This course will guide you through your first fieldwork experience. You are invited to choose a setting and a place where you will want to engage in encounters with others für six weeks. It may be a simple wooden bench at the entrance of an African railroad station deep in the bush where snacks and drinks are offered to passengers who have to wait for their delayed trains, it may also be a bourgeoise coffee house somewhere in Vienna or Paris, it may be a restaurant of an international fast-food chain in Tokyo, New York or Cape Town. You will be free to identify the place for your project, while experienced lecturers
will help you to find a setting where you can successfully conduct such research. Those who will want to work together
with other students and to have the opportunity to exchange regularly with experienced anthropologists can
do so in the target area of this guided field course, which is Mali, Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa.

Info sheet

African Worlds in Guanghzou

The Southern Chinese city of Guangzhou has emerged as a global trading hub, attracting people worldwide. It is site of cultural encounter, and an important node in the South-South web of relations. Affordable copies and knockoff goods made in China are often brought back to consumers in African countries by African traders themselves. Some of these transnational merchants also migrate to the city in search of new opportunities, hoping to establish their lives there.

Course Structure

I: Project course introduction/ development of your research project*
(Fall semester)
-Read and discuss literature about migration, cultural encounter, and globalization processes in the Global South
-Choose your thematic focus and field site
-Learn about associated research methods
-Research proposal write-up for further funding

II: Fieldwork
(6 weeks January to mid-February 2020)
-Work in groups and individually, guided by a faculty member
-Visit research institutions, meet experts, conduct your own study and analyze daily social realities in a Southern Chinese city, as well as your own position as a researcher

III: Analysis of findings and write up of projects
(Spring semester)

*Research projects are guided by a faculty member and a portion of the travel
expenses are funded by Institute of Anthropology.
*Your final research project can potentially serve as a basis for the development
of a Master thesis.

Website of the Field Course

The students who participated in this ethnographic research created a website that serves as a virtual tour of their projects and offers sights and sounds from Southern China.

The general theme of the field course is Social Change within which the individual research projects are loosely situated. The course focuses on the Solwezi Region in the Northwestern Province of Zambia, a previously rural and since ten years rapidly urbanizing area due to the (re)opening of three large-scale copper mines.

Julia Hohn: Water and Sociality in everyday Life in Solwezi

Jessica Näf: The Perception of Health and Environmental Risks and the Shaping of Knowledge regarding the Storage of Uranium at Lumwana mine, NW Province of Zambia

Anna Karsko: The Production of Music in the Context of Popular Culture and Urbanisation in Solwezi, Zambia

Michèle Monnier: Commercialisation and New Interpretations of Traditional Aboriginal Art: The relation between art, ownership and Aboriginal identity in Alice Springs, Australia

Monika Huber: Households and Access to Food: subsistence farming, local agriculture and food import

Mbaraka Matitu: Women and the Retailing of Second-hand Clothing in Urban Zambia: the case of Solwezi town

Carole Martin: Language Use in Solwezi, Zambia

Aurel Everwijn: The Work of a Carpenter in Solwezi

Deborah Oliveira: Exploring Bodily Interdependency at the Solwezi General Hospital: Towards an understanding of care and the bodily experience of interdependency

Misato Kimura: Connecting to the Town: Refugees’ everyday experience and mobility between camp and Solwezi town

Anna-Sophie Hobi: Governance and Extractivism: an NGO’s role in a booming mining town

Aurélie Yotégé: Cooperation between Switzerland And Cameroon: NGOs as actors of peace and stability

Do you want to write your MA thesis on a topic that is relevant for development cooperation? Are you interested to get a thorough insight into how globalisation looks like from the other side of the globe? Do you have an interest to reflect on how to think and rethink social inequality? Then this course is for you.

You will read and discuss relevant literature on poverty and wealth from various disciplines, including texts from development cooperation. You will learn how to approach different people and milieus in a country that was once perceived as an economic success story, as le miracle ivoirien. Besides standard methods of anthropology, you will acquire skills in the analysis of daily social realities in a country where social inequality was further intensified by a political and military crisis. You can choose your field site in a city or in a rural area. Your research will be guided by experienced tutors and the chair will partly cover your travel expenses.

What we expect from you is a real interest in doing fieldwork and an average knowledge of French.

The Institute of Social Anthropology offers an exciting opportunity for MA students to take part in a field course in South Africa. The course will be led by Fiona Siegenthaler and Till Förster and provides an intensive instruction in the planning of anthropological research, ethnographic field methods, acquisition of methodological skills in the field and the analysis of field data:
Planning research
- how to write a research proposal
- how to develop a concise research question
- how to chose the appropriate approach
Conducting research
- how to practice participatory methods
- how to keep records
- how to improve your research in the field
Analysis of field data
- How to analyse your findings
- How to write a convincing research report
- How to present your conclusions

The field course has an overarching theme to which the individual research projects of the participants are loosely related. The course will address “Urban articulations in South Africa”, focusing on Johannesburg and optionally small and medium cities in Gauteng province. The term “articulations” points in a wide sense at how actors, in particular urban contexts, express their identity, their views of the city and its society as well as their cultural convictions. It includes all forms of cultural expression insofar as they are visible to other actors in the urban sphere. They could range from religion or class-consciousness to individuality and sub-cultural collective identity.
The course starts with the autumn semester 2013 and ends with the spring term 2014. During the autumn term, students will look at concepts and theoretical frameworks of both the ‘urban’ and of ‘articulations’ as a social practice. They will also receive an introduction into methodological discussions in anthropology and the social sciences more generally. The individual topics will be defined at an early stage in cooperation with the lecturers and then developed by writing a literature review, drafting the research questions and preparing to conduct empirical research in South Africa. The first semester ends with the submission of a short research proposal of 4–5 pages that will serve as a frame to the subsequent stay in Africa.
Field research will be conducted from early January through mid-February 2014 (ca. 6 weeks). The spring term 2014 is dedicated to the analysis of the field data and the writing of the final report. The course is co-supervised by two anthropologists who have extensive field experience in urban South Africa and elsewhere in Africa. They will advise the students and monitor their fieldwork during the time in the field.