If you need anthropological perspectives on the US-election Obama-McCain, you’ll find them in the new issue of Anthropology News. One of the articles is about a study on voting, politicial participation and citizenship among individuals with psychiatric disability.

Many Americans are excluded from voting. Anthropologist Sara M. Bergstresser is conducting the study, using a “community-based participatory research framework". She writes:

The stigma of mental illness underlies taken-for-granted assumptions about some citizens’ ability to participate in the electoral process. Public discourse about disability in general, and psychiatric disability in particular, often retains historically- conditioned, biologized models of deviance and moral worth, questioning whether these individuals deserve to participate politically. Such assumptions share their origins with rhetoric that has accompanied many other social barriers to voting throughout the history of the US.
(…)
Taken-for-granted concerns about “capacity” to vote may well tell us more about societal levels of stigma than about individual neurological deficiency.
(…)
Just as health disparities have become an important focus of research in the United States, disability-linked disparities in social and political participation should also be brought to the attention of policymakers and researchers.

>> read the whole article (pdf)

PS: I realize I haven’t seen that the October Anthropology News was about the Global Food crisis!

Girls wear makeup, go with their hair uncovered, drink, have boyfriends and premarital sex: For seven years, anthropologist Pardis Mahdavi has studied the sexual revolution in Iran, the Ventura Country Star reports.

Those actions could have brought harsh punishment and even jail time in the past. But now the sheer numbers of young people overwhelm the morality police, who must often turn a blind eye on offenders, she said during a lecture.

Many parents are onboard with the changes:

Before 2002, women could not wear open-toe shoes, and then suddenly women began to openly defy the law, and you saw many, many women wearing sandals and flip-flops without any recrimination. I think they wear red lipstick just to irritate authority.

Ian Chesley has reviewed her book “Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution”:

Several of Mahdavi’s research subjects reported that by the summer of 2007, their parents considered premarital dating normal and acceptable. And while a parent in the US might be mortified by having to bail out their child from jail after an arrest at a rowdy party, some of Mahdavi’s adults happily come to their children’s rescue and forego any punishment of their own.

Mahdavi also writes of several parties put on by parents for their children and friends, and the parents come out looking more unrestrained than the younger generation. This observation is probably the most startling in the entire book: the fact that the older generation has begun to consider social behaviors as a form of protest against governmental restrictions is a clear piece of evidence that behavioral fashions are spreading to new segments of the population, beyond the young, wealthy and secular.

He writes that “the most startling and groundbreaking aspect of Mahdavi’s book is her description of the activities of young Iranians behind their bedroom doors. Not only are the book’s subjects frank and honest about their own liberal attitudes to sex, they have even provided Mahdavi with direct access to a group-sex party.

>> read the review i Gozaar

Mahdavi, who is a trained medical anthropologist and Del Jones Award Winner, adds that the sexual revolution has its problematic aspects:

I started this project looking at things from a public health standpoint — what about sex education, HIV, sexually transmitted diseases? The public health aspect is alarming. There is much premarital sex, but no sex education in schools, and almost all sex is unprotected. A condom can’t be purchased without proof of marriage. The young are largely uninformed about the risks of sex.

>> read the whole story in the Ventura County Star

>> Daily Sundial: Iranian youth continue sexual revolution against government

UPDATES:

Laura Secor has written a long review in The Nation (15.12.08)

The book was reviewed in The Australian (22.11.08)

Violet Blue sees similarities to white American evangelical teens (31.10.08)

SEE ALSO:

Weblogs are sweeping the political and social landscape of Iran

Anthropologist explores heavy metal in Asia, South America and the Middle East

Lila Abu-Lughod: It’s time to give up the Western obsession with veiled Muslim women

Chronicles Women’s Social Movements in India

When, why and how are individuals moved by a piece of art in a museum or gallery? How can art change people’s lives? Anthropologist Sandra Dudley, and neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga will develop a new, interdisciplinary approach to the perception of gallery art according to a press release.

The anthropologist explains:

What we’re studying is a basic level of human experience of the material and visual world. It doesn’t always happen that an individual will feel the wow factor when they look at a piece of art in a museum, but it does happen sometimes. What causes that? Why does certain art appeal to certain people? What lasting impact does it have on their lives?
(…)
(The study) will inform how galleries are laid out, how art is contextualised. Potentially, there are big implications in how this research may change practice.

