Gaming is big business for many Native American tribes. For the Seminole tribe in Florida, gaming wealth enabled them to revive traditions and celebrate their culture in previously unimaginable ways, anthropologist Jessica R. Cattelino writes in her new book High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty.

Cattelino conducted fieldwork on the Seminoles'’ six reservations, attending everything from tribal council meetings to birthday parties, and learning about the texture of everyday life according to a press release.

The Seminoles are often credited with opening the door to Indian gaming in 1979. In 2006, they stunned the world in 2006 with its $965 million purchase of Hard Rock International, an empire of restaurants, performance venues, hotels and casinos in 45 countries.

Cattelino found that the Seminoles’ estimated $1 billion in annual gaming proceeds has opened the door to a wealth of opportunities.

On the one hand, more and more expensive new vehicles fill tribal parking lots and driveways. On the other hand gaming proceeds have allowed the tribe to erect an social safety net that includes universal health care, financial support for unlimited education, full senior care and generous reservation amenities, from gyms to community centers.

Furthermore, prosperity has allowed the Seminoles to revive traditions and celebrate their culture in previously unimaginable ways:

A new market for high-end Seminole crafts has emerged, fueled by the collecting potential of the Seminoles themselves. Local schools now incorporate traditional practices and native-language instruction into their curricula. New positions as cultural educators, tribal museum officials or language instructors have opened up.

Gaming has also enabled Seminoles to return to traditional tribal forms of housing and community organization:

Since the mid-1960s, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, had pushed tribal members into individual, cement-block homes arranged without regard to extended family ties. But the new wealth has allowed them to take control of tribal housing, ushering in a return of native construction styles, traditional structural elements and housing arrangements that cluster residents according to Seminole matrilineal clans, Cattelino found.

And the Seminoles use their wealth to help other communities. They have contributed to Hurricane Katrina relief, the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., and numerous local causes.

A real sunshine story, too god to be true? Not even gaming scandals? There have been just “a few isolated issues", we read. “Everybody expected tribal gaming to be a wide open field for organized crime,” Cattelino writes, “but the evidence just isn’t there.”

>> read the press release (UCLA Newsroom)

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Fieldwork reveals how slot machines are exploiting people

Native American Tribe Allows Gay Marriage

Dissertation: Indigenous people not always “victims of economic globalisation

How Media and Digital Technology Empower Indigenous Survival

“They’re natural born killers. They’re good, they’re lethal, they’re fantastic. I love working with them", says Major Robert Holbert. He was part of the first Human Terrain Team in Afghanistan in 2007 and tells his story in a fascinating interview with Lisa Wynn at Culture Matters.

The interview gives insight in the way HTS-people ("cultural advisors” for the US-army) think. And it uncovers that their way of thinking only works within their own cosmology - only as long as you accept that it is okay to colonize / occupy Afghanistan or Iraq:

Lisa Wynn: OK, well let me ask a hard question, the kind of question I can imagine opponents of HTS posing. Yes, you’re saying this saves lives, and probably that’s true. But at the same time, it facilitates a military occupation of another country. You say it’s about winning a war. But talking about winning, it takes the war for granted. In the end, you’re facilitating the U.S. occupation of another country. How would you answer that?

Robert Holbert: [sighs] I’m not going to completely disagree, it’s not… God. It is what it is. OK, you say we’re an occupying army, we’re an occupying army. If that’s how you look at it, that’s how it is. What else do you call it when you’re not from the country and you’re in it? But if you’re going to fight it, then you’re there. This is an opportunity to change the culture of the military, this is our golden hour as progressives, and yeah, we’re in a country, we’re occupying it, but I’m trying to work myself out of a job, you know.

>> continue reading at Culture Matters

It reminds me of what Kerim Friedman wrote three month ago in his post The Myth of Cultural Miscommunication (Savage Minds, 26.6.08):

Treating the military’s lack of respect for local cultural knowledge as a cultural problem which can be solved by hiring anthropologists ignores the very real ways in which the military itself operates as a system for producing knowledge about the world, and the role of local knowledge in that system.

