"For those of us whose prime focus is advancing human knowledge, megaconferences are a waste of time and money." Don Moody agrees, but also criticizes my article in Anthropology Today august 2006 about weak presentations at the conference "Anthropology and Cosmopolitanism" at Keele University (UK).

The published article is a heavily edited version of my blog entry What's the point of anthropology conferences? and draws also on How To Present A Paper - - or Can Anthropologists Talk?.

Moody writes:

Your piece in AT is rightly harsh about some speakers at the ASA conference, but quite wrong in targeting Brits and anthropology in particular. I have been to conferences on subjects as diverse as anthropology, chemistry, printing and safety in the UK, Europe and further afield. The utterly boring droning reader can be found at all of them. It only happens when there is a weak chairman.

The cure is a strong chairman and a system of lights. One minute before the presentation is due to end a yellow light is switched on by the chairman. On the dot a red light comes on and all projectors and microphone are switched off. Then the chairman announces there is X minutes for discussion and asks for the first question. As the questioner stands up he is handed a roving mike if the auditorium is large and that and the platform mike are then switched on.

Some self-important twit will attempt to override the system, The chairman simply switches off all media and declares the session at an end. Will everyone please vacate the stage. The twit disappears never to be seen again at a conference. Yes it is rough and yes it can destroy reputations. So what? The boring reader who over-runs is self-confessedly incompetent at his trade, impolite, inconsiderate of the value of the time of others, and doesn't give a damn what organisation of a complex conference is screwed up. Does one want such a person to appear again, however important he thinks he is? The short answer is NO!

So what you described was actually weak chairmanship and lack of organisational preparation. If those two doors are left open, the droners will walk through. Any subject. Any time. Any where.

But nevertheless, I asked him, reading one's paper seems to be a tradition in Britain - it's something that you're expected to do?

He replied that this a modern development and is related to specialisation and economisation: Earlier, when our compartmentalised subject divisions did not exist, one individual put forward a thesis, and all present debated it and - if they could - tore it to shreds. Gradually this got supplanted by the multiple papers rushed through with insufficient time for deep discussion and analysis. According to Don Moody, there were two drivers:

On was money. People do not get funded to go to conferences unless they are 'reading a paper' or at least and more recently, taking part in 'a poster session'. So there is enormous demand on conference organisers to produce more and more slots for people to qualify for funding.

The second driver is a combination of idleness and a lack of time because so much time is taken up with committees and admin in general. Belting through a boring script without deviation is the least possible effort. It also gives the funders (and their lawyers) opportunity to put favourable slants in the paper and avoid any possible legal contention.

He then compares a conference where "we were there for the sheer love and excitement of it" (no pre-written presentations!) to the ASA conference:

Now compare that to what you saw and heard at the ASA. As person after person droned through their script with insufficient time to take ideas to pieces in discussion, did any sparks fly? I doubt it. Did a gestalt form and take the subject one great leap forward? No. The megaconference at which dozens or hundreds of papers are read may have some other useful functions but does not contribute to major advance in its subject. For those of us whose prime focus is advancing human knowledge, megaconferences are a waste of time and money.

>> my article in Anthropology Today: Cosmopolitanism and Anthropology

How To Present A Paper - or Can Anthropologists Talk?

What's the point of anthropology conferences?

SEE ALSO:

Alexandre Enkerli on "Academic Presentations: Be Brief, Be Witty, Be Seated"

"Their history deserves to be known in every other country where one can expect to be served a cup of Ceylon tea", Norwegian anthropologist Haakon Aasprong writes in his thesis Making a Home Away from Home: On Up-country Tamil identity and social complexity at a Sri Lankan university that now is available online.

He has conducted field work among Up Country Tamils at the University of Peradeniya from January to August 2006. Up-country Tamils are descendents from workers sent from South India to Sri Lanka in the 19th and 20th centuries to work in coffee, tea and rubber plantations.

He writes:

There are a number of reasons why Up-country Tamils deserve anthropological attention. The people itself is a young one and an idea of a unique ethnic identity is still in the process of articulation. Their immigration to the island [Sri Lanka] began as late as in the 1830’s at which time they arrived as labour immigrants from South India.

