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Seeing red: watching the World Cup in Northern Chile
Neighborhood children celebrate Chile’s victory. Photo by Nell Haynes The very first night I spent in my fieldsite in Northern Chile, the national team qualified for the World Cup. I had no TV, no...
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The World Cup on social media worldwide
Photo by Jolynna Sinanan In these weeks, many of the world’s eyes are trained on the new football stadiums in towns around Brazil as one of the great global sports spectacles unfolds in its most recent...
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Teens are obsessed about spell checking thanks to Facebook
Photo by Juliano Spyer Schoolteachers and staff in Baldoíno have a common perspective about the impact of social media on education. For them, Facebook and similar services are bad because they make...
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What’s the point of ethnographic fieldwork?
Learning from each other in the North China fieldsite (Photo: Tom McDonald) Being an anthropologist is one of the strangest jobs in the world. For the last 15 months, I’ve been living in a small rural...
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Pin down the questions
Xinyuan asking questions on a construction site among workers (photo by MF) “You should know that the majority of PhD students feel some regret that they didn’t ask enough questions when they came back...
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Thank you, people from Grano!
A newly-wed couple from Grano preparing for a photo session on the steps of the church (Photograph by Razvan Nicolescu) I have been living for 15 months in a beautiful place in southeast Italy in the...
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WhatsApp: A pain in the arse
Image courtesy of Josh Stocco, Creative Commons It is not uncommon for the people of Balduino to discuss sex. Even my least talkative informants enjoyed telling me about their love affairs outside...
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Normativity on social media in Northern Chile
As many entries in the blog affirm, local cultural aspects are often reflected or made even more visual on social media. As I have written before of my fieldsite, there is a certain normativity that...
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A methodological case of comparative anthropology
Image Courtesy Quinn Dombrowski (Creative Commons) I hear from colleagues in our department that completing a PhD can often be a solitary experience. Anthropologists tend to accept the fact that social...
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Personal and public aesthetics: What I learned from my own visceral reactions...
Photo by Nell Hayes At first, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but over the first several months in my fieldsite in northern Chile I began to realize that one of the reasons I never quite felt...
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Surveying Social Relationships
One of the chapters of our forthcoming book How the World Changed Social Media, which will be published as an Open Access book by UCL Press in February 2016, describes a survey consisting of 43...
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Normativity and social visibility
It has been exactly a year since finishing 15 months of fieldwork in Trinidad. Stories for this blog have moved further and further away from cool stuff that was coming out of the field and living in...
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Fieldwork is haunting me, thanks to WhatsApp
When is the end of fieldwork? (Photo:Merlijn Hoek CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) When is it that fieldwork finishes? Thanks to social media, the separation between being in the fieldsite and being in the library is...
View ArticleWhy We Post: The Anthropology of Social Media
The Why We Post project is now moving into its final stages at full speed, gearing up for our public launch on February 29th 2016. On this date we will release the first three of eleven open access...
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WhatsApp ban in Brazil: the word on the ground
The text above the image reads: ‘me without WhatsApp’. In this post Juliano Spyer suggests that the vocal backlash against the recent blocking of WhatsApp in Brazil would have been even stronger if...
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Nostalgia for a field Christmas
Image courtesy of shanzmataz. It’s the first time I’ve been away from Christmas in Trinidad since I started fieldwork there in 2011 (oh wait, I was home briefly in 2013). December to February is about...
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What is the difference between a generalisation and a stereotype?
All anthropologists would agree that stereotypes cause harm and should be avoided. Yet anthropology mainly consists of generalisations about groups of people: the Nuer do this, the Trobriand Islanders...
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They flirt, they share porn and they gossip
Image courtesy:thegillinator. The last four months of 2015 were tough. I was locking myself in a claustrophobic student carrel every day, spending 9 hours staring at a computer screen but not being...
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A close-up look at Chinese social media platforms
Tom McDonald and Xinyuan Wang introduce China’s social media platforms Chinese social media is remarkable because despite extensive media coverage and academic research, these platforms remain...
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Why We Post is “the biggest, most ambitious project of its sort”, says The...
Since our launch on the 29th February, the first three open access books in the Why We Post series have been downloaded over 6,000 times! 6,000 downloads in just two weeks makes for a very happy team....
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