblog sometimes in July (or June?) 05, I didn´t know what I was doing. Now, everytime I look at my referrerstats and my nice clustrmap there on the right hands side I´m getting this odd feeling.. Anyway, I´m glad the thing turned out to be what it is and I´m glad some average 15 readers a day are visiting my weblog. That´s not astronomical, but hey, way more than I ever expected!

Thanks to everybody for being interested in my stuff and everybody who´s promoting - willingly or not - my site. Although it´s rarely about the _big_ issues of anthropology, and lately more often than not about direct anthropology matters at all. But I believe that once you got into the subject, you practically see everything through a filter and I don´t think my posts are too far away from it anyway. Anthropology is perceptional training, we had that once. Take some sense for interpretation and the world´s full of Anthropology. Isn´t it wonderful?

I hope things continue like this. It´s spurring my motivation on a very big scale. I just feel that I´m neglecting my weblog a little bit lately, since I´m violently busy finishing our institute´s newspaper (Which will be in print very soon, btw) with our team and working like a mobster for the upcoming football exhibition in the City Museum. I´ve learned that I just _love_ to be an editor and do phone calls and write e-mails all day long ;-)
Well, the weblog´s not the only thing I´m neglecting. It seems to me that I´m currently studying in my leisure time only. And I´d like to have some time to read my books, but I´ll have to wait for the next flu. ;-) But the best men and women had it that way.

Enough words now. All the best again for 2006, may it be like the best of 2005.

Lorenz interviewed Benedict Anderson!

read the full interview

I just discovered tribe.net which offers communities for just anything. See all the anthropological communities here.

I´ve been working at the Munich City Museum for a while now helping to organize the cultural anthropological exhibition "Football: One Game - Many Worlds", so finding out that there´s also a Football Anthropology Tribe on the web sparked my interest.



And for everyone interested in "food and its ties to culture", the Culinary Anthropology Tribe might be a hint.





The Endangered Games Tribe calls the Board Game Anthropology their field.



Many more at tribe.net

View thread on the cultural anthropology tribe.

Tea brands seen today in the supermarket:





Escapism never goes out of style.

Zephyrin published an account of his daily routine.

Kudos to you, that´s discipline.

In elementary school I was always among the worst three (of 25) on the "who has the tidiest desk?"-list. (Openly published on the teachers blackboard.) Now I´m tasting the bitter consequences - All observations/thoughts/ideas are running through my fingers like sand. Afterwards I always know as much as before. Metaculousness is lively for research and I hope I´ll learn it someday. In fact I´ve been trying for a long time - But still I´m one of those horrible people who possess three organizers just to forget a) taking it with them. b) taking it out of the bag c) writing something in or d) looking up what they wrote.

Tomorrow, October 25th, the first editorial meeting of the "Ethnologik", our insitute´s newspaper will take place. After four years, a completely new staff will now be occupying themselves with this job. We´ve already got some very interesting offers ranging from interviews to book reviews from students at the LMU Munich and abroad. I´d like to invite everyone who is interested in contributing to our journal in any way to come tomorrow evening to the insitute - or if you´re living abroad to contact us. (Contributions in English are very welcome too!)

The new edition will probably appear in January 2006 and will be distributed in the insitute (of course we can mail it anywhere else too! But a .pdf copy will be downloadable from the website.)


Tuesay, October 25th 2005, 18:00, "Teeküche" des Instuts für Völkerkunde und Afrikanistik, LMU München, Oettingenstr. 67, 80538 München or contact me: w.wohlwend[at]gmx.net, 0172 498 51 33

"It's an idea the three cooked up in the midst of shooting an amateur documentary film along the U.S.-Mexico border on illegal immigration. Long a hot topic in the Southwest, with an estimated 1.1 million illegal immigrants apprehended in the United States last year (and half of those entering at the Arizona border), the immigration issue began heating up again in September when Governor Janet Napolitano agreed to send the southern Arizona counties $1.5 million in emergency aid to step up law enforcement, repair fences along the border and, in a grisly subtext to the measure, handle "costs related to illegal immigrants' deaths." Since 1998, more than 2,500 people have died making that often four-day hike across the Sonoran Desert, some buried unceremoniously in unmarked graves in Tucson's Evergreen Cemetery." read more at Phoenix New Times

"We are distributing hundreds of disposable cameras to two groups on different sides of the U.S.-Mexico border: undocumented migrants crossing the Arizona desert and Minuteman volunteers trying to stop them.

This project is an interesting example of polyphonic documentation: By now, over 300 cameras have been distributed to human-rights organizations, migrant shelters and the migrants themselves, migrants who are doing the journey and already did. Thus, a large variety of actors are reached, the documentation covers a large number of views on the U.S.-Mexican migration. See the Project´s website

via boingboing

Some people are invaluable in their zeal and I think it can´t be honoured enough:

Lorenz made an alternative version of his anthropology blogroll, which can be accessed here. The new blogroll is producing an RSS feed, allows users to search blog entries, which are arranged in a chronological order and according to categories.

I´m back "in the field" these days, as I´m doing qualitative research for a toy maker. It´s wonderful, I spent my last day playing with 6-8 year old children. Today I was together with a six year old boy, playing soccer, building houses and the most colourful myths in the world.

The most remarkable thing is the instant trust and intimacy children build up when they like somebody. They introduce you to their own world without having to push them to do it. You build up very strong bonds with a boy in just a few hours and it´s hard to remember that you´re actually doing "serious things". And it´s hard to break up the bond again when you´ve got to leave in the evening. Today it was one of the most intense ones. I felt a very big affection to the boy and I couldn´t help to feel rather like a big brother to him than the researcher that collects valuable data. And I think he felt the same. I ask myself what impact it has to meddle with the intense and instant emotions of children when you come, play, come into their world and leave again after a few hours. And I ask myself what kind of impact it has for me, since every time I feel very touched by it. It´s somewhat brutal having to switch to another mindset after the leave as you´re going for the data evaluation. But I´ve been warned by my colleague who has been doing that all last week.
I remember that I had many similar experiences in Turkey that made me think. To what extent the research issues have to prevent you to be human? To what extent should you let the situation touch you, you who are being put into a somewhat objective position by nature
of the issue of your work? Nobody tells you about those things in class. Maybe it´s something that just cannot be taught.