Today, they are in many ways a “diaspora next-door” (Bass 2004:375) and in a difficult situation vis-à-vis their Sri Lankan contemporaries, who have tended to be suspicious of their true loyalties and treated them as tools of Indian imperialism. Their employment as plantation labour in the up- and midcountry has to a large degree isolated them from mainstream society and while they enjoyed citizenship and limited voting rights under British rule, they were, following Independence, disenfranchised and rendered stateless.

Confined to conditions of semi-slavery in the plantation sector, the Up-country Tamils have been lagging behind the national averages with regard to indicators of quality of life. They are, moreover, as the Pastor of the Peradeniya campus church explained to me, “a voiceless community,” or in anthropological terms “a muted group”, and have been largely ignored when not suspected of disloyalty.

(...)

The 15 CG Up-country Tamils I have followed are all among the first in their communities to obtain a university education. They are, in other words, treading new ground, relying on each other and their own decisions, in a place which is conceptually, if not physically, far removed from their home communities. It is their task to make of campus a home away from home.

>> download the thesis "Making a Home Away from Home: On Up-country Tamil identity and social complexity at a Sri Lankan university" (pdf - 5,6MB )

UPDATE: Just found that Haakon Aasprong has been blogging on Globen Cafe

SEE ALSO:

Wikipedia about Up Country Tamils

"Our politicians are so obsessed by race that they have forgotten the importance of class", writes Daily Telegraph journalist Andrew Gimson and points to a new book by anthropologist Gillian Evans called Educational Failure and Working-Class White Children in Britain.

Evans conducted fieldwork in families of boys who were highly disruptive at school. Among other things, she documents the importance of class and institutional class prejudices.

In an essay in The Guardian (that provoced many reactions), she writes:

"It's them and us, that's 'ow it's always been, that's 'ow it'll always be," [informant] Anita laments. "We are the backbone of the nation and no one gives a fuck about us." Reacting against dominance, then, working-class pride creates the means for dignity; common people fight back defensively with their own values and so being common entails an inverse snobbery.

The importance of this understanding from the point of view of education is as follows: if it is true, as I suggest it is, that the school, as a formal institution of the state, has come to represent and embody posh people's values, and make legitimate their way of being in the world, then it is also true to say that common children, like Sharon's younger daughter, will encounter the formal, "proper", "posh" atmosphere of the school as if it were a foreign country.

(...) At school, and in life, middle-class people behave as though they are doing working-class people a favour, teaching them how to live a "proper" life and then wondering why it doesn't work. They are not prepared for working-class people's resistance to this process, a resistance born of a defiant pride about the value of common life.

Her fieldwork exploded several myths, f.ex. "Problem children at school are problem children in the home" or "Education is not highly rated amongst the working classes".

During my research, the teachers in the underperforming primary school I studied didn't focus on institutional failures and how those failures were affecting the chances of working-class children (...). The teachers were convinced that the most disruptive of the boys came from "problem families", and that was all that mattered.

(...) To my surprise, I discovered that these boys (...) were "as good as gold" at home.

Under the strict discipline of his parents, Tom [one of the boys] was "under manners". I also discovered that Tom's sister, who was three years younger than him, was doing brilliantly at school; she was a star achiever and a "teacher's pet". This fact threw a spanner in the works and suggested that "problem families" cannot, in any simple way, be blamed for children's educational failure.

Tom's "problem" had to do with "street culture" (and we may add its lacking recognition by the middle class school system?):

[I]n seeking the freedom of the street (...) he encountered gangs of older boys who rule the closely-defined territories of the street with ruthless intimidation and violence. A young boy must, then, quickly learn to withstand intimidation and, in time, learn how to be intimidating and even to enjoy violence himself.

In this way, a young boy quickly develops a reputation of his own in relation to a particular "turf" or area and it is in the failing school, where adult authority is weak, that a boy like Tom gets to use the territory of the school as a relatively safe place to work out and to extend his influence among peers. His developing reputation makes it impossible for him to be "good" and to be seen to be doing well, learning effectively at school.

(...) [T]he more problems there are at home, the more likely a boy is to seek the freedom of the street and the company of peers to escape the stresses at home that working class or what they call "common" life places on his parents.

But why has she focused on white children, she was asked by black friends:

I explained that most of the attention in Britain is on the failure of black boys, but when the statistics are examined, white working-class boys are, in some boroughs, doing worst of all and in terms of national averages are faring only slightly better than black boys. This information caused surprise.

