Anthropology

I went to university with the intention of earning a degree in literature ... two-thirds of the way through and I discovered Anthropology. I loved it, and was lucky enough to have Douglas Holmes as my professor. I studied political anthropology with him and enjoyed his lectures on the research that had gone into his ground-breaking multi-sited ethnography. His book was titled Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism, and the success of it meant that Otago University lost him after only a couple of years.

Anyway, this was only an introduction to what I wanted to write ... Erkan has put together an interesting post on current anthropological discussions. He writes, I had come across in the net a paper of my dear professor: 'Multi-sited Ethnography: Five or Six Things I Know About It Now' by George E. Marcus. For those who are still inspired by the idea of multi-sited ethnography...
I have been in a weird laziness in not following anthropology blogs properly. So I had missed some of discussions already. Still let me try for one at least (!): Lorenz introduces a new book 'Plausible Prejudice: Everyday Experiences and Social Images of Nation, Culture and Race' by Norwegian social anthropologist Marianne Gullestad and Kamriz Kamrani, first agrees M. Gullestad, and later declares that "Anthropology will never succeed until it clearly defines culture".
This emphasis on definition is against all I know about social sciences. Not that I am for an all relativistic social science with no substance. But what I know is that an act of defining is part of a power struggle. And anthropology's lack of power in the contemporary political economy of academia does not reside in its definitional problems but somewhere else. In fact I am quite optimistic about the discipline. Anthropologists are caving out new fields of studies and are challenging more and more other disciplines in that sense. I observe that there are increasing amount of efforts to reach for wider publics and to access for financial sources...