I haven’t had much time for blogging recently due to preparations for my Lahore-trip. Now I’ll shut off my macbook and head for the airport. I’ll spent one week in Lahore at a journalism conference. More updates after the 10th of February!

By the way, there is a cool website called Metblogs - a network about city focused blogs - there is also a section about Lahore. There is a quite vivid blogging scene there (I actually wanted to write a post about exploring cities via blogs…)

UPDATE (2.3.09): I’ll be back very soon during this week!

LINKS UPDATED 26.10.2023 (text changed, name removed, see comments below) Four anthropologists are among a long list of scholars who in The Guardian call for a boycott of Israel:

We must do what we can to stop Israel from winning its war. Israel must accept that its security depends on justice and peaceful coexistence with its neighbours, and not upon the criminal use of force.

We believe Israel should immediately and unconditionally end its assault on Gaza, end the occupation of the West Bank, and abandon all claims to possess or control territory beyond its 1967 borders. We call on the British government and the British people to take all feasible steps to oblige Israel to comply with these demands, starting with a programme of boycott, divestment and sanctions.

Sarah at Once Upon a Time an Anthropologist Wrote reports about more protests at British Universities in her post How Academic World Reacted Toward the War on Gaza

Maximilian Forte at Open Anthropology has posted more info on boycott activities in Canada and university protests in Britain.

In the US on the other hand 3 students, who protested against Israel’s attacks, were arrested (one of them an anthropologist).

The question of academic boycott was also discussed at a seminar that Thomas Hylland Eriksen organized with his colleages at the research project Culcom. Personally, I am not sure if boycott is the way to go, but I liked the “smart boycott” that political scientist Nils Butenschøn suggested. If you collaborate with Israel you should be sure that the Israeli institution does not discriminate or support acts that breache international law.

What role should academics play in situations like these in Gaza? Theologian Anne Hege Grung said that the conflict is held up by myths. Our job is to deconstruct these myths.

Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper is one of those intellectuals who does exactly that, she said. Last year he arranged a boat trip to Gaza in order to break the Israeli blockade. There, he formulated a message to his fellow Israelis:

(1) Despite what our political leaders say, there is a political solution to the conflict and there are partners for peace. If anything, we of the peace movement must not allow the powers-that-be to mystify the conflict, to present it as a “clash of civilizations.” The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is political and as such it has a political solution;

(2) The Palestinians are not our enemies. In fact, I urge my fellow Israeli Jews to disassociate from the dead-end politics of our failed political leaders by declaring, in concert with Israeli and Palestinian peace-makers: We refuse to be enemies. And

(3) As the infinitely stronger party in the conflict and the only Occupying Power, we Israelis must accept responsibility for our failed and oppressive policies. Only we can end the conflict.

His report of the trip can be read on the blog by Ted Swedenburg, another blogging anthropologist. Swedenburg is professor at the University of Arkansas and editorial committee member of the Middle East Report. He has blogged a lot about the Gaza-conflict.

In an earlier post I’ve mentioned several antropologists who try to do something similar. In a more recent post, Maximilian Forte analyzes and criticizes the myths spread by American media:

So THE WORLD trembles with love at the mere mention of “Obama,” while all those who oppose Israeli genocide and demonstrated against it were “Muslims.” In the meantime, the only real threat to peace is Hamas, and its bottle rockets.

Palestinians, not being white, European, privileged allies of the U.S., unlike Israelis, are less than human, and less than important, except as “obstacles.” All that Israel ever does is respond and get provoked, it never initiates — a pristine white victim of irrational brown people, you can almost hear its maiden-like screams across the white Atlantic.

With “reporting” like this, the media will keep anthropologists in business for a long time to come, as we try to clean up the damage they cause in creating a deranged culture of war and hatred. And it is hatred, a subtle, insidious, and racist hatred that motivates and encourages AP to write the kind of articles about Gaza as it has.

