(via Moving Anthropology Student Network) Another new anthropology journal and of course with open access for everybody: Omertaa, journal for Applied Anthropology. It was launched in January 2007 and is an international peer reviewed journal, associated with the organisation Expeditions, Research in Applied Anthropology.

The goals of the Omertaa journal are:

* To be a forum for anthropologists working in- and outside universities.
* To encourage a bridge between practice inside and outside the university
* To explore the use of anthropology in policy research and implementation.
* To serve as a forum for inquiry into the present state and future of anthropology in general.

As Sam Janssen explains in the introduction of the first volume: One of the main objectives of the journal is, to bring the knowledge and craftmanship of social and cultural anthropology back where it should come from: the field.

It seems to be a journal in the making. As of today, their editorial board only consists of two people. Marc Vanlangendonck is the Chied Editor.

The first volume is based on field research on Gozo, the sister island of Malta. The second volume will be about"Development work and the anthropological focus".

SEE ALSO:

Focus Anthropology - another online journal!

Anpere - New Open Access Anthropology Journal

New Open Access Journal: After Culture - Emergent Anthropologies

2006 - The Year of Open Access Anthropology?

While Iraq is seen as a place with messy politics, the Sudan is seen as a place without history and politics, and the Darfur-conflict as a case of "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide": "Arabs" are trying to eliminate "Africans". Why is the violence in Iraq and Darfur named differently? Who does the naming? What difference does it make? These questions are asked by anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani in his commentary The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency in The London Review of Books:

The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently.

The most powerful mobilisation in New York City is in relation to Darfur, not Iraq, he writes. One would expect the reverse. Even some of those who are calling for an end to intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur; as one of the slogans of the campaigners go: ‘Out of Iraq and into Darfur.’

Mamdani criticizes the de-politisation of the Darfur-conflict, especially by New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof:

To peruse Kristof’s Darfur columns over the past three years is to see the reduction of a complex political context to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart. It is a world where atrocities mount geometrically, the perpetrators so evil and the victims so helpless that the only possibility of relief is a rescue mission from the outside, preferably in the form of a military intervention.
(....)
Kristof made six highly publicised trips to Darfur, the first in March 2004 and the sixth two years later. He began by writing of it as a case of ‘ethnic cleansing’: ‘Sudan’s Arab rulers’ had ‘forced 700,000 black African Sudanese to flee their villages’ (24 March 2004). Only three days later, he upped the ante: this was no longer ethnic cleansing, but genocide.
(...)
Newspaper writing on Darfur has sketched a pornography of violence. It seems fascinated by and fixated on the gory details, describing the worst of the atrocities in gruesome detail and chronicling the rise in the number of them. The implication is that the motivation of the perpetrators lies in biology (‘race’) and, if not that, certainly in ‘culture’. This voyeuristic approach accompanies a moralistic discourse whose effect is both to obscure the politics of the violence and position the reader as a virtuous, not just a concerned observer.

The depoliticisation of the conflict gave campaigners several advantages. Among others, they were able to occupy the moral high ground. The campaign presented itself as apolitical but moral, its concern limited only to saving lives, Mamdani argues and concludes that the camp of peace needs to realise that peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention:

The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a ‘civilising mission’. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonised – sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa.

I am not suggesting that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilising them.

Iraq should act as a warning on this score. The worst thing in Darfur would be an Iraq-style intervention. That would almost certainly spread the civil war to other parts of Sudan, unravelling the peace process in the east and south and dragging the whole country into the global War on Terror.

