Exploring Anthropological Methods

In this episode of AnthroTalking, we speak to Assunta Hunter about her ethnographic fieldwork in Thailand, her doctoral research, and the struggles anthropologists might experience while conducting fieldwork in Thailand. Hunter tells us about how the community of Thai traditional medicine practitioners have adapted to the changes associated with the modernisation and professionalization of Thai traditional medicine (see references, Hunter 2013). She describes a new breed of practitioners in Thailand, as well as in Australia, who move freely between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ knowledge. As you will hear in the episode, the so-called ‘post-modern practitioners’ are at the forefront of novel patterns of knowledge creation – in which the state, the institutions of the profession and practitioners contest and cooperate in the creation of authoritative knowledge.

In this podcast, the master students of Stockholm University’s anthropology department take center stage: They have recently swarmed out into the world to do research for their master theses. The commonplace that every beginning is hard is especially true for fieldwork: You don’t only have to quickly establish a good relationship with potential informants, you also have to adapt to an environment that is unlike the one you are familiar to: Be it in terms of language, social structures or the time you have to get out of bed. The fields the students explore include a cheese workshop in the Swedish archipelago, a job agency in Slovakia, a village situated in the middle of a soon-to-be artificial lake in Turkey and a satirical newsroom in Romania. Listen to our initial struggles and problems, but also successes and moments of first insights.

In this episode of AnthroTalking, we talk to Inge Daniels about her ongoing research on amateur photographic practises in Japan. Daniels is an Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at University of Oxford, and also a Fellow at St Cross College. She finished her PhD in 2001 at University College London, and in 2010 she published the book “The Japanese House: Material Culture in the Modern Home” at Berg Publishers (Oxford), which won the ICAS Book Prize in 2013. In this episode, Daniels tells us about how the stereotype of Japanese people taking lots of photos can be said to carry some truth with it. She was intrigued by how the people she met and lived with in Japan tended to avoid displaying personal photos. Instead of associating photos with memories, to Japanese people, it is more about the future and looking forward, Daniels argues. Analytically, photography as a practice enables them to question normative practices. Thus, by using photos, these people create a certain imagination of themselves and their family, but also beyond it.

Even after years of studies, students and researchers of the discipline might find it difficult to pin down what exactly distinguishes anthropological research. In this episode, address the simple, yet much discussed and at times mystified question: “What is the anthropological method”? The podcast aims at demonstrating the range and diversity of anthropological methods while hinting at what unites all of them.