Digital turn in anthropology?

Netnography, webnography, cyberanthropology, online and virtual ethnography – new labels and academic brands are mushrooming on the ground of the anthropology within the last two decades. They reflect the growth and diversity of the new media phenomena and platforms but also serve as a PR tool for making anthropology seem modern and up-to-date. Can we actually pronounce the new paradigm/turn within the anthropology/ethnography when transferring them online? I wonder whether the binary opposition between the real and the virtual in which anthropology seems to be caught brings epistemological benefits, what is the source of this digital dualism and finally why the digital- and cyber- prefixes do more harm that benefit anthropology.
 

In search of „smallest thing”. Notes on the ethnography of new media

The phenomenon of new media has been a subject of ongoing discussions for a years. On the one hand, they are still reveal many doubts and concerns related to their interpretation and description. On the other hand – has become a pretext for extended reflection on contemporary culture and communication strategies. Particularly important in this context seem to be stories about the meanings of new media in everyday use. Indeed new media are involved in everyday practice and experience of their users.
 

Audio-anthropology: practice of the discipline through sound

The article pertains to the notion of audio-anthropology both as the methodology and the way of practice of the discipline through sound. The audio-anthropology should be understood as application of digital audio technologies relating to recording, editing, arranging, listening and publishing: a) cultural sonic manifestations, b) audio-representations. In other words, the audio-anthropology is the audio-production of anthropological knowledge. As an alternative way of „doing discipline” the audio-anthropology is the result of so called auditory turn which had raised the question of the authoritarianism of Eye – fundamental and irrefutable organ of insight into the socio-cultural reality. Practice of sounded anthropology casts doubt on oculocentric model of anthropological knowledge and leads to appreciation of sonic phenomenon and practices in a social life.
 

Media in the rural Podhale. The results of an ethnographic research.

This article relates the preliminary results of a research performed as a part of the project Ethnography of Media Audience and Local Common Sense conducted in years 2012–2014 by the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the Warsaw University. The introductory part briefly presents previous ethnographic researches concerning reception of media, realized in Poland and other countries as well as basic theoretical assumptions explained in relation to the literature of the subject. The results presented in this paper pertain to the specifics of conversations in the rural areas of Podhale and their subjects in relations to media: the influence of movies, TV series and advertisements on the construction of contemporary Podhalan identity, local means of Internet usage and associated with it dangers and opportunities. The concluding summary concerns: local ways of verifying the media coverage through confrontation with everyday life experience; transformation of the media coverage through previously acquired common knowledge; reinforcement of regional stereotypes by the media; fortification of the Internet as a technology that creates new means of earning money and heavily divides the already existing age groups.

 

To See Invisible: Poland's Wedding to the Sea

Policies are not only being expressed by symbols and rituals, but their transmission and the use are being shaped by symbolic meanings. They teach how to understand world, putting it in order and help to overcome feeling of the chaos. To a large extent a so-called political reality is being created by symbolic meanings, even if it is hard for us to be reconciled with it. With the help of the appropriate selected set of multi-sensual, dramatic measures the political ritual allows more or less to capture participants and shape social imagination according to intentions of his organizers. Reconstructing or confirming existing political order the official ceremony with its performative nature tries with similar power as the ritual to involve its participants, seeks to generate feeling and images preferred by the authority.
10 January 1920, in accordance with provisions of the Treaty of Versailles the Republic of Poland took back Pomerania (annexed by Kingdom of Prussia in 1772 during First Partition of Poland). According to this, the special celebration was organized on the Puck Bay one month later. An episode with throwing the platinum ring into waters of the Baltic, called Poland’s Wedding to the Sea became soon the most important event in the great national story about the return of Pomerania to the motherland. It established the paradigmatic pattern for another state celebrations, which confirmed the northern boundary of Poland symbolically and state’s territorial integrity. Events in 1945 and 2010 were the variants of Poland’s Wedding to the Sea settled in their own historical context. On the one hand these ceremonies served as performative instruments for national legitimization of the power, but on the other hand they were used by political elites for creating and playing their own, different vision of the state.

 

Pictures at a Funeral: Visuality and Mourning in Contemporary Ghana

Images and various visual representations accompany funeral celebrations and a process of mourning in various cultures: in the past as well as today. This article focusses on ways in which burials and funerals are celebrated in contemporary Ghana and discusses various relations functioning between mourning and visuality. Based on ethnographic data collected during fieldwork in Brong-Ahafo region (central Ghana) the author analyses visuals used as well as produced during funerals: photographs and videos made during celebrations, images printed in funeral booklets, invitation letters and obituaries. Additionally a visual presentation of a dead body during the laying-in-state-ceremony is discussed as a symbolic image of a dead person. Funeral images popular in contemporary Ghana seem to be designed as if opposing the concept of death as the end of life. Pictures ‒ abundantly produced and distributed on the course of long-lasting funeral celebrations ‒ represent a dead person as an embodiment of success, vitality and wealth.
 

Quasi-amateur porn – a brief episode of unceasing carnival

This essay explores meaning complexity of pornographic materials conceived as quasi-private though its true “professional” provenience. The main subjects of analysis are easily accessible ads of various paid X-rated websites. Author treats advertising texts as a source of knowledge about narrative strategies and stereotypes. An interpretative tool chosen for the task is Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theory of Carnival – in particular: concept of “grotesque realism” and four fundamental categories of “carnivalesque” (familiar interaction between people, eccentric behavior, misalliances, sacrilegious). The article is based on the results of research conducted in the years 2002–2004.