I haven’t written about military stuff recently, so in case you’ve missed some earlier posts on this issue in the anthrosphere, you might be interested in reading that The Human Terrain System spreads to Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean (Open Anthropology, 7.9.08) , about resistance against Pentagon’s Minerva project (military-social science partnership) (Culture Matters 5.8.08) and a review of an article by embedded journalist Steve Featherstone about the HTS entitled “Human Quicksand” (Culture Matters 29.8.08). Culture Matters provides also an annotated bibliography on HTS, Minerva, and PRISP

SEE ALSO:

Cooperation between the Pentagon and anthropologists a fiasco?

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

The dangerous militarisation of anthropology

(LINKS UPDATED 18.2.2021) “Fiction’s more fun. It lets you look inside people’s heads in a way you wouldn’t dare to do if you stuck to anthropology", anthropologist Nigel Barley says in an interview with the Telegraph:

“As an anthropologist you’re always asking questions such as: How different can different peoples be? Are we all reducible to a common humanity? And if so: what is it? Nobody can answer these questions. But I like to use fiction to try to answer anthropological questions. And fiction, I find, gives better answers.”

His book The Duke of Puddledock records Nigel’s travels, literal and figurative. It is part biography, part autobiography, part natural history, part anthropology, and part travelogue.

>> read the whole story in the Telegraph

Nigel Barley, most known for his funny book The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut is not the only anthropologist who explores the possibilities of fiction.

A few weeks ago, I read about Tahmima Anam, the first Bangladeshi writer to win the Overall First Book Award at The Commonwealth Writers Prize 2008. She has a PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard University, and an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway College.

“I wrote A Golden Age because I wanted the story of the Bangladesh war to reach an international audience", she says. She travelled throughout Bangladesh, interviewing ex-freedom fighters, military officers, students, and survivors of the 1971 war. The novel is a fictionalised account of these war stories, combined with her own family history.

In an interview with the Boston Globe she explains why she wrote a novel, rather than a nonfiction book:

I felt that this was a human story that needed character and plot. I wanted it to touch people’s hearts, as the stories I had heard had touched my heart. I wanted people to have a visceral sense of what it was like to be there at that time, and I didn’t think that nonfiction, for all its beauties and virtues, could do that.

And in an interview with the Guardian she says:

After graduating from university I started a PhD in social anthropology, but really I was dreaming of writing a novel. I would sit in my lectures and scribble in the margins of my notebooks. But for a long time, I didn’t tell anyone I wanted to be a writer; it was my undercover identity. It was when I started doing the research that it became more real. I travelled back to Bangladesh and met survivors of the Bangladesh war. After hearing their stories, I felt that I really ought to take the project more seriously, and that’s when I began writing the novel in earnest.

See also her articles in the Guardian and in New Statesman

SEE ALSO:

Manga instead of scientific paper: How art enriches anthropology

The most compelling ethnographies and ethnographic fiction

The Secret of Good Ethnographies - Engaging Anthropology Part III

Why is anthropological writing so boring? New issue of Anthropology Matters

What is it like being at a conference with anthropology students from many different countries? Daren Williams from Macquarie University in Sydney has written a review for antropologi.info about the 6th conference of the Moving Anthropology Student Network (Masn) in Sela pri Osilnici, a village at the Croatian - Slovenian border.

The students had much fun and the conference was very well organized by the MASN-team in Slovenia, he writes. And “anthropologists were much better looking than I expected". But he had expected more and better discussions after the presentations and more participants from the UK and France.

An anthropology conference that gets results: Masn Slovenia 2008

By Daren Williams, Macquarie University, Sydney

Back in July I stumbled across a brief reference to an anthropology conference in Slovenia. A quick google search later and I found the website of the 6th conference of the Moving Anthropology Student Network (Masn). I was sufficiently impressed by the idea: a network of motivated students; and a grass-roots forum to discuss anthropological ideas. The conference was to be held over 5 days in a small town on the border of Slovenia and Croatia. I booked my ticket.