I suggested that part of the problem when we talk about black boys in Britain is that we tend to focus on their race, their ethnicity and their cultural background. (...) When we look at the failure of working-class white boys, however, what is emphasised about them is their social class position.

This means the opportunity is lost to consider whether those black and white boys who are failing are doing so because of reasons to do with them being similarly working class, and that perhaps the prejudice they experience at school is first and foremost an institutional class prejudice. By default, this means black people don't have a social class position and white people don't have an ethnic or cultural background, they are simply from the working, middle or upper classes.

>> read her first article "Common Ground" (The Guardian, 4.10.06)

>> read her second article "Bottom of their class" (The Guardian, 11.10.06)

These two essays provoked lots of comments and triggered a very interesting debate.

Patrick Butler sums up:

The article, after all, was about that most British and volatile of subjects: social class. The tone of many responses might be summarised thus: how dare a middle-class person write about working-class people?

People were offended that Evans's reference to "common" people was "patronising" (though this was her Bermondsey subject Sharon's classification, not hers); her reference to Bermondsey's white working-class people as a "tribe" was deemed offensive (yet this was precisely the word her subjects used to describe themselves - as in "the last white tribe in London").

It was felt demeaning that her subjects' words were spelt phonetically - and yet what better way, in this context, to transmit the authentic, charismatic power of the spoken word (and, equally, how patronising, were we to have standardised the spelling throughout).

>> read the whole text in The Guardian

>> Class war. An edited selection of responses to Gillian Evans's article

Gillian Evans answers: "I suggest that it is this admission of the feeling of "knowing best" that has most angered people", and adds:

People's difficulty with my work and the SocietyGuardian article, is that it breaks a taboo. Taboos exist to protect sacred ideals. In this case the sacred ideal is as follows: people in Britain are equal, the Empire is over: social class is dead. My work breaks that taboo by reminding people that social class is alive and well and deeply felt. Hence the strong reaction to it. People who break taboos must be punished because no one wants to confront the truth of what's really going on beneath the ideal.

>> read her whole comment

Ramadan is being increasingly observed by France's Muslim community - but also for a few French non-Muslims, afp reports. "I do it sometimes to show my support for my Muslim friends," said Lorie, a schoolgirl in the eastern suburb of Montreuil.

The trend is especially prevalent among young adults. 88 percent of all Muslim adults in the country fasted for Ramadan - and 94 percent of those aged under 30 did, according to a recent survey in a Catholic weekly, La Vie.

French anthropologist Malek Chebel, said that the surge in interest in Ramadan "is a phenomenon we've been seeing for 15 or so years".

"Essentially, it's a phenomenon of cultural identification - French Muslims have the feeling of belonging to all other Muslims around the world," he said. The physical rigor of observing daily fasting for a month made Ramadan a sort of macho competition among boys and young men.

Abdel Rahman Dahmane, the president of the Council of Democratic Muslims in France says that Ramadan has become a month of identification for all a community.

>> read the whole story in the Middle East Times (link updated)

SEE ALSO RAMADAN-RELATED:

Blogger Anthrogal (yes, an anthropologist in France and Muslim) has done some Ramadan-blogging

On OhMyNews, Fiza Fatima Asar gives in My Ramadan. From Pakistan to California and back again a nice description:

Ramadans are really so special in Pakistan. It is a different feeling altogether -- an entirely different world. All the restaurants are closed during the day and open right before sunset when people start pouring in for iftars at their favorite restaurants, the ones that stay open all night until five in the morning. (...) When we hear someone say "the city never sleeps" we really needed to visit Karachi during Ramadan to know what that phrase really meant. Boys and young men arrange night cricket matches out in the streets with lights fixed along the street light poles and the neighborhood collected to watch the matches. These matches end right before suhur during weekends.

And she explains:

Ramadan is not just about starving and fighting your thirst. Well, I knew that before too. But in the past I thought, fine, Ramadan is also about charity, about perseverance and about patience. This year I learned more. Ramadan is really about bringing one closer to the other. Ramadan is about sharing and missing people. Ramadan is about loving the other and thanking God they are there to be with you.

>> read the whole text in OhMyNews

On GlobalVoices we learn that during Ramadan there are much more beggars on the street. These people would like to exploit this holy month as much as possible and play on the high level of religious emotions of people during this special time, Tunisian blogger Zayed writes.

