scholarly journals Strictly Confidential Anthropology

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
László Kürti

Anthropological interest in secrecy and silence – and related aspects such as lying, knowledge, memory, and forgetting – has been long and precarious. Through what may be called personal anthropology, in this article, I describe both private and professional anthropological experiences including family memories, fieldwork sites, and academic practices. By recalling state socialist ideology, censorship, and family secrets, I illustrate how citizens have relied on each other in order to counter state hegemony. I highlight how surveillance in Romania expressly encouraged my informants as well as the secret police to engage in mutual intelligence and observation tactics as evasive tactics. Building on these strategies, I argue that academic life is not immune to secrecy, silence and covert action. I introduce an anthropologist who worked for the Hungarian secret police, and consider how academic life continues to rely on covert programs and an institutionalized hierarchy to promote and maintain its structures and interests.

Author(s):  
Areej Yousef Ahmed Hakim

The current study aimed to identify the quality level of academic life during COVID-19 pandemic from students' perception of Taibah University, Yanbu branch. To this end, a descriptive approach was used to answer the following main research question: What is the quality level of academic life during COVID-19 pandemic from students' perception of Taibah University? The study tool consisted of a questionnaire to measure the quality level of the students’ academic life. The tool was ensured for reliability and validity and composed of three sections that contained indicators to measure the quality of academic life; academic practices, academic satisfaction, and academic support. The sample of the study consisted of 187 male and female students. Results showed high perceptions for the respondents in the quality of academic practices section (M=4.15, SD=1.03). The statement No.9 entitles “Rate the precautionary actions provided to you to activate the online education as an alternative to face-to-face education during COVID-19 pandemic” obtained the highest rank (M=4.63). The second section that measured the level of academic satisfaction recorded (M=1.76, SD=1.10), obtaining 58.71%. The statement 6 entitles “I felt my love to home increased during COVID-19 pandemic” obtained the highest rank (M=4.63, SD=.81, 98.93%). The academic support dimension recorded (M=4.33, SD=.93), Indicating that the level of academic support for students during COVID-19 pandemic was excellent (86.65%) as perceived by the study sample. The statement 5 which entitles “Rate the extent to benefit from academic counseling during COVID-19 pandemic” got the highest rank (M=4.67, SD=.72, 93.485). The most challenges encountered the students gradually categorized from the highest to the lowest were the poor Internet network, non-availability of laptop computers, low experience in working with blackboard, and poor technical experience. The study recommended the significance of academic support and suggested doing further studies on and the reality of quality of academic life from faculty members perspectives and the role of precautionary health during COID-19 pandemic to enhance the national loyalty for the university students.


2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (S1) ◽  
pp. 30-51
Author(s):  
György Péteri

Patron-client relations were a ubiquitous feature of cultural and academic life under the state socialist social order, as were networks crisscrossing the borderlines between the domains of political power and scholarship. Awareness of and due attention to such relations and networks, this article argues, is a sine qua non of any reliable history of economics in the communist era. Pioneering projects, publications presenting innovative new approaches, individual careers yielding significant works of domestic and international acclaim were as much dependent on the support and protection of the politically powerful as on genuine talent and diligence. State socialism was not the kind of social order that would typically enable a spectacular scholarly development just “by force of thought.” The article focuses on the story of one particularly important patron in Hungary over the field of economics, a true communist grand seigneur: István Friss. It shows how his contribution has been systematically neglected, suppressed by both the historical and the memoir literature, and it presents archival evidence highlighting the vital importance of Friss’s patronage for the work and careers of such leading economists as András Bródy and, particularly, János Kornai.


Author(s):  
Mimi Sheller

AbstractThis chapter focuses on how the coronavirus pandemic disrupted ‘normal’ academic life and travel through an analysis of my own travel history over the past decade. After contextualising the ways in which quarantines and confinement radically decreased travel, the chapter has three parts. In the first part, I document my own curriculum vitae of academic travel over the past decade and quantitatively measure my estimated CO2 emissions. Next, I seek to situate the value of such academic travel in both quantitative and qualitative terms, through extrinsic measures such as publications and impact and through intrinsic values such as the experience of different cultures and places. Lastly, I look at the transition to virtual events and my own participation in online events during the past nine months and consider the relation between physical and virtual meetings within academic practices. Insofar as the pandemic demonstrated our ability to transform academic travel and accelerate the use of remote meetings within academic practices, a pressing concern is how to find ways of extending this into the post-pandemic phase. Among the questions I ask in conclusion are: What possibilities are there for more seriously extending remote no-fly meetings to address the climate emergency? And what are the implications of such changes, both positive and negative?


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-126
Author(s):  
Gina Stoiciu

We propose to grasp conferences as an institutional ritual, which deploys a whole institutional theatricality. To do this, we use the metaphor of the orchestra; indeed each participant in the conference plays their part by adjusting to each other. The metaphor of the art of composition allows us to detect the process of shaping the knowledge of an academic text. The wide angle of reflection finds its inspiration in symbolic approaches to communication. The use of the metaphor in the understanding of academic practices, drives us to an imaginary approach framing an image, making analogies between the image and the object under study, to then take advantage of this operation of transposing the meaning of the image to the object of study. We thus have access to a fresh and imaginary angle on the rituals which mark the academic life, and which are not only duty bound. ##plugins.themes.academic_pro.article.details##


Author(s):  
Alistair Fox

This chapter analyses Brad McGann’s highly esteemed adaptation (2004) of Maurice Gee’s novel In My Father’s Den (1972) as evidence of a prevailing trend in New Zealand coming-of-age films whereby the vision of a source work is regularly updated to reflect the different values and perspectives of a later generation. In this case, the updating involves a shift of emphasis from the destructive effects on children of puritan religiosity and repressiveness to those of lack of communication among family members, combined with the preservation of unspoken, but collectively known, family secrets, reflecting historical changes that had occurred in New Zealand society since the generation of Gee (born 1931) and that of McGann (born 1964).


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