12th of December from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Vortragssaal des Staatlichen Museums für Völkerkunde, Maximiliansstr. 42 (Munich) The working group "Anthropology & Tourism" has arranged an interdisciplinary conference called "Anthropology and its search for a place in the tourism discussion" which will take place the 12th of December 2003 at the Museum of Anthropology in Munich. Topics range from "An Anthropological Perspective on Tourism Culture", "Tourism and Sustainability", "Community Based Tourism and Minorities", "The Concept of Participation in Tourism-Projects" to "The German Road of Fairy-Tales". The conference seeks to cultivate an interdisciplinary forum for scholars, private/public sectors, and policy-makers interested in the practice and theory of tourism. The working group invites anyone interested to join the conference. For more information see the schedule and invitation Tagung (application/msword, 834 KB) or contact us at AKEthnologie-Tourismus@gmx.de.

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International conference: Colonial and postcolonial constructions of Africa and Blacks in German popular culture. Königswinter near Bonn October 13-17, 2004. Call for Papers: "Possible topics include, but are not limited to: film, music, pictoral arts, literature, comics, postcards, anthropological and other museums, advertising, materials of everyday life, food, toys, missions, circus and ethnological show business, sports, journalism and the media, sexuality, sexisms, gender construction, mapping the African body, violence, "blackness"/"whiteness". The influence of: philosophy, physical and cultural anthropology, "Rassenlehre", historiography, politics. The impact from abroad: USA, Africa, European countries. Further suggestions are welcome. We also plan to set up round table and/or panel discussions. Conference languages will be German and English. Registration fee will be EUR 30,- (EUR 15,- for students). Please share this information with interested colleagues and students at your institution. Registration deadline will be January 15, 2004. Only those who register will receive subsequent mail with more information." For more information write an e-mail to KopfWelten e.V. or to Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst, both at the Institut für Afrikanistik of Cologne University, Germany or directly download the registration form as a .pdf.

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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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The students of the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and African Studies in Munich have finally rewritten and reprogrammed their homepage ETHNOLOGIK.

On our new site you will find all the information to our activities that expand anthropological student life in Munich. Please review our page once in a while for still ongoing updates, for announcements and for questions. Please join our activities - we need you ! - and continue coming to our events. Everyone is warmly welcome !!!

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As we have a lecture about ICT (information and communication technologies) and Anthropology at our institute, the following digital textbook (german) could be of interest, as it lists all inventions and developments in this field in the last centuries:

REHM, MARGARETE. 2000. Information und Kommunikation in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Berlin: Institut für Bibliothekswissenschaft, Humboldt Universität. Electronic Document. www.ib.hu-berlin.de.

Via Technik-Kultur

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OSIRIS is a organization which is informing about internet development in Senegal, and which is also involved in this development. For example the had a recent article about internet trade with local products. More I wasn't able to figure out without speaking french. Via Afrique Web. I would really recommend that students speaking french and who are interested in Africa should take a look at this weblog regulary. We miss a lot of good news every week, because I can't speak french

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