Cultural anthropology | EPFL Graph Search

Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The term sociocultural anthropology includes both cultural and social anthropology traditions. Anthropologists have pointed out that through culture, people can adapt to their environment in non-genetic ways, so people living in different environments will often have different cultures. Much of anthropological theory has originated in an appreciation of and interest in the tension between the local (particular cultures) and the global (a universal human nature, or the web of connections between people in distinct places/circumstances). Cultural anthropology has a rich methodology, including participant observation (often called fieldwork because it requires the anthropologist spending an extended period of time at the research location), interviews, a

Travail artisanal et production de l'espace bruxellois. Prototype d'atlas lisuel

Marine Nicole Anne Antoinette Paul Declève

In Brussels today we can observe a proliferation of initiatives that reject the utilitarian framework which society, since industrialisation, has imposed upon the notion of work. Architects of their own lives, their adherents approach work as an existential value. They shift the classical boundaries between the time of labour and domestic reproduction, the time of imagination and creation of an irreplaceable and unique existence, and the time of public activity. They occupy new spaces and networks, transforming labour's relationship to the city and to inhabiting the city.The author has taken this phenomenon as the basis for an investigation conducted at the intersection where the cultures of town planning, of art history, and of anthropology meet. Bypassing classic definitions that reduce labour and employment to the functions of growth and the accumulation of capital, it tests the perception that this proliferation of initiatives is part of the tradition of urban craftsmanship. She will seek theoretical reference points in the work of authors such as F. Braudel, K. Polanyi, H. Arendt, W. Morris, I. Ilitch, K. Lynch, C. Alexander, and A. Corboz. Her question becomes: how do artisans and artisanal work spaces contribute to the production of the city as a place for living?Answering this question requires staking a position on writing the history carried by maps and city plans, which generally overlook the role of subordinates. This is what led the author to experiment with a lisuel method a cartographic reading allowing identification of the traces artisanal lives leave imprinted in maps' negative space. The experiment uses three maps drawn at key moments in the city's economic history: the noble city (c.1770), the new industrial Brussels (1910), and productive Brussels (2018). The method consists of reading in reverse the story the three maps convey by relying on a hypertextual corpus which makes it possible to adjust our perception of the scene and to spotlight a sample of the artisanal lives embedded in the maps' negative space.This investigation, which makes no claim to being exhaustive, reveals profiles of itinerant craftspeople open to cooperation and interculturality of different kinds and at different scales. It testifies to the complexity of the links between craft, industry, and art, revealing the lives of craftsmen dedicated to the enhancement and transformation of non-relocatable public goods such as territorial knowledge, public space, and the landscapes of movement.We see revealed an art of composing a singular spatiality, articulating the first location of the home, the second location of labour, and the third places of the exercise of public life. Materially, this produces the buildings that accommodate the activities and public spaces which they take part in structuring.The imprint of artisanal lifestyles in the fabrics of the city contributes incrementally to the production of space as well as to a collective process of structuring a singular urban sociability, which the author calls communality. The result of this experimental exercise is a prototype atlas showing the pattern language mobilised by artisans to write, in a vernacular mode, the space of this commonality.

EPFL2021

Rencontre de la science de l'information géographique et de l'anthropologie culturelle

Abram Pointet

Geographical Information Science and Cultural Anthropology are aimed to collaborate on development projects dedicated to indigenous communities. This fact is first based on a growing intention to integrate the reality and the perception of the development owned by the community. This movement, towards a stronger consideration of the community's point of view, is assigning to the anthropologist with a central importance in projects. He plays a leading part in linking the culture and the scientific disciplines involved in a project. Secondly, the geographic space, the community is evolving in, has its own organization and functioning. The recognized importance of space therefore implies the participation of the geographical information science specialist. The "rapprochement" of those disciplines with distant epistemologies constitutes the context of this study. At first sight, the use of a geographical information system by an anthropologist appears to be limited to the introduction of a new tool. For the specialist in geographical information science, the adaptation of the anthropological knowledge to the logic of the information systems seems to be a common problem of data structuring, analysis and mapping. The attempts of rapprochement to date aren't particularly successful. Their analysis brought us to formulate a statement of fact summarized in this research by the complexity versus simplicity paradox. The interaction between the two disciplines, given a concrete expression by the confrontation of their epistemologies, is at the origin of new problems and questions. Some of them are complex as this study shows. This research results corresponds to a twofold proposal for collaboration approaches. First, an innovative approach of modelling the anthropological knowledge in geographical information science is suggested. This approach introduces the concept of "knowledge model", dialogue object between the disciplines. Its establishment precedes the one of the conceptual data model. Second, an approach is developed for the conception of a visual and interactive interface. This computerized framework is set up in order to support interdisciplinary communication. Moreover, it allows products of the geographical information science to be accessible to the anthropologists. The pertinence and the reliability of the suggested approaches are established in terms of adequacy to the logic of each discipline, and of integration to the development projects. The associated contributions and limits are finally discussed, leading to some future prospects.

EPFL2007

Boundaries and Urban Worlds. The Contested Ethnoscape of Expatriates in Geneva

Hossam Adly El Shentenawy, Luca Giovanni Pattaroni

After having for long time been neglected by social anthropologists, cities are nowadays central in numerous researches, and more particularly in the field of migration and transnational mobility. However, studies of the impact of migrants on cities themselves remain insufficient. Based on ethnographic work within the United Nations office in Geneva, this paper argues that the impact of international civil servants on the city's settings and space lies in an expatriates' "ethnoscape" (Appadurai 1990) transforming Geneva's architecture, public space and patterns of sociability. The paper also analyses in what terms these urban mutations get contested in a central neighbourhood where inhabitants criticize gentrification, the rise of rental prices and eviction. Not only do the results of this study shed light on the process through which the presence of the UN office transforms Geneva in a global city, but they also show how such transformations of the urban space may produce the symbolic and spatial boundaries of contested territories that bring inhabitants to negotiate oppositional identities.In a broader theoretical perspective, this paper allow us to defend, along authors such as Boltanski and Thévenot, a pragmatist approach of boundaries, paying attention not only to their role in the discursive drawing of specific communities and public problems but their actual anchorage in every day practices. In other words, boundaries - in their various phenomenal manifestations - participates in the phenomenological and practical separation of contrasted urban worlds, that is of differentiated ways to organize - and relate to - urban everyday experience. This raises the question of how a boundary actually works as a separation and differentiation process, how it influences perceptions and actual experience of the world.

2013