Restrictions to keep immigrants from entering the United States are having the effect of encouraging those who are already here to stay by any means necessary, a study by anthropologist Maxine L. Margolis finds.

“The restrictions are doing exactly the opposite of what they intend to do by locking these people in place”, she says according a press release by the University of Florida. Tightened post 9-ll security has prompted immigrants to skip visits to their homelands because of the risk of not being allowed back into the U.S., the anthropologist explains.

Even with valid passports and visas, they can be denied re-entry, she said.:

One Brazilian immigrant, who owned a floor tile company in New York and had lived in the state for several years with his wife and American-born daughter, flew to Brazil when he learned his elderly father was seriously ill. On his return, he was stopped at JFK International Airport and was deported to Brazil for having previously overstayed his tourist visa.

The research is based on interviews with Brazilian immigrants and applies to other nationalities as well, Margolis said. Her findings wil be published in the January issue of the journal Human Organization.

>> read the press release

SEE ALSO:

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

For free migration: Open the borders!

“Anthropologists Should Participate in the Current Immigration Debate”

David Graeber is one of the authors in a new journal called Radical Anthropology. The journal is available for free. You can download it as pdf-file. The journal follows Graebers vision of anthropology as an “intellectual forum for all sorts of planetary conversations” that makes “common cause with social activism for the sake of human freedom".

The first issue consists of two essays

David Graeber: Revolution in reverse
The idea of radical change today seems unrealistic.Why?

Camilla Power: Religion as spectacle
Richard Dawkins may think it’s just a delusion, but religion had amore interesting evolutionary role than that.

The journal is edited by The Radical Anthropology Group that was founded back in 1984. Many members are active in indigenous rights movements and combine academic research with activist involvement in environmentalist, anticapitalist and other campaigns.

>> download the first issue of “Radical Anthropology

>> previous publications by The Radical Anthropology Group (lots of papers!)

For Jews, not only food needs to be kosher, the New York Times explains in an interesting article about Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox.

There are even kosher mobile phones. You cannot send text messages with them, take photographs or connect to the Internet. More than 10,000 numbers for phone sex, dating services etc are blocked. Calls to other kosher phones are cheaper and on the Sabbath any call costs $2.44 a minute, a steep religious penalty. “You pay less and you’re playing by the rules. You’re using technology but in a way that maintains religious integrity.”

A whole economic system has evolved to meet their needs, as Tamar El-Or, an anthropologist at Hebrew University explains. She has studied ultra-Orthodox shopping patterns. “There are lines of cellphones and credit cards and Internet suppliers and software and DVDs and clothes and so many things produced or altered or koshered for them, because they have a certain organized power to get the producers to make what they want.”

We read about a bus company that has special routes for the ultra-Orthodox, so that men and women are segregated, sometimes in separate buses. There are shops where you can buy special clothing. Movies and television are forbidden by many rabbies - an exemption is made for children if the intentio is educational. So in a video and music store for the Ultra-Orthodox you can find a large stock of nature documentaries: “National Geographic videos are considered fine, so long, as that there is no human nudity or sexuality, or even sexuality from animals.”

>> read the whole story in the New York Times

As we learn in an article in Science-Spirit mobile use has always been allowed but “it has been difficult to find one that didn’t contain access to the Internet or feature instant messaging plans displaying ads for worldly goods and services.” So, Israel’s ultra-Orthodox rabbis responded by convincing companies to produce a no-frills mobile phone for their community.

The introduction of the kosher phone comes at a time of intense discussion about the community’s future and the practicality of remaining so separate from the rest of Israeli culture:

The Ultra-Orthodox constitute about ten percent of Israeli Jews, or about 600,000 people. (…) They live in their own neighborhoods, have their own school systems, and, as long as they remain in religious school, are exempt from the military service required of all other Israeli citizens (except the approximately 1.5 million Palestinian Arabs living in the state). Ultra-Orthodox families have an average of seven children and most of the men study religion rather than work, relying on stipends from the government. (…) But in recent years, driven by rising poverty, cuts in government stipends and their own expanding population, the ultra-Orthodox have slowly begun to increase their participation in the largely secular Israeli society.

