Fieldwork and Technology
The images on the front and back covers illustrate two of several reflections in this issue on the impacts of technology on the world studied by anthropologists. On the front cover, an internet cafe is one of the first sights to greet visitors to Dhunche, once a ‘remote’ area in northern Nepal. On the back cover, a youth tries out a telescope during the commemoration of the confirmation of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity at Roça Sundy, Príncipe, where Arthur Eddington observed a total solar eclipse.
In his editorial, Bob Simpson remarks on how much the craft of fieldwork has changed as a result of the widespread on-site availability of communications technology, placing even the remotest sites within reach of home or employer. In this post-Malinowskian fieldwork, where the distinction between back here and out there has disappeared, what are the implications of this for our craft and for the quality of our obversations?
Gisa Weszkalnys reflects on her fieldwork site of Príncipe as the location of one of the most important events in 20th-century science, the confirmation of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. She overlays the 2009 commemoration of this event, with international institutions promoting scientific knowledge and tourism, with another, colonial history of Príncipe as the focus of a controversy around the alleged use of slave labour in its cocoa plantations.
As Kristín Loftsdóttir argues in her article, science and technology are among a range of markers used to determine who is most in need of international development, thus contributing to what she calls the ‘racialization of development’.
Akbar Ahmed alerts us to the fear in Washington, DC and Islamabad that the Taliban, who have recently taken over his field site in Swat Province, could potentially destabilize world order by appropriating nuclear technology.
There are evidently many ways in which science and technology can and do affect our field sites. One of the greatest challenges for anthropology will be to experiment creatively and innovate with appropriate technologies in partnership. In this way we can generate more egalitarian conversations in an atmosphere of mutual respect, trust and tolerance. Whatever fieldwork becomes, it must be founded on such engagement with the broadest of publics, while making the most of these new technologies.
Contents
Bob Simpson 1
Messages from the field
Kristín Loftsdóttir 4
Invisible colour: Landscapes of whiteness and racial identity in international development
Gisa Weszkalnys 8
Príncipe eclipsed: Commemorating the confirmation of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity
Jens Meierhenrich 13
The transformation of lieux de mémoire: The Nyabarongo River in Rwanda, 1992-2009
Akbar Ahmed and Gustaaf Houtman 20
Swat in the eye of the storm: Interview with Akbar Ahmed
FILM
Jonathan Benthall 23
‘You’ll see how big we are’: Journey into America
CONFERENCES
Caroline Gatt and Kathryn Lichti-Harriman 25
Performance, art and anthropology
Elizabeth Frantz 25
Diasporic encounters, sacred journeys
OBITUARIES
Ray Abrahams 27
Aidan Southall
NEWS 27 CALENDAR 29 CLASSIFIED 30
