This paper takes a look at the idea of the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage as an initiative of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization by first exploring the definition ...of culture and then looking at the case of Tibetans as an ethnic minority population. It suggests that the initiative is problematic in a number of ways and may inadvertently contribute to the further marginalization and demise of the very culture it aims to safeguard.
In the spring of 2009 I embarked on a teaching experiment in which I joined an online SUNY-Plattsburgh class taking my Anthropology of Human Rights course with a conventional class at the University ...of Zagreb, Croatia, where I was a visiting professor teaching the same course. My motivations were several, but prominent among them was to test the potential of technology in the creation of a virtual intercultural learning environment, to test in practice the cross-cultural context of human rights understanding, and a wish to provide students with an opportunity to interact cross-culturally to explore issues of vital importance to human beings across the globe. In this article, I describe this endeavor, while also reflecting on some of the implications of online teaching and its limitations. My thoughts and sentiments are representative, I believe, of many other non-technophilic, but globally conscious academics. (Contains 14 footnotes.)
In the spring of 2009 I embarked on a teaching experiment in which I joined an online SUNY–Plattsburgh class taking my Anthropology of Human Rights course with a conventional class at the University ...of Zagreb, Croatia, where I was a visiting professor teaching the same course. My motivations were several, but prominent among them was to test the potential of technology in the creation of a virtual intercultural learning environment, to test in practice the cross-cultural context of human rights understanding, and a wish to provide students with an opportunity to interact cross-culturally to explore issues of vital importance to human beings across the globe. In this article, I describe this endeavor, while also reflecting on some of the implications of online teaching and its limitations. My thoughts and sentiments are representative, I believe, of many other non-technophilic, but globally conscious academics.
This paper takes a look at the idea of the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage as an initiative of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization by first exploring the definition ...of culture and then looking at the case of Tibetans as an ethnic minority population. It suggests that the initiative is problematic in a number of ways and may inadvertently contribute to the further marginalization and demise of the very culture it aims to safeguard.
Anthropologists have typically been polarized in their preferred methods of data collection and analysis. Quantitative research is characterized by its detractors as being reductionistic and ...positivist, while qualitative research is viewed as being non-scientific because of issues of reliability and validity. In the Survey Methods course at SCRM, participants were primarily from qualitative backgrounds. It quickly became apparent that we represented a small, but perhaps growing, subgroup of ethnographic researchers who are interested, for a variety of reasons, in bridging this qual-quant divide.
The question of whether anthropologists should or should not bring their expertise and anthropological knowledge to the service of the war in Afghanistan, or any war for that matter, has touched a ...nerve and raises ethical, political, and ideological questions that are likely to beset the discipline for some time to come. Anthropologists have been debating and discussing this question in public forums for the past several years, but since around 2007, when the military began to actively recruit anthropologists to participate in the Human Terrain System (HTS), the urgency of the question has heightened. The HTS is part of the new war doctrine that places priority on cultural knowledge in the prosecution of counterinsurgency warfare. Adapted from the source document.
The author advocates the use of the phrase “intangible culture” instead of “intangible cultural heritage”. The word “heritage” implies a certain fixity and immutability, and assumes that authorities ...have identified and proclaimed heritage. Dealing with intangible culture would provide the opportunity for the deflection of the UNESCO model of preserving intangible cultural phenomena, whose application has brought some problems. The author illustrates this in practice with the example of bell-ringers, who are included on the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
