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I’m off to Germany on a short holiday (by train). I’ll resume blogging again after the 14.5.08

In his post Not only freedom: the dark ethnic side of the Tibetan Buddhist revolt, anthropologist Gabriele Marranci challenges mainstream images of Tibetans as peaceful and writes about Tibetan racism, ethno-nationalistic dreams, and attacks against muslims in Tibet.

Both the mass media, academics, and even anthropologists specialised in Tibetan Buddhism, have hidden what Marranci calls the ‘dark ethnic side’ of the revolt.

The Muslims in Tibet have been the target of Buddhist Tibetan violence for some time now, especially since 9/11. During the recent protests in Tibet there were anti-muslim attacks:

The mosque in Lhasa was burnt and destroyed, shops and the possessions of Muslim Tibetans smashed, a family burned alive in their own shop, terror and terrorism have affected this community because of a pernicious form of ethnic (Buddhist) nationalism

Marranci points to the paper Close Encounters of an Inner Asian Kind: Tibetan-Muslim co-existence and conflict in Tibet past and present by Andrew Fischer. According to Fischer, the tensions are primarily the cause of ‘economic’ differences and opportunities:

During the 1990s Ethnic Tibetan Buddhist started to fear that the economic success of Muslim Tibetans (particularly their restaurants and shops), would have undermined the economic, and so social, status of the Buddhist Tibetans. The Buddhist monks began a campaign against the economic activities of Tibetan Muslims, which epitomised in the 2003 boycott of Muslims’ businesses and saw also violent actions against innocent Muslim Hui families

Marranci writes:

Since the beginning of the revolt in March, demonstrations against China are held in all those countries through which the Olympic torch is passing. From the politicians, to the public, from Hollywood to Bollywood, from the scholars (with few exceptions) to the students, from the Trade Unions to the Industrial associations: all show indignation against the ‘oppression of the Chinese government’. Yet they ignore the dark side of this ‘revolt’ which is not so different from that in 2003.
(…)
Meanwhile monks and lamas are just stoking the fire in the hope of not just a free Tibet but also an ethnically clean one!

>> read the whole post on Marranci’s blog

SEE ALSO:

The special thing about the Tibet protests

Articles on Biometrics, US Refugee policy, children’s migration, transnational students, challenges of multi-sited ethnography and more can be found in the most recent issue of Anthropology News May, a publication by the American Anthropological Association (AAA).

16 articles can be downloaded!

Additionally, we find a photo essay and a photo gallery (Anthropology News is on flickr!)

>> visit Anthropology News

UPDATE: See also Maximilian Forte’s comments on the article about multisited ethnography

Why did religions evolve? According to anthropologist Maurice Bloch, there is nothing special with religion. It’s just a product of human imagination - in the same way as nations are, Bloch writes in an article to be published in June, the New Scientist informs.

The development of religion is dependent on the development of imagination. We had to evolve the necessary brain architecture to imagine things and beings that don’t physically exist, and the possibility that people somehow live on after they’ve died, Bloch argues according to New Scientist:

Once we’d done that, we had access to a form of social interaction unavailable to any other creatures on the planet. Uniquely, humans could use what Bloch calls the “transcendental social” to unify with groups, such as nations and clans, or even with imaginary groups such as the dead. The transcendental social also allows humans to follow the idealised codes of conduct associated with religion.

“What the transcendental social requires is the ability to live very largely in the imagination,” Bloch writes.

“One can be a member of a transcendental group, or a nation, even though one never comes in contact with the other members of it,” says Bloch. Moreover, the composition of such groups, “whether they are clans or nations, may equally include the living and the dead.”

(…)

“Once we realise this omnipresence of the imaginary in the everyday, nothing special is left to explain concerning religion,” he says.

>> read the whole story in the New Scientist

Bloch has recently been interviewed in Vikerkaar / Eurozine and was presented as an anti-anthropologist: “It may well be that anthropology departments disappear, and that wouldn’t bother me very much", he said.