A new interactive multimedia-website was launched about Swiss folk music including an Alphorn Tune Composer. On www.swissalpinemusic.ch you can read about alphorn music and yodelling, on alpine traditions and so on but the best thing is that you can listen to the music and then there is the Alphorn Tune Composer: It allows you to create your own tunes and send them via email. The Composer is made up of 17 notes – all the tones possible on the alphorn – as played by André Scheurer, music editor at Swiss Radio Swiss Classic.

The texts are written by music anthropologist Brigitte Bachmann-Geiser. She writes:

"The alphorn was dying out after 1800 because it was no longer necessary as a communication tool of the alpine cowherds. Increasingly, the individual dairies in the alpine chalets were replaced by big cooperative cheese-making companies in the villages. The whole tradition of alpine dairy production was breaking down; on many alpine pastures beef cows had replaced dairy cows."

But recently the alphorn has undergone a revival and is now used in both classical and pop music, and jazz.

>> read more at Swissinfo

>> visit www.swissalpinemusic.ch

(LINKS UPDATED 31.10.22) In the field, anthropologists spent lots of time playing football or learning to dance: Could such enjoyable pastimes be considered a kind of work? Could play be used as a research technique? The new issue of Anthropology Matters is out. Its topic: From Play to Knowledge.

Seems to be a very interesting issue. Here some excerpts from the editorial by Susanne Langer, Emily Walmsley, Hannah Knox, and Mattia Fumanti:

In the first article Jonathan McIntosh reflects on his research with children in a Balinese dance studio. (...) Without a degree of linguistic competence he would not have been able to understand the children's songs and games he was interested in, let alone able to join in (...). Being able to participate did not only add an important embodied dimension to McIntosh's research, but also changed his relationship with the children. Balinese adults tend to be figures of respect, who may initiate games, but tend not to play themselves. By being an atypical adult, McIntosh was able to let the children take the lead and become his teachers, allowing him to learn about their everyday games and the role music and dance play in their lives.

(...)

Lucy Atkinson (...) played with children from the Democratic Republic of Congo who were living in a refugee camp in Northern Zambia. (...) [H]er aim was to create a space for the children to express themselves freely, using a variety of creative media, such as drawing, drama, or film, as well as techniques derived from participatory consultation and decision making processes to achieve this. (...)

However, the incorporation of these incredibly rich sources into standard academic accounts has presented Atkinson with a challenge. (...) In particular the children's drawings, she contends, are not mere illustrations of the writing, but should be seen as more akin to quotes. However, she admits that this new status of the pictorial will require a major change in the conventions of how ethnographic writing is received.

(...)

In his research, Will Gibson was interested in the intersubjective knowledge involved in the production of improvised jazz performances (...). Dissatisfied with the degree of detail that conventional interviews produced, he decided to record incidents when he was playing with experienced performers. Gibson then played the recordings back to them, inquiring about their motivations and decisions when playing a sequence in a particular way.
This approach allowed him to learn about conventions, a player's personal preferences, and the considerations concerning the skills and experience of other players that had influenced their improvisations. This innovative approach enabled Gibson to tease out the ways in which players orient themselves to each other and to the conventions of jazz improvisation.

>> read the whole Editorial

Articles in this issue:

Jonathan McIntosh: How dancing, singing and playing shape the ethnographer: research with children in a Balinese dance studio
"In this article I contribute to the debate on research methods in ethnomusicology. To do this I illustrate how active engagement in the activities and learning processes of children better enables the ethnographer to gain insights into children's musical worlds."

Lucy Atkinson: From play to knowledge: from visual to verbal?
"This article relates my experiences using playful child-centred research techniques whilst undertaking research with Congolese refugee children in Zambia. Such techniques generate rich and varied information, and often in unexpected ways."

Brett Lashua: The arts of the remix: ethnography and rap
"In this paper I take note of 'the arts of the remix', in which techniques of producing hip-hop music with First Nations young people in Canada involved remixing both music and research practices."

Will Gibson: Playing in the field: participant observation and the investigation of intersubjective knowledge in jazz improvisation
"I describe an approach to participant observation in which recordings of the researcher and research participants improvising musical performances together were used as 'texts' for framing discussions."

Katrín Lund: Making mountains, producing narratives, or: 'One day some poor sod will write their Ph.D. on this'
"This paper looks at ways of narrating mountaineering experiences in Scotland. What anthropologists can learn about their own ways of organising and abstracting their experiences from examining the material culture of mountaineers."