>> read the whole article in The London Review of Books

SEE ALSO:

Book review: Mahmood Mamdani: "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim"

Challenges of Providing Anthropological Expertise: On the conflict in Sudan

Anthropology and Sudan: "We have a huge responsibility to give back to the places we study from"

Cameroon: "Ethnic conflicts are social conflicts"

Anthropologists on the Israel-Lebanon conflict

Fieldwork reveals: Bush administration is lying about the "war on terror" in the Sahara

American Anthropologists Stand Up Against Torture and the Occupation of Iraq

Another example of experimenting with the internet: The journal Museum Anthropology (MUA) has started publishing its book reviews in a blog called Museum Anthropology Review:

Its purpose is the dissemination of reviews, essays, obituaries and other editorially-reviewed content complementing the work of Museum Anthropology. It reflects the research and outreach interests of the Council for Museum Anthropology and is offered as a resource enhancing all fields concerned with the study of material culture and with the place of museums and related institutions in social life.

Journal editor Jason Baird Jackson explains:

On a case by case basis, I am asking authors of reviews-in-hand if they would be willing to publish their review online. Publishing reviews in this way takes advantage of the following benefits of the online medium (among others): immediate rather than delayed publication, free access to anyone in the world with internet access, the ability to incorporate internet hyperlinks, the ability to publish color images along with the review, the ability (if desired by the author) to turn on the blog's comment function for the review (thus allowing others to comment on the review or its subject matter), and the ability for an author to simply send an email link for the review to whomever they wish to share the review with.

Because reviews published thus are easily found by anyone doing internet searches, they may become a subject of discussion elsewhere on the web. They can also benefit from the power of the social networking dynamic of the web today, such as with folksonomy tagging. This strategy also provides more space for publication of peer-reviewed articles in the journal itself.

>> visit the Museum Anthropology Review

SEE ALSO:

More book reviews: Publishers are approaching bloggers

New: Anthropology Matters with book reviews

American Ethnologist: Book Reviews in Full-Text!

Lots of book reviews on The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology's site

The journal has existed for a few years already but it seems to be one of the many hidden treasures on the web. It's called Focus Anthro and is an peer-reviewed undergraduate anthropology journal at Kenyon College, Ohio.

Lots of interesting papers to explore, among others The Concept of Tribe in Sub-Saharan Africa by Meghan Schaeffer that refers to our discussion of the term tribe in a recent post (it was by googling the book that Alex Golub recommended that I've stumpled upon this journal)

>> visit Focus Anthropology

Good news: British anthropologists take part in public debates. The ASA (Association of Social Anthropologists) issued a statement where they "condemn the use of terms like 'stone age' and 'primitive' to describe tribal and indigenous peoples alive today".

We anthropology bloggers have often criticized the use of these terms.

The official condemnation comes in the wake of controversial comments made on the BBC (not online!) by Baroness Jenny Tonge, the Liberal Democrat peer, who called the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert 'stone age' and 'primitive.'

The ASA statement reads:

'All anthropologists would agree that the negative use of the terms 'primitive' and 'Stone Age' to describe [tribal peoples] has serious implications for their welfare. Governments and other social groups. . . have long used these ideas as a pretext for depriving such peoples of land and other resources.'

The ASA has become the latest supporter of Survival International's campaign against racism in the media which challenges the use of terms like 'stone age', 'primitive' and 'savage' to describe tribal and indigenous peoples.

Survival International writes:

Terms like 'stone age' and 'primitive' have been used to describe tribal people since the colonial era, reinforcing the idea that they have not changed over time and that they are backward. This idea is both incorrect and very dangerous. It is incorrect because all societies adapt and change, and it is dangerous because it is often used to justify the persecution or forced 'development' of tribal peoples. The results are almost always catastrophic: poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, disease and death.

Other supporters of this campaign include prominent journalists such as John Simpson, John Pilger and George Monbiot.

According the Washington Times, the American Anthropological Association did not return calls for comment.

But why do they still use the term tribe in their campaign? Why not use society or community? Doesn't the term tribe imply something similar as "primitive"?

As I've mentioned earlier, several African scholars argue that the idea of tribe promotes misleading stereotypes and that "anyone concerned with truth and accuracy should avoid the term "tribe" in characterizing African ethnic groups or cultures".

