Anthropology Matters Journal, 1999.

Rethinking Thai Masculinity: New Perspectives on Prostitution in Thailand

Alyson Brody, SOAS

While raising questions about the Thai sex industry is, in view of the AIDS pandemic, a matter of urgent research interest, much of the existing discourse has failed to place an understanding of masculinity on the agenda. This paper aims to rethink assumptions about masculinity and confront much wider assumptions about male – and therefore human – nature. Against this background Thai prostitution is conceptualised as an axis around which many discourses of ‘otherness’ turn, leading to questions about the forms prostitution takes, who the clients are and how their motivations are articulated.

(html)

Fieldwork in practice: Thoughts from the pre-fieldwork armchair

James Staples, SOAS

While fieldwork in a place already known to the researcher brings with it a list of specific advantages and disadvantages, it also encounters many of the same methodological and ethical considerations common to all ethnographic research. Written pre-fieldwork, this paper anticipates some of these issues – from interview techniques and participant observation to the researcher’s own relationship to the research – and invites the reader to respond.

(html)

Managing culinary diversity in urban China: On the reception of Sichuanese cuisine in the recent Guangzhou press

Jakob Klein, SOAS

Taking as its starting point the broad themes of globalisation and transnationalism, this paper focuses on what the author describes as an often neglected aspect of the growing interconnectedness of the late twentieth century: that is, the management of cultural influences moving between unequally positioned places within a single polity or region. In particular, the paper examines how the cuisine of Sichuan Province in south western China has been received in Guangzhou. Providing a summary of the historical background, the paper ends by outlining an agenda for further ethnographic research, which should look in particular at restaurateurs, restaurant workers, consumers and gastromic writers

(html)

Alternative pedagogy of learning and teaching Anthropology: Process and legitimisation

Celayne Heaton, Tomoko Kurihara and Jakob Rigi, SOAS

This paper is a first attempt at presenting a multi-authored ethnography of e@tm in its second year. It is open to further elaboration through the contributions of readers. It aims to investigate the contradictions inherent in our own practice, as subalterns within an academic institution attempting to create a space for the production of alternative but equally legitimate knowledges. The notions of communitas, and creativity or innovation which the formation of communitas supports, have been used in the past to describe this seminar, but as practices, these can in some instances sit uneasily together. Here their coexistence is found to be rendered problematic through the requirements of legitimisation of the seminar and the form this process takes.

(html)

Appendix 1 - Report on 1 Day Workshop "Alternatives and Innovations: Imagining the future of research Anthropology"

11 June 1999

(html)

Appendix 2 - E@TM response to the ESRC Research Training Consultation

(html)

Appendix 3 - E@TM Profile

(html)

Is Anthropology Nobel Enough? - An invitation to reflect on why no anthropologist has ever walked away with a nobel prize.

Albert E. Alejo

(html)