The Setup

A month later, I made my way from Italy to Slovenia by train and bus. The last bus was provided by the Masn Slovenia Team, since our final destination was obscure, to say the least (population 327). Upon arrival at the hotel, each participant was checked-in to their room and provided with a conference pack. The pack included the conference schedule, clipboard, notepad and the usual things, but what impressed me most was the inclusion of a tourist guide pack – with maps and event guides for Slovenia and the capital Ljubljana!

Conference facilities, accommodation, and food were all included in the participation fee of €80 (I understand that the fee was so affordable due to the Masn Slovenia Team’s excellent job of securing sponsorships from local government and non-government organisations). Needless to say, I was highly impressed with the preparation and foresight of the organising committee!

The programme

The days were filled with formal presentations and workshops, whilst the nights gave us an opportunity to socialise.

The first three days were straight to business: presentations and workshops. We attended three presentations each morning. Due to the location of the conference and the conference topic of “Boundaries, Borders and Frontiers”, most of the field work data focused on eastern Europe. However, there were also well-conceived ethnographic material from field work in Nicaragua, Malaysia, and South Africa.

I noticed two things about these morning sessions: firstly, this conference was a great opportunity for students and young scholars to present their work to colleagues, and secondly, the discussion afterwards was mostly uncritical or altogether absent. I see the two points as interrelated, both in a good and a bad way.

In the afternoon, participants were offered a choice of 3-4 workshops per session, so most people found something of interest. Some highlights were: the discussion on post-socialism and its definitions; field work conducted in a life insurance company in Ireland; and, a consideration of anthropologists whom choose to work for the military.

Again, these sessions were great opportunities for presenters to work through their own ideas or issues, this time in collaboration with a group of people whom I felt were constructive, considerate, and intelligent. And the activities did not stop at dinner-time… Each evening after dinner we were treated to ethnographic films, art exhibitions, a night tour of the border, and one night there was an interactive refugee game.

Many people were impressed with the eye-opening film ‘Wetback’, which followed the journey of illegal immigrants from Central America to the USA. Of course, music and alcohol kept participants entertained after the formal activities ended.

On the weekend, a group of us went white-water rafting, and there was also an opportunity to conduct field work. The Masn Slovenia Team organised visas for everyone to cross the border into Croatia, and offered translators to those people willing to meet local residents. I think most people were too exhausted to perform serious field work by that stage, but there was a group who explored the area with cameras, and reported back later to share their ‘perspectives’.

Mission accomplished?

I attended the Masn Conference with one goal in mind: to be mentally stimulated.

I can say, without doubt, that I achieved my goal. From the first night, I spoke to students about anything that came to mind – conversation was not limited to small-talk. Every conversation became a point of reflection for me. Throughout the week I noticed that everyone I spoke with was open-minded (we’re anthropologists after all) and most were able to, respectfully, give a viewpoint that in some way differed from my own (come to think of it, almost every one of my opinions was challenged in some way).

Furthermore, this informal discussion was complimented by the actual programme of morning, afternoon, and evening sessions!

On a personal level, I was able to clarify some of my ideas as well as generate new ones. For instance, simply stating that I was interested in ‘creativity’ was never sufficient – I was always pushed further, to explore my perspective (how is creativity socialised; can it be taught explicitly?) of which eventually became a two-way discussion of examples and experiences.

On a professional level, I now have access to an extensive network of like-minded individuals with information on ideas, universities, publications, or for just having fun.

Lastly, a note about demographics: anthropologists were much better looking than I expected, funky glasses are popular, and what is with guys and beards? Participants came from all parts of continental Europe, Scandinavia, Ghana, and there was also me, from Australia. I was, however, surprised about the low number of participants from the UK and France - two countries with rich traditions in anthropology. Hopefully more of them will get involved for the next one… and the rumour is Romania, October 2009…

SEE ALSO:

First reports from Europe’s largest anthropology conference (EASA)

(LINKS UPDATED 8.9.2020)

Are democracy, capitalism, freedom and the concept of romantic love unique inventions of the West? No. In his new book, anthropologist Jack Goody shows that the superiority of the West is largely unreal, even if we look to the recent past.

