Anthropology in Action

In opening this 2009 volume of Anthropology in Action, it seems important to comment on what are self-consciously interesting times. The first quarter of the year has already witnessed the inauguration of Barack Obama as US president, bitter and destructive bombing campaigns in Gaza, and further financial shocks in the world’s markets, with a seeming domino effect of wealthy capitalist institutions turning to national governments for support. Global and local relations, networks, identities and conflicts have been brought into sharp focus by world events, but anthropology is rarely visible in the news, and anthropologists rarely called upon to comment, despite a wealth of potentially valuable knowledge. Applications of anthropology are becoming gradually more accepted within the academy, but seem to have come only a short distance in terms of public profile or ability to influence national and trans-national policies.

Ireland, both North and South, has gained international prominence in recent years for the startling economic transformations it has achieved. Many governments study the example of the Republic of Ireland and attempt to learn the recipe of the ‘Irish Model’ in which, as implied in the quote above, technology and design play a part. Key elements in the narrative of Irish national transformation are manufacturing and processing plants, established by companies whose names evoke the feeling of a contemporary hi-tech global zeitgeist. Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Rank Xerox and others, all have major plants for their core products, which can roll off a production line but are intricately engineered. Several of these companies have also established head offices in Ireland, overseeing European operations. Dublin has therefore become an international leader in hi-tech components, software engineering and pharmaceuticals.

This paper presents a study of Irish households, the internet and everyday life. Social studies of technology draw heavily from anthropology, not only in ethnographic methodologies but also in the ways in which such data can be understood and interpreted within the contexts of everyday life. To achieve this, the concept of the domestication of (media) technologies has been developed to describe and analyse the processes of technology's acceptance, rejection and use. Domestication is employed as a structural and analytical framework to achieve an empirical understanding of the domestic user. Based on a critical analysis from an anthropological perspective, the paper will revise the original domestication of the concept of technology. The notion of technological black boxes and I-methodology strategies are critiqued. This paper calls for users to be conceptualised as active agents in the overall design process and not as just end users who become active once the artefact has become commodified.

This paper examines the role of the mobile phone within the everyday lives of youth in contemporary Ireland. The current generation of teenagers can be said to have grown up with the mobile phone, and as such, treat it as a taken-for-granted part of life. This submersion of the technology into young people's lives means it touches upon multiple aspects of their everyday experience. Employing a framework derived from the work of Michel de Certeau, in particular his concepts on tactics and strategies, I will explore how young people use the mobile phone to manage and navigate these experiences.

The analysis of electronic versus paper documents, especially in the context of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), has often focused on affordances, issues of design and implementation, and work practices. Issues of culture are often understated in such studies. Yet, like any object of material culture, the use of paper files, as well as an aversion to electronic information sharing, is conditioned by the cultural and political background of a society. This article will suggest that the persistence of paper files in a section of the Irish civil service during the 1990s had much to do with issues of accountability and a cult of expertise, in which papers files, as material objects, were deployed on behalf of claims of expertise and power. This intertwining of power, politics and information is a feature of Irish society, and the discourse of expertise and power is a theme that permeates many aspects of Irish culture.

While informatisation has officially been hailed as a major component of the modernisation of the Romanian health-care system, this paper, based on ethnographic research in Romanian hospitals, shows that it has been mostly geared towards managerialist goals of administrative control and cost containment. Paradoxically, informal relations, which were supposed to be suppressed as a result of both informatisation and managerialist marketisation, continue to thrive in the Romanian health-care system.

Ethnographic work conducted by the Digital Health Group, Intel Ireland, explores the questions of how concepts of health and independence relate to peoples' lives in later life. This paper serves to present artistic approaches to the design of the material culture in elderly homes in Ireland, and aims to highlight and discuss the merits and problems of such approaches. Through writing 'in miniature' about specific experiences and homes, we propose that it is possible to develop explorations of material objects in the home which, rather than presenting material contexts as terminal 'conclusions' to the research process, use them as provoking and questioning resources for engaged dialogical encounters with informants.

Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society. By Holly Wardlow. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2006. ISBN 0-520-24559-8

Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research. By Patricia Sunderland and Rita Denny (eds.). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1-59874-091-2

Anthropology and Science: Epistemologies in Practice. By Jeanette Edwards, Penny Harvey and Peter Wade (eds.). Oxford, New York: Berg (ASA Monographs 43), 2007. ISBN 978 184520 500 3

Anthropology in Action is always happy to hear from potential reviewers at all stages in their academic careers. Reviews are normally short – about 500 words – but a more in-depth review can also be planned if you wish. We currently have a number of books awaiting review. If you are interested in reviewing any of the books on the list below, please feel free to get in touch. Alternatively, if there is a particular book you would like us to request, please contact Michaela Benson (M.Benson@bristol.ac.uk).