In their paper Talking about "Tribe" Moving from Stereotypes to Analysis, they argue that:

• Tribe has no coherent meaning.
• Tribe promotes a myth of primitive African timelessness, obscuring history and change.
• In the modern West, tribe often implies primitive savagery.
• Images of timelessness and savagery hide the modern character of African ethnicity, including ethnic conflict.
• Tribe reflects once widespread but outdated 19th century social theory
• Tribe became a cornerstone idea for European colonial rule in Africa.

Black Britain sheds more light on the use of this term. Several scholars, among others sociologist and cultural historian Lez Henry say that Survival and the ASA should also examine their use of the terms ‘tribe’ and ‘tribal.’ Henry says, people in Africa who live simple agrarian lifestyles are often seen as ‘primitive.’ Such notions served as justification for the colonisation of countries designated as ‘third world’. For Ekwe Ekwe, the term ‘tribe’ conjures up images of being unsophisticated and away from technological advancement.

According to Survival, they are guided by the United Nations in their definition of the term ‘tribe.’:

“Survival uses the term ‘tribal’ peoples, partly because we need a way to describe the type of people that we are working with. The term ‘indigenous’ can be used as well and often is.”

Following publication of the Black Britain article, the ASA contacted Black Britain to clarify its position and said:

"The ASA does not support the use of the term 'tribal' to describe people...We share your concerns about the use of the word in perjorative ways in the same vein as primitive, etc.

"However, we do support the overall aim of the campaign which is to change perceptions and work against racism and outdated ideas of social evolution. Hence we wish to support Survival International's aims even if the wording is difficult."

>> read the whole article on Black Britain

SEE ALSO:

Our obsession with the notion of the primitive society

Primitive Racism: Reuters about "the world's most primitive tribes"

"Stone Age Tribes", tsunami and racist evolutionism

"Good story about cannibals. Pity it's not even close to the truth"

Ancient People: We are All Modern Now - Debate on Savage Minds

Social anthropology isn't (yet) an established discipline in Eastern Europe. In an interview with me, Vytis Ciubrinskas explains why he thinks anthropology is badly needed.

Vytis Ciubrinskas is Head of the Center of Social Anthropology at Vytautas Magnus University in Lithuania and editor of the scientific journal "Lietuvos etnologija: socialines antropologijos ir etnologijos studijos" (“Lithuanian Ethnology: Studies of Social Anthropology and Ethnology”).

Last week, he was in Oslo and lectured at the research program Cultural Complexity in the new Norway (where I work) about identity in post-communist Lithuania.

If you visit Vytis Ciubrinskas' website you'll see that his Center of Social Anthropology is part of the sociology department. There's no Department of Social Anthropology.

He explains:

- Anthropology is not established as a seperate discipline. It belongs to sociology at my university. In many East European countries, anthropology departments are either part of national ethnology, or sociology as in Poland or in the Balkans or together with sociology. This is really a bad situation.

It's the same situation in the other Baltic countries?

- It's the same or even worse. We already have a program in social anthropology and we have started teaching, but that's not the case in Latvia or Estonia. In Poland, the Czech republic and Hungary, anthropology is still a very new thing.

Why?

- Because of the dominance of Volkskunde ("national ethnology" / "folklore studies"). National ethnologists are especially nationally supported: They are dealing with ethnic culture, the soul of the culture ("Volksseele, Volksgeist"). But also archaeology, history, liguistics.

- Another reason: This territory has been a closed society for almost half a century that never took account of global or foreign or cosmopolitan attitudes. Comparative perspectives were not allowed because we had "one system and one truth and one leader". Always, "the world is wrong and we are right".

- Anthropology is badly needed because of the prevalence of national ethnologies. These diciplines have their own established voices in the region. Their orientation is very different from that in anthropology departments in Western or Northern Europe whose professionals work in many spheres of public sectors.

- Spreading information about anthropology is very important, especially in Central and Eastern Europe where anthropology is almost unknown or is known as physical anthropology. It's very important to question the use of self-focused ethnocultural approaches especially where issues of culture, heritage, identity, globalisation are concerned.

