Burma’s protesters may have been silenced, but we must continue to support them, writes Brendan Barber in The Guardian. But maybe we should not focus too much upon the courage of the monks. Muslims in Burma are persecuted, not only by the military, even by the ‘peaceful’ monks according anthropologist Gabriele Marranci:

From an anthropological viewpoint, the revolt in Burma is particularly interesting for an anthropologist specialised in Muslim societies and communities. There are two elements that attract my attention. First of all, how this revolt is represented by the western mass media and secondly, the near total lack of reference to the drama that the Muslim minority, the so called Rohingya Muslims, have experienced in the last three decades. There are some hard stereotypes which affect how the mass media represent religions, and consequently, how ordinary people understand religions.

Muslims in Burma are a persecuted minority - a story that the mass media neglects to inform us, he writes. The omission, when compared, is according to the anthropologist “not very dissimilar from the western attitude towards other Muslim minority and refugee tragedies".

He explains:

The Rohingya Muslims live mainly in the North of the Rakhine State and represent, officially, 4% of the entire Burmese population, but represent 50% of the population of Rakhine state (previously known as Arkana) itself. (…) In 1784, a Burmese king, Bodawpaya, annexed Arkana to his domain. This provoked a long guerrilla war with the Muslims, which saw, according to historians, more than 200,000 Arkanese killed. Many of the local Muslim population, at that time, were reduced to slavery and forced to build Buddhist monasteries. (..)

Muslims in Burma are not considered to be citizens. They have no rights and often suffer discrimination and indiscriminate killings. Many of them, in particular after 1962, had to flee the country and still today live in refugee camps in Bangladesh, which actually do not welcome them. Although Muslims have taken active part in the 1988 revolt, and paid the consequences more than the Buddhist population, the majority of monks and Buddhists in Burma have anti-Muslim sentiments, in particular based on the fear of possible intermarriages.

Pamphlets glorifying race purity and Buddhism and actually reinforcing anti-Muslim sentiments have been distributed since 2001 (i.e. Myo Pyauk Hmar Soe Kyauk Hla Tai or The Fear of Losing One’s Race). These inflammatory publications, preaching against the Muslim minority, as well as rumors spread about Muslims raping children in the streets, provoked a series of monk-led riots against Muslim families and the destruction of mosques. Muslims were killed and mosques destroyed, and again the Rohingya Muslims had to flee to Bangladesh.

(…)

Everybody hopes that the Buddhist monks can succeed in mobilising the population in a sort of Intifada. Some Muslims, I know, are repeating their Inshallahs in the not so distant Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. They hope that the end of the military junta means the end of their oppression.

Nonetheless, a question remains, after such strong monk-led anti-Muslim campaigns which were also reinforced by the welcomed ‘Bushit’ rhetoric of ‘war on terror’: would the new, certainly Buddhist, regime accept the history and the existence, as Burmese citizens, of Rohingya Muslims? Or, would the new regime, like their predecessor generals the Muslims as an easy scapegoat?

>> read the whole article on Gabriel Marraci’s blog

A few days after his blog post, mainstream media has started writing about the discrimination of muslims and minorities in Burma - but without reference to the monks, see the CNN-story Myanmar’s ethnic minorities suffer a ‘hidden war’

UPDATE: See also Martijn de Koning: Muslims in Burma (Closer, Anthropology of Muslims in the Netherlands)

UPDATE According to South Asia Analysis Group, the Burmese muslims in Rakhin “have strongly come out in support of the uprising against the military junta spearheaded by the Buddhist monks, students and others". On 26 September 2007, the Rohingyas and Rakhaings had jointly participated in the demonstration staged by the Buddhist monks forming human chains in Akyab chanting the slogan: “We are a family and we are travellers in the same boat, we Burmese citizens need to be united without regard to religion, class or race.”

Supporters of Burmese protestors from around the world are planning a global day of protests on 6 October according to the Democratic Voice of Burma.

MORE INFORMATION:

Wear red shirts on friday - Anthropologists on the protests in Burma?

George Monbiot: Let’s put pressure on the companies responsible. Western interests in Burma contribute to the oppression of its people

Guardian Special Report: Burma

BBC News Special Reports: Burma Protest

Wikipedia: 2007 Burmese anti-government protests

Global Voices: Burmese bloggers on Burma

Democratic Voice of Burma

(LINKS UPDATED 29.10.22) Norwegian anthropologists no longer hide their master theses in distant libraries. Most theses are now available online in digital archives. Last week, more than 20 new theses (among them 11 in English) have been put online at DUO, the digital library of the University of Oslo.

