A Norwegian studying at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, Dagny Nome wrote this paper for a seminar in intercultural business management. In it she explores the popular practice of "culture jamming", i.e. distorting, parodying and co-opting advertisements for well-known brands. "The most advanced culture jams," Nome writes, "are counter-messages that mimic the corporation's own method of communication, and send a message, a subvertisement, starkly at odds with the one originally intended." This is an elegant, semiotically inspired account of power and resistance on the postmodern and global marketplace.

Visit Adbusters Media Foundation (http://www.adbusters.org), an international culture-jamming organization run by Kalle Lasn, and read the quarterly magazine "Adbusters". 

And after this recognizably anthropological discussion by a student of business, click here to take a look at a text in which business is studied by a student of anthropology.

Artificial Life: A Technoscience Leaving Modernity? An Anthropology of Subjects and Objects
by Lars Christian Risan

Lars Risan is a doctoral student at the Center for Technology and Human Values at the University of Oslo, Norway. His Master’s thesis, based on 8 months of anthropological field research at the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at the University of Sussex, is here published in a revised edition.

This is a laboratory study in the tradition of Latour and Woolgar, but with the added twist that the scientists studied by Risan were themselves students of Life. At the COGS laboratories, an interdisciplinary group of researchers attempt to create Artificial Life - i.e. robots and computer simulations, whose behavior mimics that of living organisms. Their theoretical interests therefore coincide, in many respects, with those of the fieldworker: This, we understand, is anthropology very close to home. Risan studies the social production of scientific knowledge, in experiments, at conferences, and through the informal shop talk of scientists at work. Theoretically, the thesis is inspired by (among others) Bruno Latour, Gregory Bateson and Martin Heidegger.

Risan has published several other papers on AnthroBase. In one of these, he discusses some aspects of his present, doctoral work - on the interaction between humans, technology and animals on modern industrial farms in Norway. Click here to see it.

In his thesis, Risan discusses Latour’s innovative actor network theory. Click the below link to see the two best (?) actor network theory resource on the Net:

http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/antres.html 
and:
http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/act_net.html 

And check out another anthropological study of Artificial Life here:

http://www.gslis.utexas.edu/~sgunn/A-life/anthro.html

See our Links page for these and many other links to anthropological texts on the net.