Voices: Palestinian Women Narrate Displacement is a collection of oral histories recorded by Beirut-based anthropologist and oral historian Rosemary Sayigh. It was published as e-book, devoted to men and women living in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and Israel. It allows readers to not only read the texts and see the pictures but also to hear the stories in the speakers’ own voices, The Daily Star Lebanon reports.

“Because “Voices” seizes on the advantages of technology, the book transcends precisely those borders so troublesome to the Palestinian condition", Louisa Ajami writes in her review:

Sayigh became one of the few women to enter the Palestinian camps in Lebanon and she devoted her anthropological expertise to writing about the Palestinian diaspora. Much of her field work has centered on women and children, and she writes of the lives of rural peasant women and their more educated urban sisters with equal attention and flair.

Sayigh writes in the unobtrusive, objective style of an anthropologist, but she also interjects her personal impressions. She gives readers a sense of location, ambience and familiarity. (…) With her detached yet intense approach to recording their stories, Rosemary Sayigh renders her Palestinian subjects’ struggles less abstract and more human.

But there is one drawback for those who don’t speak Arabic:

Each narration is preceded by a short introduction in English. The opening lines of each interview are also transcribed in English, but the full interviews have been left in the original Arabic, as has the audio footage. For non-Arabic speakers, this leaves the bulk of the stories out of reach.

The review in The Daily Star Lebanon is no longer online.

>> read the e-book “Voices: Palestinian Women Narrate Displacement” (Link updated 24.7.2024)

More about / by Rosemary Sayigh

Interview with Rosemary Sayigh (The Jerusalem Times / palestine-family.net)

Rosemary Sayigh: No Work, No Space, No Future: Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon (Middle East International, 10 August 2001)

Rosemary Sayigh: Dis/Solving the “Refugee Problem” (Middle East Report 207 - Summer 1998)

SEE ALSO:

Anthropologists on the Israel-Lebanon conflict

The Future of Anthropology: “We ought to build our own mass media”

Open Source Anthropology : Are anthropologists serious about sharing knowledge?

2006 - The Year of Open Access Anthropology? 2005 was the year anthropology finally became visible on the internet. 2006 was the year of a more public, political and open access anthropology?

Podcasting - publishing mp3-interviews on websites - has become more popular in the social sciences, including anthropology. But as Paul Ayres writes in an article for ALISS Quarterly, the journal of the Association of Librarians and Information professionals in the Social Sciences, content producers have already started to move on to video.

Audio podcasting won’t take over the world, he explains:

Audio as a format has a number of limitations. It can be inefficient, as it takes 10 minutes to listen to a 10 minute audio file, plus time to download it as well. Much of this information could be summed up in a short piece of text that is easier to scan and retain. Plus, some content does not lend itself to being read out loud, such as complex URLs or detailed instructions.

In the Higher Education context, providing only the audio of a lecture leaves out PowerPoint slides, data, charts or diagrams that may illustrate a point and it also limits the presenter to a chalk and talk approach, which excludes problem based learning techniques and active learning strategies, which require interaction in the lecture theatre or classroom.

Information Professionals may find audio only user education assets very limiting. With an increasing number of online services available, screencasts that offer commentary on a video walkthrough of a service, website or database, will give a visual cue and a more meaningful learning experience to students.

So users and content producers have already started to move on to video and it’s clear that audio podcasting won’t take over the world. Awareness of podcasts has only increased marginally in the last 18 months, and some say that it suffers from the “try me” virus effect, where something may be cool or interesting to sample, but not be engaging enough to return to.

>> read the whole article “Podcasting and Audio in the Social Sciences”

SEE ALSO:

Anthropology podcasts receive much attention

The Future of Anthropology: “We ought to build our own mass media”

Video by anthropologist Michael Wesch: How collaborative technologies change scholarship

Savage Minds: Visual anthropologist Jean Rouch on YouTube

Anthropological Films online

Paul Bohannan, the anthropologist who was known for his research on the Tiv culture of Nigeria (especially the economic spheres) died July 13. He was 87. Later, Bohannan studied U.S. culture, particularly family life and divorce among the middle class.

