(LINKS UPDATED 11.1.2021) "Why the French Don't Like Headscarves: Islam, the State and Public Space" is the title of a new book by American anthropologist John R. Bowen. For nearly three years ago, the French government banned headscarves and similar clothing that indicates religious affiliation from public schools.

Bowen writes in the introduction:

French public figures seemed to blame the headscarves for a surprising range of France's problems including anti-Semitism, Islamic fundamentalism, growing ghettoization in the poor suburbs, and the breakdown of order in the classroom. A vote against headscarves would, we heard, support women battling for freedom in Afghanistan, schoolteachers trying to teach history in Lyon, and all those who wished to reinforce the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity.

He explains:

France has a long-standing tradition of state control and support of religious activity despite its modern laws concerning secularity. We often have the misconception that the state stays out of religious affairs. In fact, the French government pays the salaries of all teachers in private religious schools, it organized a national Islamic body, and it and city governments put a lot of money into building churches and mosques.

But because the Republican political tradition that developed out of the French Revolution of 1789 targeted the privileges of the Catholic Church, many French citizens developed a certain allergy to religions' symbolism in public, and particularly in schools, a battleground between the Church and the Republic.

From that research, he's working on another book, titled "Shaping Islam in France," to be published in 2008, which will examine how French Muslims strive to build a base for their religious lives in a society that views these practices as incompatible with national values.

>> read the whole article on the website of Washington University in St.Louis

>> John R. Bowen: Muslims and Citizens. France's headscarf controversy (Boston Review February/March 2004)

>> John R. Bowen: Pluralism and Normativity in French Islamic Reasoning (pdf)

>> John R. Bowen: Beyond Migration: Islam as a Transnational Public Space (pdf)

>> John R. Bowen: Does French Islam Have Borders? Dilemmas of Domestication in a Global Religious Field (pdf)

SEE ALSO:

Lila Abu-Lughod: It's time to give up the Western obsession with veiled Muslim women

France: More and more muslims observe Ramadan

Two major studies have found that male circumcision reduces the risk of HIV infection by half, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Dozens of studies conducted since the 1980s found similar results but lacked the scientific rigor of a randomized clinical trial.

"This is a landmark day in the history of fighting this epidemic", said medical anthropologist Robert Bailey, who led one of the the two studies. Bailey first became interested in circumcision for AIDS prevention in 1985, when colleagues in the field began noticing that HIV rates were much higher in regions of Africa populated by non-circumcising communities.

Doctors theorize that circumcision might protect against HIV infection because the foreskin is rich in a type of white blood cell that is a favorite target of the AIDS virus. In addition, some studies suggest that circumcised males are less likely to have other sexually transmitted diseases, which cause sores that serve as gateways for HIV to enter the bloodstream.

Researchers stress that circumcision should not be considered a replacement for other measures such as the use of condoms. Male circumcision requires trained personnel, sterile instruments etc. In the developing world, these resources are often in short supply, and, in their absence, the procedure can lead to infections and even death.

Another study will attempt to determine whether women also benefit from the reduced HIV infection risk in a population of circumcised men.

>> read the whole story in the San Francisco Chronicle

SEE ALSO:

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

"There's no AIDS here because men and women are equal"

Cultural values and the spreading of AIDS in Africa

"Ethnographic perspectives needed in discussion on public health care system"

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

Are public Christmas trees an "unconstitunal endorsement of one religion over another"? The debates about the removal of nine Christmas trees at the Seattle airport remind of the hijab-controversis and the display of (supposedly) religious symbols in the public. The Christmas trees at the airport had come down after a rabbi requested that a Hanukkah menorah also be displayed. "We decided to take the trees down because we didn't want to be exclusive," said airport spokeswoman Terri-Ann Betancourt.

Seattle Times:

Port of Seattle staff felt adding the menorah would have required adding symbols for other religions and cultures in the Northwest, said Terri-Ann Betancourt, the airport's spokeswoman. The holidays are the busiest season at the airport, she said, and staff didn't have time to play cultural anthropologists.

Andrew Gumbel comments in The Independent:

By Monday night, the trees were back, as if nothing had happened. Airport officials, frantically wiping egg off their collective faces, thanked Rabbi Bogomilsky for seeing the light and promised to rethink their seasonal decorations for next year. Cultural anthropologists across the US are no doubt busy honing their application letters already.

>> Wanted: cultural anthropologist to sort out Seattle's 'holiday trees' (Andrew Gumbel, The Independent 13.12.06)

>> Airport puts away holiday trees rather than risk being "exclusive" (Seattle Times, 10.12.06)

>> Christmas trees going back up at Sea-Tac (Seattle Times, 12.12.06)

>> Treeless in Seattle? The port stumbles (Robert L. Jamieson Jr, Seattle Post Intelligencer, 12.12.06)

>> Christmas trees date back to ancient nature lovers (seattle Times, 12.12.06)

"Anthropologists should actively cooperate in the building of new Nepal", Subash Chandra Nembang said at the three-day international seminar on 'social science in a multi-cultural world', organized by the Nepal Sociological and Anthropological Society (NSAS).