Then, I found a post by Palestinian anthropologist Khalil Nakhleh who concludes:

The only future for us, as an indigenous national minority that can exercise our inherited basic human rights on our land and that can achieve true justice and equality, is to reclaim and re-assert our narrative. (…) Our repossessed narrative cannot be a reinterpretation of our history as a dull shadow of Jewish-Zionist narrative. Our repossessed narrative must be based on the deconstruction of the racist Zionist-Ashkenazi system, which itself is a precondition for such a just solution. The existing Israeli system is, by definition, racist and exclusivist, and it is inherently and structurally incapable of providing justice and genuine equality to my Palestinian people.

Today, Anthropologist Smadar Lavie emailed me a link to her text Sacrificing Gaza to revive Israel’s Labor party. She reminds us of the different groups within the Israeli society and writes that it was mostly was the Mizrahim (Jews with origin in the Arab and Muslim World) who have been hit by the Hamas missiles. The Israeli European elite “imported” them “as a demographic shield against the Arab enemy".

Smadar Lavie has put lots of papers online.

Finally, the anthropologists Kerim Friedman and Kiven Strohm have set up the wikipage “Understanding Gaza”

For more comments by anthropologists see my first posts: Anthropologists on the war on Gaza

A few days ago, Pakistani anthropologist Samar Minallah lauched a “video song", a tribute to little girls in all the regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan where schools are being destroyed, depriving girls of their right to education, The News reports.

The song ‘Allaho: A Lullaby for You, My Daughter’ (both in Dari and Pashto) is one of the first lullabies that have been dedicated to girls according to the news report. Traditionally lullabies are made for sons alone. The new song is “a welcome break from the traditional practice":

The production and launch of the song has acquired an added significance in that hundreds of schools have been burnt down in recent months both in Pakistan and Afghanistan by those who are not ready to allow girl education despite the fact that women constitute almost half of the population of both the neighbouring countries.
(…)
One of the verses in Pashto is: ‘Ookhiyaara sha taleem oka; Da tol jahan tazeem oka; Da khalqo khidmatgaara sha; Har kaar pa lowar tasleem oka’ If translated into English, it means: ‘Become clever and educated; Respect and serve mankind; Ready for the challenges of life; Learning makes the journey of life easy.’

Samar Minallah is a Pukhtun (Pashtun / Pashto) from the North-West Frontier Province who has done her MPhil in Anthropology and Development at the University of Cambridge. She heads Ethnomedia, an organisation in Islamabad that works in the field of media and communications for a social change. She is the winner of Perdita Huston Human Rights Activist Award 2007 for effectively using electronic media to highlight the lives of women in Pakistan.

UPDATE (via pukhtunwomen.org) The video is now availabe on youtube:

Samar Minallah has produced lots of documentaries, among others ‘Swara — A Bridge Over Troubled Waters’. ‘Swara’ is the name of a practice where minor girls are given away as compensation to end disputes between different families. Even swara killings occur. Although officially outlawed in Pakistan, the custom prevails.

In the documentary a “tribal leader” says about one of the swara girls:

“She is the prize of my son’s death and will be treated accordingly, I’ll taunt and humiliate her for she’s the price paid for my son’s death. She’s not part of the family and cannot partake in any rituals or festivities.”

The anthropologist comments:

“Swara is a part of the Pukhtun culture, we are always told it is a noble sacrifice or that the girl is an ambassador of peace. Sadly though, throughout my research, it is clear that the girl that is given away in the name of Swara has very little chances of leading a good life. A custom that so heartlessly forces a girl to suffer for the rest of her life is completely against basic human rights”

The film can be watched online in full length. At first I only found a six minutes introduction and I was not sure if I liked it as it seemed to be a bit essentializing. But in an interesting interview with Damon Lynch, she is more nuanced:

Samar points out that culture is never static. What is seen as a fixed cultural tradition today may have developed over time from an honorable tradition into a profoundly negative one. For instance, a current “traditional” method of dispute resolution involves the payment of a girl to a family that has been wronged. (…)

Historically, Samar believes this tradition involved a girl from one family or village going to another family or village, and returning with gifts, signifying the respect of one family or village for the women of the other. However this practice decayed until it reached its present form. Samar is challenging this practice of dispute resolution in the Supreme Court, hoping to have it declared illegal. (…)

Samar believes that aspects of Pukhtunwali–the ancient code of Pukhtun honor and custom–are good, even as there are other areas in need of reform.