On this rainy Sunday, I’ll pick out two studies:

Doing busness in Brazil. An anthropological study of the interaction between Norwegian and Brazilian business people is the title of the theses by Anita Wold. She conducted fieldwork in a Brazilian family company that recently was acquired by a Norwegian company. Furthermore, she interviewed Norwegians working in Brazil and Brazilians working in Norwegian companies.

Her point of departure: The increase in international business has created a demand for books about cultural differences in business that are easy to grasp. But books and teaching material within the field called intercultural communication is dominated by quantitative studies. “I believe anthropological theory can provide a more fruitful analytical framework for understanding communication between people with different backgrounds and knowledge", she writes.

She shows among other things that the dominating figures within the field of intercultural communication use a problematic perspective on cultural difference. For Hofstede (2001), Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (1997) national identity is an imprint of values and a collective “software” in peoples’ minds that produces a distinctive national behavioural pattern. Through quantitative studies these researchers have found a small set of value-based continuums of interpretation such as individuality-collectivist, masculinity-femininity, power distance etc. (see for example Hofstede’s country profiles):

I found that most of the Norwegian managers find “the Norwegian leadership style” the best way of practicing leadership. The Brazilian leadership style is considered to be more authoritarian than the Norwegian, and few of the Norwegian managers seemed to be willing to adjust their own practice.

The Norwegians, as owners and managers, are in a position where they can define the use of management techniques and practices in the companies where they are in command. However, whenever Norwegians engage with customers in Brazil, they are not in a position to define the situation and therefore have to adapt to local practices and demands in order to sell their products.

In exploring the interaction between people with different backgrounds, I have argued against the perception of culture as it is postulated by Hofstede (2001), Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (1997). In the present study I have argued that business practices are embedded in the local context.

Thus, in order to understand the differences encountered by the Norwegian and Brazilian business people I have demonstrated the importance of placing the practices in a cultural, historic and economic context.Thus, quantitative studies and universalistic assumptions of cultural differences fail to achieve a fruitful understanding of the contextual variations.

>> download the thesis

Martin Høyem has written the thesis I want my car to look like a whore. Lowriding and poetics of outlaw aesthetics. It as an extremely well written thesis and even fun to read. He captures the reader already on the first pages when he describes his first days in the field, looking for potential lowriders:

I never saw any lowrider cars in the streets, and this surprised me, since I had an impression—gathered from the material I studied before I left for the field—that the streets of LA would be packed with lowriders. I suddenly realized that my plan A of simply walking up to somebody with a lowrider asking to talk to them rested on a missing premise. I also realized I had no plan B.

At one of the first meetings with his informants, they asked him some questions:

“One thing first: Do you like Abba or Led Zeppelin?”
Chuy had presented me to everybody, in plenum, and asked that I talked a little about myself. (…) It was immediately clear to me what the right answer would be. “These guys aren’t Abba fans,” I thought to myself. And as Bourdieu points out: “Nothing more clearly affirms one’s ‘class’, nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.” (Bourdieu, 1984:18) (…) “I like Zeppelin,” I said. They all nodded and mumbled approvingly. “That was easy,” I thought.
(…)
Then one guy asked “What kind of car do you have?”
Not missing a beat—since I felt I was doing so well building credibility—I told them: “It’s a 1989 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz. Two doors.” They didn’t like that. “Well at least it has two doors,” somebody mumbled.

For Martin Høyem it was important to contribute with new perspectives in the study of the lowrider culture:

As a result of the tendency in social studies within USA to threat themes in the light of ethnicity and gender, a major part of ethnographical studies portray the population groups they write about as exotic and describes them as physically and culturally isolated—as subcultures opposed to main-stream American culture. The same goes for descriptions of the lowrider culture, both in academic literature and in diverse types of popular culture.
(…)
The lowrider cars are traditionally described as products heavily influenced by the owner’s Mexican heritage. While there is obviously much to be said for these accounts, they often fall short of considering the class aspects in the judgment of aesthetical taste. I have pointed to data which illustrate how class background might be just as important, if not more, in an effort to analyze the cars and their owners place in the American consciousness.

