News: Department of Anthropology

The Department of Anthropology has been rated as the best in Scotland, according to the latest Good Universities Guide. It was placed 5th overall in the UK league table.

Professor Tim Ingold's application to the AHRC for ‘An anthropological investigation of bird sound' has been successful. Dr Andrew Whitehouse will be Research Fellow on the project.

Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold (eds) - Creativity and Cultural Improvisation (Oxford: Berg), the book of the 2005 ASA conference held in Aberdeen.

Papers from the symposium co-organised by Nicolas Ellison 'Paisaje, Espacio, Territorio: reelaboraciones símbolicas y reconstrucciones identitarias' (Landscape, space and territory: symbolic reinterpretations and identity reconstructions) are being made available online (in French).

Jo Lee Vergunst has been awarded a grant from the Bailies of Bennachie to carry out oral history fieldwork around the hill of Bennachie in Aberdeenshire. The project will investigate memories of the crofting colony at Bennachie and the changing uses of the hill over recent decades.

One-day brainstorming workshop - ROADS: ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONTEXT

Friday, 15 December 2006:
Linklater Rooms, University of Aberdeen
At this workshop we will be discussing various aspects of roads research. No formal papers and presentations are required, but fruitful discussion of roads, way finding, travelling, safety and other road aspects from different disciplines is welcome.

For more information contact Tanya Argounova-Low <soc177@abdn.ac.uk> or Arnar Arnason <arnar.arnason@abdn.ac.uk>.

Arnar Árnason and Jo Lee have been awarded a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to run a series of seminars under the title 'Landscapes beyond land: new ethnographies of landscape and environment'. Three events of one and a half days each will take place in January, March and June 2007, one of which will be held in conjunction with EHESS in Paris. The grant is part of the current AHRC Landscape and Environment Research Programme. Nicolas Ellison and Andrew Whitehouse will be involved in running the seminars, and they will also build on Jo Lee and Nicolas Ellison's panel on 'Integrating experiential and political landscapes' at the EASA conference in Bristol in October 2006. More details here

Donald Lyon, a third year undergraduate student in the Department of Anthropology, has been awarded an Undergraduate Vacation Scholarship by the Carnegie Trust. His fieldwork will investigate how groups of traceurs (a French term for 'fast movers') in Edinburgh and Glasgow constitute places in the city and their identities through their distinctive styles of urban movement.

Three PhD students in the Department have had their doctoral dissertations approved during the spring semester 2006: Karla Williamson, Alison Ramsay and Mark Ebert. Karla Williamson's thesis, on ‘Post Colonial Gender Relations in Greenland', is a study of relations between Inuit men and women, analysed within a framework comprised of Inuit rather than Western theoretical terms and notions. Alison Ramsay studied the ways in which the current crisis in the whitefishery is affecting everyday life in the Shetland Islands, and their implications for the future of fisheries management. Her thesis is entitled ‘Fishing the Past, Managing the Future: Crisis and Change in Shetland Fisheries'. Mark Ebert's thesis, entitled ‘To a Different Canoe: A Study of Cultural Pragmatics and Continuity', is a study of the meaning of tradition among the Coast Salish of the American Northwest Coast. Adopting a relational perspective in contrast to the conventional genealogical model implied in the idea of traditional transmission, Ebert develops a pragmatic approach to cultural dynamics that transcends the distinction between continuity and change.

Spring 2006:
Alex King and Hiroko Ikuta have been awarded an ESRC grant to study 'Dance, Tradition and Power among Alaskan Eskimos'. The project is a comparative study of Alaskan Eskimo dance in the Yup'ik and Iñupiaq regions. There are dramatic differences between Yup'ik and Iñupiaq histories of colonisation and contemporary socioeconomic situations that affect contemporary understandings of song, dance and traditions. Traditional dance is an important ethnic marker, and is used to present an 'official' version of local culture to outsiders, whether other indigenous Alaskans or white tourists. The project investigates the larger context of learning and performing dance, which includes not only bodily movements and gestures, but also drumming and singing in a language not always fully understood by performer or audience.

