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TOWARDS A MORE NUANCED UNDERSTANDING OF POVERTY

The imperatives and dynamics of the world of poverty are little understood but evermore pressing, says Professor Vigdis Broch-Due. For the past four years, she has been in charge of the research project entitled Poverty Politics: Current Approaches to its Production and Reduction.

- By Iselin Åsedotter Strønen

The project is located at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. Broch-Due is the only Professor in Poverty Studies in Scandinavia and has been a pioneer in the study of poverty.
- With over a third of the world’s population living in some condition of poverty- and that proportion is growing relentlessly- there can be few more important fields of research. Concerns about poverty– who are the ‘poor’, why they are poor, and what can be deemed a proper response to them, have in fact long been at the core of discourses about society, says Broch-Due.
Her interest in poverty research started in 1994, when she was recruited as the head of the research programme "Poverty and Prosperity in Africa: Local and Global Perspectives" at the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala Sweden.
- Being in charge of a new research programme and thus responsible for drawing up a research agenda, my thinking became of necessity more focused on poverty and the complex issues that collect around it, tells Broch-Due. 

 “Thin Description”
- When I first came to the study of poverty in the early nineties and was browsing through the available literature on the topic, I was struck by how ‘thinly’ it was framed. Poverty appeared on the page as a material and totally measurable condition, the quantifiable absence of resources and its results. Clearly, lack of income and nutrition are important indices of poverty and yet, based on my own ethnographic experience, this economist's poverty discourse dominating development research seemed to me as a seriously reductive one. It appeared to give a simple and revealing categorisation of areas, populations and their needs, but by making income and nutrition the only factors standing for complex social realities, it clearly concealed and misrepresented important political, social and cultural processes defining and creating poverty. The politics of wealth and want are anything but ‘thin’, argues Broch-Due.
She upholds that poverty has always been a contentious and complex construct, an archetypal ‘thick’ discourse, encapsulating a vast range of social, political and historical struggles, constantly evolving new values, social identities and material outcomes.
- However, the way poverty is conceptualized in the media, amongst politicians, within development agencies and on a wide range of other field, represents a “thin” definition of poverty, means Broch-Due and goes on explaining:
- If we approach poverty as a total social phenomenon, we are more able to grasp the various dynamics which is at work. Poverty is not just an economic fact but a whole social and cultural universe. To acknowledge the complexity of poverty is of course not to give up on large-scale generalisations. It rather suggests that in order to abstract, focus and compare more adequately, one needs to build upon more refined, in-depth, processual studies and comparisons rich in historical and social specificity.  

Developing Poverty
Broch-Due maintain that if we look more into it, we see that the discourses and practices which were at play in the colonies and towards the industrialized countries’ own poor, are similar in many ways to today’s conceptualization of the poor and poverty. Then, as now, poverty is often implicitly individualized and attributed to people’s own poor management of their lives and lack of will. This profoundly disguises how imperial and colonial power has produced poverty which is sustained today through global trade-and-aid structures.
- Furthermore, discourses of poverty are the raison d’etre for a plethora of global enterprises which have marched forward under the banners of “Civilisation”, “Modernisation”, “Development”, “Globalisation” - but do we understand how they have arisen and the unintended processes they set in motion? asks Broch-Due. An individualized approach to poverty, which is central within the neo-liberal paradigm, also disguises how structures of power based on class, race, gender and so on are producing and perpetuating poverty.
- Hence, if we bring all these processes into the analysis, we will get a much more nuanced picture- and through this we might also be able to suggest how poverty can be reduced.

Long experience in Kenya
Broch-Due’s main area of research has been among the Turkana pastoralists in Kenya, where she first did fieldwork as a student of anthropology in the 1980s. Since then, she has returned a number of times. Also in this region, the issue of poverty is of uttermost importance. Although the Turkana area had been targeted as an area to be developed through foreign aid; poverty and inequality in the area has persisted and even worsened. Broch-Due also found that the structures and effects of modern development in the area had much in common with colonial policies:
- From the very beginning of my work in Turkana, the problems of inequality and redistribution seemed to present a particularly intriguing puzzle both ethnographically and theoretically. It was immediately clear, for instance, that contemporary aid policies, injecting huge amounts of capital into fishing and agriculture to promote "development" and sedentarization shared with earlier colonial policies, aimed primarily at extraction, resource exploitation and control, produced an overwhelmingly similar result - the impoverishment of large segments of the population, she explains.

Wealth through cattle
One of the reasons why these external interventions produced such disappointing results was that they were based on definitions of poverty and well-being imported from Europe but with no resonance among the peoples they intended to benefit.
- There is the profoundest possible opposition between the diagnoses of development planners, and the perceptions of the pastoralists themselves. While modern planners see the reduction of livestock and moves towards sedentarization and agriculture as the ways to prosperity, pastoralists tend to see these as the very definition of poverty itself. For them to be without cattle is to be poor, lonely and powerless, tells Broch-Due and continues:
- These divergent perspectives bring us to the realisation that global and local models each come to the problem of poverty with its specific ideological bias. This is not to say that poverty is merely a matter of divergent ideas, but that even where its social manifestations are blatantly evident and concrete, its meanings and interpretations are inevitably culturally and conceptually mediated.
 
Changing paths
Through her extensive fieldworks in among Turkana and, more recently, among Samburu, Broch-Due has sough to understand and analyse the experiential and inter-subjective configurations of nomadic culture and identity. Recently she hosted an international workshop in Bergen with leading experts on pastoralism in Africa from various continents. The conference was entitled “Path versus Place: Reconfiguring Nomads to fit the State.”
- The title reflects very well what we wanted to tease out from this workshop. The colonial state in Africa tried to control the movements of nomadic groups, and through this facilitate extraction, resource exploitation and territorial control. Also the post-colonial state, and more recently, the neo-liberal state, has continued this pattern, maintains Broch-Due.
However, nomads often traditionally lead their lives through following paths. In it most obvious form, this is meant in a physical sense, as movement though the landscape, but it also implies a wide array of social and economical structures and a particular way of experiencing life and one’s existence, both at an individual and collective level. As the movements of nomads are controlled or changed, as has happened since colonial times, their social and cultural structures are also altered and re-configured.
- There are of course various other processes intersecting here, such as the development of a monetarized and stratified economy, the emergence of missionaries and development agencies, tourism, urbanization and so on. Hence, through this workshop we wanted to explore the discourses and processes which arise in the interface of various forms of encounters between the nomads and the state or state-like processes and structures. These changing processes and discourses might be even more present, though more difficult to grasp, in the wake of the emergence of the neo-liberal state in its various forms, she explains.

Research leave
Professor Broch-Due has published a long list of articles throughout the past twenty years, has and been the co-author and editor of several books. As a part of the Poverty Politics project, she has hosted two international conferences and guided eleven top-graded students through the writing of their master thesis. Currently, she has two more master students writing up their thesis and two PhD students out in the field. She is currently having a semester research leave in Washington working on different book projects and finishing a film project from Northern Kenya.

Future research plans
The first phase of Poverty Politics project is finished in December 2007.
- Although poverty is an extremely complex theme to do research on, I mean that the Poverty Politics project has reached far in enhancing our understanding of how poverty is created, sustained and experienced on various fields and in different societies. However, there are still a lot more questions to explore, maintains Broch-Due.
- Together with colleagues, I am currently developing several new fields of research as the next phases of the overall Poverty Politics umbrella. One is the connection between poverty and environmental issues.This is a research topic which has been close to my heart for a long time, and which I would like to elaborate further. We know that environmental interventions, whether in the form of state programs or private industry, often have direct and far-reaching consequences for the distribution of wealth and poverty, says Broch-Due. She sustains that around the world, local peoples are forced to confront, with increasing frequency, the interests of mining and logging companies; forestry, soil, and ancient monument conservation projects; game parks and tourism and the competing discourses of western environmentalists. More often than not, clash of interests generates severe resource struggles.
- We need to pay more research interest to a significant dimension typically embedded in the outcomes of such struggles: notably the restructuring of gender, class and ethnic relations,- usually to the disadvantage of poor people, means Broch-Due.

Poverty, religion and violence
Another research area that she wants to continue theorising is the problem of violence and its complex relationship to poverty. Together with a group of researchers at the faculty, Broch-Due is developing a research field that focus on the politics of faith– whether based in Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddism, Hinduism or more local cosmologies. She suggests that as they work themselves out socially in diverse ways, religious beliefs and practices provide us with a fresh perspective through which to view the vexed relations between poverty and violence, and between prosperity and peace in different times and places.
- Religious movements are linked to processes of globalization and can in some cases create alternative global connections, represent alternative value hierarchies and principles of inclusion. These are however complex processes turning religion into a countermovement in relation to the globalizing economy is some cases, but in other, as with prosperity theology for instance, the opposite is true, says Broch- Due.
She explains that while secularism as an ideal is firmly embedded in the western economic world order and the bureaucratic discourses of foreign aid, it too can be analysed as fundamentally moral discourses playing on notion of Christian ideals and world views.
- We plan to have a comparative ledger of research from a great spectre of areas in the South; Africa, Latin America, South East Asia, India and the Pacific. Through this project, we aim to build a network of researchers on this research filed both nationally and internationally and have long term goals for development of a solid research environment at the University of Bergen, says Broch-Due.