What do you mean by self-centered ethnocultural focus?

- Societies in Central and Eastern Europe are open now and live in a new Europe. But we still have with us the inheritance that comes from the approach of a captive mind where "local knowledge and way of life is the best". Globalisation, multiculturalism, all kinds of new influences are taken as threats rather than challenges.

- Cultural policy bureaucrats listen to the local scholars who say: "Look, the end of the world is near. They are starting Halloween parties instead of continuing our old and deep moral tradition of All Saints and All Souls' Day. You must pay respect to your ancestors, light a candle on the grave. This is a very important holiday, and suddenly Halloween comes with crazy parties. It's totally unacceptable. What is to be done?"

- So if we take it seriously and signal like it's the end of the world, it will be a very ethnocentric attitude.

- In my understanding we need real analyses of everyday life, of life-ways, of identity, of identity politics on multiculturalism and globalism and who can do that? I'm afraid not many local scholars do that because, especially in Humanities, they are very much focused on national heritage, tradition, culture, folklore. They need a comparative, a global perspective. And who can provide that? Sociologists? Psychologists? Politologists? I doubt it. Anthropologists are badly needed.

- We need comparative studies and an international team to come and do work in Lithuania. Interdisciplinary is good but international is even better.

- Lithuania is a fertile research field. Transitionalism is very interesting and important to study and is comparable to postcolonial studies which have identified significant problems in former colonial communities.

- Europe is not explored enough in anthropology. Oceania or Latin America are much better explored than Europe. European anthropology and anthropology at home should be taken more seriously than it is today.

What are the major challenges in anthropology? What should be researched?

- 1) Studies of postcolonialism and post-communism. Westernisation is a big issue in postcolonial and post-communist societies but it has not been explored enough: How does western aid and develoment work, what kind of impact does it have on local populations?

- An example is Ida Knudsen's researches on EU hygiene standards - how they are accepted and dealt with. It's somewhat like being at school again with the master prompting you. It's a new standardisation of your culture. In post-communist countries modernity as such is known. It is not bringing modernity to pre-modern societies, it's the bringing of standards which are received or accepted in diverse ways.

- Lithuania is a good example. We have the highest rates of suicide in Europe, maybe in the whole world. We have very high rates of dependency on alcohol, attitude of fatalism, racism, frustration and passivity. This could be blamed on problems of rapid change, uncertainty, but at the same time, I think it might have more to do with the introduction of a new standard, a new way of doing things.

- It's about changing from communism to capitalism and having capitalism not just as an open market but as recipebook. This recipe book syndrome is important to study: How it is accepted? How it is implemented? How does it undermine the old ways? What are the the social consequences?

- 2) Of course anthropology should always be aware of and interested in local knowledge and identity: What is sameness and togetherness in a particular community?

- 3) Antiglobalism. I like very much Jonathan Friedman's idea. He says that globalism is nothing new but what we have to be aware of is the kinds of changes that take place at home. People might be globals but they have stayed more or less the same. Antiglobalism amounts to new religious movements: ecovillages, new ways of consumption. That's all new. Globalism in not new, but antiglobalism is, and it's very inventive.

You're the editor of "Lietuvos etnologija" ("Lithuanian Ethnology"). What do you think of open access to scholarship so that all articles are online for free for everybody?

- It's very important I agree, and we're now on the way to doing that. Very soon you'll be able to read it. But you'll need a good Lithuanian-English dictionary. Of course, we do have summaries of all the articles in English.

You can download two papers by Vytis Ciubrinskas:

Vytis Ciubrinskas: Revival Of Tradition For Reconstruction of Identity. Lithuanian Case (pdf)

Vytis Ciubrinskas: Transnational Lithuanian identity: imagined, constructed and contested in diaspora (pdf)

MORE ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH ABOUT LITHUANIA:

Kristina Sliavaite: When Global Becomes Local: Rave Culture in Lithuania

Kristina Sliavaite: From Pioneers to Target Group: Social Change, Ethnicity and Memory in a Lithuanian Nuclear Power Plant Community

Irmina Matonytë: Elites in Soviet and post-Soviet societies

SEE ALSO:

In Central-Europe and Poland: "I think that anthropology has never been as strong as it is now..."

