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Somatosphere - Science medicine and anthropology is the title of a new medical anthropology blog by researchers at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

It will be an interdisciplinary blog as Eugene Raikhel writes in his first post:

The core of this blog is medical anthropology – the majority of the authors are anthropologists who work on medical topics; however, we’re particularly interested in the borders between anthropology and a number of neighboring disciplines: namely, science and technology studies (STS), cultural psychiatry and bioethics.

In his second post, he reviews some medical anthropology related journals (special issues).

Raikhel is currently a postdoc at the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry and the Department of Social Studies of Medicine - “fairly unique interdisciplinary units in which foster some very interesting research and discussions between anthropologists and psychiatrists, neuroscientists, sociologists and historians of science.”

His dissertation is an ethnographic study of addiction and the therapeutic market in contemporary Russia. He’s been on extensive fieldwork in addiction and psychiatric hospitals, clinics and rehabilitation centers in St. Petersburg (source).

>> visit Somatosphere - Science medicine and anthropology

I was also asked to announce a new social science forum www.socialtalks.net. It is run by Espen Malling, student of anthropology at the University of Aarhus, Denmark.

At the same I want to remind of recent activity (not much, though) in the antropologi.info forum. It is also a pin board that you can use to post announcements
http://www.antropologi.info/anthropology/forum/

An increasing number of women are becoming involved in Mexico’s drug trade. Anthropologist Howard Campbell has conducted fieldwork among female smugglers on the U.S.-Mexico border, The Dallas Morning News reports.

Dallas Morning News refers to Campbells paper that was published in the Anthropological Quarterly Winter 2008 issue.

The anthropologist has resided and worked in the border region for 15 years. He writes that women’s involvement in drug trafficking has expanded dramatically. Yet there are few studies of female drug smugglers, the causes of female involvement in smuggling, and the impact of smuggling on women’s lives specifically:

Ethnographic research on drug issues tends to focus on drug use and abuse; anthropological studies of trafficking organizations, because of the dangers such work entails, are limited. The major studies, with some exceptions (Anderson 2005) have little information on women, treat them as secondary and subsidiary to men, or else focus on women’s mostly subordinate, victimized role in street-level crack-dealing in American cities

He portraits a variety of drug smugglers, among others Zulema who belongs to the “high-level female drug smugglers” who enjoy “a pleasurable lifestyle and relative autonomy from men.

He argues that women, like men, may obtain excitement, adventure and thrills from engaging in illegal activities such as drug smuggling. We should not assume, that women’ s sole motivation for engaging in crime is narrowly economic or subsistence oriented:

Zulema revels in the money, power and independence she reaped from cocaine and heroin smuggling . Although she was raised in an upper-middle-class Catholic household in a small north central Mexican town, as a teenager Zulema left the comforts of her bourgeois home and nun’ s school to live with a “wild aunt” in a poor barrio of Ciudad Juárez on the U.S.-Mexico border.

This aunt was - in Zulema’s words “a whore, a drunk, a crazy woman, and considered the black sheep of the family".

The anthropologist writes:

Contrary to standard interpretations of women’ s motivation for entry into drug smuggling, Zulema was initially attracted to crime, including drug-selling, by the opportunity it presented for adventure and revolt against bourgeois lifestyles.

Consciously rebellious, Zulema discarded the discreet attire of her social class and donned a masculine chola outfit. (…) Zulema’s macho style and determination gained her acceptance in the then male-dominated drug world and allowed her to move upward.
(…)
Drug trafficking profits allowed her to achieve a freedom from male control that was available to few other women of her background. After “ El Mexicano’ s” death Zulema became the leader of her own heroin and cocaine smuggling ring in maj or Texas cities in the 1990s.
(…)
Zulema’ s life and that of other female drug lords, though not typical of average smugglers, sharply contradict cultural stereotypes about Mexican female passivity or that the only role for women in the drug life is that of “trophy wife.
(…)
Although Zulema’s case may seem extreme, there are other similar cases of powerful female drug lords, though they seldom appear in social science literature on drugs which emphasize women’s victimization.

All in all, he divides his informants in four different categories of smugglers. He summarizes:

High-level female drug smugglers may be attracted to the power and mystique of drug trafficking and may achieve a relative independence from male dominance.

Middle-level women in smuggling organizations obtain less freedom vis-à-vis men but may manipulate gender stereotypes to their advantage in the smuggling world.

Low-level mules also perform (or subvert) traditional gender roles as a smuggling strategy, but receive less economic benefit and less power, though in some cases some independence from male domestic control.

A fourth cate gory of women do not smuggle drugs but are negatively impacted by the male smugglers with whom they are associated.