In “The Theft of History”, Goody criticizes both Western historical writing and his own discipline anthropology, professor Alfredo Ascanio writes in a review at OhMyNews:

For example, it was always believed that democracy was born in Athens and in fact there appeared a particular form of democracy, but democracy existed first in Carthage, even in some cities in the Mediterranean, India, China and other “tribal” societies.

Karl Max and Max Weber were wrong in their thesis about capitalism, because capitalism – despite the industrial revolution – was far more widespread. It was first a product of sowing cotton and the exploitation of silk in India and China.

In another example, Goody explains how Elias and Braudel have overemphasized the European contribution in relation to modernity, when in fact this happened first in India and China. The concept of capitalism is rather a concept of the 19-century, says Goody, which should be used more carefully and has only been used for overvaluation of the differences between Europe and Asia.

And in Asia, the reality was always more advanced than the West in art and science, even in what was considered romantic love. It was not a Western invention but is a universal sentiment that already existed.

>> read the whole review at OhMyNews

In the introduction, Goody explains the title of the book:

The ‘theft of history’ of the title refers to the take-over of history by the west. That is, the past is conceptualized and presented according to what happened on the provincial scale of Europe, often western Europe, and then imposed upon the rest of the world.

The books is inspired by his research in Africa:

After several years’ residence among African ‘tribes’ as well as in a simple kingdom in Ghana, I came to question a number of the claims Europeans make to have ‘invented’ forms of government (such as democracy), forms of kinship (such as the nuclear family), forms of exchange (such as the market), forms of justice, when embryonically at least these were widely present elsewhere.

These claims are embodied in history, both as an academic discipline and in folk discourse. Obviously there have been many great European achievements in recent times, and these have to be accounted for. But they often owed much to other urban cultures such as China.

(…)

The closer I looked at the other facets of the culture of Eurasia, and the more experience I gained of parts of India, China, and Japan, the more I felt that the sociology and history of the great states or ‘civilizations’ of Eurasia needed to be understood as variations one of another.

>> read the whole introduction (Cambridge University Press)

The book has also been reviewed by The Canadian Review of Sociology and Keith Hart.

SEE ALSO:

David Graeber: There never was a West! Democracy as Interstitial Cosmopolitanism

Amartya Sen: Democracy Isn’t ‘Western’ this text was also debated on Savage Minds

For an Anthropology of Cosmopolitanism

Ethnocentric anthropology and Working towards a global community of anthropologists

Anthropologists condemn the use of terms of “stone age” and “primitive”

Today was the fifth and last day of the 10th Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) in Ljubljana, Slovenia. There are no news stories yet, but anthropology students at the University of Ljubljana have already written an impressive number of reports on workshops, plenaries and poster sessions.

The students have done a real great job and I hope they will inspire other conference organizers. There are exciting things being told and discussed at conferences. But until now, these stories have stayed inside a small community of scholars. Things are changing: The Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) has started podcasting from their annual meetings.

EASA has started an ambitious project. Read this:

You have reached the online database of texts on the 10th Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). During this event, the site is hourly updated, bringing you fresh reports on the venues (workshops, plenaries and poster sessions) as well as several interviews with the lecturers, EASA officials and other guests. All texts will be published in English language.

The reports and interviews are written by students at the Department for Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. Since human resources are scarce, not all venues are covered and are therefore not reported or commented. We are trying, however, to present as much material as possible by covering as much events as possible.

The reports give a great overview over current anthropological research in Europe.

Tjaša Selič and Goran Karim for example write about Michael Carrithers who is interested in the question: How can so many differences between cultures, groups of people and individuals still inspire participation, cooperation, solidarity? (pdf) Tjaša Zidarič also mentions Panayiota Toulina Demeli who is interested in how being in prison effects the social meaning of motherhood (pdf).

Nikolas Kosmatopoulos seems to have given an interesting paper in the workshop “Imagining and Constructing “Terrorism” and “War on Terror". “Being an anthropologist in the Middle East feels almost like being a spy", he said according to Vasja Pavlin:

(I)t is possible to be objective in such an intense field as Lebanon. There is a grey zone between the attackers and the attacked into which an anthropologist enters in order to do his or her research. By entering into this zone one immediately becomes a suspicious person.