"It is sad that most of the projects run in Nepal do not have participation of sociologists and anthropologists", he said. Secretary of the Society Bhanu Timsina said the sector has been under shadows as the planners have not realized the utility of the sociologists and anthropologists, according to the website The Rising Nepal.

Unfortunately, neither the conference nor the organisation seems to have a website. Digital Divide?

SEE ALSO:

Anthropology in a Time of Crisis. A Note from Nepal

Global identity politics and The Emergence of a Mongol Race in Nepal

Festivals and Cultural Change in Kathmandu, Nepal

“No Nepalese Can Dare To Challenge Centuries Old Religious Harmony”

Stefanie Lotter: Studying-up those who fell down: elite transformation in Nepal (Anthropology Matters 2/2004)

"The US is sending troops to the Sahara desert of west Africa to open what it calls a new front in the war on terror", the Guardian reported three years ago. "The ‘official truth’ about the ‘war on terror’ on the Sahara-Sahel is a ‘lie’", anthropologist Jeremy Keenan writes in Anthropology Today December and argues that in this situation, anthropologists have to act as independent witnesses and have to refuse collaborating with intelligence agencies and government bodies.

Keenan has been - according to himself - the sole ‘external’ or ‘foreign’ witness to a sequence of events associated with the US administration’s ‘global war on terror’ that many Tuareg believe has irreversibly transformed the central Sahara and Sahel, as well as their lives and livelihoods. Keenan has done research in the central Sahara for more then 30 years. He writes:

As a result of more or less continuous and at times microscopically detailed field research, much of which has been undertaken by and in collaboration with local Tuareg in Algeria, Niger, Mali and Libya, and with Toubou in Chad, we now know that all the incidents used to justify the launch of this new front in the ‘war on terror’ were either fiction, in that they simply did not happen, or were manufactured by US and Algerian military intelligence services.

(...)

How and why did such a monstrous deception take place? The ‘how’ is simple. First, the Algerian and US military intelligence services channelled a stream of disinformation to an industry of ‘terrorism experts’, conservative ideologues and a compliant media, whose prevailing ‘cut and paste’ culture has made them the perfect mouthpiece for an administration that operates through the Orwellian concept of ‘reality control’ and ‘proof by reiteration’. The result is that several thousand articles have turned the great ‘lie’ into the ‘official truth’.

Second, if a story is to be fabricated, it helps if the location is far away and ‘beyond verification’. The Sahara is the perfect place – larger than the United States and effectively closed to public access.

As we know, the CIA has started sponsering anthropologists to gather sensitive information in their so-called "war on terror".

Here, anthropologists have a key role to play, Keenan writes:

The role of the anthropologist in such situations (as in all his/her work) must be to provide field-based information that can counter the propaganda emanating from the ever growing (and now increasingly privatized) intelligence and other war agencies. At the very least, the anthropologist must be the witness, the recorder, perhaps the interpreter and, where necessary, the author of the ‘truth’.

In the present critical juncture, anthropologists have a key role to play in the ‘war on terror’: to remain located outside the corrupting sphere of intelligence agencies and government bodies and to act as independent witnesses and reporters. This requires considerable courage, not necessarily because of dangers in the field situation, but because access to the field, on which the anthropologist’s professional career often depends, is likely to be terminated.

Even more serious for anthropologists in American universities is that such actions, especially in the prevailing‘McCarthyist’ climate of the Bush-Cheney administration, may increasingly lead to self-censorship as the result of threats to employment prospects.

The risks are not so high in ‘old Europe’. But there is no certainty that similar pressures as those in the USA will not be brought to bear on anthropologists and other academics in the UK. After all, it was only in October that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s offer of £1.3 million to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)45 attempted to inveigle academics, anthropologists in particular, to help it in ‘combating terrorism by countering radicalisation’.

In this duplicitous incident, the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) played a key role in getting the project cancelled, at least for the time being. With such potential threats to anthropologists greater now than at any time in the past, it is imperative that our professional associations publicly recommit themselves to the protection of all anthropologists from any such pressures and threats.

The text is not available online (for subscribers only. But Keenan has written on this issue here as well:

Jeremy Keenan: Bush's Imaginary Front in the War on Terror (AlterNet, 28.9.06)

More information:

Saharan peoples are falsely accused of terrorist acts (ESRC Science Today, June 2004)

Jason Motlagh: The Trans Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative: U.S. takes terror fight to Africa's 'Wild West' (Global Research, San Francisco Chronicle, 30.12.05)

Anthropology Today editor Gustaaf Houtman comments:

If anthropologists, as a particularly exposed branch of academia, are to have any value at all in the ‘war on terror’, we must, to adopt a Quaker maxim coined in Nazi Germany, ‘talk truth to power’. But talking truth is clearly not enough. We must, first, be wary of ‘spin’ and find new and more appropriate ways to converse with government agencies without compromising our academic independence. And second, we must ensure we are actually heard. So let us engage the world of popular communications to our best ability on issues that matter.