Additionally, the outlaw mystique which clings to the cars and their owners is a social problem for the lowriders. (…) Perhaps the outlaw aesthetic in the lowriders play the same role as folklore did for the rise of the European romantic nationalism. Just like the scholars of that time gathered histories to demonstrate “connections with the cultural glories of supposed common ancestry” (Herzfeld 1996) the histories that are told through the outlaw aesthetic are stories seeking to establish an abstract common background.
(..)
Although the imagery tells stories of violent conflict solving, loose sexual morals, liberal use of recreational drugs and a strong focus on material values, the everyday reality for the majority of the people who parade this imagery is much more mundane; theirs is a life lived within a framework in agreement with the moral code of society.

>> download the thesis: I want my car to look like a whore. Lowriding and poetics of outlaw aesthetics

And here are the other nine new anthropology theses:

Anne Gry Venås: “School is for the lazy ones". Local interpretations of children`s rights to education in a rural community in Guatemala

Matthew Whiting: Men & motors. Myth-making and the emulation of a past elite class

Brigt Hope: The function of the internet in the Moroccan public sphere

Marit Aune Bergstrøm: Struggling for respect and dignity. Strategies for shaping meaningful lives among persons with disability and their families in a community on the Mexican south-pacific coast

Hilde Johanne Bjugn Foss: The Hmong in the Twin Cities. Generational and gender differences in the perception of kinship, marriage and prestige

Katri Elina Matikainen: Transformative substances, knowledge and power. Affecting the course of events in a Gambian Mandinka village

Jonas Ursin-Holm Lea: Streets, skollies and coons in district six. On narratives and identity related to an area of forced removal in Cape Town, South Africa

Lene Cecilie Hellum: The face of the cowboy. Perspectives on myths and identities among Texan cowboys

Janne Waagbø: “Dancehall! - a serious thing!” Performing gender in Jamaican dancehall

UPDATE 1/10 Even more new theses in English! More in a later post.

Is it because the academe rewards critique rather than advocacy? Conflict resolution studies, Mark Davidheiser and Inga E Treitler write in Anthropology News September, are “not widely acknowledged within our discipline” and are “rarely published in mainstream anthropological journals".

Is it because these studies are often written to be intelligible to a broad audience, they wonder:

Addressing an interdisciplinary readership makes it impractical to philosophize on the finer points of specialized topics like agency and employ the latest anthropological jargon. A prominent case in point is the bestselling Getting to Yes, coauthored by anthropologist William Ury. Getting To Yes did not foreground anthropological themes, and while it has been read by many public health practitioners and management professionals, it has received scant attention within anthropology.

One may justifiably wonder why anthropology has not engaged conflict resolution in a more sustained manner. As Leslie Sponsel and Thomas Gregor emphasize in The Anthropology of Peace and Nonviolence, there has been much more scholarship on violence than on peace. The fact that their book has long been out of print only underlines their point.

>> read the whole article “Conflict Resolution and Anthropology: An Analytic Introduction and a Call for Interdisciplinary Engagement” (link updated)

In his historical overview of anthropology and Conflict Resolution, Kevin Avruch writes that most of anthropologists’s early involvement was dedicated to the problem of getting the field to take the idea of culture seriously. They faced two main hurdles. First, the political scientists and international relations folk took power to be the only “variable” that counted. Second, the psychologists assumed that given the biogenetic unity of the human brain, we must all think and reason in the same way, and so, say, decision-making (as in negotiation) must look the same everywhere.

>> read the whole article: A Historical Overview of Anthropology and Conflict Resolution (link updated)

Günther Schlee stresses that an important finding of anthropological research is related to causes of conflicts:

Ethnicity is not the cause of so-called ethnic conflicts. The corresponding thesis about religion is that religion is not the cause of religious conflicts. We continue to talk about ethnic or religious conflicts, because there is much about such conflicts that is indeed ethnic or religious—just not their causes. Frequently, ethnic or religious polarization only starts to emerge in the course of a conflict, and that is certainly the wrong time to be looking for a cause.

>> read the whole article “The Halle Approach to Integration and Conflict” (link updated)

As Mark Davidheiser and Inga E Treitler writes, there are anthropologists who argue that conflict resolution can be seen as an ideology that subverts access to “justice”. One of them is Laura Nader.