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Conflict and Displacement in Northern Kenya [abstract]

Thor Erik Sortland carried out his fieldwork in northern Kenya, in Samburu district and Laikipia district. Being chased by an elephant, becoming a godfather and getting malaria was some of the many experiences he carries with him back to Norway. 

- By Berit Angelskår

You have recently conducted your fieldwork in a rather remote rural area in Kenya. How was your return to Norway? Did you experience any sort of “reversed culture shock”?
I think in cases like mine it’s unavoidable, even though I have experience from long travels before. I went to this very different place from what I am used to, and there was no way for me to really prepare myself, partly because it was impossible to know what would meet me. And in this very different place I was a very different person from those who live there. I carry a different history and a different way of seeing things. No matter how much I adapted and got acceptance into their way of life, I still always felt some loneliness. But then again this place and its people managed to form and change me in many ways,the experience was very unique and difficult to compare. So when I came home to Norway, I had the same problem, I was again different from most of the rest. Again, I had the feeling of being categorised into something with a content I am not really at peace with.

The first encounter with the field: Heat and blowing wind
Can you briefly describe your field, and what your fieldwork was about?
I choose Samburu and Laikipia because I could do research on a subject I was interested in and already had knowledge about. It was also an advantage that my supervisor had been there herself and knew people that could help me from the beginning.

The first weeks were hard, mainly because of the heat and blowing sand. I arrived during the dry season in a semiarid area and it was very hot and the sand wind made my throat sore. I had good people to help me from beginning and some of them opened many gates and opportunities for my further research. However, there were so many things I didn’t know and understand yet, that posed some difficulties in the beginning.

I did a multi-sited fieldwork with great diversity between the places I stayed.  Most of Samburu district had limited technological development, and the majority lived in traditionally built houses with no electricity or water access. The majority was either pastoralists or semi-pastoralists. Most pastoralists migrate with their animals seasonally, but this varied in frequency and form depending on the size of the herd.  

I visited a lot of people who was only temporarily settled, as they had escaped from their permanent settlements due to insecurity following the conflict between Samburu and the neighbouring people Pokot. The internally displaced people were relatively poorer and struggled with more problems compared to the settled. 
I had two main objectives; the first was to learn how and why the conflict between Samburu and Pokot started, and what processes that generates its continuation. The other objective was to explore the consequences of the conflict. My primary focus is on how displaced people remake their world. I used ceremonies as an entry-point into these issues.

Unpredictable and political sensitive conflict
How did you experience being a sole researcher in a conflict-ridden environment?
It was very difficult for obvious reasons like death, poverty and desperation. But also due to more subtle reasons of carrying out fieldwork among people who are both afraid and angry. The discourse and people’s way of acting is highly affected by the constant insecurity. People’s negative sentiments towards opposing ethnic groups, were revealed time and time again through different narratives. Consequently it was very challenging to tease out unbiased information from people.

The conflict was political and unpredictable. I often felt paranoid; maybe more often then I had to be. Not only did I fear for my life, but I also worried about those who became my friends. This posed limitations to my research, as I found myself constantly on guard and cautious about what I said to whom. Some people I avoided completely. However, I also challenged my own fear and took chances several times, and I don’t feel that I ever was in any acute danger.

Becoming a godfather
Can you describe some experiences that made an impression on you?
Many incidences made an impression on me. Once I was chased by an elephant, another time I was lost in the wilderness with a broken motorcycle, and another time I got sick with malaria. But I find it more important to mention a few incidences in my meeting with people, because those are the ones that truly meant something for me.

One of the incidences that really made an impression on me was the first time I was able to participate in a ceremony. A family of which I knew slightly was going to circumcise their boy. Since I had made a good impression on them they suggested I should have the role as one of two godfathers. I participated in all stages of the ceremony, and I could truly feel in body and mind the significance and intensity connected to this ceremony. When watching the warriors emotionally fall into trance, I was nearly tipping over myself. I truly felt proud to be the godfather of the boy and I still feel a kind of responsibility for him.

Meeting with the eccentric “loibon”
Another incidence that made a great impression on me was the time I met one of the many loibons I visited in Samburu district. Loibons are witchdoctors specialising on healing curses and foretelling the future of their patients. I had been walking for at least one hour when I entered a fairly condensed village, and people formed around me in great numbers as I was led towards his house. The loibon was very eccentric and I according to western definitions I would probably understand him as a crazy person. The room was dark and his eyes were huge and constantly open. He stared at me continuously and broke out in laughs and trance like conditions in an unpredictable radius. Even though his foretelling and supposed facts about me and my life were fairly dubious and seemed to come out of illogical guessing, the experience of sitting there was incredibly frightening in an exiting way.

Participant observation through ceremonies
What are your experiences from conducting “participant observation”? How did you carry it out?
Participant observation became a very important element of my research.  The obvious example is the ceremonies, but also just living with families observing their routines and activities. Examining how they build their traditional houses, or who did what at what time, became an important part of my data.
When I joined the ceremonies it was difficult to blend in, both because of my obvious dissimilar features and because of my lack of knowledge. But through my participation I picked up more details and got a feeling about the activities’ importance and meaning.

Getting access to ceremonies the way I did was not an easy task. It depended on coincidences and established relations with the ones who performed the ceremonies. For strangers I was either understood as a tourist or a development worker, I therefore had to negotiate in order to observe or join the authentic rituals. These rituals stand in contrast to Samburu’s ritual performance for tourists, which are lacking any other significance other than economic gain.

Complex consequences of conflict and insecurity
Can you outline some of your findings?
As mentioned my objectives was to learn both why the conflict started and what the consequences are for the people. I am left with several relevant findings.

People’s complicated life situations can not be reduced to explanations concerning the conflict alone, but several other processes have to be taken into account. I have seen how the insecure situation over a long time encouraged alternative lifestyles other then pastoralism, and how this challenged the current social stratification in the society. For example was new types of statuses created and the meaning of the existing system is undergoing change. I have seen how the insecurity has affected communal activities like for example ceremonies. These ceremonies have been an important part of the long- and short time relation-building in the society. Several social practises are loosing meaning and new practises are being created, challenging particularly the cooperation between families and clans. I have not only been interested to find what has been lost for these people but also to learn how they adapt to new circumstances and remake their world.

In retrospective, are there anything you would have done differently?
Yes, there are several things I would have done differently. But this presupposes knowledge I just didn’t possess beforehand. In retrospective it’s easy to forget how choices are made not only for academic reasons, but under influence of the context, the people and the discourse one lives in.  I can see in retrospect that I should have done this and this earlier, or I should have been at certain places for a longer time etc. But I think the whole point of doing a fieldwork in the master degree is actually to learn how to do a good fieldwork. I certainly feel that I learned not only about the topic, the people and the place, but also the methodology and the subject of Social Anthropology.

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A Religious NGO with Microcredit Programmes in Embu and Mbeere, Kenya

Leah Junge went back to her home country Kenya for fieldwork. There she critically examined how microfinance initiatives affect people at a local level. Being a “native anthropologist” she also encountered particular challenges of representation.

- By Berit Angelskår

Fieldwork on familiar grounds
How did you choose field location? And how was your first encounter with the field?
Being a Kenyan myself and having previously visited a newly established ‘village-bank’ in Embu, (Kenya) I already had an idea of the sort of developmental initiative I was interested in researching. It was not a problem at all to decide where I wanted to carry out my field work on micro-finance, but it was a challenge to find an NGO willing to allow me to partially carry out my field work under them. I must say that my first encounter in the field had already happened, so returning to the field was relatively easy; I really had no problem at all except the logistics of getting a place to stay.

Can you briefly describe what your fieldwork was about?
My field work mainly involved following the relationship between a religious NGO providing microfinance programmes to communities in Embu and Mbeere. I spent the first part of my field work examining the NGOs two financial programmes, their Financial Service Association (FSA) otherwise known as ‘village banks’ and their micro-credit programmes. During the second half of my field period, I spent time with the NGO’s clients, who were either a part of the FSA or the micro-credit programme. I also examined the effects participation in these programmes was having on individuals’ identities as well as the local community.

Did the fieldwork pose unforeseen challenges? How did you deal with these?
The actual field work was not so much the challenge as writing the thesis itself. I have addressed this in my first chapter titled ‘My Identity’. It is when you come back and begin the process of writing that you realize the complexity of balancing yourself between writing ‘of’ and ‘for’ while at the same time being ‘of’ a people your writing about and critically writing ‘for’ an audience you are otherwise a part of.

What are your experiences from conducting “participant observation”? 
Participant observation was exciting and challenging at the same time. On several occasions despite my protests I was drawn into arguments I should otherwise have not been a part of. These fortunately ended well with agreements on both parts. Field work, data collection and the need of being included means that one cannot easily choose to when to be passive, the challenge is how active one should be without jeopardizing ones position.

