Indaba—Fieldwork, Jive and Phenomenology

When on my first fieldwork trip in north-western Namibia, the music by the Soul Brothers (a South African jive band) confronted me with my own naivety and estrangement. But it also introduced me to phenomenology, and continues to warn against an all too intellectualist understanding of social and cultural realitie

Embedded Line Scan Image Sensors: The Low Cost Alternative for High Speed Imaging

In this paper we propose a low-cost high-speed imaging line scan system. We replace an expensive industrial line scan camera and illumination with a custom-built set-up of cheap off-the-shelf components, yielding a measurement system with comparative quality while costing about 20 times less. We use a low-cost linear (1D) image sensor, cheap optics including a LED-based or LASER-based lighting and an embedded platform to process the images. A step-by-step method to design such a custom high speed imaging system and select proper components is proposed. Simulations allowing to predict the final image quality to be obtained by the set-up has been developed. Finally, we applied our method in a lab, closely representing the real-life cases. Our results shows that our simulations are very accurate and that our low-cost line scan set-up acquired image quality compared to the high-end commercial vision system, for a fraction of the price.Comment: 2015 International Conference on Image Processing Theory, Tools and Applications (IPTA

Automatic Generation of Product Concepts from Positive Examples, with an Application to Music Streaming

Internet based businesses and products (e.g. e-commerce, music streaming) are becoming more and more sophisticated every day with a lot of focus on improving customer satisfaction. A core way they achieve this is by providing customers with an easy access to their products by structuring them in catalogues using navigation bars and providing recommendations. We refer to these catalogues as product concepts, e.g. product categories on e-commerce websites, public playlists on music streaming platforms. These product concepts typically contain products that are linked with each other through some common features (e.g. a playlist of songs by the same artist). How they are defined in the backend of the system can be different for different products. In this work, we represent product concepts using database queries and tackle two learning problems. First, given sets of products that all belong to the same unknown product concept, we learn a database query that is a representation of this product concept. Second, we learn product concepts and their corresponding queries when the given sets of products are associated with multiple product concepts. To achieve these goals, we propose two approaches that combine the concepts of PU learning with Decision Trees and Clustering. Our experiments demonstrate, via a simulated setup for a music streaming service, that our approach is effective in solving these problems.Comment: 17 Pages, Conference: BNAIC 202

Recentering the city : an anthropology of secondary cities in Africa

This text summarises an ongoing research project about small cities which are usually not included in the research agenda on global cities. We aim at bridging between research focused on global or world cities and that on smaller or secondary cities in Africa. Arguing against the view of smaller Third World cities as mere towns, as “not yet cities”, and therefore irrelevant to world city theorizing, this project intends to develop an alternative analytical approach to think differently about these small cities in the South. Basing ourselves on ongoing ethnographic research in Ghana, Congo and Namibia, we argue that these secondary cities are fully urban in that they generate networks and practices that extend far beyond the local limits of these cities and their immediate rural hinterland, and that they often manage to do so in more successful ways than their larger counterparts. At the same time these secondary cities are sites in which new and different forms of urban life and imagination are being shaped, offering the perspective of an alternative African urban future.Department of Culture, Delegation of the Flemish Government in South Africa, Embassy of Belgiumhttps://africanperspectivesconference.wordpress.com

The socio-cultural-symbolic nexus in the perpetuation of female genital cutting: a critical review of existing discourses

Female Genital Cutting (FGC), also known as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and Female Circumcision (FC), continues to be a prevalent practice in many parts of the world and especially in Africa. This is somewhat perplexing given the concerted efforts aimed at eradicating this practice. This article argues that the perpetuation of FGC is due to the unintended effects of marginalization experienced by individuals and groups of women as a result of the approach of some of the anti-FGC global discourses and policies put forward to eradicate the practice. This, we argue, happens when the social structure that provides such groups and individuals with a sense of identity and belonging breaks down. Therefore, the attack on what practicing communities consider to be of crucial cultural value causes a re-focus on the practice resulting in a re-formulation and re-invention of these practices in a bid to counter the feelings of alienation. FGC is thus reframed and reconstructed as a reaction against these campaigns. This article intends to investigate the socio-cultural-symbolic nexus surrounding the practice of FGC, its meaning and implications with respect to its continued existence. It draws examples mainly from communities in Kenya that practice FGM as a rite of passage into adulthood. Herein, perhaps, lies the driving force behind the practice in this contemporary age: it carries a lot of significance with respect to transformational processes, and it is seen as crucial in the representation of the body, identity and belonging. The aim of this article is not to defend FGC’s continuation, but rather to explore the interplay between its changing socio-cultural dimensions as a counter-reaction to the eradication discourse and policies. In this way we will try to explore some of the factors that lay behind its perpetuation. Key words: body practices, female genital cutting, female circumcision, femininity, cultural identit