Doing fieldwork in Eastern Europe - New issue of Anthropology Matters

Researches neo-paganism in an overwhelmingly Catholic society

New issue of Pro Ethnologica: The Russian Speaking Minorities in Estonia and Latvia

The power of dead bodies in Eastern Europe

Book review: East to West Migration: Russian Migrants in Western Europe

Book and papers online: Working towards a global community of anthropologists

More than 50,000 scientists from 63 nations turned their attention to the world's poles when the International Polar Year officially opened on Monday: It unifies 228 research projects about the impact of global warming in the Arctic the Washington Post reports.

Anthropologists are also part of it. "Anthropologists are also planning to study the culture and politics of some the Arctic's 4 million inhabitants" according to the newspaper.

More information can be found on the website of the Polar Year where the participants already have started blogging. The website provides lots of RSS feeds.

One of the projects about people in the Arctic is:

NOMAD: Reindeer herding from a reindeer perspective:

The central idea of NOMAD is the establishment of a mobile observation platform. This is facilitated by a nomadic tent camp that houses an interdisciplinary group of researchers. They follow the annual migration of semi-domesticated reindeer in Kola Peninsula, Northwest Russia. This is a novel effort, putting social and other scientists on the reindeer trek on a long-term basis. By positioning themselves in close contact with migrating reindeer herds the researchers observe the delicate ecology and conditions of renewable resource use in the subarctic.
(...)
The NOMAD Blog and Forum will start as soon as the first photographs and entries of the fieldwork diary will be sent over from the camp to the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle, Germany). We reckon this will happen in late April 2007.

On the website of the Indigenous People International Polar Year, we can see presentations from a workshop and videos. Among others, you can watch the whole Opening of the Indigenous Peoples International Polar Year, in Guovdageaidnu, Norway online - a three-day's conference! Unfortunately there are no subtitles (presentations in both Norwegian, English, Saami).

Recent news coverage about the Polar Year

Greenland meltdown could change the world: If ice covering the island melts, rising sea levels could displace millions from Florida to Bangladesh (The Vancouver Sun, 28.2.07)

SEE ALSO:

A new word For June - or: When is the Arctic no longer the Arctic?

The days of anthropologists taking recordings away to Canberra where they might as well be lost to the community forever, are now gone according to ABC Radio (Australia) in a story about the National Recording Project. Its aim is to document the traditions of Indigenous Australia.

What's different here is that performers, and language experts from the communities are recognised as co-researchers, alongside the university based musicologists, linguists and anthropologists. Instead of the music being recorded onto tapes and taken away to vast archives in the southern cities, it's recorded digitally and is stored on solar powered local computers in remote communities.

>> read more at ABC Radio

In their paper The National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia: year one in review, the authors Allan Marett, Mandawuy Yunupingu, Marcia Langton, Neparrnga Gumbula, Linda Barwick and Aaron Corn write in the abstract:

Many Indigenous performers now keep recordings of their forebears’ past performances and listen to them for inspiration before performing themselves. In recent years, community digital archives have been set up in various Australian Indigenous communities. Not only can recordings reinforce memory and facilitate the recovery of lost repertoire, they can also provide inspiration for creative extensions of tradition.

>> read the whole paper (pdf, 596kb)

There are several related papers in the Sydney eScholarship Repository

SEE ALSO:

How Media and Digital Technology Empower Indigenous Survival

"Aboriginal knowledge is science"

How internet changes the life among the First Nations in Canada

Multimedia Music Ethnography of Yodelling and Alphorn Blowing

Aboriginees in Australia: Why talking about culture?

The emerging research field of medical ethnomusicology: How music fights AIDS

On the Roots of Ethnic Music: Identity and Global Romanticism - Open Access Musicology Journal