UPDATE:

The dangerous militarisation of anthropology

SEE ALSO:

San Jose: American Anthropologists Stand Up Against Torture and the Occupation of Iraq and AAA Press Release: Anthropologists weigh in on Iraq, torture at annual meeting

"War on terror": CIA sponsers anthropologists to gather sensitive information / see also debate on this on Savage Minds

Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relations

Bush, "war of terror" and the erosion of free academic speech: Challenges for anthropology

USA: Censorship threatens fieldwork - A call for resistance

Two Books Explore the Sins of Anthropologists Past and Present

Embedded anthropology? Anthropologist studies Canadian soldiers in the field

"Tribal Iraq Society" - Anthropologists engaged for US war in Iraq

Another example of how religious and cultural practices change: A soon to be released survey of religious practices in Morocco will show that the majority of Moroccans prefer to pray alone, and use audiovisual media and the internet for information on their religion, according to Magharebia.com:

About 65% of those interviewed pray on a regular basis and a significant portion of Moroccans practise their religion in an individual manner, rather than collectively. As for sources of religious knowledge, the survey has demonstrated the ever-growing role of satellite channels, audiovisual media in general, cassettes and the Internet. These channels have become essential sources, taking the place of traditional written sources, to the level of 85%.

The survey also picks up on the shrinking role of institutions providing religious teaching in the acquisition of religious knowledge. These institutions, such as the family, the mosque, the school, the brotherhood etc., do not play the role they used to play in giving Moroccan people a grounding in religion.

As for the status of women, the survey highlights the ever-growing role of women in the field of religion.

The survey was carried out by three Moroccan researchers -- sociologist Mohamed El Eyadi, political analyst Mohamed Tozy and anthropologist Hassan Rachik -- who were assisted by a team of field workers.

>> read the whole story in Magharebia.com

SEE ALSO:

Muslims in Calcutta: Towards a middle-class & moderation

What does it mean to be Muslim in a secular society? Anthropologist thinks ahead

Islam: Embracing modernity while remaining true to their traditions and core beliefs

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

Islam in Europe: Mainstream society as the provider of conditions

Islam Is Gaining a Foothold in Chiapas

How Islamic cassette sermons challenge the moral and political landscape of the Middle East

Lila Abu-Lughod: It's time to give up the Western obsession with veiled Muslim women

56 artists, theorists, politicians, and grassroots activists from all over the world participated in the project that took place in Iceland, The Faroe Islands, Sapmi, Norway, Sweden and Finland. They exchanged colonial and postcolonial experiences and strategies, examined why this past has been forgotten and how it continues to reproduce itself as waves of intolerance, xenophobia, and nationalism.

A week ago the (impressive!) website of this project (which has also been published on DVD) has been launched in Oslo. You can spend hours and days, reading the papers, watching videos and movies, looking at exhibitions, listening to presentations.

In the introduction Frederikke Hansen and Tone Olaf Nielsen explain:

The colonial history of the Nordic region is a dark chapter that seems to have slipped the memory of many of the Nordic populations. Although it continues to make itself very much felt in the region’s former colonies, this history is alarmingly absent in the collective memory of the once-colonizing Nordic countries.

With Rethinking Nordic Colonialism: A Postcolonial Exhibition Project in Five Acts, we aim to shed light over this history. Not only do we hope to explain why this past has been forgotten in some parts of the region. We also want to show how this history continues to structure the Nordic societies today, and how our contemporary problems of intolerance, xenophobia, and nationalism have their roots in this past.

I'll come back with more blog posts about this website

>> visit Rethinking Nordic Colonialism

SEE ALSO:

An exhibition and a movie: The French, colonialism and the construction of "the other"

Anthropology and Colonial Violence in West Papua

"A postcolonial urban apartheid": Two anthropologists on the riots in France

The Five Major Challenges for Anthropology

Is it okay to publish your own journal articles on your website? Won't you violate any copyright? No problem! Publishers are quite flexible if you let them know you are just going to include a copy of your article on your own website or on your institution’s website, according to the most recent entry in the Open Access Anthropology Blog.

But important: Many publishers ask the author to transfer all copyrights in the work to the publisher. Don't give them all copyrights! They quote Peter Hirtle who in his article Author Addenda: An Examination of Five Alternatives proposes an author’s addendum — "a little bit of legalese that you add to the agreement with your publisher and sign that lets you save the rights you need in order to make your work open access".

>> read the whole entry: Author’s right agreements: how to make them work for you

For example when I published the (rather short) article Cosmopolitanism and anthropology/ in Anthropology Today, it was no problem to delete the second part of this part of the copy right agreement:

In consideration of the publication of the Article in the above Journal, I hereby warrant and undertake:
a. that this Article is an original work, has not been published before and is not being considered for publication elsewhere in its final form either in printed or electronic form.

SEE ALSO:

antropologi.info Open Access Anthropology Special