Conflicting strategies of saving, investing and loaning
Can you describe an incident that made an impression on you?
Yes I met and got to know a group of women participating in the micro-credit programme who were to a great extent geared at making a connection with the international market. They wanted to know if it was possible to establish some trading relation with women in Norway. This group of women was the best group savers the NGO had and they were filling up their savings books fast and getting new ones. The NGO however was pressuring them to invest their money in some form of financial activity which they would not do as they had not seen anything worth investing in. For the NGO however this group was turning into a ‘problem’ they needed them to spend their money ‘regardless’ in order to take up more loans. This group of women refused to do so until they found a secure market for their talents which were mainly in basket weaving, sewing and knitting. It will be interesting to follow them up and see what happened.

Grass root accounts of microfinance needed
What conclusions did you reach? And how can these relate to the issues of poverty politics?
Despite the praises and many claims that microfinance has received in the name of poverty alleviation and development, plenty has been left out in bringing to the fore some of the flaws and loopholes that are resulting in more poverty for those that are participate in these programmes. A critical examination of the effects is needed in order to understand and create better policies around the implementation of programmes such as the micro-credit programme. Where laws and rules are lacking, where adequate education on these programmes is missing loan sharks are taking advantage of the poor. Many locals are finding themselves in even worse states of poverty but this is hardly being addressed.

Anthropology provides grass root accounts of how these programmes are affecting the local communities, something that is hardly seen or documented by economists and development agents churning out these very initiatives that are supposed to assist the poor. Poverty politics is complex and complicated and in research I have looked into one of the ways in which poverty is re-produced within both the social and economic settings. By exploring the relationship between an agent of development in this case a religious NGO and their clients, I strove to combine my research agenda with a critical assessment of their strategies and methodologies aimed at poverty reduction and at the same time observe the different effects these were having on both the participating individuals and groups of people in the local communities of Embu and Mbeere.

What are you doing now and what are your plans for the future?
At the moment I am working for NGO and Civil Society Research Network at Unifob Global at the University in Bergen. My future plans involve pursuing a doctoral thesis in the near future which will be an extension of my Masters.

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WHERE THE SEA MEETS THE LAND

Dr. Stephanie Kane walked around in Bergen a lot during her stay as a guest lecturer at Department of Social Anthropology. She has a particular interest in port cities and is currently studying water management in Buenos Aires.

By Iselin Åsedotter Strønen

Kane’s current research project deals with studying three different port cities in Argentina and Brazil. Her goal is to understand how different people, institutions and laws interplay in the management of urban water front.
- It is a unique environment, she says, and adds with a laugh that she is fascinated by the scale of the containerships. Her theoretical approach is to look at how port cities represent a particular kind of transnationality, where the interconnections in the world become particularly visible.
- The global shipping industry shapes the landscape and everyday lives of people in port cities, and yet the local communities are not very important to the industry, says Kane. She also mentions that post 9-11 international security laws require tightening of boundaries between city and docks, often requiring the fencing off of waterfront areas previously open to the public.
– And so, the way people relate to the port areas within their cities is always changing.

Cultural institutions
Kane is interested in how legal regulation of water management at different levels can be seen as a cultural schema. This is based on the notion that people use the law in order to act socially.
- I am asking myself how written law is deployed by people and how people think in relationship to it. How do different people and institutions interpret laws? What  consequences does law actually have in shaping our everyday behaviour? She mentions a political debate going on in Salvador, Bahia, where a federal law regulating construction on the beach may be applied to a large area that is being destroyed by intensive human use. If enforced, the law will protect the maritime environment but demolish all the local bar/restaurants- called “las  barracas”- built on the sand.
- These are cultural institutions where people meet and relax on weekends and holidays, drinking beer, eating, listening to music, chatting and bathing. It is one of the few places where people from different classes interact. Thus, if enforced, the law will not only put an end to many peoples way of making a living, it will also end an important local cultural institution, tells Kane. The situation is an example of the contradictions between ecology and economy that humans are increasingly forced to face.

Trained as biologist
Dr. Kane is now an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice and Gender Studies at Indiana University but she was initially educated as a biologist at Cornell University and the University of Texas. Eventually she got tired of doing experiments which involved chopping off rats’ heads, she tells with a laugh. Then she started orienting herself towards anthropology and eventually ended up doing a PhD on the indigenous Emberá and Waunan peoples of the  tropical forest in the Darién Gap of Panama.

Kane wrote her dissertation in the mid-80s when the cultural critique debate in anthropology was central. The debate focused on the crisis of representation: how do we convey our fieldwork findings through writing? And who is the “I”, the anthropologist who performs the fieldwork and directs the writing?  What implications does this have for readers’ understanding of themselves and the subjects of ethnography?  Dr. Kane says that the opening of this debate allowed her to write up her thesis as creatively as she wanted to do.
– I was the first person at the Anthropology Department at the University of Texas who used the word “I” in her dissertation, she laughs.
Kane suggests that her background as a biologist gave her a solid basis to reflect on the former belief that ethnography could be written as if  it were an “objective scientific truth” out there which could be put on paper by the anthropologist.
- I had done scientific experiments for a long time which had had relatively clear objective scientific rules and limits. The proof of an experiment’s validity is that the same experiment can be done by another scientist with the same outcome. When I moved into the field of social anthropology and began thinking about the complexity of human behaviour and belief in the world, the idea that one could apply objectivity in the same way that laboratory scientists do seemed absurd to me. And yet, before the critique in the 1980s, that was a basic assumption.

Naval gazing: Not!
The book based on her dissertation, The Phantom Gringo Boat: Shamanic Discourse and Development in Panama, came out 10 years later and has been hailed for it fine ethnographic writing.
- It is important for me to show that fieldwork is a dialogue between yourself and the people you spend time with, and not to portray the anthropologist as an observer outside the situations she studies, says Kane. She tells that she always takes as a point of departure the assumption that the people know more than she does, and through this, she learns through conversation. Ultimately though, the dissertation and the book are about the people and their lives, their worlds, not the anthropologist’s.
- It is important not to shift the writing’s focus from the interactive reality of fieldwork, to a focus on oneself as fieldworker-author,  although I don’t want to make a blanket statement. There is also a place for writing about the ethnographer’s experience withinanthropology.

-Intervening in an epidemic
Kane did put her biology background to use again when she did fieldwork on AIDS intervention in Chicago and Belize City. Her second book, based on this research, is called AIDS Alibis: Sex, Drugs, and Crime in the Americas and focuses on the role of law and culture in shaping our responses to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic. It also includes an analysis of international mass media representations of penal cases against those who are charged with intentionally transmitting HIV.

-Success story
Kane has also written a book with an American ex-prisoner about his life history. So far, she has not found a publishing house willing to publish it.
- The theme kind of falls between two chairs, but I think it is an important story to tell.
The man had a difficult childhood and was groomed to become a criminal. However, he was rehabilitated while in federal prison and is now reintegrated successfully into society. This was in the 1960s, when rehabilitation in prison was taken seriously for a brief moment.
– It is important to see this story on the backdrop on the way the American prison industry functions now, and it is a reminder that people can change when they are given a chance, Kane says. 
– His story represents more than just his life.

Bergen’s waterfront
Kane found it very interesting to walk around at Bergen’s waterfront. She suggests that, compared to the cities in Brazil and Argentina where she has worked, Bergen has to a larger extent been able to strike a balance between the spatial and security demands of the global shipping industry that integrates city life and the maritime edge. 
- The port cities of the South Atlantic have succumbed to a much greater degree to the demands of industrial growth, including container shipping. Large population sizes, poverty, irregular settlement and migration patterns are forces that make it more difficult to protect the urban maritime environment, she says.
Kane hopes that Bergen's strong tradition of protecting the integrity of and access to open public space as well as social activism among its small, well-educated population will lead to sustaining the dynamic balance between port and city.

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THE SACRALISATION OF DECEASED IDOLS IN BUENOS AIRES

By Iselin Åsedotter Strønen

“The rainy weather in Bergen has at least made me work a lot”, laughs Eloísa Martín from Argentina. She has been a visiting researcher at the Poverty Politics project at the University of Bergen for three months.

Eloísa received her PhD in Social Anthropology from The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in June 2006. Afterwards she returned to Buenos Aires where she works at the San Martin University. Her PhD thesis deals with popular culture, popular religion, popular music and identities, focusing on the worshipping and sacralisation of the Argentinean cumbia singer Gilda, who died tragically in a car accident in 1996. Gilda is viewed upon as a saint-like person by her followers, who are mostly from the popular classes. Gilda herself came from the middle class, but cumbia is music enjoyed by the popular classes. “I look at how the worshipping of Gilda is a way of sacred making within the popular sectors/classes”, explains Eloisa. “The worshipping of Gilda can be viewed upon as a process of sacralisation that involves elements outside what we consider religion in a strict sense. It stands in contrast to the hegemonic view and practice of religion, in Argentina primarily represented by Catholicism.”

Extended notion of the sacred
The popular classes in Argentina often create other forms of the sacred through the media, sports and politics, or what Eloisa calls an extended notion of the sacred. The worshipping of idols like Gilda provides a means which affects the practices of everyday life. Eloisa also refers to male, poor soccer supporters who also relate to soccer in a way which have certain characteristics of worshipping. “This practice and identity constitutes certain notions of being a man; being courageous, being brave. They are tools to create a form of sacredness through using certain concepts of morals and resistance. They often use the word aguante, referring to courage, to the value of moral and physical strength.  It is a harangue, war cry, and demand. To have aguante is to not retreat, nor flee, nor complain.  It is to bear pain and everything that provokes it.  It is to accept challenges, even when one finds himself in inferior conditions.