Revisionen des Porträts. Jenseits von Mimesis und Repräsentation

Noch immer wird das Phänomen ›Porträt‹ im kunsthistorischen Diskurs zumeist unter Begrifflichkeiten wie Identität, Individualität, Repräsentation oder Ähnlichkeit diskutiert. Zeitgenössische amimetische, konzeptuelle und performative Porträtformen werden mit solchen Konzepten jedoch nicht mehr vollständig eingeholt. Der Band befragt deshalb einerseits kritisch diese traditionellen, mimetischen Begriffe anhand von Fallstudien. Andererseits werden ihnen dynamische und offene Konzepte (teils aus Nachbardisziplinen) wie Spur, Berührung, Fraktalität, Defazialisierung oder Dividualität an die Seite gestellt, um den kunsthistorischen Porträt-Begriff in einem fachübergreifenden Diskurs aufzufächern, der auch die Digitalisierung umfasst. ›Porträt‹ wird somit explizit als Konstruktion, self-fashioning und konzeptuelle Praxis des Performativen betrachtet

Drawing-writing culture: the truth-fiction spectrum of an ethno-graphic novel on the Sri Lankan civil war and migration

With our focus on an “ethno‐graphic novel” on the Sri Lankan civil war and the forcible displacement and migration of Tamil survivors, we make two main propositions while reflecting on the “graphic narrative turn” that has emerged in anthropology in recent years. First, we inscribe drawing into the “writing of cultures” where words have held a superior status in ethnographic representations. Rather than seeing drawings as perceptive tools for recording scenes in fieldwork alone, we extend them to a representational practice where they can have a deep, intricate, and equivalent entanglement with words to create synchronous affective intensities among a larger audience. Our second proposal follows Jean Rouch on cinéma vérité to interrogate assumptions about truth and fiction as portrayed by film representations. We propose a theory and practice for graphic novel production that we have termed vérités graphiques (literally, graphic realities). This describes the collaborative and interactive engagement with people's contributions and views, and their distillation and fictionalization through the ethno‐graphic form. We diverge from cinéma vérité, however, by highlighting a truth‐fiction spectrum that further challenges the presumed objectivity of what is seen, experienced, co‐created, and revealed

A qualitative study of culturally embedded factors in complementary and alternative medicine use

Abstract Background Within the intercultural milieu of medical pluralism, a nexus of worldviews espousing distinct explanatory models of illness, our research aims at exploring factors leading to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use with special attention to their cultural context. Methods The results are based on medical anthropological fieldwork (participant observation and in-depth interviews) spanning a period from January 2015 to May 2017 at four clinics of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Budapest, Hungary. Participant observation involved 105 patients (males N = 42); in-depth interviews were conducted with patients (N = 9) and practitioners (N = 9). The interviews were coded with Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis; all information was aggregated employing Atlas.ti software. Results In order to avoid the dichotomization of “push and pull factors,” results obtained from the fieldwork and interviews were structured along milestones of the patient journey. These points of reference include orientation among sources of information, biomedical diagnosis, patient expectations and the physician-patient relationship, the biomedical treatment trajectory and reasons for non-adherence, philosophical congruence, and alternate routes of entry into the world of CAM. All discussed points which are a departure from the strictly western therapy, entail an underlying socio-cultural disposition and must be scrutinized in this context. Conclusions The influence of one’s culturally determined explanatory model is ubiquitous from the onset of the patient journey and exhibits a reciprocal relationship with subjective experience. Firsthand experience (or that of the Other) signifies the most reliable source of information in matters of illness and choice of therapy. Furthermore, the theme of (building and losing) trust is present throughout the patient journey, a determining factor in patient decision-making and dispositions toward both CAM and biomedicine

De strijd om de waterpomp : Interview met Steven Van Wolputte door Ingrid Van Daele

status: publishe

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Interview met Steven Van Wolputte door Joos Meestersstatus: publishe