Culture and IS: National cultural dimensions within IS discipline

The study of culture is rooted in sociology, social psychology, and anthropology. In particular, cultural anthropology seeks to understand the similarities and differences among groups of people in the contemporary world. Within the last 20 years, the practical relevance of researching cultural issues, and especially comparing phenomena across cultures, was questioned (Ferraro, 1990). However, the importance of cultural issues is becoming increasingly evident in many applied disciplines; these include the management of information technology (IT) (Davison and Martinsons, 2003). A normative literature review has been carried out in this paper to provide IS researchers with the milestones of studying culture in IS disciplin

Anthropology and Open Access

While still largely ignored by many anthropologists, open access (OA) has been a confusing and volatile center around which a wide range of contentious debates and vexing leadership dilemmas orbit. Despite widespread misunderstandings and honest differences of perspective on how and why to move forward, OA frameworks for scholarly communication are now part of the publishing ecology in which all active anthropologists work. Cultural Anthropology is unambiguously a leading journal in the field. The move to transition it toward a gold OA model represents a milestone for the iterative transformation of how cultural anthropologists, along with diverse fellow travelers, communicate more ethically and sustainably with global and diverse publics. On the occasion of this significant shift, we build on the history of OA debates, position statements, and experiments taking place during the past decade to do three things. Using an interview format, we will offer a primer on OA practices in general and in cultural anthropology in particular. In doing so, we aim to highlight some of the special considerations that have animated arguments for OA in cultural anthropology and in neighboring fields built around ethnographic methods and representations. We then argue briefly for a critical anthropology of scholarly communication (including scholarly publishing), one that brings the kinds of engaged analysis for which Cultural Anthropology is particularly well known to bear on this vital aspect of knowledge production, circulation, and valuation. Our field’s distinctive knowledge of social, cultural, political, and economic phenomena should also—but often has not—inform our choices as both global actors and publishing scholars

Where did anthropology go?: or the need for 'human nature'

I was recently asked the question: “Where did anthropology go? ” by a psycholinguist from a famous American university. She was commenting on the fact that she had tried to establish contact with the anthropology department of her institution, hoping that she would find somebody who would contribute to a discussion of her main research interest: the relation of words to concepts. She had assumed that the socio- cultural anthropologists would have general theories or, at least, ask general questions, about the way children’s upbringing in different cultures and environments would constrain, or not constrain, how children represented the material and the social world. She was hoping for information about exotic societies in order to gain a broader cross-cultural perspective. She was hoping that her enquiry about a topic that is inevitable in any discussion about culture would be equally central to the three disciplines of psychology, linguistics and anthropology, and would therefore be an ideal ground for constructive co-operation, that is, one where the different parties could articulate and challenge the theories on which their different disciplines are built. In fact she found that nobody was interested in working with her, but what surprised her most was the hostility she perceived, caused, not only by the suggestion that cultural social anthropologists were interested in simple exotic societies, but even more by the idea that they might be interested in formulating and answering general questions about the nature of the human species and that, therefore, their work could be compatible with disciplines such as hers. The lack of any generalising theoretical framework within which her research interest might find a place is not surprising when we look at what kind of thing is done in many university departments under the label social or cultural anthropology. Take for example the interests listed on the web site of th

Troubling futures: can participatory design research provide a generative anthropology for the 21st century?

This essay argues there is value in considering participatory design as a form of generative anthropology at a time when we recognise that we need not only to understand cultures but to change them towards sustainable living. Holding up the democratically-oriented practices of some participatory design research to definitions of anthropology allows the essay to explore the role of intervention in social process. And, challenging definitional boundaries, the essay examines design as a participatory tool for cultural change, creating and interogating futures (and the idea of futures). In analysing how designing moves towards change in the world, the essay brings together design research and concepts from anthropology to help us better understand and operationalise our interventions and pursue them in a fair and sustainable manner

New Lives in Anand

Social and cultural anthropology;Social classes;Isla

INTRODUCTION TO ANTHROPOLOGY

Anthropology is the study of mankind (anthropos). Etymologically, anthropology comes from the word anthropos meaning man and logos meaning knowledge. Anthropology looks at humans as something complex in terms of physical, emotional, social, and cultural complexity. Anthropology also refers to the science of humans and their culture

Anthropology: Social and Cultural, in Iran and Afghanistan

ANTHROPOLOGY (New Persian mardomšenāsī), social and cultural, in Iran and Afghanistan (see also Afghanistan iv). Anthropology as an Iranological discipline evolved from a Western interest in non-Western and especially non-literate societies; over the past fifty years it has developed a holistic and relativistic approach to the ethnographic description of life in small, largely face-to-face communities, and to the analysis and explanation of variation in human experience generally. Iranians who have turned to anthropology more recently, primarily as a framework for the study of life in their own country, have tended to treat it as a branch of sociology and apply it only to the study of tribes and of rural material culture. The terms “social” and “cultural” derive from the historical distinction between focuses on interaction (behavior) and ways of thinking (culture), though they are not always easily distinguishable in recent work. The term “ethnology,” used mainly in Europe, is identified with a tradition that has paid particular attention to material culture. For convenience, in this article the simple and comprehensive term “anthropology” is used for work from all three traditions. (Physical anthropology is not included here.

René Girard’s Fundamental Anthropology

As a social science cultural anthropology shares the problems of all preparadigmatic sciences. Cultural anthropology textbooks primarily aim to overcome the traditional division to natural and social sciences, and they see anthropology as an ideal space for uniting the two. However, this aspiration does not remove doubts about the subject and methods of cultural anthropology. René Girard, a French-American theoretician, tried to solve the aporias of the science about man by deliberating on the origin of man and his culture. For that purpose, he created so-called fundamental anthropology, whose basic theoretic idea is the mimeticity of a human being resulting by violence. By repressing the true nature of the so-called founding murder, and by its ritualization, a man defers his violence and creates culture. Girard\u27s inspiring theory, though widely accepted, is still not completely recognized among professional anthropologists. However, all prerequisites for that have been created, and this short review endeavors to provide evidence for that