Special gifts when alive
“In Argentina even intellectuals consider poor people as non-educated”, says Eloisa. “But I discovered during my fieldwork that they had diaries, the read, they wrote, they dream. They might not read James Joyce, but they are familiar with books. Thus, they are not stupid, nor ignorant; they just consider the world in another way, and through other references like say, soccer or Gilda,” explains Eloísa.
Gilda’s followers are mostly men, but there are also many women. They often dress like her, through this showing commitment and acquiring a sense of being deeply related with their deceased idol. Gilda is a natural part of their every day life and they ask her for advice and help. Many women also feel that they are Gilda’s heirs, embodying her. “In Argentina there is not a tradition of spirit incorporation practices like in Cuba or Brazil, and in a way Gilda is for them a two-way communication. They understand their lives in relation to hers, and try to find things they have in common”, says Eloisa.
- But why do you think that there are more male followers?
- This has something to with the way women and men relate to the public space. Women might have alters at home where they pray and carry out practices of healing, but men are controlling the public space and thus participating more openly in Gilda’s fan club, taking care of her grave and so on.
- And there is nothing sexualized in men’s worship of her?
- No, you see, Gilda was a very beautiful woman, skinny, black hair, white skin, but she was not the sexual stereotype preferred by the popular classes. Normally, cumbia singers are very sexualized, with big breasts and bottoms and bleached hair, but Gilda was beautiful but not sexually aggressive. She was also a mother and housewife, a traditional figure. And even before she died, she was considered as a gifted person and people asked her for favours and healing. All over South-America, everyone who dies can continue to interfere in the lives of living people, but only those who were considered to have extraordinary special gifts also before their death become very special persons or saints like Gilda. Gilda her self once said in an interview that she is a singer, not a healer. But nevertheless, they attributed these gifts to her.

Looking more into cumbia
Eloísa came to Norway through a Belgium foundation called Coimbra Group Foundation, which invites young talented researchers from Latin-America to spend short periods at a university in Europe. The University of Bergen has two scholarships through this foundation; one within the field of Social Sciences and one in the field of Natural Sciences. Professor Vigdis Broch-Due, the leader of the Poverty Politics program has been Eloisa’s supervisor whilst she has been here, and she hopes that she will return next year. “It is very important to explore how poverty is linked to other forms of expressions, not only looking at it as numbers and statistics. In that regard, Eloisa’s work is very interesting”.
As Eloísa now returns to Buenos Aires, she will continue working at the University of San Martín with the National Research Council of Science and Technology (CONICET).  She is now starting a new field of research looking further into the links between cumbia and the popular classes. She says that she returns very inspired: 
“It has been a fantastic stay, both at a professional, institutional and personal level. I have met a lot of nice and warm people, in that sense it has not only been a professional trip. And thanks to the rainy, dark winter in Norway, I have worked a lot more than I expected. There was nothing else to do”, she laughs. “But next time I’ll come back in April!”
 

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The production of poverty through gifts and charity [Abstract]
 by Iselin Åsedotter Strønen

Based on her fieldwork in a small Indian fishing village, Kristina Jones shows how development initiatives havecreated new forms of poverty and inequality between people.

Where did you do your fieldwork and for how long did you stay?
I did my fieldwork in Allapad, a fishing community in the South Indian state Kerala. Allapad is a narrow strip of land, with the Backwaters on one side, and the Arabian Sea on the other.

The majority of the inhabitants of Allapad belonged to the Hindu caste Araya, officially categorised as a “backward caste” by the state of Kerala. I stayed with an Araya family during my fieldwork there. I did my fieldwork in Allapad over a period of five months, from September 2004 until January 2005.

First norwegian development project
Why did you choose this theme and location ?
The reason I chose this particular field was that I had an interest for the region, having been in both South India and Sri Lanka previously. It also felt reassuring to travel to a region which I had been before so it would not be entirely a culture shock for me.

Another important reason was that Kerala was the state where the first development project of the Norwegian government, initiated in 1952, was set. This project, called the Indo-Norwegian Project, aimed towards increasing the income of fishing communities by introducing new technology. My initial intention was to explore the concept of efficiency. Economic efficiency is a central aim for a number of development projects and policies. A specific concept of efficiency is very much taken for granted in the general development discourse, and it is not questioned as a cultural construct. This particular idea of efficiency is based on certain ideas and practices of space and time, derived from a Western rationality.

What was your first impression of the field ?
When I landed in Trivandrum in the beginning of september 2004 I only had a couple of contacts which I had communicated with per email. Nothing was clear in relation to where I was going to stay during my fieldwork. I was quite stressed because I had travelled to India with one goal in sight, to do fieldwork, and I had a small fear that things wouldn' t work out regarding a place to do fieldwork. That actually worked it self out quite quickly. I was interested to do my fieldwork in a fishing village in Kollam which had been affected by the Indo-Norwegian Project. The organisation SIFFS (South Indian Federation of Fishermens Societies) introduced me to a family in Kollam district in Kerala. Two weeks after arrival I moved in with a family in Allapad.

The difficulties of participant observation
How did you arrange your everyday life ? Was it difficult to obtain material?
It is a great advantage living together with people you are studying, so I was very lucky being able to stay with a family. In this way one gets a good insight into everyday life and routines. It also gives plenty of opportunities for informal conversations. I was very lucky to stay with a family where the members spoke English, as I didn´t speak Malayalam, the language spoken in Kerala. Participant observation involves a lot of hanging around, not being quite sure what one will find, or if one necessarily is doing the right thing. I moved around together with different people I met, and observed I tried to do “participant observation” in the ideal sense of the word, by working and participating in every day chores of the household, but it was difficult to make the people I spent time with to let me help, they confronted me with my incapability. It was also a little frustrating in the long run getting so much attention wherever I walked, being the only foreigner (“saip” or “madamma”) in the village, and clearly not belonging there.

I had trouble getting a permanent interpreter to work with me during my fieldwork for different reasons. Recording everyday conceptions or discourses during an anthropological fieldwork is very difficult when one does not speak the language, or when one does not have a professional interpreter who translates word for word what is said. The empirical material I base my thesis on I gained by being present in the village, observing and participating in the everyday life of people, having conversations with people who spoke English well and those who spoke a little bit of English, and communicating with people who could not speak English through those who could.

Did the focus for you fieldwork change during the time you where there, and why?
My initial plan was to focus on activity related to fishing. I do this in my thesis as well, but not as primarily as I intended to begin with. The fact that fishing mainly took place from a harbour a bus ride away from the village, and that I associated closer with the women and not so much with the fishermen meant that I did not gain as much material as I intended in the first place. As I was introduced to Allapad, I found that the main Ashram (spirtual centre) of the internationally known female guru Mata Amritanandamayi was situated in the Area. The guru herself comes from the Araya community. The guru´s organisation has a number of charitable projects directed towards poor people. The guru´s initiatives were quite visible in Allapad, where the guru had built a large of little pink houses for the poor under the Amritakuteeram housing project. This gave me an interest of studying religious charity as well. Development and charity can be regarded as gifts to a diffuse category of “the poor”. Poverty is produced and reproduced in various economic exchanges, and these may also be regimes of gifts.

Development aid and dependecy
What are the main findings and conclusions of your thesis ? Regarding the field of poverty studies, what you found out through this fieldwork and subsequent writing of the thesis?
My thesis explores different aspects of charity and development as gifts to the poor, through presentation of various ethnographical examples, related to, as I have mentioned, state development initiatives and religious charity. Charity and development are generally thought to be free gifts, based on altruistic intentions. Anthropological theories and the exploration of empirical examples and social and cultural contexts show how a gift is never given for free; something or other is expected in return in the long run, and a social relation is created between the giver and receiver. A gift which is given which is considered larger than what is given or expected to be given in return, creates an asymmetric social relationship between the giver and the receiver. One can say that charity and development are gifts which create asymmetric relations between giver and receiver. Development aid, one can argue, implies an inferior status of the receiver in relation to the donor. The development discourse defines people, groups and countries as `underdeveloped' in contrast to the "developed" implying a certain direction of progress, where `the developed' present the ideal model which the "underdeveloped" are striving towards. Development aid implies a relationship of dependency, and a diffuse debt, between the givers and receivers. Poverty is always a complex and relative situation. I show in my thesis that development initiatives actually have created new forms of poverty and inequality between people.
Relations between guru and devotee in India is also based on relations of reciprocity, the guru gives spiritual guidance, while donations, praise, gifts and services are given in return. The gift a devotee gives a guru can never measure up to the gift given form guru to devotee, and an asymmetrical relationship is in this way created between guru and devotee. In my thesis I show how also relations between gurus and `the poor' who receive charity can be said to be based on relations of reciprocity. Charity legitimates the fact that recourses are unequally distributed in a society, and poverty is thereby reproduced.

