What is the point with the recent demonstrations? What is the point with the FSLN reaction to it?

As to social anthropology: I actually agree that a lot is dead in the sense that one is studying things that don't make any difference. I got almost a little angry when I was with a group of anthropologists looking at texts from master-degree students and they specifically criticized one person for "coming up with solutions" -- they thought anthropologists shouldn't think about such things.

However, that is not all social anthropology. A lot of it is about figuring out why government programs don't work, for example. It is structures somewhat differently from country to country and in the Norwegian/British version it is almost the same as sociology. The difference is just that sociologists go out with question schemes and ask hundreds, but only give them say 10 different choices for answers. Or sociologists do interviews with some 10-25 people. Basically the problem with that is that people (everywhere, always) are lying. There are loads of different codecs in the room when the interview is done -- customs as to how one interacts with a person of the sex, skincolor and nationality of the interviewer, customs as to what kinds of things one talks about, customs as to how one expresses oneself (a good example is the way I and Gringita understand the word "dictatorship" differently), customs as to what kinds of things one lies about, etc. . The sociologist often don't get a lot of that. That's why social anthropologists simple are send somewhere or another for a longer time. They often don't do formal interviews, but just hang around offices or places of general gathering and just try to figure things out that way.

Unfortunately, social anthropologists and spies share a lot in common, and so in the past a lot of anthropologists have offered their services to such organizations of either Soviet Union or USA.

Anthropology is my study path, but the thing I "do" is maintaining web servers for various Norwegian NGOs, and help program webpages and stuff like that.

As to a discussion on the "value" of various jobs: well, first I'd like to make three categories:

1. those jobs that create a service to mankind. In this category you might find farmers who are producing food that is actually eaten by someone, oilworkers that are technically needed, doctors when they actually are treating a disease with something else than a placebo, etc. .

2. those jobs that neither create nor destroy much of anything. Here you find a whole range of jobs that only exist because we have a rather strange production and distribution system in place worldwide. Here you can have a Wall Street banker who spends his entire day (also doing overtime) doing something that isn't technically needed. You can also find people creating advertisement, the production of placebos, people inventing copy-prevention-mechanisms, people inventing mechanisms to make products automatically fail after a given time, etc. These jobs at times also create more work in sector 1, simply because people need or are told they need to buy more.

3. those jobs that destroy, and thereby require more work of sector 1 to be done. Obviously this is soldiers, arms industry, etc.

Now you wonder where social anthropologists fit in. Like many things, likely in parts 1 and 2. If they just do nothing and are never used for anything, then its 2. If they figure out how a product is used and manage to help to prevent throwing away valuable resources, then it's 1. Of course, if working as a KGB or CIA operative, they may also be in 3. In addition they can at times write interesting books for people who will never be able to go to some other part of the world for an extended period of time, and that would also belong to 1.

In my case, I hope to do the last, and in addition will hopefully be able to work as a resource to make connections between European political movements who want to get in contact with the MRS or FSLN. In addition, specifically in Norway there is a tradition by the newspapers to ask anthropologists to comment when something happens in a far away part of the world, that doesn't immediately make sense to Norwegians. Like for example when a Nicaraguan Ernest Cardenal suddenly shows up in Oslo and starts talking about the "dictatorship" in his country. Then they need to know who he is, why he uses such words, etc. And that's stuff he cannot just tell them directly himself.

Anyways, this conversation is clearly off-topic. I think I'm done with it for now. Btw, real-estate-agents are probably to be placed firmly in category 2: that is that their work is only needed because we have capitalism as a production system on a world level, not because there is some inherent need for someone to be able to speculate and make money by speculating on property prices. -- Johannes Wilm http://www.johanneswilm.org