Sif har blitt tildelt kr 20,000.00 i feltarbedisstipend som vil bidra til gjennomføringen av hennes feltarbeid i Cuba!
Vi hadde i år flere engelsk-talende søkere, og komiteen som i år besto av Kenneth Bo Nielsen (UiO) og Trude Lerfald (NAV) har skrevet begrunnelse på engelsk.
Signe Howell’s feltarbeidsstipend for 2021 is awarded to Sif Emilie Lauritsen
from The Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, for her
MA-thesis project on organic small-scale farming in Cuba.
Cuba’s small-scale farming sector has grown rapidly since the beginning of the
1990s with sustained state support. Against this background, Lauritsen’s thesis
project seeks to investigate the everyday life of organic small-scale farming in
Cuba, as well as the kind of relations between people, state and landscape that
are being ‘cultivated’ through such new farming practices.
The project proceeds from an intimate understanding of the broader literature on
Cuba’s small-scale organic farming sector, including from disciplines such as
food and resource economics, agro-ecology, environmental science and
agronomy. Within this broad and diverse literature, Lauritsen convincingly
carves out a distinct methodological and analytical space for anthropology.
Anthropology, Lauritsen argues, can offer valuable insights into everyday
agricultural practices and their local meanings, as well as how state, people,
economy, and community come together in and through small-scale farming. In
addition to thus potentially offering a valuable contribution to the anthropology
of agrarian change in the global south, the thesis project also displays a keen
awareness of Cuba’s peculiar in-between position as an ethnographic region,
and of the country’s longer agrarian history.
The project is both theoretically and methodologically sophisticated. It is firmly
grounded in the classical anthropological tradition of long-term fieldwork
centred on participant observation and an active engagement with the everyday
and seasonal farm-life of the community under study.
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