The internationally acclaimed Australian anthropologist Bruce Kapferer became a professor at the University of Bergen, Norway in 1999. His colleague Olaf H. Smedal interviewed him for the journal of the Norwegian Anthropological Society, Antropolog Nytt. The interview provides, among other things, a personal account of Kapferer’s fieldwork experiences in Zambia, his close relationship with Max Gluckman, and his experiences at the University of Manchester. Read about Bruce Kapferer’s research interests, and find out why he thinks anthropology is currently in a crisis…

For more information about The Manchester School, read "History of The Manchester ’School’ of Social Anthropology and Sociology", by Max Gluckman himself, at:

The author, at present completing his doctorate in social anthropology at the University of Tromsø, Norway, wrote his Master’s thesis on the techno-house movement in Oslo and Tromsø. A former musician, Olsen had excellent access to some of the central actors of the movement in Norway. Discussing Roy Wagner’s theory of symbolism, Olsen argues that modern music, with its constant creative revolutions, is nevertheless shaped by deep-seated continuities. The house-party / rave is then analyzed as a form of ritualized resistance against the bodily alienation (Marx) of a mechanized world. The new, "mechanical" music appropriates the machine itself, giving its dead metal life through the subtle orchestration of DJ’s, and the live heat of the dance.

One should then go on to read yet another of our texts, written by a Lithuanian Master’s student at the University of Lund, Sweden:

When Global Becomes Local: Rave Culture in Lithuania

Kristina Sliavaite, now a lecturer at the University of Vilnius and working on her Ph.D., is one of the first Western-style anthropologists in Lithuania.

Note also that AnthroBase starts its life with a rather interesting collection of texts on subcultures. Click here to have a look at it.