Today the organisation of the students of our institute handed over a revised version of the position paper II (application/pdf, 106 KB) (german). The institute is still in danger of loosing the main professorship due to radical cuts by the government of bavaria. The paper is a description of the aims and goals of anthropology at our institute, from the viewpoint of the students.

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"In 1978 Edward Said's landmark "Orientalism" did something that the vast majority of books, even great ones, fail to do: It literally changed the way we understand the world. By developing a system for conceiving and deconstructing the long and tangled relationship between East and West -- a relationship that Said argued was marked, throughout the colonial era, by the West's systematic portrayal of the East as culturally and racially primitive, exotic, backward and inferior -- Said virtually created an entirely new field, post-colonialism, which continues to have profound effects on academia and international politics to this day.

The new book "Occidentalism" expressly positions itself as the Western-looking counterpart to the Said classic. Its authors want us to believe that it, too, will shatter myths, define a new genre of thought and study, and change the way we understand the world." Read more at Salon.com (Requires watching a commercial for free day pass).

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The term 'culture' is definitly the most discussed term in anthropology. But the debate is always about the scientific meaning. In german (in english also?) there are also other meanings, which are not part of this debate, except to express, that we don't mean this meaning. The problem is, that if we have to talk about this 'external' meaning, we don't have a term for it. My question: Is there any term for culture as it's meant in daily life, expressing institutionalised culture like classical music, theater etc.? Bettina Beer describes it in the article "Ethnos, Ethnie, Kultur" (1)Beer, Bettina: Ethnos, Ethnie, Kultur. In: Fischer, Hans: Ethnologie. Berlin : Reimer, 2003, S. 60. "Kultur im Sinne von Kultur-behörde und Kultus-ministerium oder im Sinne des Feuilletons als Musik, Theater, Literatur, Architektur und bildende Kunst." A shorter term? My ideas:

• bürgerliche Kulturverständnis
• institutionalisierte Kultur Any other suggestions?

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The title of the weblog "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends: How new technologies are modifying our way of life" is self-explaining, I guess. via mosaikum

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