As part of her work, Minallah even produced a talk show for a Pashto television channel, which she hosted. And she persuaded truck and rickshaw owners to paint slogans against Swara, such as “Giving away little girls as compensation is not only inhuman but also un-Islamic” on their vehicles.

She has been present in Pakistani media many times also related to other issues like Da Bajaur Guloona — Homeless at Home. Highlighting the plight of the displaced and Minallah brings out hidden colours of NWFP (North-West Frontier Province)

SEE ALSO:

“Anthropology needs to engage in an activist way”

Criticizes the “apathy of anthropologists toward the human rights situation in the Balochistan Provice in Pakista")

Thesis: The limits of youth activism in Afghanistan

John Postill on media anthropology and internet activism in Malaysia

Do anthropologists have anything relevant to say about human rights?

Chronicles Women’s Social Movements in India

Thesis: How Indian women fight the stigma of divorce

5.11.2022: Some links updated, links to her site ethnomedia.pk removed as the site has been hacked

After 30 months ethnographic fieldwork on Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites, danah boyd has finally completed her PhD-thesis and put it online. Although she is no anthropologist, she seems to have worked like an anthropologist. Her thesis is relevant reading for anybody who is interested in the anthropology of childhood - especially in children’s relations to adults.

For children spend so much time on Facebook or MySpace ("networked publics") partly because they are marginalized in their society by adults, she explains in the concluding chapter:

One of the most notable shifts I observed in the structural conditions of today’s teens, compared to those of earlier decades, involves their limited opportunities for unregulated, unstructured social interaction.
(…)
When asked, teens consistently reported that they would prefer to socialize in physical spaces without constant parental oversight. Given that this is not an option for many of them and that many have more access to networked publics than to unmediated public spaces, social network sites are often an accepted alternative.
(…)
Their desire to connect with others is too frequently ignored or disregarded, creating a context in which many must become creative in making space for maintaining connections outside the control of adults. (…) Through the use of technology, teens are able to socialize with others from inside the boundaries of their homes. This presents new freedoms for teens, but it also provokes new fears among adults.

The teen years are marked by an interest in building new connections and socializing broadly. Online-activites are extensions of offline-activites. Teens’ engagement with social network sites reveals a continuation of earlier practices inflected in new ways, she writes.

My findings show that teens are drawn to social media collectively and that individuals choose to participate because their friends do. The appeal is not the technology itself—nor any particular technology— but the presence of friends and peers.

boyd draws many interesting parallels and comparisons:

Baudelaire’s Parisian flâneur enters the public to see and be seen. Teenagers approach publics in a similar vain. Like the flâneur, teens use fashion to convey information about their identities.
(…)
Teens have long struggled to find a place for themselves; they have consistently formed counterpublics within broader structures. Yet when they do, adults typically demonize them, the identity markers they use, and the publics they co-opt. The demonization of MySpace is akin to the demonization of malls and parking lots that took place when I was growing up.

The inability to access publics is an explicit reminder of teens’ marginalized position within society according to danah boyd:

When well-intentioned parents limit access to publics out of fear of potential dangers, they fail to provide their children with the tools to transition into adult society. This may have other unexpected consequences, including isolating teens from political life and curbing their civic engagement. I believe that the practice of maximum control and restrictions infantilizes teenagers, making them more dependent on or resentful of adults and adult society.
(…)
In learning how to make sense of publics that are different from those with which their parents are comfortable, teenagers reveal valuable techniques for interpreting and reworking publics. Their experiences provide valuable insight for understanding how publics are transformed by structural forces.
(…)
The key is for adults, and society more broadly, to engage with these issues and help guide teens in making healthy decisions that allow them to leverage social media in positive ways as part of their everyday lives.

>> download the thesis via danah boyd’s blog

Her thesis reminded me of Mari Rysst’s thesis on the (presumed) “sexualisation of childhood” and the notion of the “pure childhood".

I’ve only read the last chapter of boyd’s thesis.

By the way: As a famous blogger, danah boyd’s blog post on her thesis has received more than 40 comments within two days. Furthermore, there a numerous blog posts about her thesis already.