The economic view of poverty, which only considers market exchange quantitative sizes, is dominating in today's global discourses regarding how to combat poverty. Anthropological perspectives consider other types of economic exchange, such as gift exchange, as producing or reproducing poverty. These perspectives take into account not only the exchange of money and goods, but also exchanges of for instance prestige, respect and goodwill, and exchanges which take place within a sphere of reciprocity. These are important components in the economy of poverty.

The strength of the anthropological methodology
In retrospective, what would you have done differently?
I found that shared language is an important part of understanding other people's own conceptions and images of the world. Should I have the chance to do another anthropological fieldwork I would choose to do it among people whose language I speak.

Why did you choose to take a master in anthropology in the first place ? What do you think are the qualities of the discipline anthropology in comparison with other social sciences?
A fondness of travelling and having and international family background has given me interest for issues of cultural differences. One of the reasons why I chose to take a Masters degree in Social Anthropology had a lot to do with the opportunity to travel away to do long term fieldwork. Social Anthropology combines everyday lived experience, with an abstract theoretical approach. Anthropological approaches often present us with new perspectives on issues which are usually taken for granted. One can for instance locate relations of power in transactions which are assumed to have altruistic intentions, like for instance charity.

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Studying food security in Malawi [abstract]

Despite different national and international efforts to alleviate hunger and poverty, Malawi is still suffering from food crisis and inequality, says Jessica Mzamu.

by Iselin Åsedotter Strønen

Jessica has left her home country, Malawi, in order to obtain her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Bergen. She is now living at Fantoft Studenthome with her husband, Dean, who is pursuing a Masters in Water and Resource Management. Jessica’s PH.D project is called “Can the “Poor” Influence Policy? An Anthropological analysis on conceptualisation of “food security” and its related policies.” In March next year she is going back to Malawi to carry out her fieldwork for 11 months.

- Can you tell us a bit more about your research project, Jessica?
- This research is aimed at exploring complex and paradoxical discursive orders that surrounds food issues, “poverty” and policy processes in Malawi. Hence this research is going to take place in Malawi and will try to link macro and micro Institutions dealing with “food security” issues to the ethnographic Chewa society of Malawi. As such, this research, which has been designed as a multi-sited one will try to explore how politics and policies surrounding “poverty” and “food security” as formulated at global and national level, articulate with the Chewa peoples’ real life experiences of the issues in question.

Background from UNDP
Although the project seems ambitions, Jessica has a broad background, both from work experience and education to draw on. She has previously worked as program officer for the society of the Advancement of Women and also as a District Humanitarian Affairs officer under the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) /United Nations Volunteer programme. Her educational background includes a Bachelor of Science degree in Agriculture from the University of Malawi, with a specialisation in Family Sciences. She also took part of the Master in Anthropology of Development-program at the Department for Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, before she extended her Master project into the PhD project she is now working with.

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Contesting the use of Guatemalan rainforest [Abstract]

After several years of teaching at the Department of Social Anthropology, Margit Ystanes is now going back to Guatemala where she did fieldwork for her major (hovedfag) in Social Anthropology. This time she will carry out a 9 months fieldwork for her PHd project.

by Iselin Åsedotter Strønen

 - What is the topic of you PhD- project?
- My PhD-project concerns an archaeological-environmental project in the Guatemalan rainforest, and the contestations of this project by local communities. The idea is to capture the point of view of the different groups involved in or influenced by this project, from the national and international elites behind it to the local communities and the variety of approaches to the situation found within these villages.

- Why have you chosen this project?
- Because I find the questions raised by the way politics for the use of natural resources and the conservation of both nature and ancient relics of culture is formed and contested in the Guatemalan context highly interesting, and also relevant for similar situations in other parts of the world. Anthropological studies can potentially capture both the local level; the point of view of the communities influenced and targeted by such conservation and development projects, and the national and global level; the point of view of policy makers and the formation of global discourses about such issues that are relevant also at the local level. Therefore, I hope that this research will be useful both in terms of understanding the ongoing contestations of a particular development and conservation project in Guatemala, but also for understanding how these contestations are informed by and informing global discourses on these matters.

- What do you think will be the biggest challenge with this project?
- I think the biggest challenge will be to do a multi-sited fieldwork, and spread the time and effort between two or three different sites and social milieus. It usually takes some time to get to know a field location sufficiently to do anthropological research, and this will most likely pose a big challenge in this particular case.

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Sri Lankan children between the tsunami and the civil war [abstract]

Berit Angelskar came to Sri Lanka in order to explore how development assistance was directed towards children and youth in the aftermath of the tsunami. However, the violent conflict at the island escalated while she was there and became a central part of her analysis.  

by Iselin Åsedotter Strønen

- Could you shortly describe what your fieldwork was about?
- My fieldwork was conducted in the Northeast province of Sri Lanka, in a city called Trincomalee. I did my fieldwork about six months after the tsunami hit the area in December 2004. I wanted to explore children and youth’s situations in the aftermath of the tsunami, in regard to development interventions. I wanted to see if there were linkages between the representations made of “the third world” and its children and the developmental interventions in Trincomalee following the tsunami. I got early contact with Save the Children in Sri Lanka (SCiSL), and cooperated with them. They provided me with a desk at their office and internet access. However, after some time I changed my focus towards a group of young adults that called themselves Team of Artists for Social Change (TASC). I followed, and assisted, the group in their workshops with children. As the fieldwork continued, the situation in Sri Lanka and in Trincomalee changed after the elections in November 2005. The violent conflict escalated and Trincomalee was one of the focal points of escalation. This influenced my fieldwork and my focus of course. So I started looking into the relations between the tsunami - and the political and developmental interventions that followed - and the beginning of a spiral of violence that was played out in Trincomalee district. This turned out to be the beginning of another brutal Eelam War.

Escalating violence
- How did you organize your everyday life?
- I first rented a room at a typical backpacker place basically on the beach a little north of Trincomaelee. After two weeks I got to rent a room in an apartment together with a development worker near to the town. After a while we moved out, and I lived in a house alone, close to a military camp. My house also served as an office and “free space” for TASC members.

Everyday was a different day. To organise and plan in Sri Lanka is difficult. People are on the other hand very good in mobilising quickly. This inability to plan could be quite frustrating though, because I was worrying about getting enough data.

At first I struggled to access my field. The cooperation with Save the Children did not turn out to be as fruitful as hoped for, since most of their tasks as a donor agency are to monitor and do skill-training. Also the political situation made it difficult restricting my ability to move freely. I also found it hard to establish personal or trustful relationships with the people from Trincomalee. People seemed reluctant to speak freely and to engage with a Vallikari (white woman). I was easily put into the category as a development worker, that seemed to create an invisible barrier. My everyday life the first month was therefore to go to SCiSL office, conduct some interviews and get to know their work.

After starting working with TASC life got busier and more fruitful fieldwork-wise. Together with another Norwegian woman sent by Norwegian Development Fund, we assisted them in organising their work and to get funding form SCiSL. We arranged workshops for TASC members and helped TASC in writing project proposals and conducting workshops for Save the Children’s children’s clubs in Trincomalee. I now build up friendships and got direct access to my field: Children and youth.Except this work I also associated with international development workers in the weekends. I found it fruitful to get away from “fieldwork” and take days off. It also provided me with useful information form the development sector.

However my everyday life became more and more influenced by the increasingly tense situation, which made it even harder to plan ahead. There were frequently curfews, blasts and shooting episode. Playing beach volley and attending social events with other internationals was no longer an option for weekends, neither could TASC conduct their work. To buy food, phone cards etcetera could also cause a challenge, but since I knew a shop-owner I was able to get hold of most things.

Children as an counter-discourse
- What were the main findings of your fieldwork?
- I found that there often exist discrepancy between the objectives of development interventions and the outcomes. One example is the objective of utilising local knowledge. For example did TASC have difficulties attending funding, even though the local SCiSL office in Trincomalee wanted to have them as partners. It was said form Colombo office that to have local knowledge was the most important skill of a new partner organisation. This is a skill in which TASC embodies. However, the main obstacle for TASC was to conceptualise their work in the “developmental language”, not only in English but also in the form of “objectives”, “inputs” and “outcomes”. I therefore found myself as an interpreter of TASC’s intentions and ideas and SCiSL standards. It seems contradictory to the aim of utilising and respecting local knowledge, especially since they all spoke the same language; Tamil.

Wider ranging were the consequences of the organisations drive to hire local staff and local partners. This created a competition for labour, draining local organisations for resourceful staff. It also developed an atmosphere of competition between local organisations for funding. The tsunami brought a lot of money, and politics, into the war ridden landscape and society of Trincomalee. This also resulted in many local organisations taking on to much work that they were not able to accomplish, resulting in distrust between local and donor organisations. I also found that children themselves constitute a counter discourse to the one found in the Tsunami representations. Especially maybe so in a conflict ridden society as Trincomalee, where children are soon aware of the political situation. They show strong involvement in what would be labelled as “politics”, about distribution of state funds, development interventions, roads, heath system etc.

- Was it anything which turned out to be radically different from what you expected?
- Sri Lanka was one of the most secure post-war countries at the time I decided to go there. However, it turned out to become a war zone. I also did not expect it to be so hard to establish trusting relationships to local people. It was an extraordinary experience to travel alone to a new country, to establish a whole new network and to learn to navigate in a total new environment and society. To have this opportunity to dip into another culture, as ones research method and as a part of ones education, is a privilege one can appreciate a long time after being done with the fieldwork. The personal experience, learning and development that followed as a consequence of this process were greater than expected.