UPDATE Maximilian Forte has written a summary of the interview with Bloch, see Maurice Bloch: “Reluctant Anthropologist” or “Anti-Anthropologist”?

See also the tutorial Anthropology and Religion

Anthropologist Martin Høyem has launched the e-zine “American Ethnography”, an “internet glossy on the study of cultures":

We cover ethnography that relates to anything we would call America. We aim to present the tradition and practice of ethnography to people who didn’t know they could be intrigued by ethnography. The goal is to help increase the interest in how we all try to understand unfamiliar cultures. This, we think, could do the world good.

As he writes to me in an email, “it’s pretty new, so there isn’t a lot of material there yet, and most of what is there is old public domain texts (previously not freely available to the general public).” Most of the texts were previously published in the journal American Anthropologist.

Around twelve articles are online already, including portraits of some famous anthropologists and texts about the peyote-cult - a cactus that was eaten in rituals of native Indians. The most recent issue contains articles about race and tambourine juggling. Looks interesting!

>> visit American Ethnography

Høyem has previously written a thesis about American Lowrider Culture called I want my car to look like a whore. Lowriding and poetics of outlaw aesthetics, see also my post about the thesis: When Norwegians do business in Brazil, Lowrider Culture and 9 more anthropology theses.

Høyem is currently working at Pacific Ethnography - anthropology and design

UPDATE: The discussion about American Ethnography and copyright issues is continuing over at Savage Minds, see American Ethnography, the AAA, and the Public Domain

Our fellow anthro-blogger Martijn de Koning was awarded his doctorate at the Free University of Amsterdam last week.

In his Ph.D. thesis he shows how Islam has become the most important frame of reference for Moroccan-Dutch youth to reflect upon who they are and what they want to be.

In the late 1990s, the general perception was that young muslims were turning away from their religion. But things went differently, he says in an interview with Radio Netherlands. Young Dutch Moroccans are increasingly turning to their religion.

According to Martijn de Koning this is a direct result of the current polarisation of the debate on Islam:

Even before 9/11 there was already an increase in interest for religion among young Moroccans. But once the debate on Islam flared up, their interest increased enormously. They were continually asked about their Muslim identity; not just by the media, but also by school mates and teachers and by people at their sports club. They started looking into Islam so that they could answer these questions.

These group of young Muslims searched for an identity with which they could distinguish themselves from Dutch society as well as from their parents:

They wanted a pure Islam, without compromise. Not an Islam that had been watered down because they happened to live in the Netherlands. Nor did they want an Islam peppered with Moroccan traditions.

The Islam they found was not the traditional type from Morocco. They found their answers on the Internet in the conservative, Saudi-Arabian version called Salafism, the anthropologist says:

It is a form of Islam with clear rules, which makes a clear distinction between good and evil. An Islam which is stricter and more orthodox than that of the older generation, but nevertheless seemed to provide better answers to their complicated lives in modern Dutch society.

>> read the whole story in Radio Netherlands

>> visit his blog (in both Dutch and English)

Interestingly, researchers in Norway came to similar conclusions, for example anthropologist Christine M. Jacobsen - see Doctoral thesis: Towards a transnational Islam and the culture historian Liv Bjørnhaug Johansen - see Moving toward a Cultureless Islam

“Few students of anthropology probably can tell you who Germaine is despite the fact that she has been one of the anthropologists who have contributed not only to the understanding of the Mediterranean region, particularly North Africa, but also to the freedom of Europe from the nightmare of fascism and Nazism", anthropologist Gabriele Marranci writes in his post In memory of the anthropologist Germaine Tillion.

Germaine Tillion died on Saturday at the age of 100. Her resistance against injustice and inhuman treatment, Marranci writes, never ceased despite her age. Recently, starting from her experience in Algeria under the French occupation, she had condemned the use of torture in Iraq and the ‘CIA secret prisons’ as part of the Bush administration’s so-called ‘war against terror’.