>> Orbituary in the Los Angeles Times

>> Orbituary by University of Southern California

There’s no Wikipedia entry yet about Paul Bohannan

Inspiring research contradicts journalistic and academic presumptions. It seems that the multidisciplinary research program Cultures of Consumption has produced inspiring papers. Anthropologist Daniel Miller gives us a summary of a public presentation of the research results on the blog Material World:

As usual in such programme the highlights came from research that contradicts journalistic and academic presumptions. For example we heard evidence that international retailing firms find that they have to raise their standards to meet Chinese consumers who are more demanding than those in other areas. Another paper demonstrated that people have extended family meals in the UK just as much now as in the 1970s (though migrating from dinner table to kitchen table) and that in terms of food behaviour generally there is no evidence for global convergence e.g. becoming more like the US.

>> read the whole post

The research project has a great website. The snapshops from the projects provide reader-friendly summaries. Lots of working papers can be downloaded.

“Muslim religious leaders are not only working with local authorities but are helping to decrease radicalisation", stresses anthropologist (and blogger) Gabriele Marranci. During an International Conference on Extremism in London, key authorities were criticized for not listening to Muslim Imams who reach out to offer help. They were criticized for paint the Muslim community as un-cooperative at the same time according The Voice.

Marranci said:

“During my research, I found no evidence to suggest that the Muslim chaplains are behaving or preaching in a way that facilitates radicalisation. On the contrary, my findings suggest that they are extremely important in preventing dangerous forms of extremism. However, the distrust that they face, both internally and externally, is jeopardising their important function.”

Marranci researched on islam in prisions: How does being behind bars impact on Muslim identity and their experience of Islam? He interviews over 170 current and former Muslim prisoners in Scotland, Wales and England and lived with the families of former prisoners. His study Living Islam in prison: faith, ideology and fear showed that sometimes it is actions by the authorities-and not Imams- which can make a situation worse. Current efforts by the authorities to curb radicalism within UK prisons are having the opposite effect according to the anthropologist.

His study said, the Voice writes, Muslim prisoners are subjected to stricter security surveillance than other inmates. Marranci claimed that security policies within prisons - including restricting praying in a communal space or reading the Qur’an during work breaks - are exacerbating, rather than suppressing the radicalisation process.

>> read the whole story in The Voice

In a recent entry in his blog he gives us more details about his studies and concludes:

The terrorist threat, as well as the general representation of an ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ Armageddon battle, is polarising, in a very dangerous way, prison life. On one side are the Muslim prisoners, with a minority of radicals but a majority of ordinary Muslims pushed towards the aforementioned because of the discrimination they suffer. On the other side are the non-Muslim staff and prisoners whom understandably develop resentment towards the terrorists, but which too easily becomes resentment towards the ordinary Muslim prisoners.

These circumstances maximise the possibility of attacks against Muslim prisoners, and consequently provide a fertile soil for successful radicalisation of Muslim prisoners.

Yet I have the impression that the Prison Service and the Government see ‘extremism’ as merely the product of ‘indoctrination’. Yet, as my research suggests, ‘extremism’ within prison should be tackled by rejecting over focused Muslim-centric security policies in order to develop an encompassing strategy against intolerance. (…) I have highlighted many times to the Prison Service that extremism and radicalism are not just Muslim issues. Within the prisons there are visible increases in right-wing ideologies and a high level of unnoticed intolerance.

The ‘War on Terror’, he stresses, is disintegrating the British Values: “Today we are ready to deport people towards their torture and death thanks to shameful political agreements with tyrants who shun our democratic values.”

>> read the whole post “Mr Barot’s disfigured face can radicalise Muslim prisoners more than his voice”

Marranci is currently transforming his research into a book provisionally titled “Faith, ideology and fear: Muslim identities within and beyond prisons”. It will be published by Continuum Books in summer 2008. You can download a speech about his researchheld at the House of Lords.

SEE ALSO:

New blog: Islam, Muslims, and an Anthropologist

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

Doctoral thesis: Towards a transnational Islam

The Penan people from the jungles of Sarawak are threatened by rampant commercial logging and palm oil plantations for bio-fuel, a Malaysian government report said. European and North American demand for “green” bio-fuels made from palm oil means rainforests across the region are being replaced with plantations writes the Telegraph:

For 20 years the Penan people from the jungles of Serawak have mounted a peaceful campaign to protect their ancestral lands, only to be driven back by soldiers, police and contractors.

Earlier this year, as police firing shots in the air tore down the latest blockades of bamboo tied with grass, Penan leaders said that if the loggers were not stopped their jungle would be entirely destroyed within two years.

Now at last they have received some official backing. “Claims made [by Penans] on ancestral land are often not considered by the relevant authorities and those who clear the forest areas and commence logging and oil palm activities,” said the report, recommending that the land code be reviewed to include customary rights.