Need for more focus on youth and young men
- What particular challenges did the fieldwork pose?
- The largest challenge was the language and to gain access to children and youth. It is difficult to build relations without the language and through the communication of a translator. However, gaining this contact within the framework of drama and arts turned out to be very fruitful, and opened a space to utilise the body language in a larger extent. Restriction of movement and cultural expectations towards females were also quite challenging. Also the constant attention given to Vallikaris (white women) were not always given in a respectful manner, and could be annoying.

- What are the main conclusions of your thesis?
- I argue that there exists a representational discourse on children from developing countries as victims. These representations serve to exclude important aspects of their lives and further the image of the child tend to dominate representations of disaster-struck developing countries. This discourse prevails both within the photographic discourse on others suffering, as well as within the developmental discourse. This goes parallel with an increased focus on children within development practise. I found that children themselves presented a counter-representation of this discourse, not as purely victims, but as persons with agency.
I further argue that the politics of the image is crucial both for the survival of the news-media and development organisations, and are tightly connected to capital-accumulation. I also argue that representing the child victim as the image of the tsunami, and the tsunami as a depoliticised event/disaster, is further also in the interest of local as well as international politicians.

However, I also argue that especially in the case of armed conflict - or under circumstances where the outbreak of armed conflict is a constant threat - there is a need for increased focus on youth and young men. This are the ones caught in the cross fire between suspicion and recruitment by the combating forces. They are therefore attractive for one group to recruit, in this case the Tamil Tigers recruitment of Tamil youth, and exposed to suspicion and harassment by the Sri Lankan Army. This age- and gender group easily get overlooked in the increased attention paid to children and women within both development policies and social research. This is neither a coincidence, since there are direct budgetary consequences in focussing on political correct groups and issues as women and children. This is again linked to the popular representations through media, setting the issues of these apparently more vulnerable human beings of children and women on the agenda, and into the spectators’ memories.

New experiences in Palestine
- You participated in a conference in Thailand during the fieldwork, could you tell a bit about that?
- It was a conference called Child and Youth Participation Fair. The objective was to bring together children affected by the tsunami in different countries, researchers and development workers to discuss and learn from each others experiences. The workshops were of varied quality, but we had some good discussions with different people working with development and research, both from local organisations and international ones. Also I learned about the body-map here, and also about using drama and drawing in work with young people, which turned out to be useful tools both for my research and for TASC’s workshops with children.

- What are you doing now and what are your plans for the future?
- I’m currently working as a volunteer for Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel. I have been working in the West Bank for four months and have another seven weeks left before returning to Bergen. I was recruited by Norwegian Church Aid, and the programme is owned by the local churches in Jerusalem. We accompany and assist local initiatives on both Palestinian and Israeli side, working against the occupation. In addition we do check point watch, assist social work in refugee camps, reporting and advocacy work. I have been working in Bethlehem and I am now placed further north in Tulkarem. I am planning to apply for a position as teaching assistant at the University in Bergen. I am also thinking about applying for a PhD, with focus on youth or young adults and their perceptions around peace and resistance. I would like to make a comparative analysis between Tamils and Palestinians. If possible to combine, my focus would also be on how to use theatre and arts as methods of resistance and healing. I would thereby be able to use my already acquired knowledge.

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Management of cultural heritage in India [abstract]

It started with an idea he got at a holiday trip to India. Later, Stian Krog returned to do fieldwork in Hampi, a small village state of Karnataka.

by Iselin Åsedotter Strønen and Berit Angelskår

Stian’s theme for his thesis is to try to establish an analytical link between notions of home, religion and pragmatic values– a network of interconnecting associations that make out the backdrop of a different view on management of cultural heritage. He investigated some of the notions people in Hampi had about space and place, as well as the way these notions were connected to various social parameters such as economy, caste and profession.

Strangely impenetrable
What was your first impression of the field?
Small and easy to get an overview of, yet somehow strangely impenetrable. I felt like everything was escaping me right in front of my eyes. It had of course a lot to do with the fact that I did not speak the language. Although weakened over time, the feeling never quite abated.

How did you arrange your everyday life? Was it difficult to obtain material?
Once I had established a functional method in my field approach, it wasn’t that hard to obtain the material I wanted.But figuring out how exactly to go about with it took me quite some time. I stayed at a small, family-run guesthouse and hired one of the “staff” there as my interpreter – he gradually became my friend, and we worked out a lot of the details concerning my field activities together. My everyday life consisted in trying to interact with as many relevant people as possible for my thesis, spending a considerable amount of time just being in the various places I wrote about, and doing formal interviews, which I recorded. I did not have anyroles in the village that would have allowed an “integrative” participant observation mode of fieldwork, soIhadto go about much more formally and relying a lot on my own observational skills and interpretations.When myinformants were busy I spent quite a bit of time alone - wandering around, taking photos and contemplating the topics for my thesis.

In retrospective, what would you have done differently?
I would have spent less time trying to “integrate” myself in Hampi, and more time investigating the analytically interesting topics that I now wish I had gone further into. Also, I might have been a bit more direct at times, instead of consistently tip-toeing around the topics I worked with. But foreseeing the useful and less useful approaches and elements of a fieldwork is a difficult one… All things considered, I am more or less satisfied with the efforts during my stay in India.

Closeness to people
Why did you choose to take a master in anthropology in the first place? What do you think are the qualities of the discipline anthropology in comparison with other social sciences?
To be honest, I chose to do my master mainly because of two reasons. One was that my grades from the basic courses indicated a potential career in the field, or at least a justification for going through with the ordeal that a master in anthropology is. The other is that I have had a deep ambiguity about what to do with my life – a sort of post-modern existential anguish – for an extensive period of time. Embarking on the long and winding path as a master student allowed me to ponder that fundamental question just a while longer. Or maybe just postponing the inevitable decision-making…
I’ve been fascinated with the discipline’s approach to its objects of study ever since I came in contact with it. No other academic tradition seemed to have closeness to people so strongly embedded. The empathic aspect of it appealed a lot to me – making an academic effort to enter into someone else’s life experience through emulating their ways of life – what an exciting concept!
Although I might have lost some of the initial romantic expectations towards the potential achievements of anthropology, some of the curiosity and fascination still remains. What is it like to be human? In real life? I think anthropology draws its scholastic power from the combination of commitment by its exponents and an inherent humility towards the people we are studying. Any real attempt to represent other people’s life worlds should require time, effort and humility. Anthropology, at its best, has all three.
Moreover, there are certain phenomena that are hard to illuminate without a qualitative methodology as a basis, and that’s exactly where a discipline like anthropology finds its niche.


The power to define
What were your main conclusions? And how do these relate to the issues of poverty and development?
The main conclusion I reached concerning the issues in Hampi is that paradigmatic hegemonies enforced by social, economic and cultural marginalization or exclusion do not only affect the poor. It also prevents alternative views and notions of important topics from gaining foothold. This has an adverse effect on the international communities working with f. ex. heritage management, as such organizations often strive to adapt site planning to fit the local worlds they are engaging with. As the perspectives of poor people are often either ignored or disregarded, the assimilating efforts of such non-local agencies as UNESCO (in spite of their good intentions) inevitably clash with forces on the local level. Although my fieldwork in Hampi focused on the rights to define heritage and the underlying values connected to it, I believe it is a lesson easily applied to other areas such as development, food programs or democratization processes. The voices of those “on-site” (or in “the field”) need to be taken into consideration everywhere big tasks are at hand. The assumptions of non-local experts are never enough, and need to be supplied with the voices of those whose lives are actually involved. I think anthropologists are needed in far more places than they currently operate, and I also think there’s a lot of work to do in raising consciousness about the constructive roles social researchers in general can have on “global-local” relationships.    

What are your future plans now?
Right now I am applying for jobs. While I would love to get a job in which I could really use my academic background and personal experience, such jobs are few and much sought after here in Bergen. I will be content with any steady job which even slightly enables my abilities to come forth. On my spare time, however, I intend to keep writing non-fiction material inspired by or based on anthropological ways of thinking and working. I have plenty of ideas for the documentary genre and I would love to get into that at some point. Eventually, I would like to become a full-time writer, either as a scriptwriter/researcher or as an independent author.

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Eleven Masters student and three PhD students are taking part in the Poverty Politics project. So far, eight of them have submitted their thesis. Below, you can download the PDF-versions

	Stian Krog: Living Homes and Dead Monuments. Cultural Heritage and the Construction of Space and Place in Hampi, India. Read more. (PDF-format)
	Ingrid Jæger: Crumbling houses - The transformation of Ladakhi elderhood. Read more. (PDF-format)
	Leah W. Junge: A Religious NGO with Microcredit Programmes in Embu and Mbeere, Kenya. Read more. (PDF-format)

Berit Angelskar: Children in the Interface of Tsunami and Ethnic Conflict: Interventional Consequences of Outsider Interpretations. Trincomalee, Sri Lanka. Read more (PDF-format)

Hanne Elisabeth Wanvik Johansen: Medisinsk Masala. Om forholdet mellom om urbefolkningsgruppe i Sør-Inda, og de ulike biomedisinske tilbudene de har til rådighet.