>> read the whole obituary

See also the Reuters article French resistance hero Germaine Tillion dies at 100 and Tillion’s website (in French) where also the picture is taken from.

The collaboration between the U.S. military and anthropologists has been criticized for both political and ethical reasons. According to a recent article in Newsweek, the whole project could end as a fiasco: The implementation of the $40 million project has fallen short, according to more than a dozen people involved in the program that were interviewed by Newsweek.

Recruitment appears to have been mishandled from the start, with administrators offering positions to even marginally qualified applicants:

Several team members say they were accepted after brief phone interviews and that their language skills were never tested. As a result, instead of top regional experts, the anthropologists sent to Iraq include a Latin America specialist and an authority on Native Americans. One is writing his Ph.D. dissertation on America’s goth, punk and rave subcultures.
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Of 19 Human Terrain members operating in five teams in Iraq, fewer than a handful can be described loosely as Middle East experts, and only three speak Arabic. The rest are social scientists or former GIs who (…) are transposing research skills from their unrelated fields at home.
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Most team members admit they are hampered by an inability to conduct real fieldwork in a war zone. Some complain that the four-month training they underwent in the States was often a waste of time.

Matt Tompkins, who returned home in January after five months in Iraq, said he thought his team provided helpful input to its brigade, but the contribution was more superficial than planners of the program had conceived. “Without the ability to truly immerse yourself in the population, existing knowledge of the culture … is critical,” he said in an e-mail. “Lacking that, we were basically an open-source research cell.”

Actually, language skills and the fact that you have been to Iran to attend academic conferences can make you suspicious - as it was the case with Zenia Helbig, a 31-year-old doctoral student at the University of Virginia with a concentration in Islamic studies and proficiency in both Farsi and Arabic. She had according to Newsweek one of the more impressive résumés of all the recruits.

She says:

“The running joke was that I was clearly a spy and the only question was which country I worked for.”

The articles continues:

The banter turned ugly when, over beers one night, team members began speculating whether the U.S. military would eventually be called on to invade Iran. In the jocular spirit of the moment, Helbig made what she now describes as a careless remark: “I said, ‘OK, if we invade Iran, that’s where I draw the line, hop the border and switch sides’.” In an academic setting, the comment might not have been particularly shocking. Her supervisors settled for a rebuke. But an officer in the program complained to security officials at Fort Leavenworth whose investigation led to her dismissal.

>> read the whole story in Newsweek

According to Wire, “Human Terrain Teams are hopping mad about the Newsweek article” and anthropologist Montgomery McFate, one of the main architects of the human terrain teams, wrote a lengthy response >> read the letter

UPDATE: The American Anthropological Association (AAA) has also responded to the Newsweek article. >> read the letter to the editor on AAAs website

Furthermore, Maximilian Forte has written several related posts recently, see Reviewing the AAA’s Report on Anthropology and the Military and American Anthropologists against Counterinsurgency: Part Two.

SEE ALSO:

The dangerous militarisation of anthropology

Anthropology and CIA: “We need more awareness of the political nature and uses of our work”

Protests against British research council: “Recruits anthropologists for spying on muslims”

Oppose participation in counter-insurgency! Network of Concerned Anthropologists launched

Savage Minds: The Fate of McFate - Anthropology’s Relationship with the Military Revisited

“Tribal Iraq Society” - Anthropologists engaged for US war in Iraq

Military spies invade anthropology conferences?

“Arabs and Muslims should be wary of anthropologists”

San Jose: American Anthropologists Stand Up Against Torture and the Occupation of Iraq and AAA Press Release: Anthropologists weigh in on Iraq, torture at annual meeting

“War on terror": CIA sponsers anthropologists to gather sensitive information / see also debate on this on Savage Minds

Two Books Explore the Sins of Anthropologists Past and Present