SEE ALSO:

Ethnographic Study: Social Websites Important For Childhood Development

Ethnographic study: Social network sites are “virtual campfires”

Ethnographic research on Friendster’s online communities

Cyberanthropology: “Second Life is their only chance to participate in religious rituals”

Danah Boyd on Open Access: “Boycott locked-down journals”

Heard of the Sudan Open Archive? Already taken a look at the recent anthropology papers of the University of Pretoria? Many universities in Africa have set up digital libraries, repositories for papers and theses that are freely accessible for everybody.

Here is a short overview over some repositories that also feature anthropology or anthropology related papers in English.

Sudan Open Archive

The Ethnography and Linguistics section of the Sudan Open Archive (SOA) includes papers like Report of The Field Research in Lafon, Eastern Equatoria State: Assessment of the General Conditions and Livelihoods of The Pari People by Eisei Kurimoto or “Presentation on Customary Mediation in the Sudan: Past, Present and Future” by Adam Al Zain Mohammed.

There are comprehensive sections on Conflict and Peace. There are lots of scanned older publications like the 1987-study The Dhein Massacre: Slavery in the Sudan by Ushari Ahmed Mahmud and Ushari Ahmed Ali Baldo.

University of Zimbabwe

There is no anthropology department at the University of Zimbabwe, but a department of sociology. Among the six papers we find Anatomy of Alterity: Instrumental Identies Among the San in Zimbabwe by Gillian Chomutare and Elias Madzudo and Revival of Indigenous Food Security Strategies at the Village Level: The Human Factor Implications by Claude. G Mararike.

The Institute of Development Studies has published several papers, among them Plight of children in conflict and post - conflict societies: the case of Africa and Africa and Globalisation Revisited by Donald Chimanikire.

SOUTH AFRICA

We’ll find much more anthropology papers and theses at South African universities.

Rhodes University

The anthropology section in the Rhodes eResearch Repository consists of five items. The most recent ones are the master’s theses The resurgence of tuberculosis in South Africa: an investigation into socio-economic aspects of the disease in a context of structural violence in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape by Ida Erstad and The rural-urban interface : the ambiguous nature of informal settlements, with special reference to the Daggafontein settlement in Gauteng by Sibongiseni Kumalo.

University of Johannesburg

There are 14 items in the Anthropology & Development Studies section, among them An analysis of the livelihoods of the Muyexe community located along the Kruger National Park in Limpopo Province by Mkhacani Makamu and Livelihood activities in female-headed households: Letlhakane village by Mamedupe Maggie Kgatshe.

University of Pretoria

7 anthropology papers, for example End of culture? Some directions for anthropology at the University of Pretoria by John Sharp and How equal is equal? A legal-anthropological note on the status of African women in South Africa by J.C. Bekker and C.C.Boonzaaier

University of Western Cape

6 papers by the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, among others Positive Muslims: a critical analysis of Muslim AIDS activism in relation to women living with HIV/AIDS in Cape Town by Abdul Kayum Ahmed and A critical analysis of the effects of tourism on cultural representation: a case study from Leboeng by Masete Mamadi.

University of Witwatersrand

Searching for anthropology gives five hits as for example The silence of colonial melancholy : The Fourie collection of Khoisan ethnologica by Ann Wanless

There are of course more depositories. My selection is based on the overview at http://www.opendoar.org - a website Peter Suber at Open Access News mentioned recently.

In October, Suber pointed to an article on Open Access in Africa that was discussed at Sciencebase.

SEE ALSO:

The resurgence of African anthropology

“Focalizar o que é comum aos seres humanos” / Open Access Anthropology in Brasil

Book and papers online: Working towards a global community of anthropologists

How can we create a more plural anthropological community?

Why open access?

Tight jeans and short tops for seven year-old girls? When anthropologist Mari Rysst was out shopping clothes for her then seven year-old daughter she - to her dismay - mostly found clothes which imitated the teenage look. Seven years later she published her doctoral thesis “I want to be me. I want to be kul” An anthropological study of Norwegian preteen girls in the light of a presumed ‘disappearance’ of childhood.