I argue that drug smuggling frequently leads to female victimization, especial y at the lowest and middle levels of drug trafficking organizations. However, it is also, in the case of high-level and some low-level and middle-level smugglers, a vehicle for female empowerment

His paper is only available to subscribers.

>> Mexico’s drug war shows a virulent feminine side (Dallas Morning News

SEE ALSO:

Online: On the Margins - An Ethnography from the US-Mexican Border

Why borders don’t help - An engaged anthropology of the US-Mexican border

Will Buddism die out in Japan? Across Japan, Buddhism faces a confluence of problems, the New York Times reports.

Interest in Buddhism is declining in urban areas. The religion’s rural strongholds are being depopulated. Successors to chief priests are lacking. Many temples in the countryside are expected to close.

Buddhism is also losing its grip on the funeral industry as more and more Japanese are turning to funeral homes or choosing not to hold funerals at all. Although the Japanese have long taken an “buffetlike approach to religion", the New York Times writes, the Japanese have traditionally been inflexibly Buddhist when it comes to funerals (they ring out the old year at Buddhist temples and welcoming the new year, several hours later, at Shinto shrines. Weddings hew to Shinto rituals or, just as easily, to Christian ones.)

“Buddhism doesn’t meet people’s spiritual needs”, according to chief priest Ryoko Mori. “If Japanese Buddhism doesn’t act now, it will die out,” he says.

According to anthropologist Noriyuki Ueda, Japanese Buddhism had been sapped of its spiritual side in great part because it had compromised itself during World War II through its close ties with Japan’s military.

>> read the whole story in the New York Times

SEE ALSO:

“Racist” Buddhist monks hope for “ethnically clean” Tibet?

Book review: Ritual praxis in modern Japan

Maurice Bloch: Religion is a Figment of Human Imagination

“Visual Anthropology of Japan” and more new blogs

In November, a referendum on the legalizing of slot machines in Maryland will be held. In the Washington Post, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll tells us how slot machines are exploiting people.

Natasha Dow Schüll has been on fieldwork in Las Vegas among gamblers and the designers of the slot machines. Her book Machine Life: Control and Compulsion in Las Vegas will be published by Princeton University Press in early 2009.

Her research, she writes has been “focused on a dramatic turn that has taken place in recent decades from social forms of gambling played at tables to asocial forms played alone at video terminals". The machines are designed to exploit aspects of human psychology:

Without the presence of social elements such as other players or a live dealer, they are able to exit the world and enter a state where everything fades away. (…) Players enter what’s known as the “machine zone,” where even winning stops mattering; in fact, it can be unwelcome because it interrupts the flow of play. Such players only stop when their credits are consumed.

She concludes:

What revenue slot machines do generate comes not from entertaining but exploiting people. Should the government, whose role is to protect its citizens, become a partner in this ethically dubious enterprise?

>> read the whole story in the Washington Post

To Salon.com she says that the industry has successfully defined the terms of gambling addiction: It’s telling that we speak about problem gamblers, but not problem machines, problem environments, or problem business practices.

The anthropologist has put three papers on her Las Vegas research online (pdf):

Digital Gaming: The Coincidence of Desire and Design

Machines, Medication, Modulation: Circuits of Dependency and Self-Care in Las Vegas

Oasis/Mirage: Fantasies of Nature in Las Vegas

The BBC has sent six British women to be “second wives” to so-called “tribesmen” in - according to the BBC “some of the world’s most remote communities". “Any anthropologist feels pleased when the hidden peoples of the world get a chance to appear on television, but the BBC series Tribal Wives is misleading", anthropologist Michael Stewart comments in The Guardian.

The tv-programm, he writes, gives us “a romantic notion of a Shangri-La", based on the idea “that we have lost something that only the “savage” can teach us". This film claims to be a window on another world, but we mainly learn about what it means to be a westerner in that situation.

Steward watched the episode about a British woman who spent a month with the Huaorani in Ecuador. Their village is far from isolated. It is a well-known eco-tourism destination with an airstrip in the middle of the village, according to the anthropologist.

>> read the whole comment in The Guardian

In a comment on the Survial International blog, Guy Edwards writes that the “overall impression was that of a circus where Huaorani culture was portrayed as simple and backward” and adds: “The BBC and/or the other production organisations involved should apologize and compensate the Huaorani for any damages.”

