Culture – Ethnography.com

Religious Ritual at the Credit Card Machine

Posted on November 24, 2022May 10, 2023 by Christina Lauren Quigley

Ritual Shrine Offerings Among the Exotic Nacirema Tribe

While it may seem that anthropologists have documented the most exotic rituals across the globe, the strangest rituals are still yet to be documented by scientists in the exotic tribe of the Nacirema. The strange beginnings of the exotic Nacirema tribe have been documented by Tocqueville (1835), and intimate body rituals have been documented by Miner (1956), but no scientist has brought to light the strangest worship ritual of any tribe on the planet.…

Ethnography.com launches on Youtube thanks to Chinese Smartphones in Africa

Posted on November 6, 2022November 7, 2022 by Christina Lauren Quigley

Greetings Ethnography.com aficionados!

My previous post “What Happens if Chinese Smartphones Teach English Lessons in Tanzania?” is now on Youtube. Keeping up with the times, Tony and I will be working together so that Ethnography.com articles will be in video format along with the transcription here on Ethnography.com. Please subscribe to Laurelin the Other– the Other meaning, the Ethnographer. Hit that like button and leave a comment on Youtube.…

What Happens if Chinese Smartphones Teach English Lessons in Tanzania?

Posted on October 7, 2022November 6, 2022 by Christina Lauren Quigley

English is the dominant global language of the world, it is the language of power, and control. But it is not the only language, and different people have different levels of command over the use of the same language. It is interesting to watch how this happens, often in unexpected ways, for example by the arrival of Chinese cell phones here in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

I recently bought the cheapest smartphone I could find, when it seemed my primary phone had been burned by excess voltage coming out of the electrical sockets in rural/provincial Tanzania (Kigoma).…

Understanding the Shaman’s Tribulations

Posted on June 15, 2022 by Guest Blogger

Understanding the Shaman’s Tribulations
– By Taba Menia –

The scholarship of shamanism is closely related to ideas about traditional healing and their knowledge. Found across the world in concern with the relationship between health and the super-natural, Shamans are observed as custodians of the human realm. Becoming a shaman involves expertise in traditional knowledge and transcendental abilities. Many researchers have focused on the initiation in Shamanhood and their roles. However, few discuss the Shaman’s own accounts of their hardships

I came across Shaman understandings of their work when I was carrying out my fieldwork in Arunachal Pradesh, high in the Himalayas in the far east of India between December 2020 and March 2021.…

(Almost) Native Ethnography Meets the Heat of the Tunisian Desert

Posted on March 29, 2022October 7, 2022 by Guest Blogger

– by Imen El Amouri –

Before embarking on my ethnographic graduate research, I dove into literature on native anthropological research in North Africa and the Arab world. My personal anguish over social and political conditions in my parents’ (and sometimes my own) home country motivated me to study Tunisian society. With confidence, I started my fieldwork in a remote desert village in the south of Tunisia. The following vignette from my fieldwork has put my native gaze in question.…

A Liquor Store is like a Drive-Thru Cheers

Posted on April 18, 2019April 3, 2022 by Christina Lauren Quigley

Notes From the Liquor Store…

Thought I was finished working here.
But I remembered, I do like the liquor store.

Been coming in and chatting with Norm at night. He’s helping with my studies in Arabic philosophy. So I thought I’d give him a night off so he can run errands and cook dinner for his family. Norm says he has no knowledge of Arabic philosophy, but over time, he has showed me a little– books, poetry, music, history. …

Is Drumming Better than Prozac? An Anthropological Reflection

Posted on February 21, 2019April 3, 2022 by Christina Lauren Quigley

‘Mental health’ has been shown to be social and environmental, though we’ve heard of Prozac, and even music therapy led by professionals. Well-being may also be connected to collective, organized sound among ordinary people. I’d like to share a recent study in biomedicine, and draw these scientific conclusions into the anthropological realm. First, because I’d like to bring biomedicine into anthropological discussions, so that the medical system fathered by Hippocrates can meet other medical systems, particularly those of the immense continent of Africa.…

Would sobriety coins be an acceptable form of payment at the liquor store?

Posted on January 25, 2019April 3, 2022 by Christina Lauren Quigley

Notes From the Liquor Store

It’s the second time Rita has been into the liquor store where I work in Chico, California. Last time was Wednesday, when it was pouring rain, and the man she was with was dressed from hood to boots in bright yellow PVC. She’s from Paradise, or what was the town in which the November 8th ‘Camp Fire’ destroyed 19,000 buildings, and she keeps telling me to watch the city council. …

The Place That Is Our Home

Posted on January 13, 2019April 3, 2022 by Christina Lauren Quigley

In 1978, Remmy Ongala left his home in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (not far from the city of Bukavu) for Tanzania. He boarded a boat across Lake Tanganyika to Kigoma, Tanzania’s main port city on the great lake. From Kigoma, he then traveled by train to Dar es Salaam to eventually become one of the most famous and well-loved ‘Tanzanian’ songwriter-musicians, Dr. Remmy.

For me, that small city of Kigoma that Dr.…

On the Culture of Binge Drinking in a Residential College Town

Posted on March 1, 2017February 28, 2017 by Marianne Paiva

Culture: The values, beliefs, behaviors, and expectations of behaviors or social norms of a given population of humans.

Do you know what I find amazing? I find it amazing that I never see people burning couches and cars in the streets of my neighborhood. And I find it amazing that I never find discarded red plastic cups in the gutters outside my house. And I never find my neighbors passed out in the bushes in front of my house.…

Which Thumb is on Top? Questions about Culture from a Mlabri Village in Thailand

Posted on July 11, 2011July 11, 2011 by Tony Waters

Explaining why people do things, even when it doesn’t seem reasonable to an American undergraduate is what I do for a living. I’ve explained why people don’t agree with their political views, the persistence of “irrational habits,” why most people don’t want to move to America, why poverty persists in a world of abundance, and a whole bunch of things that the many undergraduates do not want to believe. And after I’m done they undergraduates still don’t generally understand how people could have such persistent beliefs and practices which to them are just not logical.…

Musings about the Theft of Culture from Anthropology

Posted on May 28, 2010August 21, 2013 by Tony Waters

Some years ago, I asked the question, “Who Stole Culture from Anthropology?” in a brief essay in Anthropology News in 2006. I raised the question because many anthropologists had complained to me since about 1987, about how they had trained “too many” anthropologists with the result that they were unemployed. The discipline seemed to be in a perpetual depression, wallowing in its own insecurities, seemingly like no other. This bothered me though, in part I guess because I was a victim of this insecurity. …