Ethnographic methods will consist of archival research, participating among dance groups, analyzing conversations with numerous dancers, and reviewing life histories during formal interviews of elders. The project will use dance groups and performances to analyze the explicit and implicit connections among body aesthetics with indigenous languages, ideas of tradition and culture, and pragmatic practices from hunting to political engagement with governments. Conclusions from this project will shed light on the role of perfomance groups for cultural revival projects and the connections between these activities and language revitalization practices generally, and inform policies on endangered languages and community development programmes.

‘“Pictures Bring Us Messages”: Photographs and Histories from the Kainai Nation', by Alison Brown and Laura Peers with members of the Kainai Nation, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2006. Exploring the meanings that historic photographs have for source communities, the authors – in collaboration with members of the Kainai nation – develop and demonstrate culturally appropriate ways of researching, curating, archiving and accessing museum and archival collections. The book has been heralded as a ‘major contribution to research into museums/archives collections and how people who work at these institutions can reach out and work productively and collaboratively with Aboriginal peoples'.

Nicolas Ellison is co-organiser of the symposium 'Landscape, space and territory: patrimonialism, symbolic reinterpretations and identity reconstructions' in the frame of the 52nd International Congress of Americanists to be held in Seville on July 17-21 2006.
For more details: http://www.52ica.com/preaccepted.html or n.ellison@abdn.ac.uk

Jo Lee and Nicolas Ellison are co-convening a panel in the 2006 EASA conference in Bristol on September 18-21 2006: 'Landscapes for life: integrating experiential and political landscapes.

Staff in the Department of Anthropology were awarded grants totalling just over one million pounds in the year 2004-05.

In the first round of the new RCUK Academic Fellowships Scheme the Department was exceptionally fortunate to receive no fewer than three Fellowships, out of a total of eight awarded to the University as a whole. The Fellowships, all starting during 2005, are of five years' duration, at the end of which they will be converted into Lectureships in the Department. Our three Fellows are Dr Jo Lee, Dr Robert Wishart and Dr Alison Brown. Jo Lee has been investigating the sociality of walking, through fieldwork in and around Aberdeen, and will build on this research in addressing wider issues of movement, placemaking and landscape perception. Both Robert Wishart and Alison Brown are looking at the histories of relations between Scots and Aboriginal Peoples of Canada. Wishart's study is of the ways in which the interests and experiences of Scots traders and settlers became intertwined with those of the Gwich'in peoples of the Canadian Northwest Territories. Brown is examining the role of artefacts in mediating relations between Scots and people of the Kainai Nation during the period of the fur-trade.

Tim Ingold has been awarded a prestigious three-year (2005-08) Professorial Fellowship by the Economic and Social Research Council, for a project of research entitled ‘Explorations in the Comparative Anthropology of the Line'. The research will pursue the implications of treating the human being not as a self-contained entity but as growing along a way of life. Every such way is a line of some kind. Through a comparative and historical anthropology of the line, the research will forge a new approach to understanding the relation, in human life and experience, between movement, knowledge and description. As a work of intellectual synthesis, the research will be library- based, spanning literatures in several disciplines within and beyond the social sciences. It will lead to the production of two major books. Life on the line will explore how, in the transition from the trace to the connector, the growing line was shorn of the movement that gave rise to it. The 4 As will examine the relations between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture as disciplinary paths along which environments are perceived, shaped and understood.

Dr Alison Brown began a two year project in October 2005 funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. 'Material Histories: Social Relationships between Scots and Aboriginal Peoples in the Canadian Fur Trade, c1870-1930' uses museum and private collections to explore how artefacts from the past can be used to evoke memories of diaspora experiences, and specifically, of the cross-cultural nature of social relationships within the Canadian fur trade.

In September 2005 Jo Lee and Tim Ingold hosted a very successful three day seminar on the sociality of walking. The results are currently being edited for publication. More details on the project and seminar are here