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Field work and mobile phones at Lake Victoria, Uganda
Field work and mobile phones at Lake Victoria, Uganda
This article discusses the role of mobile phones in anthropological fieldwork. Based on research around Lake Victoria (Uganda), this article shows that in the local fishery, mobile phones play a crucial part. At the same time, it appears that increasingly mobile social relations are difficult to observe, that new social rules emerge, and that the mobile phone introduces new forms of exclusion. This imposes new requirements on the fieldworker, and the article argues that the mobile phone as a research instrument offers new, often unexpected, opportunities. As a result, the mobile phone might acquire a key position within the craft of anthropological fieldwork.

The paradox of field research permits
The paradox of field research permits
This essay provides an account of the way in which permits for field research in South Sudan were obtained. It shows how, despite the fact that the new country did not have a formal procedure for researchers, doing fieldwork at South Sudans borders with DR Congo and Uganda would have been impossible without a few letters of endorsement signed by people within the South Sudanese government. This inherent contradiction is further complicated by a paradox: The security personnel at the border interpreted the letters differently than the staff in the government offices in the capital. The essay argues that the contradiction between practice and procedures and the paradox of variable legitimacies provide key insight in the everyday organization of the state in South Sudan, both in the center and in the periphery.