Anthropology of Media
Media and Communciation is a central focus in the research of the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University.
Dr. Bart Barendregt
Dr. Bart Barendregt is currently researching the process of appropriation of mobile phone technology by marginalized groups as part of a larger book project on the “Underbelly of Indonesian IT society”. He is linking this research to the dynamic and growing field of research on ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development) based movements, which plays an essential role in determining the relevance of future anthropological research. Bart Barendregt is also interested in Islamic pop culture, new media and images/imaginations of the future. He is currently working on a book about Nasyid: Islamitic boyband music and the mixing of religion, youth culture and politics that has become so popular among Malaysian and Indonesian students and activists. Bart Barendregt is also involved in a long-term research project on eco-chic and slow living Asian style: a mix of lifestyle politics, wellness and the desire to return to an aristocratic version of ‘traditional culture’, in which newly rich Asians are adopting a cultural version of the politically loaded “Asian Values” debate.
Keywoords: South- East Asia, Mobile Technology, ICT 4 Development, Religion (Pop Islam), Asian Eco-chic.
Dr. Jan Jansen
Jan Jansen (1962, PhD Leiden 1995) has a special interest in oral tradition in Sub-Sahara Africa. He conducted extensive fieldwork in the region southwest of Mali's capital Bamako. Jan Jansen’s anthropological studies focus on the relationship between historical discourses and local politics. He has published extensively on local systems of education by apprenticeship and has produced - often in collaboration with Malian scholars and local male elites - numerous text editions of oral history accounts. Jan Jansen’s current research project focuses on the epistemological and methodological consequences of applying new recording and documentation technology, with a special attention for the academic traditions by which the encounter between researcher and informant is constructed. Jan Jansen is co-editor of African Sources for African History (published by Brill, Leiden) and Mande Worlds (published by LIT Verlag, Munster/Hamburg).
Keywords: Oral history, Technology, Politics, Gender, Africa
Dr. Erik de Maaker
Erik de Maaker is specialized on South Asia, notably Northeast India and Bangladesh. Earlier research focused on the social and religious implications of the mortuary rituals of one of the ‘tribal’ communities of that region. Present research in the same region has shifted towards the implications of religious conversion and cultural transformation. His research proceeds from the material and ritual dimensions of religious practices, extending to topics such as the dynamics of kinship and the politization of ethnicity. Erik de Maaker is also engaged in research on contemporary mortuary practices in the Netherlands. The latter project is conducted within the framework of the NWO sponsored project ‘Refiguring Death Rites,’ of the Nijmegen Radboud University. Methodologically, he has specialized in the use of video recordings for qualitative research, as well as the production of ethnographic DVD’s and films. He is one of the founders of the Asian Borderlands Research Network.
Keywords: Religion and Ritual, Qualitative Analysis, Visual Ethnography and Material Culture, South Asia.
Drs. Metje Postma
Metje Postma’s current research examines how a group of refugees from the Arab Rashaayda Bedouin community of Sudan, staying in Eritrea, is represented to and by aid organizations and how it presents itself in different ways, arenas and for different audiences. Her theoretical interest is in how forms and modes of communication engage an audience differently. For their Arab brothers the Rashaayda emphasize their courage and their high descent through lengthy poems and songs and rhetorical speech, mobilizing their cultural heritage and history; to Western aid organizations they stress their neediness and their victimization by the Sudanese government and how they suffered from human rights abuses. Metje Postma explores how the discourse on representational processes in ethnography can be applied in the field of development. In past and future research she has also been interested in how people embody knowledge and skills, and how body-techniques are traditionally used to reach certain states of consciousness.
Key words: Visual Ethnography, Development, Ethnic Identity and Representation, Media and Communication, Embodied Knowledge, Africa.
Prof. Dr. Patricia Spyer
Prof. Dr. Patricia Spyer holds the chair of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Contemporary Indonesia at Leiden University and is Global Distinguished Visiting Professor at New York University’s Center for Religion & Media and Department of Anthropology. She is the author of The Memory of Trade: Modernity’s Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island (Duke 2000), editor of Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (Routledge 1998), and co-editor of the Handbook of Material Culture (Sage 2006). Patricia Spyer has published, among other topics, on violence, media and photography, historical consciousness, materiality, and religion. Her current book project Orphaned Landscapes focuses on the mediations of violence and postviolence in the recent religiously-inflected conflict in the Moluccas, Indonesia. A co-edited volume Images Without Borders with Mary Steedly of Harvard University is forthcoming with the School of American Research Press.
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