Kristina Jones: The Children of The Sea-Mother: Charity, Development and the Economy of Poverty in a Fishing Village in Kerala, India. Read more (PDF-format)

	Iselin Åsedotter Strønen: "For us this is Utopia coming True". Venezuela`s Bolivarian Revolution and Popular Movements in a Caracas barrio. Read More (PDF-format)
	Heidi Larsen: Null sult på rottens øy? En antropologisk analyse av sosialstøtte og utvikling i Brasil. PDF-versjon

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Abstracts of newly published masters thesis's:

Cultural Heritage and the Construction of Space and Place in Hampi, India

Stian Krog, June 2007

This thesis is concerned with the inhabitants of Hampi, a small south Indian village formerly the seat of the medieval Vijayanagara Empire. Hampi is extremely rich in ruins and temples from this historical era, and was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1986. The management of Hampi as an archaeological site has been a controversial issue in the region over many years, due to the many inhabitants who have been residents there since before the area’s inclusion to the World Heritage List. My main focus has been on how my informants conceptualize their own use of space, and how this differs from the notions of space which are being promoted by the archaeological discourse implemented by authorities governing the site. I have tried to show how social, cultural, religious and economic factors converge to construct the inhabited house as locus of Hampi people’s spatial universe. In general, the house represents safety and purity – a view which resonates on social, symbolic and physical levels of understanding. I have strived to illuminate the contexts for the way villagers construct and make sense of the world around them, and how the paradigm of archaeological preservation clashes with fundamental aspects of their experiences. In Hampi, habitation is a key not only to maintain religious and cultural dignity, but also as a general ‘security warrant’ on the social level. Using these ideas around space and place as analytical basis, I have outlined a rough continuum of spatial categories in Hampi, from center to periphery. In the analysis, I have tried to show how different buildings and spaces are categorized according to associative patterns among villagers based on everyday experience. I also discuss the implications of a practice-oriented mode of life in relation to old buildings and material culture: buildings carry cultural worth and meaning only if they can be utilized on a practical level. This is very different from the discourse-oriented relationship emphasized in the Western paradigm of archaeology: material remains of the past are there to teach us something; to be analyzed, scrutinized and recorded. It is my hope that this thesis may contribute to the formation of a constructive debate around different ways of understanding and relating to archaeological remains – and indeed material culture in general.

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Crumbling houses - The transformation of Ladakhi elderhood

Ingrid Jæger, June 2007

In this thesis I discuss the Ladakhi house and the elderly in the Ladakhi society,who have traditionally been taken care of within the family confines and within the walls of the large family house. With a changing societal landscape in Ladakh, the physical and architectural landscape is also changing, and with it, changes happen within the household. I will guide the reader through the Ladakhi landscape, focusing on the old and new “bodies” that the houses constitute, before I enter these houses and look at the Ladakhi familycomposition. The elderly population is the vehicle I shall employ to scrutinize some of the changes taking place within the houses. As building patterns and housing constellations change, family relations also change. We shall see that the elderly, who formerly played a central role in the family and household, are made more and more superfluous. Their authority is challenged, and they are physically marginalized at the periphery of the household or even forced toleave it entirely.

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Children in the Interface of the Tsunami and Ethnic Conflict, Interventional Consequences of Outsider Interpretations

Berit Angelskår, June 2006

Keywords : Sri Lanka, tsunami, ethnic conflict, children, development, images, Tamil, violence, aspiration

My thesis builds on empirical fieldwork conducted from August 2005 till February 2006, in Trincomalee in the Northeast of Sri Lanka. Trincomalee district has approximately one third of all the main ethnic groups in Sri Lanka; Tamils, Singhalese and Muslims. It is therefore perceived as a potential peace-building site, as well as a place exposed to the escalation of ethnic violence. Despite the perceived peace potential embedded in the post-tsunami interventions, the conflict escalated into the fifth Tamil Eelam war. The consequences of the conflict at an everyday level, as well as the fear for another war, were what my informants – mainly children and young people - were preoccupied with. My interest was hence drawn to search for explanations for this development. I found that the tsunami and the conflict were inseparable: The consequences of the conflict, created a vulnerable society for the disaster and the recovery work, and the tsunami recovery process produced new areas of tension. Further I argue that the international interventions done after the tsunami and in the peace process are tightly interlinked with international knowledge producing discourses.

My thesis also includes a photographic analysis from the tsunami coverage, in addition to the empirical data. I argue that there exists a representational discourse on children from developing countries as victims, which serves to exclude important aspects of their lives and represent disaster-struck developing countries through the image of the child. This discourse prevails both within the photographic discourse on others suffering, as well as within the developmental discourse. This goes parallel with an increased focus on children within development practise. I found that children themselves presented a counter-representation of this discourse, not as purely victims, but as persons with agency.

I further argue that the politics of the image is crucial both for the survival of the international news-media and development organisations, and are tightly connected to money-accumulation. I also argue that representing the child-victim as the image of the tsunami, and the tsunami as a depoliticised event/disaster, is also in the interest of local politicians. News-media, developing organisations and politicians therefore share the same agenda regarding the representation of the Tsunami, this representational discourse is therefore a very powerful one.

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“For us this is Utopia coming true” Venezuela ’s Bolivarian Revolution and popular movements in a Caracas barrio

Iselin Åsedotter Strønen, August 2006

My thesis is based on a six months fieldwork in Caracas, Venezuela between August 2005 and February 2006. Venezuela has frequently figured in the international media throughout the past years, and the opinions about the self-proclaimed revolutionary president Hugo Chávez and his so-called Bolivarian Revolution are diverse and intense. My interest was to explore how the presidency of Chávez had generated changes amongst the poor majority of the population. The fieldwork was carried out in a barrio – shanty town neighbourhood- in Caracas amongst several grass root activist groups who are engaged in community work and political mobilization for the Bolivarian Revolution. The thesis aims to shed light on how social and political transformations in contemporary Venezuela are taking place on various arenas and mediated through a multitude of discourses, narratives, values and identities. Under the Chávez- government, a number of social programs aimed towards alleviating poverty and improving living conditions have been introduced, and the formation of community organizations in the barrios has exploded. Through encouragement and with different degrees of technical and economical support from the government, there are now a vast number of different groups working with health, education, property entitlement and infrastructure improvements, to mention some activities.

My thesis discusses how the relationship between the individual citizens, the local community and the state are re-configured through these social programs, and I discuss if the social programs can be analysed as an alternative model- and vision- of development than the schemes presented by institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. I also discuss how these policies, combined with a radical political discourse which has moved el pueblo - the people- to the centre stage of government attention, have re-shaped the traditionally deep-rooted social landscape of racial and class-based exclusion, but also generates and sustains the political polarization between Chávez’ supporters and the opposition. Furthermore, I discuss extensively the ambiguities and frictions which arise when the popular movements and the state are engaged in a common political discursive sphere, and how this gives way to negotiations on various arenas over autonomy and more influence from the grass root.

Preceding Chávez’ rise to presidency in 1998, the country had faced several years of social and political unrest caused by increasing social, political and economic marginalization of the 80% of the population which was considered as poor. Experiences of poverty, marginalization and political violence throughout the political époque prior to Chávez are attributed to the former elites´ neo-liberal governance but also to a meta-narrative about colonialization and US- imperialism. The Bolivarian Revolution headed by Chávez is hence not only experienced as the emancipation of el pueblo within the borders of Venezuela; it is also a struggle for el pueblo’s emancipation from imperial subordination. I show how these historical and political narratives shape a collective identity amongst people and re-enforces their determination to work for and defend the Bolivarian Revolution.

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The Children of the Sea-Mother. Charity, Development and the Economy of Poverty in a Fishing Village in Kerala

Kristina Jones, July 2006

Charity and development aid are considered to be free gifts or altruistic gestures. However, as I show in my thesis, charity and development can also create or maintain relations of social dominance. The thesis explores poverty, charity and development in the perspectives of anthropological theories of the gift, as well as in the context of commodities and markets. I describe how poverty is created and maintained through various transactions. The thesis is based on my fieldwork in a Hindu Araya fishing community in Kollam district in the south Indian state Kerala, from September 2004 until the end of January 2005.
The giving of charity and development is dependent on a definition of who "the poor", the receivers of charity and development, are. I explain how, in various cultural and historical contexts of caste, colonialism and projects of modernity, “the poor” have been defined as equivalent to the economically or socially "backward". Together with the other fishing communities in Kerala, the Hindu Araya caste is considered a socially and economically backward caste. I also explain how charity and development have been constructed in different cultural and historical contexts, and how they can create or maintain asymmetric social relations.