An anthropologist has to tell his or her informants some of the intimate stuff about what he or she is doing in order to be accepted by them. The situation forces you to take a position but you cannot please everyone; if you do so you are just like a clown. He concluded that being an anthropologist in the Middle East feels almost like being a spy.

(pdf)

“Crowd crystals and birdwatchers: charismatic leadership in volunteer organisations” was the title of Dan Podjed’s paper. In her summary, Tina Mučič informs us that the meaning of charisma and charismatic leadership is “a black hole in anthropological research” (pdf).

She also writes that “his presentation was very good and in some parts funny".

I was surprised over the open and honest comments on the papers and the presentations. Maybe these reports may inspire some anthropologists to rethink their way of giving papers.

Tina Kranjec comments on a presentation by Elke Mader at the workshop Happiness: Anthropological Engagements:

I must say this was a very interesting paper. The author explores how fans experience, express, communicate and circulate happiness in relationship with Shah Rukh Khan. There was a lot of visual material, which was also very representative.

(pdf)

But the workshop On ‘Souvenir’: experiencing diversity, objectifying mutuality was less exciting, she writes:

After visiting two other workshops, I can say that this last one was more oriented on giving as much information as possible and not so much on trying to provoke us and making us participate by commenting and asking questions. Almost all of the lecturers were reading as fast as possible, which made the comprehension of the papers quite difficult.

(pdf)

Tina Mučič has also reviewed several presentations. An anthropologist “was reading her paper very quietly so it was difficult to understand everything", another one “was speaking and reading very fast, almost too fast to understand the meaning of the paper.”

She liked Gillian Evans‘ presentation best:

This introduction was the most likeable. Dr. Evans was speaking aloud and her tone was resolute. She was trying to explain some terms which we did not understand and was aware that there were not only experts on this topic in the room.

It seems that more and more paper givers have used PowerPoint presentations than for two years ago when I attended the conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth in Keele. Then, most presentations were so boring that I decided to stay at home. According to the students’ reports, the conference in Slovenia must have been very interesting. Their reports are very inspiring. Maybe I should have gone though?

>> overview over all reports

>> conference website

UPDATE (12.9.08) : Guest post: Review of the Moving Anthropology Student Network conference

UPDATE (3.9.08): Martha Jiménez-Rosano has written a few notes about the conference of the Moving Anthropology Student Network (MASN) that took place before the EASA conference (in Slovenia as well) and has uploaded her paper “Projectionists of Reality. When researchers project images of their own boundaries.”

UPDATE 10.11.08) Another EASA-report by Martha Jiménez-Rosano: A feeling about EASA 2008

SEE ALSO:

What’s the point of anthropology conferences? - EASA conference 2006

How To Present A Paper - or Can Anthropologists Talk?

Academic presentations: “The cure is a strong chairman and a system of lights”

Norwegian anthropology conferences are different

Anthropology and the World: What has happened at the EASA conference?

Conference Podcasting: Anthropologists thrilled to have their speeches recorded

This is conference blogging!

AAA Annual Meeting: Are blogs a better news source than corporate media?

First news from the AAA-conference?

Military spies invade anthropology conferences?

The myth of the “untouched” Amazone is popular. But areas that look pristine today have been the home of large urban areas, anthropologist Michael Heckenberger has found out already five years ago.

In a new paper that was published today in Science he writes that these settlements might be a model for the future.

In a press release Heckenberger says:

If we look at your average medieval town or your average Greek polis, most are about the scale of those we find in this part of the Amazon. Only the ones we find are much more complicated in terms of their planning.
(…)
These are not cities, but this is urbanism, built around towns. The findings are important because they contradict long-held stereotypes about early Western versus early New World settlements that rest on the idea that “if you find it in Europe, it’s a city. If you find it somewhere else, it has to be something else.

They have quite remarkable planning and self-organization, more so than many classical examples of what people would call urbanism.