It may already be too late for the Penan. The rainforests of Serawak are millions of years old but have been decimated by the Malaysian logging companies which, campaigners say, have felled trees at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world.

>> read the whole story in the Telegraph

The Penan leaders also met with officials from the Sarawak state government to demand that it recognise their rights to their land and stop issuing logging and plantation licences on their land. Groups of Penan have set up blockades on roads through their forest to stop loggers destroying their homes according to Survival International.

>> more Penan-news by Survival International

This story reminds me of the article Eco-junk by George Monbiot. Ecological of ethical shopping is not the solution, but less shopping.

SEE ALSO:

“Help the Hadza!” - A United Arab Emirates royal family is trying to use the land of the Hadza as a “personal safari playground”

Dissertation: Survival in the Rainforest

Criticizes the “apathy of anthropologists toward the human rights situation in Balochistan”

But We Are Still Native People” - Tad McIlwraith’s dissertation is online

Arctic refuge saved from oil drillers - Inuit divided

Some weeks ago I wrote a few lines about the book On Suicide Bombing by anthropologist Talal Asad. Among other things, he questions our notions about legitimate violence.

On Sunday, the book was reviewed in the New York Times:

Asad (…) takes aim less at the Bush administration than at the rest of us, and at what he sees as our unspoken complicity in “some kinds of cruelty as opposed to others.” He hopes, he writes, to “disturb the reader sufficiently” by showing the hypocrisy of rules that permit murderous conduct by states but deny it to nonstate actors. And he is angered by scholars, theorists and journalists who don’t speak Arabic and have never set foot in the Middle East, yet sound off about why suicide bombers do what they do. He is understandably aghast that the American public has expressed so little shock over the bloodshed inflicted in its name.

And by the end of the book, his rage has overtaken him. The Bush administration’s actions in the Middle East have left him so disgusted that he declares simply, “It seems to me that there is no moral difference between the horror inflicted by state armies (especially if those armies belong to powerful states that are unaccountable to international law) and the horror inflicted by insurgents.”

It is hard to answer Asad’s argument without drifting into the distinctions he attempts to demolish. For instance, he cites the political philosopher Michael Walzer’s definition of the “peculiar evil of terrorism,” which, according to Walzer, is “not only the killing of innocent people but also the intrusion of fear into everyday life, the violation of private purposes, the insecurity of public spaces, the endless coerciveness of precaution.” Asad then asks why the United States’ war in Iraq and the Israeli cluster bombs in Lebanon do not earn the same condemnation as bombs wielded by terrorists. But if you continue to believe (as I do) that there is a moral difference between setting out to destroy as many civilians as possible and killing civilians unintentionally and reluctantly in pursuit of a military objective, you will indeed find “On Suicide Bombing” disturbing, if not always in the way he intends.

Nonetheless, Asad’s book is valuable because the legal distinctions he is challenging are especially vulnerable now.

The review is part of the article Our War on Terror.

As Savage Minds already has noted, Columbia University Press has published a mp3-interview with Talal Asad. For more information on the book and Talal Asad see my earlier entry Anthropological perspectives on suicide bombing

More information will follow. I’m currently reading this book.

Anthropologist Reining died July 19 at the age of 84. “Anthropologist Broke Ground on AIDS, Satellite Mapping", writes the Washington Post in an orbituary.

Last winter I wrote about anthropological studies that showed that male circumcision reduces the risk of HIV infection. But Reining had researched this topic already 18 years ago:

In a 1989 study published in Current Science with three co-authors, Reining spelled out the unmistakable correlation: Uncircumcised African men were 86 percent more likely to get the AIDS virus than those who had been circumcised. Her findings held true across different regions, ethnic groups and religious faiths in Africa.

At first, her study was ignored or dismissed. Some African peoples had taboos against circumcision, and many scientists couldn’t believe that such a simple procedure could produce such startling results.

(…)

Yet study after study – there have now been more than 60 – supported Reining’s initial findings. She was interviewed for a BBC documentary in 2000, and one-time skeptics were convinced by years of mounting evidence that she had been right all along.

>> read the whole article in the Washington Post

SEE ALSO:

Male circumcision prevents AIDS?

“There’s no AIDS here because men and women are equal”

AIDS:"Traditional healers are an untapped resource of great potential”

Cultural values and the spreading of AIDS in Africa

AIDS and Anthropology - Papers by the AIDS and Anthropology Working Group