Rodrigo Quian Quiroga adds:

It will be interesting from a scientific angle too. What makes people interested in a particular piece of art in a gallery? Is it lighting? The surrounding environment? Previous information? How will they explore this art, or will they just pass by and miss it? For me, from a neuroscience point of view, this is very interesting.

The two researchers work together with the Art Fund. Director David Barrie says:

The Art Fund firmly believes that art can really change people’s lives: that’s at the heart of everything we do. But it’s very hard to prove. My hope is that this pioneering piece of work will be the start of a much wider programme of research which will, over time, help us to understand just how art can exercise its power over us. Maybe then it won’t be so hard to persuade our political leaders to invest in it!

Dudley’s research has previously led her to spend a year in a jungle refugee camp on the Thai-Burma border:

It may sound a long way from gallery art, but my work there shares the same focus on human experience of, and aesthetic response to, the material world.

Quian Quiroga is known for his research on how the brain responds to images.


The project will combine participant observation and interviews with the use of an eye tracker. Quian Quiroga explaines:

When you look at something, you don’t see it as a whole. Your eyes are continually moving, gazing at a tiny portion of the visual field, and the picture is reconstructed in your brain. From the eye tracker we can infer exactly what you’re looking at. Then we can reconstruct the signal and see exactly how people look at different pieces of art.

The research project is part of the ‘Beyond Text’ initiative by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

>> read the whole press release

SEE ALSO:

Social Neuroscience - Psychologists neuroscientists and anthropologists together

Neuroanthropology: “Different cultures produce different brains”

Neuroanthropology.net - neuroanthropology blog

Connecting Art and Anthropology

Contemporary art from Africa is branching out in radical ways

Ricksha art as political indicator in Bangladesh

Are muslim communities getting more sceptical towards anthropologists? In an interview with Phnom Pen Post, anthropologist Bjørn Blengsli tells about his research among muslims in Cambodia - “one of the fastest-changing Muslim societies in the world".

After September 11, he got arrested and expelled from the village and the district. He was accused of being one of “60 identified CIA spies". (After a letter from the Ministry of Religion and meetings with undersecretaries of state, he could continue his research.)

Furthermore, Blengsli is concerned about reports of certain researchers who have pretended to convert to Islam in order to gain the confidence of Muslim informants. Muslims consider such people hypocrites, or munafiq - one who is more dangerous to Muslims than the enemies of Islam, he says. “I am afraid that this kind of devious behavior will negatively impact legitimate researchers in the future.”

Blengsli is especially interested in religious change and the impact of foreign donors on religious schooling. He found out that the schools’ religious content is closely linked to the type of religion practiced in the donor countries - often conservative Arab countries. Islamic schooling has led to a “growing sympathy for fundamentalist understandings of the faith and terrorism".

In his opinion, secular education should be implemented in all Muslim schools:

The secular education among Muslims is still low when compared to that of the Khmer, with Muslim girls most disadvantaged in their pursuit of secular education. Increased knowledge not only about the Khmer society, but also the different sects within Islam is also imperative. As many as 99 percent of Muslim religious students believe there is only one correct interpretation of their religion and this is extremely dangerous.

>> read the whole interview

Earlier, he told Arab News:

In Cambodia … religious activists from the Arab world are arriving with a new view on religion and they preach an austere version of Islam. These organizations want to purify Cham Islamic practice by getting rid of the many influences from Buddhism.

He was also interviewed by the New York Times. He said:

‘This country is ripe for Muslim missionaries. They had to start all over again. They had no religious leaders, nothing. They lost almost everything – their script, their rituals, almost all their written material. They were left with a couple of myths. That’s why today a purification movement is so easy. They are very vulnerable, and a lot of people are coming into Cambodia and telling them how to change.

But he added that ‘’being fundamentalist does not mean being a terrorist.'’ And ‘’If you have radical, militant Muslims living in Cambodia, I have not seen any proof.'’

SEE ALSO:

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

“Arabs and Muslims should be wary of anthropologists”

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

Religious divide grows amid Thai unrest

Doctoral Thesis: Is Islam Compatible with Secularism?

Islam in Morocco: TV and Internet more important than mosques

(LINKS UPDATED 20.5.2022) When George Marcus, one of the most influential anthropologists, was in Oslo recently, I asked him what he thinks about Open access. His answer surprised me. “Journals? Who cares?", he replied. There is in his opinion little original thinking in journals, there are no longer exciting debates. “Maybe it’s because I’m getting older", he said. “I don’t care.” He explained that “journals are meant to establish people", to advance careers.