>> front page of Anthropology Matters 2006, Vol 8 (2)

The first temporary exhibition at Paris’s Quai Branly museum takes an ambitious look at how the West constructs its ‘other’, Mary Stevens writes in her research blog about the reconfiguration of national identity in French museums:

In the permanent exhibition it is the aesthetic qualities of the objects on display that are foregrounded; what is missing is a critical reflection on how the western aesthetic criteria which visitors are encouraged to apply have developed over time. What makes us see something as art, and why do we now judge as art objects that in the past might have been seen either as silent witnesses to social customs or indeed as curiosities? These are the questions that D’un regard l’Autre sets out to explore.

(...)

[H]airy savages carved in wood bear witness to Renaissance man’s desire to position his superior self firmly on the side of culture against nature. However, it is interesting to be reminded that in this period real-live people from other cultures were sufficiently rare in Western Europe to command wonder and a degree of respect. A life-size portrait of an Inuit couple, painted during their visit to the Danish court in the late seventeenth century provides a subtle reminder: the names of these two travellers – Pock and Kieperoch – were carefully noted by the artist. It was only in the nineteenth century that their successors would become ‘types’, documented and classified for the new sciences of anthropology and phrenology and displayed for public instruction in the new museums.

>> read the whole review of the exhibition

See also earlier on antropologi.info: Indigenous? Non-Western? Primitive? The Paris Museum Controversy

Mary Stevens has blogged a lot about multiculturalism and nationalism in France. One of the interesting recent posts is about the integration of foreign students: What image of France is presented in the introductory courses about French society?

(...) Day 2: the gastronomic map of France (lots of camembert and choucroute - not a lot of couscous and brik) place names (all Greek, Roman, Celtic or religious), family names (every single one of them belonging to the Français de souche, whoever they might be) and - to top it all - "languages, ethnic groups and cultures". Aside from the fact that I thought ‘ethnic’ was a taboo word in French, only regional minorities get a mention and we are told authoritatively that cultural diversity has been in decline since the Revolution, or at least until a ‘recent’ upsurge in regional movements (e.g. Coriscan, Breton, Basque).

So here we have it: ‘le mythe national’ condensed into two short days. Above all the course seeks to inculcate a closed, exclusive definition of national identity that fails to take into account any of the demographic developments of the last 200 years and indeed before.

If anyone was ever in any doubt that there is still work to be done in France in rethinking the ‘collective memory’ - or what I prefer to call the collective or social ‘imaginary’ (the latter after the philosopher Charles Taylor) - then here (with apologies for the poor quality) is the proof.

>> read the whole post: Integrating the elite: peddling national mythology

Related topics are touched in the French movie Indigènes. Mary Stevens explains:

The film tells the story of a group of North African soldiers, fighting on French soil for the liberation of France from 1943. It is explicitly geared toward the re-evaluation of national collective memory; its aim is to address the way these soldiers, who played a major role in the Liberation have been written out of (the Gaullist account) of history. And it looks set to have a major impact.

>> read the whole post: The « Indigènes » effect ?

Anthropologist Cicilie Fagerlid is back in Paris and has also seen the film:

Indigene is the shameful juridical assignation used for Muslims in French North Africa. Muslims, being indigenes and not citizens like the Christians and Jews, didn’t enjoy equal rights until 1945. It’s incredible, isn’t it, in the country priding itself with the slogan libérté, égalité, fraternité?

>> read the whole review

(LINKS UPDATED 21.9.2020) The first part of the paper Media consumption, conformity and resistance: a visual ethnography of youth culture in Iranian Kurdistan by anthropologist Kameel Ahmady has been published on KurdishMedia. Ahmady wanted to examine the factors which shape a sense of belonging among young people in Mahabad, a town on the north-west periphery of Iran.

His methodological approach is interesting:

I used reflexive visual methods, asking them [the young people] to take their own photographic pieces dealing with themes they saw as relevant to local current events and their place within these processes. The works they produced were then placed in a week long public exhibition in Mahabad, where further data was gathered in a Guest Book of reactions to the event, as well as participant observation notes taken at the time.

Kameel Ahmady has an interesting website with an image gallery and we also can read some of his articles and papers, mostly dealing with Middle East issues.

UPDATE (15.10.06): Part II of his paper Media consumption, conformity and resistance: A visual ethnography of youth culture in Iranian Kurdistan is out