This new knowledge could change how conservationists approach preserving the remains of forest so heavily cleared it is the world’s largest soybean producing area. “This throws a wrench in all the models suggesting we are looking at primordial biodiversity,” Heckenberger says.

This early urban settlement can be a model for future solutions. Heckenberger and his colleagues conclude:

Long ago, Howard proposed a model for lower-density urban development, a “garden city,” designed to promote sustainable urban growth. The model proposed networks of small and well-planned towns, a “green belt” of agricultural and forest land, and a subtle gradient between urban and rural areas.

The pre-Columbian polities of the Upper Xingu developed such a system, uniquely adapted to the forested environments of the southern Amazon. The Upper Xingu is one of the largest contiguous tracts of transitional forest in the southern Amazon [the so-called “arc of deforestation"], our findings emphasize that understanding long-term change in human-natural systems has critical implications for questions of biodiversity, ecological resilience, and sustainability.

Local semi-intensive land use provides “home-grown” strategies of resource management that merit consideration in current models and applications of imported technologies, including restoration of tropical forest areas. This is particularly important in indigenous areas, which constitute over 20% of the Brazilian Amazon and “are currently the most important barrier to deforestation".

Finally, the recognition of complex social formations, such as those of the Upper Xingu, emphasizes the need to recognize the histories, cultural rights, and concerns of indigenous peoples—the original architects and contemporary stewards of these anthropogenic landscapes—in discussions of Amazonian futures.

>> press release: ‘Pristine’ Amazonian region hosted large, urban civilization, study finds (University of Florida News)

Heckenberger has put online several papers. On the frontpage of his homepage we read “Come visit our site after August 30, 2008 for latest research results”

SEE ALSO:

Tropical Stonehenge found in the rainforest? Why so surprised over the “finding” that the early inhabitants in the rainforest were “sophisticated” people?

The Double Standards of the “Uncontacted Tribes” Circus

Anthropologists condemn the use of terms of “stone age” and “primitive”

Dissertation: Survival in the Rainforest

As some of you might know, I work as a journalist at the interdisciplinary research programme Culcom - Cultural Complexity in the New Norway. I’ve just put online the English translation of my interview with Thomas Hylland Eriksen, research director of Culcom.

We talk about how hard it is to challenge conventional academic thinking and to establish a new analytical view of the world.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen says:

- What we are trying to do is shift the analytical gaze in a direction where the nation-state and the ethnic group are not viewed as the most important unit. It is here researchers like Knut Kjeldstadli have been vital in insisting on the significance of class, or Oddbjørn Leirvik, who points out that differences in value-based questions cuts across the majority and minority population.

- In this way, lines of distinction that are somewhat different than those common to immigrant research, in which an us-and-them way-of-thinking is common, get established. And in addition, the transnational perspective leads to a de-centering of the nation-state; it is almost like a small Copernican revolution.

We also talk about open access and dissemination via our website. He says:

- Working in a place where most of what is published is electronically available and can be downloaded as a PDF has been a dream of mine for many years, even in the transnational sense: Then people who are in Switzerland and India can get onto our webpages, download texts and use our research in their own work. There is no reason why this should cost money.

>> read the whole interview with Thomas Hylland Eriksen

There are two more new interviews online about related issues.

Hans Erik Næss criticizes in his thesis the methodologicial nationalism in sociology text books. Sociology does not focus enough on transnational aspects in society. His thesis contains not only suggestions for a better sociology, but also an alternative required reading list.

>> read the whole interview: “In favor of a more transnational sociology”

Gunn Camilla Stang has written one of the first studies on Polish labour migrants in Norway. She says that debates about migration should focus more on the possiblities of learning. In viewing Polish laborers primarily as (cheap) labor, companies miss out in a great deal of knowledge they could have used to improve routines and products.

>> read the whole interview “More than “social dumping””

And Arnfinn Haagensen Midtbøen explains us why Scandinavia should be illuminated as an interesting region in migration research.

>> Interview: Does migration strengthen the nation-state?

We have relaunched our website, and our English pages are “still under construction”