George Marcus offered similar pessimistic views in an interview in the journal Cultural Anthropology (subscription needed) in spring. Among other things, he said, that there are “no new ideas in anthropology".

Maximilian Forte at Open Anthropology does not agree with Marcus and summarizes parts of the interview in his post George Marcus: “No New Ideas” (2.0) & the After-Life of Anthropology (1.1)

I mentioned Forte’s critique. Marcus replied “Of course Forte does not agree. Younger anthropologists are interested in progress and new ideas.”

Additionally, Marcus explained me his vision of the anthropologist as collaborator. Anthropologists should not study other people, but work together with them, and treat them as co-researcher. Nowadays, our informants may be interested in the same questions as the anthropologst, and they might even have studied anthropology as well. Marcus wrote an experimental book about the nobility in Portugal called Ocasião: The Marquis and the Anthropologist, A Collaboration.

George Marcus talkes about these issues in another interview in the Open Access journal After Culture, see Elise McCarthy, Valerie A. Olson: After Writing Culture: an interview with George Marcus.

See also the website of the Center of Ethnography that he has established and the website of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory where there are lots of papers, among others Marcus’ Notes on the Contemporary Imperative to Collaborate, the Traditional Aesthetics of Fieldwork That Will Not Be Denied, and the Need for Pedagogical Experiment in the Transformation of Anthropology’s Signature Method - check also the 2020 update

George Marcus is best known for the books Writing Culture (edited together with James Clifford) and “Anthropology as a cultural critique” (written together with Michael Fischer)

For those of you who can read Norwegian, there’s an article by me on George Marcus here.

UPDATE: Peter Suber (Open access news) comments:

Did this transcript miss something or did George Marcus miss something? Even if we concede for the sake of argument that there are no new ideas in the field of anthropology, and that journals are more about advancing careers than advancing research, Marcus’ answer was not responsive. Apparently he thinks OA is all about journals, which it isn’t. It’s all about access, which may be through journals or repositories or many other vehicles (like wikis, ebooks, multimedia webcasts, P2P networks, RSS feeds…). It’s as if someone had asked, “What do you think about freedom of speech?” and he answered, “Public speaking? Who cares? It’s all grandstanding and vanity.”

Good point! I have to admit that Marcus was very busy and did not have much time for this interview - and I had lots of questions! We talked just a few minutes on Open Access while we we took the subway from the city up to the university campus at Blindern. He said he admires Chris Kelty’s work on open source and open access, but he does not seem to be up to date in regard to blogging, web2.0 etc (few anthropologists actually are, and most anthropologists have never heard of the Open Access movement)

ANOTHER UPDATE Dorothea Salo does not agree with Peter Suber. Yes, its about journals, she writes.

What is it we’re asking faculty to self-archive? Theses and dissertations, yes; (…) If we weren’t talking about the journal literature, why would repository-rats get so much flak (…) when we take in other things?

So follow Dr. Marcus’s train of thought here: if the journal literature isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, why would he waste time fighting for open access to it? There’s a lot to fight for in the world!

Interesting comment by Chris Kelty on journals:

I think George is right that journals are not where the action is—- and this is related to why I and others are so passionate about open access. Journals are increasingly getting slower, more clogged with submissions, finding it difficult to get reviewers, cash strapped and so on. And at the same time, getting published in a “good” journal (i.e. one with “prestige”) is getting more and more important for people who want permanent jobs in the academy.

the result is that the interesting debates and discussions have moved elsewhere… in some fields (though not anthropology, I fear) they have moved online and into the blogosphere. In others (anthropology I fear) they have retreated into departments and enclaves of other sorts, or have produced and increased sense of alienation from things.

AAA Creates “Open Access” to Anthropological Research announced the American Anthropological Association two weeks ago. But in reality, open access is only granted to two journals (American Anthropologist and Anthropology News) and to articles that are at least 35 years old!

AAAs move has received mixed reactions as Peter Suber’s Open Access News and Inside Higher Ed summarize.

Is it a first step as Alex Golub suggests or is it rather a way to avoid discussions about actual Open Access as Alexandre Enkerli argues?