>> read the whole story in Science Spirit

I’ve found one article by anthropologist Tamar El-Or online:

The length of the slits and the spread of luxury: reconstructing the subordination of ultra-orthodox Jewish women through the patriarchy of men scholars (Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, Nov, 1993)

See also Wikipedia on Orthodox Judaism

Another new blog: Anthropologist Maximilian C. Forte has recently launched the blog Open Anthropology - “a project of decolonization, growing out of a discipline with a long history and a deep epistemological connection to colonialism":

OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY arises from a dissastisfaction with the state of knowledge in contemporary and classical anthropology, and is meant to significantly restructure and move anthropology beyond its current confines, beyond the constraints of professionalization and institutionalization, transcending the very “disciplinariness” of a discipline that has often foundered on its own shoals since its inception as “anthropology.”

Maximilian C. Forte is among others the editor of the open access journal KACIKE: The Journal of Caribbean Amerindian History and Anthropology, and writes also for the The CAC Review.

>> visit Open Anthropology

News of anthropologists in the US. military starts circulating on one of the largest Muslim websites, Culture Matters reports. Anthropologist Donald Abdallah Cole says to IslamOnline.net that “Arabs and Muslims should be wary of western anthropologists":

‘We should be wary of everything that is written about us, whether by local people or by foreigners. To be wary does not mean to reject. We need to read what anthropologists say about people in the developing world and what they say about Islam and Muslims,’ he explained.

‘We can expect to trust the reliability of professional academic anthropologists who are subject to peer review and evaluation. But for others who are not fully professional, we need to be more careful.’”

>> read the whole story on Culture Matters

This reaction is no surprise, especially when we remember that Britian has recruited anthropologists for spying on muslims.

A few weeks ago anthropologist Maximilan Forte wrote that if anthropology’s role as an instrument of empire can come back into sharper focus it is no wonder that anthropology is banished from universities in the ‘decolonized’ world”.

Over at Savage Minds, a dscussion is going on if all this focus on anthropology in the Iraq war is primarily a PR game to bolster the image that the military is doing something novel to correct the errors of the Iraq occupation.

Norwegian anthropologist Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme has started blogging. He is currently on fieldwork in the Philippines among the Pentecostal Christians in Ifugao.

In his first two posts of his blog Jon Henrik in Ifugao, he describes parts of the fieldwork process that are familiar for most anthropologists but that rarely make it into papers or monograps: “anthropology-fed-up-ness” and antipathy for the field.

“Back in Ifugao, the first thing that struck me was that I was already tired of being here", he writes in his first post Chasing Ifugao Christians with a lack of motivation….

“One of the main impressions I had of my previous fieldwork was that this type of research is very inefficient. (…) Today I had such an experience again", he writes in his second post When the time is right…

>> visit Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme’s blog

For information on his first research project, see the project website.

SEE ALSO:

On fieldwork: “Blogging sharpens the attention”

Paper by Erkan Saka: Blogging as a Research Tool for Ethnographic Fieldwork

antropologi.info survey: Six anthropologists on Anthropology and Internet

Anthropology blogs

(via Museum Anthropology) More and more open access to anthropology online: The American Museum of Natural History has digitalized their up to 100 year old Anthropological Papers and put them online.

We find both more recent papers like Green revolution : agricultural and social change in a north Indian village and (that’s maybe even more interesting) historic ethnographies from the beginning of the 20th century like Some protective designs of the Dakota by Clark Wissler (published 1907), Tales of Yukaghir, Lamut, and Russanized natives of eastern Siberia by Waldemar Bogoras (published 1918) and The history of Philippine civilization as reflected in religious nomenclature by Alfred L. Kroeber (published 1918).

>> browse the whole collection

SEE ALSO:

2006 - The Year of Open Access Anthropology?

Patrick Gorham, editor of AfricaWrites: Heroes, Rituals & Legends writes to me. He created AfricaWrites several years ago “with the intent and goals of research, exploration, preservation and documentation of traditional African culture". On the website you can watch several videos from rural Africa.

>> visit AfricaWrites.com

>> Ugotrade.com with more info on AfricaWrites