Blogs 2010

Checking the signs

Daniel Audéoud, December 2010

Do you know how to recognize a counterfeit banknote if you see one? Have you ever knowingly come across one? Or are there chances you could have had (or have right now) one without knowing it? Such questions we seldom ask ourselves, unless confronted with practices that do bring the issue to the fore. As you may well have experienced, this can ...

[more]

Emphatic beginnings: from culture contact to creolization

Robin Cohen, October 2010

Following the publication of Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (Tarcher/Penguin 2010), Steve Vertovec’s blog [provide link] on this site provides an excellent entry into contemporary debates on how we can foster empathy. I would like to add that we need a little more on showing how we got to where we are now ...

[more]

Diversity, cosmopolitans and locals

Steven Vertovec, September 2010

More than ever before, today more people are moving from more places to more places. Over the past twenty-five years, there has not only been a substantial increase in, but also a remarkable diversification of, international migration flows. While United Nations statistics suggest that in the near future, migrants may account for up to 10 percent of the total population ...

[more]

Ties that bind: the emotional entanglements of ethnography

Justine Buck Quijada, August 2010

I first met Bair Zhambalovich in Ulan Ude in 2004. He is the Director of the shaman’s organization with whom I worked as part of my dissertation research. Ulan Ude is the capital city of the Republic of Buryatia, part of the Russian Federation. Buryats are an ethnic group, closely related to Mongolians, who, for the most part, live in the area around Lake Baikal ...

[more]

Social sciences, theology and many coffee cups

Dorottya Nagy, June 2010

Not long after I started my work at the Max Planck Institute, I attended a conference -- the first one in my new position. During the coffee break the first intermingling with my fellow participants took place; the same old ritual of new comers attempting to get to know each other, always eased by the statuary position of holding a cup in one’s hand, ...

[more]

Windows to a virtual field

Jovan Maud, April 2010

I begin my blog post with a look out my window. I have a view of the garden behind the Max Planck villa which houses the Religious Diversity department. Trees are blossoming. Workers are out there, landscaping a Japanese garden. It's a peaceful scene. Good for writing you would say. And this is what I am my main task is at the moment: writing up my research on ...

[more]

Christianity, space and gender in the Chinese Christian community in the UK: tracing a trajectory

Yuqin Huang, March 2010

From October 2009 to January 2010, for 11 weeks or so, I was travelling around England, doing research on Chinese Christian community. This research interest was first prompted by my experiences of being converted and involved in a Chinese Christian church for four years in England. Due to my doctoral training in ‘gender and work’, my original concerns were about the ...

[more]

Angst and Enlightenment in the City of Angels

Sophorntavy Vorng, February 2010

Thailand abounds with images of the Buddha's half-lidded eyes and mysteriously serene smile, which beckon toward a not so well kept secret: his solution to the universal question of human suffering. This was encapsulated in the Four Noble Truths, namely, that all life is suffering, that the reason for suffering is desire, that the elimination of...

[more]

Doing fieldwork with religious missionary networks - examples from the Tablighi Jama’at al-Dawa and Christian Baptist missionaries in Northwestern Thailand

Alexander Horstmann, January 2010

Doing fieldwork with religious missionary networks is a methodological challenge. In order to get an insider perspective, it is necessary to have access to the religious movement. This is not an easy task. In the November blog, Boris Nieswand showed that the fieldwork entry in Germany can be a complex and difficult story with its own dynamics. What is it like for a white European anthropologist ...

[more]