In her article in Anthropology News, she writes:

Conflict, adversarialness, dissent, confrontativeness are tools used in asymmetrical situations to right a real or perceived wrong—the collision of force with opposing force. In the absence of such opposing force there is acquiescence, subordination, passivity, apathy—features associated with Brave New World or 1984 societies.
(…)
Looking back on our study of consumer justice makes me realize that conflict, confrontativeness, adversarial law would have produced much more benefit for our society than the harmony and reconciliation industry, in terms of improved products, citizen participation (rather than apathy), and an investment in our judicial system appropriate to a country that espouses democratic rule.
(…)
The search for justice is both fundamental and universal in human culture and society. Thus, as long as there is power asymmetry one can expect conflict.

>> read the whole text “What’s Good About Conflict?” (link updated)

Leslie E. Sponsel is one of several anthropologists who contribute to the website Peaceful Societies. Alternatives to Violence and War

SEE ALSO:

Applied anthropology - A wedding ceremony in support of peace in West Timor

Book review: An Anthropological Challenge to Assumptions about War and Violence

Mahmood Mamdani: “Peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention”

Challenges of Providing Anthropological Expertise: On the conflict in Sudan

Anthropologists on the Israel-Lebanon conflict

Anthropology in a Time of Crisis. A Note from Nepal

Cameroon: “Ethnic conflicts are social conflicts”

Do anthropologists have anything relevant to say about human rights?

Ethnobotany in not only about “exotic” plants in the rain forest: “The ethnobotany of British home gardens: diversity, knowledge and exchange” is the title of a new research project at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kent. Among other things the anthropologists will look at the the social networks along which plants and knowledge are exchanged.

“We hope to be able to demonstrate scientifically the wider value of home gardens beyond the material worth of the land that they occupy", Simon Platten explains. “We wish to learn how people learn to become good home gardeners. Whilst biological diversity in itself is important, so are the skills and knowledge that maintain it”, project director Roy Ellen says.

Despite high rates of participation in gardening there is according to him relatively little work on the basic social, cultural and ethnobotanical dimensions of home gardening.

>> read the whole story at Scenta

>> more information about the research project

SEE ALSO:

New Research Study about Traditional Folk Knowledge related to Plants in Albania

Lowly weeds may hold promise for curing host of common health woes

Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine - New Open Acces Journal with RSS feed

“Ecologists have photographed a little-known nomadic tribe deep in Peru’s Amazon, a sighting that could intensify debate about the presence of isolated Indians as oil firms line up to explore the jungle", the Vancouver Sun writes. But Suzanne Oakdale, an anthropology professor at the University of New Mexico, does what an anthropologists should do and corrects popular assumptions about “the others".

She said:

“Often, ‘uncontacted tribes’ means uncontacted by a government institution, but the groups have long and complicated histories with other people.”

Oakdale is (among others) the author of I Foresee My Life: The Ritual Performance of Autobiography in an Amazonian Community.

SEE ALSO:

Malaysia: Penan people threatened by demand for “green” bio-fuels

From Stone Age to 21st century - More “fun” with savages

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

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

Bella Ellwood-Clayton is sexual anthropologist. As we read in the Washington Post, Bella Ellwood-Clayton has studied texting and dating in the Philippines. On her website you can download the texts Desire and loathing in the cyber Philippines and Unfailthful: Enchantment and disenchantment through mobile use, some of her weekly sex and relationship columns and some poems and short stories.

You can even watch some videos and follow her on her fieldwork in Sumatra, researching beauty as a cultural notion.

>> visit her website

SEE ALSO:

E-mail has become the new snail mail - Text Messaging on Rise

Instant Messaging - Studying A New Form of Communication

Why cellular life in Japan is so different - Interview with anthropologist Mizuko Ito

(via Intute Social Science Blog) Homeless women, gated commnities, active citizenship and the post-industrial labour market: That’s what the papers in the first issue of the new open access journal People, Place and Policy are about:

People, Place and Policy provides a forum for debate about the situations and experiences of people and places struggling to negotiate a satisfactory accommodation with the various opportunities, constraints and risks within contemporary society.

(…)

PPP is founded on the belief that academic research has a critical role to play in the creation and assessment of policies. This is not to criticise social scientists who shy away from involvement in the messy business of policy, but to celebrate the contribution of critical and questioning applied social research to both academic knowledge and thought, and the interpretation, understanding and responsiveness of policy to contemporary social challenges.

(…)

The editorial home of the journal is the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University.