Will AAAs recent move lead to greater divisions between the AAA and anthropologists who want to engage with the wider world by making their research more accessible online?

Additionally, the AAA has announced that they are going to conduct preliminary research on the economic issues faced by scholarly society publishers in the humanities and social sciences as consequence of the demand for open access to their peer reviewed journals, Culture Matters informs.

Until now, the AAA has opposed Open Access to journal articles.

More than 80% of all anthropology open access journals are published outside of the U.S, as Maximilian Forte has found out.

As last year, the Savage Minds bloggers are going to promote the Open Access issue at the annual meeting of the AAA. Chris Kelty writes:

Ergo, I am hereby inaugurating an independent awards show to be performed at the AAA. I’m willing to organize it this year, if others are willing to help out (please!?). Nothing too extravagant or long, I’m thinking a guerrilla ceremony in the lobby. I’ll need people to hold the signs, act as paparazzi, maybe a little musical act before and after… and especially: NOMINATIONS. Post them here, or email me (ckelty at ucla etc ). I’m not sure what the prizes will be yet, but they will be good, I promise.

These are the categories I’ve come up with so far:

1. most excellent (and second most excellent) open access article in anthropology or associated disciplines, 2007-8. open access = green, gold, self-archived or institutional repository.

2. most excellent open access teaching materials 2007-8. Syllabus, teaching materials, assessment ideas, technologies or tools, ideas for teaching.

3. most excellent idea for making anthropology public.

4. most (or least?) excellent new theoretical fad.

5. most excellent anthropology blog (SM recuses itself, naturally).

6. most excellent business plan idea for the AAA.

7. most excellent award category not listed here.

>> more at Savage Minds

As the Open Acess Anthropology blog, I forgot that the 14th of october was the Open Access Day

I have installed a new bulletin board for job announcements and call for papers. Announcements are now easier accessible.

Until now, I’ve posted announcements in one of the forums. Apart from the German forum, the forums haven’t been a huge success, so I am considering closing them and concentrate on announcements instead (I often receive emails where I am asked to put announcements on the antropologi.info website).

There are two ways of publishing announcements:

1) send them to me

2) register (takes 10 seconds) and do it yourself.

So take a look at the new announcement site and tell me if it looks okay. I’ll integrate the bulletin board into the site afterwards.

(Norwegian version) In the reality program «Den store reisen» (Ticket to the tribes), a Norwegian family moved in with Waorani-indians in Banemo, Ecuador. The TV-pictures show people who go naked and live “primitively". What the TVstation NRK fails to mention, is that they pay the Indians to take off their western clothes during filming, the magazine Ny Tid (New Times) reports.

NRK wanted to present the Indians as more different from Norwegians as they in reality are.

Many anthropologists criticized the program. One of them is Laura Rival from the Centre for International Development at Oxford University. She has studied the Waorani tribe since 1989 and was in the village of Banemo when the Belgian version of the series was recorded:

The Waorani take their clothes off just for these programmes. I know them. They never walk around naked in groups any longer, it’s only for tourists and reality shows.

There were too many modern elements that disturbed things in the village where they really live.

These programmes are built on the same ideas that the west has had for 400-500 years: find the last people in the wild and live with them. The TV companies are only interested in recreating western myths. This is very patronising and gives a false idea of their differences.”

NRK has not problem admitting that parts of the series have been staged: “We are not pretending this is a “fly on the wall” documentary. Reality programs are always a mixture of fiction and reality.

But on the NRK website, the fiction is presented as reality. “The Waorani go around naked. The men’s penises are tied to their bodies with string,” says NRK’s website.

The Waorani have taken part in a large number of reality programmes. The BBC’s Tribal Wives and several countries’ versions of Ticket to the Tribes were filmed in the area.

Read the whole story in these two articles which I have based my summary on:

NORWAY: “Naked bluff” on Primetime TV (Galdu - Resource Centre for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 19.9.08)

Indian bluff on NRK: Natives turned out not to be so primitive after all (Stavanger Aftenblad, 19.9.08)

LINKS UPDATED 9.7.2019

We’ve had many similar stories before:

“Tribal wives” - Pseudo-anthropology by BBC?

Primitive Racism: Reuters about “the world’s most primitive tribes”

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

The Dictionary of Man: Will Bob Geldof and the BBC reproduce racist anthropology?

On Savage Minds: Debate on the Construction of Indigenous Culture by Anthropologists