In the introduction Rysst explains:

This study aims to explore gender constructions, sexuality and peer relationships among preteen Norwegian girls in the light of a presumed “disappearance” of childhood. The focus is on whether girls’ everyday lives are affected by what is currently expressed as the “sexualisation of childhood”. The sexualization of childhood forms part of the wider preoccupation that “childhood” is disappearing, as inferred by the above quotation.

But these fears seem to be exaggerated, she concludes:

By doing participant observation over a two year period in two school settings in Oslo, I concluded that the sexualisation of childhood exists in their social contexts and wider milieu, but does not dominate their overall everyday practices and mixed- gender relationships. These are still filled with sports activities and different forms of both traditional and particular play.

Most importantly, the ultimate indication of any (senior) sexualisation, how they “do love”, still qualifies as variants of “play”, not as older heterosexual practices. This is so because the love relationships are performed according to strict norms or rules. In the first place, they are directed and followed up by the peer community. In the second place, they are a collective rather than a private affair, and lastly, they include a minimum of physical intimacy. (…) The study shows how the subject positions of the kul and of girlfriend/boyfriend did not relate to images of the sexy before the peer group had reached puberty (being aware of individual exceptions).

The notion of the “pure childhood” is,she writes, rather Western - and paradoxical:

Understanding children and childhood in developmental terms has so far meant that children have to be protected from the “evils” of adult society (sex, drugs and violence) in order to become healthy adults. In particular, the positive potential of children can only be realized if they are not “spoiled” (too early) by the “impure” adult world.

In this lies a moral paradox: The ideal, pure childhood is not to involve a preparation for what children will inevitably be confronted with as youths and adults. The paradox is historically and culturally specific, having its roots in the Enlightenment and Rousseau’s perception of children as “pure” or “innocent” (Ariés 1962, James, Jenks and Prout 1998).

>> download the thesis

Mari Rysst has been several times in Norwegian media, see among others my post in Norwegian Doktorgrad: Barn mer opptatt av tauhopping enn G-streng

SEE ALSO:

Transforming the Anthropology of Childhood - Anthropology News April

New book critizises ethnographic methods in market research on children

“We want children to be their own ethnographers”

Anthropologist calls for a greater appreciation of child labor

Technologies of the Childhood Imagination- new text by anthropologist Mizuko Ito

Ethnographic Study: Social Websites Important For Childhood Development

In the new issue of American Ethnography, we’ll find these words by anthropologist Martin Hoyem:

Artists, like ethnographers, train their eyes to see things other people don’t see. They try to present what they see so that we, the audience, can glimpse something where we have looked a thousand times and failed to find anything noteworthy.

He continues:

“Nothing exists until or unless it is observed,” wrote William Burroughs, in his 1992 Painting & Guns. (…) “An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it ‘creative observation’. Creative viewing.”

Anthropologists as creative viewers? Sounds good! The January issue includes two articles on the similarities and differences between artists and social scientists. In his article on Robert Frank’s famous photo book “The Americans”, Hoyem quotes anthropology professor Jay Ruby who wrote:

“Frank’s The Americans is a fundamental text. While he did behave like a field worker he knew nothing about ethnography. His contribution to photography was the virtual invention of a photographic narrative. Few have been able to equal it and in many ways it should be a model for ethnographic photographers to follow.”

>> read the whole article “This, upon reading The Americans”

>> Howard Becker: “Photography and Sociology” (republished from Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication, 1974).

SEE ALSO:

New e-zine: American Ethnography

The anthropology of nudity: New issue of American Ethnography Quasimonthly

Manga instead of scientific paper: How art enriches anthropology

Connecting Art and Anthropology

Photography as research tool: More engaged Kurdish anthropology

Anthropology, photography and racism

Xenophobia in South Africa, labour mobility and economic development, minorities’ integration, representation of refugees and forced migrants in the British Economy are some of the topics in the most recent issue of Journal of Identity and Migration Studies.

The journal was founded a bit more than a year ago by The Research Centre for Identity and Migration Issues (RCIMI) at the University of Oradea in Romania. It was recently added to the Directory of Open Acces Journals.

It is an interdisciplinary journal on one of the most popular topics for anthropologists. So far, no anthropologists have contributed to it, though.

>> visit the journal’s website