>> Homepage of the journal

SEE ALSO:

Free access to Anthropologica 2002 - 2005

For Open Access: “The pay-for-content model has never been successful”

Omertaa - Open access journal for Applied Anthropology

2006 - The Year of Open Access Anthropology?

Wear red for Burma: Several thousand people at the demonstration in Oslo

“Wear a red t-shirt in solidarity this friday!” “Light candles in your windows on Friday night to honour the victims of the demostrations.” Pro-democracy protest marches in Burma have entered the tenth day. Burmese soldiers have detained about 200 Buddhist monks and fired shots as they attempt to disperse thousands of anti-government protesters in Rangoon.

Any comments by anthropologists on the situation in Burma? By now I’ve found two three four:

Monique Skidmore, medical anthropologist in The College of Arts & Social Sciences at the Australian National University (ANU) has been conducting research in Burma since 1994.

In the Australian online magazine Crikey she explains, that the the current protests stretch its roots stretch back to 1962 “when the Burmese armed forces, led by General Ne Win, usurped power from Burma’s democratically elected government of Prime Minister U Nu. General Ne Win ruled the country by fear, informers, propaganda and isolation. A civil war has waged since then, with estimates of the loss of life at up to 10,000 each year.”

Today’s street protests are furthermore “the culmination of a campaign for democracy being coordinated by the ’88 Student Generation, the activist movement in exile, the labor movement (embodied by Su Su Nway, now in hiding), monks, and the National League for Democracy.”

Coordination is difficult given that most mobile phones are illegal as well as use of the internet, she writes: “Burma’s first blog appeared last week showing the first day of the monk protest in Rangoon. It only took the military regime 24 hours to shut it down.”

>> Monique Skidmore: The Burmese people have had enough

Sometimes Burma is also called Myanmar. Myanmar is actually the official name, the BBC explains: The ruling military junta changed its name from Burma to Myanmar in 1989, a year after thousands were killed in the suppression of a popular uprising. Rangoon also became Yangon.

The name change is a form of censorship, says anthropologist and editor of Anthropology Today Gustaaf Houtman in the BBC article Should it be Burma or Myanmar?

Houtman has written a book that is available online (free) called Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics. Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy. It is also available on Google Books. Read also an interview with Houtman on The Culture of Burmese Politics.

update: In the New York Times story Karma Power: What Makes a Monk Mad anthropology professor Ingrid Jordt contributes with some orientalitic statements when she explains that the monks’ power comes from their role in bestowing legitimacy on the rulers:

“Legitimacy in Burma is not about regime performance, it’s not about human rights like the West. It is something that comes from the potency and karma bestowed by the monks. That’s why the sangha is so important to the government,” she said, referring to the Buddhist hierarchy and the spiritual status that its monks can convey. “They are actually the source of power.”

UPDATE: Anthropologist Gabriele Marranci tells a story that the mass media neglects to inform us: Muslims in Burma are persecuted, not only by the military, even by the ‘peaceful’ monks: >> Gabriele Marranci: The other, invisible suffering of Burma

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE SITUATION IN BURMA SEE:

BBC News Special Reports: Burma Protest

Wikipedia: 2007 Burmese anti-government protests

Global Voices: Burmese bloggers on Burma

BBC News also has a story about how Burma cyber-dissidents crack censorship and tell the world what is happening under the military junta’s veil of secrecy.

See also on Facebook Support the Monks’ protest in Burma and Red Shirt For Burma

For non facebook users more on the red shirt campaign see on these blogs at Livejournal, Dynamic Nonvilence, Sungame and in the Phuket Gazette: Red-shirt-Friday campaign sweeps Phuket and Norwegian trade union leader backs call to “wear red”

To those who think this might be a pointless or even stupid campaign I’ve found this comment in a facebook group:

Nobody thinks wearing a red shirt is gonna change the situation. Did you actually think so? Now THAT is really stupid.

Nobody really thought demonstrating against the Iraq war in Oslo, where I live, or any other place in the world would for that matter, would make Bush change his mind either. Point is, we still did it, it’s the biggest demonstration in Norwegian history.

What’s wrong with gathering the world? What’s wrong with trying to spread the word to everybody? What’s wrong with showing that you care, and that you are aware of the situation and have a statement, even though it doesn’t necessarily make a practical change? Negativity of that kind is what really is stupid.

UPDATE

Monks prosecute muslims? Free Burma International Bloggers’ Day 4.10.2007