For more info on the programm, see UK women to become ‘tribal wives’ (BBC 10.11.06) How the Waorani tribe made me relax (BBC 24.6.08), Mudhut life for Lana enough to drive her away from drink (Evening News Edinburgh 2.7.08) and a more positive review in The Times by Caitlin Moran Tribal Wives - the acceptable face of reality TV from the BBC

SEE ALSO:

Is this anthropology? African pygmies observe Britains in TV-show

“Good story about cannibals. Pity it’s not even close to the truth”

The Double Standards of the “Uncontacted Tribes” Circus

From Stone Age to 21st century - More “fun” with savages

Three weeks ago, anthropologist Siru Aura defended her doctoral dissertation Women and Marital Breakdown in South India: Reconstructing Homes, Bonds and Persons at the University of Helsinki. She has studied divorced, separated and deserted women from different socio-religious backgrounds in the city of Bangalore in South India.

In her conclusion she makes several interesting points. We all know that we should avoid essentializing. Particularly since the 1990’s, Siru Aura writes, there has been a tendency to emphasise the differences among the various groups of Indian women, based their cultural, social, religious or regional backgrounds. One should avoid presenting a “monolithic” picture of “an Indian woman” – a representation that does not exist in real life.

But this focus on diversity can make us blind to seeing what these divorced and separated women have in common. In her thesis, she challenges the popular notion that religion is a main determinator of a person’s social position in India. It’s rather being a wife and being in an unequal power relationship with the husband.

The Indian proverb “there are only two castes: men and women” highlights that the inequality between men and women is so enormous that it overpowers differences between the women, Siru Aura writes:

The significance of wifehood in the South Indian environment leads to my suggestion that there is such a thing as a South Indian marital breakdown. Although the women of different religious communities (Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Parsi) each have their own religious personal laws concerning marriage and divorce, they share similarities in their ways of constructing wifehood. Therefore the practical reasons and consequences of marital problems are often similar in different religious groups.
(…)
The women, from the richest to the most impoverished; from the most highly-educated and sophisticated to the most illiterate women; from their various religious backgrounds: all tolerated severe harassment throughout their marriages and their threshold of leaving the marriage was very high.

But as her study shows, more and more women question male domination. They use the cultural and social structures of their society creatively in order to improve their situation - for example by adopting the prestigious family roles of sons or fathers and by the means of legal procedures and public demonstrations and by the other activities of women’s organisations.

The anthropologist thinks that the womens’ activities “could gradually lead to a greater acceptance of divorce as an unfortunate but not unavoidable state of affairs and the abolishment of the stigma attached to divorced or separated women":

I suggest that the transformation of social and kin relations will continue because marital breakdown may become a more common occurrence in Bangalore and even broaden further in South India and consequently the number of love marriages as well as the number of single women will also increase. Despite the importance of wifehood in South India, the conditions of wifehood are changing.

Marital breakdown is an anomaly in South India. In Siru Aura’s view, the focus on the margins of the kinship relations revitalises kinship studies:

It emphasises the importance of looking between the structures and highlights the worth of looking beyond the kinship rules and into the “exceptions” to the rules, which are, as I suggest, as frequent as the rules themselves.

As I have shown, although the exceptions are hard to pin down, they are of great consequence: ignoring them may in fact distort kinship theory. Moreover, this study demonstrates that examining something truly significant in Indian society such as personhood, gender or law, or the interplay between an agent and the structure, leads us to study kinship. This keeps the study of kinship at the heart of anthropology in India and makes the renewal of it an anthropological mission.

>> download the thesis

SEE ALSO:

Chronicles Women’s Social Movements in India

Unmarried Women in Arab Countries: Status No Longer Dependent upon the Husband

China: Where women rule the world and don’t marry

On African Island: Only women are allowed to propose marriage

(via CultureMatters) Prostitution is a fascinating topic and means different things in different parts of the world. In the American Sexuality Magazine, anthropologist Lisa Wynn writes about her difficulties to understand what Egyptians meant when they said “prostitute”.

The article explains why we always have to think out of the box and leave our own preconceptions behind. She writes:

Eventually I realized that the reason I was struggling to understand the concept of a prostitute had everything to do with my own preconceptions about sex and money. I thought of prostitutes as women who had sex for money.

It was not the injection of money into a sexual relationship that defined it as prostitution:

What is involved in defining a prostitute in Egypt, then, is a complex moral judgment about a woman’s social behavior, the number of her sexual partners, the extent to which she submits to familial controls over her social life, and her loyalty to her current romantic partner.

>> read the whole story

Similar points have been made by anthropologist Bjarke Oxlund who conducted research among students at the University of Limpopo in South Africa, see my earlier post An anthropologist on sex, love and AIDS in a university campus in South Africa. Earlier this year, anthropologist Patty Kelly argued for a decriminalization of prostitution.