I found something in google about "metacortex" there is a worldwide company developing sofware and information systems www.metacortechs.com The Mission of this company:" To enable the world to fulfill its destiny through technology" There is also a mysterious connection with some kind of a metacortex-conspiracy somehow connected to the movie Matrix. free.pages.at Seems to be some kind of a game...

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As cultural anthropology still isn't too active in studying social and cultural phenomena induced by information and communication technologies (ICT) there is a class on this issues at the "Institut für Ethnologie" in Munich, Germany. The class is called "e_thnology II -- online-communities of practice". Students attending the class will not only have a look on communities-of-practice, but shall organize themselves as an online-community of research, and the category "class" here at the Ethno::log provides the platform. Please give the header of every new story you post for this class the beginning "e2 --", so that all entries can easily be retrieved by the search-function. Post links, findings, thoughts and use the commentary function to create discussion-threads, help each other out, and share results. There are the possibilities to put up images and files, too.

"Go ahead ... and make my day!" ("Dirty" Harry Callahan)

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As tourism has developed to be quite an issue inside cultural anthropology I thought I'd provide a data-source for research in that field: "For the past 45 years, the Travel Industry World Yearbook -- The Big Picture has provided marketers in as diverse sectors as airlines, hotels, car rental companies, convention and visitor bureaus, destinations, cruise companies, travel agencies, advertising, accounting and law, investment banking, and economists and educators, with a better understanding of the events, issues and challenges that shape the travel and tourism industry. With its own, unique approach, the Yearbook highlights the main events and searches beyond the headlines to root out causes and effects and what they mean for the travel industry. Statistics are an important part of our presentation, but equally important is covering regions, countries, and industry sectors with in-depth analysis. This remains our operative method." [underline added] Read more or browse its contents and features. The volume is quite costly ($125,-), but having a look at it in the library may do as well ;-) And chances are good that your library holds the whole series which started in 1958.

TRAVEL INDUSTRY PUBLISHING COMPANY (Ed.). 2003. Travel Industry World Yearbook: The Big Picture 2002. New York: Travel Industry Publishing Company. [ISBN 0-9673634-2-X, ISSN 0738-9515]

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"Alien worlds and sensation. Around 1900 in munich a new genre of entertainment emerged. The business with the exotic was at the same time an image of european colonialism." A new book deals with ethnic exhibitions (Völkerschauen) in Munich around 1900. It contains 15 articles by different authors which are sorted into chapters called "Fairs of the exotic", "Exotic knowledge", "Exotic theatre", and "Imaginations of the exotic". Topics range from "The curiosity of the civilised" to "Cinema and the exotic". The volume is printed on heavy stock glossy paper, contains an ample bibliography and on its 320 pages countless photographies, drawings and reproductions of posters and the like are to be seen.

DREESBACH, ANNE AND HELMUT ZEDELMAIER (Eds.). 2003. "Gleich hinterm Hofbräuhaus waschechte Amazonen": Exotik in München um 1900, München, Hamburg: Dölling und Gallitz. [ISBN: 3-935549-77-6]

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Herwig Zahorka, a former forestry commissioner, writes on Karl Helbig's 1937 expedition through Borneo and compares the frontiers of accessability and exploitation then and now. Download info on the book as a .pdf or contact the author.

ZAHORKA, HERWIG. 2003. Die Erschließungsfronten auf Borneo (Kalimantan) 1937 bis heute: Sozioökonomische, ethnographische und ökologische Veränderungsprozesse unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Stammeskultur der Dayak, Libertas Paper 48, Sindelfingen: Libertas. [69 pp., 23 photographies and maps, ISBN 3-921929-22-9; 30 EUR]

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The Center of Public Integrity (USA) published a detailed list of companies which made contracts with the american government. This list shows involvements in donations to the government and personal ties with it. In their article they write: "Those companies donated more money to the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush (a little over $500,000) than to any other politician over the last dozen years, the Center found. Nearly 60 percent of the companies had employees or board members who either served in or had close ties to the executive branch for Republican and Democratic administrations, for members of Congress of both parties, or at the highest levels of the military."

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"Unlike in many aesthetic fields, a [computer]game is not a fixed object, but a fluid and (sometimes) social activity or process. [...] By their fluent nature and dynamic ("emergent") behavior, games represent a challenge to humanist, textual perspectives on aesthetics. [...] The border zone between aesthetics and technics represent a great opportunity to explore both game structure and games' cultural meaning. Also, the humanist notion of "analysis" must be reexamined in light of digitized media such as computer games." (Game Analysis Methodology -- underlines added) All this clearly adresses issues already taken up by cultural anthropology: The notion of culture as being dynamic; the transcendendation of text-centred methods and theories (think of oral history and such); not anymore taking for granted the traditional differentiations of societies into spheres like politics, economy, technology, religion, art ...; the reflexivity concerning own methods and concepts like analysis. We not only encounter the "other" when traveling into remote regions of the globe, but every time when we face something "new". Computergames, although products of 'western' cultural change, bring forth new social and cultural phenomena which are alien or even completely unknown to the majority of the members of 'our' societies. The above quotation restrengthened my believe that cultural anthropology has quite something to contribute to the new academic field of game analysis. see the original posting by flammable

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