I examine which types of transactions create social relations in Allapad, and how economic or socialdifferences between people are created through various transactions. People in Allapad have been in touch with both development initiatives regarding fishing, and religious charity initiatives through the organisation of Guru Mata Amritanandamayi.
I ask which consequences development of fishing has had for the moral, spatial and economic webs of transactions of the fishing community in Allapad. The fishing sector in Kollam district has experienced a shift to large scale production and centralisation, under paroles of development. From using small non-mechanised boats that landed on the beaches in the villages where people lived, fishermen are now using large motorised boats and trawlers that landed at big harbours a bus ride away from Allapad. The process of motorisation and mechanisation in Kollam district was initiated by the Indo-Norwegian Project. This was the first development project of the Norwegian government, which was initiated in 1952. The project aimed towards introducing a Norwegian fishing pattern, and was based on the assumption that if one made fishing more efficient by introducing technical help, experts and equipment, this would create economic development and improve the conditions of living for most people. My ethnography shows how development belongs to a certain type of rationality, tied to a project of modernity, and based on culturally constructed ideas of efficiency, space and time. Development, aimed towards combating poverty, has created new forms of social inequality. Another consequence has been over fishing.
I also examine the motives and background of the charity initiatives of the organisation of Guru Mata Amritanandamayi, and ask how these initiatives can be said to be strategies of creating or maintaining social dominance. I examine these charity initiatives in the context of the various economic transactionswhich constitute the authority of Mata Amritanandamayi and her organisation. I argue that principles of reciprocity are in force here. Gift giving mediates the asymmetric relationship between guru and devotee or pupil. Guru Mata Amritanandamayi’s authority springs out from the fact that what is given back to the guru, in form of respect, praise, worship or donations, can never measure up to what is given by the guru in the first place, which is spiritual guidance, miracles, charity and, paradoxically, unconditional love. Charity is one of the important ways of marketing or legitimising religious and political organisations in India today, as well as organisations around contemporary gurus. Charity can also be said to legitimise the material status of the wealthy groups of society in comparison to the poor.

I look at the guru’s charity initiatives in the context of other religious and political NGOs in India. At the end of my fieldwork, Allapad was affected by the tsunami wave which struck large parts of Asia inDecember 2004. The organisation of Mata Amritanandamayi and many other organisations came to the scene. I will show how organisations used the opportunity to make themselves visible to the public, the donors of charity. The guru has to operate within a private “charity market”, with a number of other NGOs which compete for the same private donors. One can here talk about a comodification of the charitable service.

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Note: the interview was originally published in Norwegian in Utveier nr 5/05. Originally written and later translated into English by Iselin Åsedotter Strønen. Photo by Yifan Jiang.

- we lack a language for talking about helplessness

The Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth is a corner stone within anthropology, both nationally and internationally. He has lived in small scale communities throughout the world during a lifetime. I asked him how he had seen these communities change in the course of the last decade’s economical globalization.

- It is most visible on the material level regarding technology, goods and consumption. But also people’s consciousness is changed. What I think is sad, is that I had a naive hope about the Third World achieving more autonomy; that ordinary people should be allowed to control their own lives. But it didn’t turn out that way. What concerns me more and more is the possibility for cooperation in such a way that weaker elements shall be enabled to control more of their lives.
- What du you think of then?
- That many decisions which for 30-40 years ago were political decisions are now impeded, or decided within the automatics of economy. These guidelines are so overwhelming, that everything has to give profits, and that profit is measured solely within the terms of business. This result in deep and basic changes in people’s life patters which they don’t choose, but which seem necessary and in-avoidable. This leads to that our communities, and other small communities, do not have control over themselves.

The language of economics
- How do the people you have met reflect around this?
- Barely. To the extent they see it; they see it as progress, as modernity. And some things they value a lot, like basic things such as health services, consumer goods and luxury goods. And no sane person says no to something like that! But then this implies many other things. It means that public politics is changing, and these politics doesn’t raise the question “what is the good life?” It rises the question of the immediate, what is wanted in order to rise production. It is not aware of that different ways of for example the organization of production result in different patterns of redistribution and different patterns of living.
- Can you take an example from a community you know well?
- The examples aren’t very concrete, because I think it is that way all around. And people are being taught more and more in a modern global discourse. They don’t have a clear image of, and really not words for talking about their lives. We accept the modern way of talking. And that it is the rhetoric which concerns economic growth, measured on the premises of the economist. People get entangled into it! And they can’t really explain it very well. And I can’t explain it very well. But the sighs are there, just as they are here. Stress and hurry. But they don’t know that it stems from other things, and which things it stems from.
- What other things do you think about?
- What I experience the most is how we ourselves experience it. That a society with a level of well being and growth like us should have to cut back on schools and kindergartens and other things that we all agree upon that we want, but then it turns out that we can’t afford it. It is a profound paradox. And I can’t really see that neither economists nor politicians are addressing that paradox. But we are very good at small taking over it!

Helplessness
- Do you encounter a lot of helplessness?
- Not as much as I would have thought. Because one needs concepts in order to articulate helplessness. We are helpless, and that is natural. Because we are helpless in the universe, really. Sometimes things turn out well, and we don’t know why, we just know that it is that way. And there are lots of things in our lives which just “are that way”. And then we can complain and say that we don’t like it, but that’s just the way it is. I see that experience everywhere.

Some places entire manners of living had disappeared. I was with a group of nomads, and now it is just a handful of people left wandering. And I travelled through Afghanistan, where it is now just ruins and mine-covered fields left. And I’ve seen poor neighbourhoods in India which were very extreme, but where people could shape their lives somehow. But now it is just falling into pieces by uncontrolled crime and misery. Even though they might be a little bit better off measured in calories, life gets meaningless.
- So you mean that as long as people are not capable of pointing at what’s going on around them, the feeling of helplessness is avoided because it feels unavoidable?
- Yes, so it is there you (Attac, the organization the interview originally was written for, journalist’s comment) have to raise the debate and address the questions. So that people can take up a position. And wonder how it could have been different! (…) And that is a new way of doing it, that it is youths who can be young and idealistic. It is not that dangerous then. But if it is an old man like me talking like that, I’m cranky and cross. And I am in some ways.

Meaningless misery
- What are you cranky and cross at?
- At the circumstances, at life. But this is strongly mixed with the experience of the course of life. It is so very different to be young. So…what I project at the world; half of it is I who have grown old. Youths can’t have nostalgia for how it used to be. The whole perspective which you use for thinking changes a lot throughout life.
- So you are nostalgic?
- Yes, at many specific points I am.
- Are you pessimistic at behalf of the world?
- A bit of that and a bit of despair. There is so much misery which is so extremely meaningless and unnecessary. And it makes me despair because something could have been done about it. The other question is that of the environment and global warming. And the knowledge which we are starting to articulate regarding resources and sustainability and so on; it seems like one to a very small extent is able to transform it into politics. Even through people talk as if one agreed upon its prime priority.

Expanded living space
- What has inspired you throughout all these years?
- A kind of curiosity and appetite for experiences. I think it has been extremely fun to enmesh myself into local forms of living. And it doesn’t really matter where it is and what it is. Every time it is as if a window is opened or a wall removed, and every time your own living space is expanded. That’s why I have maintained an appetite for fieldwork and it has also functions as a cure against the process of aging. You become new when you arrive to a new place. But people’s experiences are so closed and they are kept within their own provincial perspective no matter where they are. They don’t know what the rest of the world is like. And no one can go around and know it, without being allowed, as anthropologists are, to really spend time on it. To create a common understanding of all the wonders of variations is practically impossible. So that’s where we as anthropologists should tell and write and let information and perspectives flow.
- Towards the end, is the something else you want to convey?
- Yes. And this is something which is important to me. Humbleness. We are so easily filled up with our own knowledge within out own cultural framework. If people could to a larger degree live with an anthropological touch, approach other things with humbleness and make it a part of their own experiences, it would expand their horizon and their own lives, concludes Fredrik Barth.

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Masters Degree in Anthropology of Development

Institute of Anthropology, University of Bergen

Credits: 120 ects

Degree: Masters

Duration: 2 years starting autumn 2004, intake every second year.

Language of instruction: English

Number of semesters: 4 semesters (2 years)

Application deadline:
December 1st for students from developing countries seeking scholarships.
May 15th for self-funded foreign students and Norwegian students with external education.
June 1st for internal students.

Application requirements
General requirements: For NORAD-funded students, as defined by the NORAD Fellowship Programme.
Academic requirements: The participants must have a good Bachelor or Master degree in a social science discipline or other disciplines relevant to the course content. Students without prior formal training in anthropology will be given special attention at an early stage of the programme.

Objective
This Master's programme is a direct continuation of the NORAD-funded M.phil. Programme in Social Anthropology (with emphasis on Human Ecology), which has been run by the Department since 1998 ( M.phil.-thesis).

The programmes main objective is to train students in anthropological theory and methodology relevant to the analysis of complex social and cultural conditions with bearings for social and economic development. The programme also provides training in multidisciplinary approaches connecting anthropology to disciplines like ecology, demography, medicine, economics and political science. To further these objectives and to foster truly research-based training, all students carry out field research in a non-Western country. The programmes broad international orientation aims to strengthen national institutions in developing countries and to expand north-south collaboration in research and education.

For More Information: Click Here

Project proposals for the class of 2004-2006: Click Here

Class of 2004-2006 in lecture with Fredrik Barth, distinguished professor and the founder of the Departement of Social Anthropology in Bergen. Also present is the course responsible Gunnar Haaland.
The class was composed of students from India,Malawi, Sudan, China, Kenya, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Kirgysistan and Norway.

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