It might sound deterministic (and essentialising - maybe one should replace "cultures" with "societies"), but Juan Dominguez, a PhD student at the University of Melbourne, believes "different cultures" produce "different brains" and that cultural differences reflect different neurological functioning. He discussed the effects of 'enculturation' on the human brain at a recent anthropology conference in Cairns, according to ABC Australia. He said:

In certain societies and cultures there are certain patterns of behaviour, people may make certain evaluations, have certain opinions, there are certain tasks that are culturally specific. We should be able to find that ... the brain would have some sort of bias acquired through exposure to culture.

Douglas Lewis, a senior lecturer at anthropology who is supervising the work, acknowledges this is a controversial area. He explains that the emerging science of neuroanthropology suggests that brains within a group can be 'wired' by common experience, just as individual brains become 'wired' by individual experiences. "What we're looking for are correlates in the brain that anthropologists have in the past thought of as being cultural or culturally mediated," he says.

>> read the whole story in ABC

>> coverage in the Neorophilosopher's weblog

John Walter, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Saint Louis University comments:

This kind of work makes some of us in the liberal arts really nervous, but that’s because we don’t understand cognitive studies and neuroscience well enough. (...)

My sense is that there’s a fear that if we accept or find that difference is part of our neurological wiring we’ll be taking a step back to past racist practices of essentializing and differentiating groups. This fear is, I think, rooted in the assumption that there’s some kind of culture-biology duality, that if something is wired into us it is unchangeable, because (...) wiring doesn’t change. Those familiar with cognitive science, however, know that brains are adaptive.

>> read the whole comment in Machina Memorialis

SEE ALSO:

Social Neuroscience - Psychologists neuroscientists and anthropologists together

A local news story that might say something more general about why anthropology isn't more present in the news? The results of University research between April 1 and June 30 show high school athletes often get 4 to 8 times the media coverage of an academic all-star, Minnesota Daily reports.

"We're not ignoring good stories; we're not being told good stories," Maureen McCarthy, Star Tribune education leader, said. "It's unrealistic to expect two reporters to know what is going on in all area high schools."

>> read the whole story in the Minnesota Daily

SEE ALSO:

"Discuss politics!" - How anthropologists in Indonesia engage with the public

More and more anthropologists, but they're absent from public debates - "Engaging Anthropology" by Thomas Hylland Eriksen (1)

Why anthropology fails to arouse interest among the public - Engaging Anthropology (2)

Sometimes, readers send call for papers or job announcements to me. Therefore, I've now "relaunched" the forum. After registering, you may post there your announcements if you want.

>> visit the antropologi.info-forum

Now, there are two new posts:

PhD scholarship at the Department of Organization and Industrial Sociology, Copenhagen Business School

Call for entries: European Documentary and Anthropological Film Festival Budapest, Hungary, April 2007

The New York Times called it "Bin Laden's Low-Tech Weapon": Islamic cassette sermons are often associated with terrorism. They are rather a medium for democratic activism and ethical selv-improvement, anthropologist Charles Hirschkind argues in his new book "The Ethical Soundscape. Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics".

There is an book excerpt on the website of Columbia University Press. Hirschkind writes:

To read the cassette sermon primarily as a technology of fundamentalism and militancy reduces the enormous complexity of the lifeworld enabled by this medium, forcing it to fit into the narrow confines of a language of threat, fear, rejection, and irrationality.

On the contrary, cassette sermons frequently articulate a fierce critique of the nationalist project, with its attendant lack of democracy and accountability among the ruling elites of the Muslim world. The form of public discourse within which this critique takes place, however, is not oriented toward militant political action or the overthrow of the state. Rather, such political commentary gives direction to a normative ethical project centered upon questions of social responsibility, pious comportment, and devotional practice.

(...)

For those who participate in the movement, the moral and political direction of contemporary Muslim societies cannot be left to politicians, religious scholars, or militant activists but must be decided upon and enacted collectively by ordinary Muslims in the course of their normal daily activities.

These sermons are a key element in the technological scaffolding of what is called the Islamic Revival (al-Sahwa al-Islamiyya), he writes. The cassette sermon has become an omnipresent background of daily urban life in most Middle Eastern cities:

In Cairo, where I spent a year and a half exploring this common media practice, cassette-recorded sermons of popular Muslim preachers, or khutaba' (sing. khatib), have become a ubiquitous part of the contemporary social landscape. The sermons of well-known orators spill into the street from loudspeakers in cafes, the shops of tailors and butchers, the workshops of mechanics and TV repairmen; they accompany passengers in taxis, mini-buses, and most forms of public transportation; they resonate from behind the walls of apartment complexes, where men and women listen alone in the privacy of their homes after returning home from the factory, while doing housework, or together with acquaintances from school or office, invited to hear the latest sermon from a favorite preacher.

During his stay in Egypt, he spent much of his time meeting both with the khutaba' who produced sermon tapes and with young people who listened to them on a regular basis.

One of the central arguments of his book is, he writes, "that the affects and sensibilities honed through popular media practices such as listening to cassette sermons are as infrastructural to politics and public reason as are markets, associations, formal institutions, and information networks."

>> read the whole book excerpt

SEE ALSO:

Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood: Feminism, the Taliban and the Politics of Counterinsurgency

Charles Hirschkind: What is Political Islam? (Middle East Report)

Charles Hirschkind: The Betrayal of Lebanon (tabsir, 1.8.06)

Why haven't there been such blog posts about the recent EASA-conference (European Association of Social Anthropologists)? Anthropologist Grant McCracken has presented a paper at the EPIC-conference (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference) and written three blog posts, among others about his presentation (and the usefulness of ethnography):

In my presentation on Monday at EPIC 2006, I proposed that we might want to take advantage of the "extra data" effect. Ethnography is often most useful when we don't know what we need to know. The method is good at casting the net wide. We ask lots of questions. Collect lots of data. Apply lots of theory and interpretation. Eventually, we begin to see what it is we need to see. At the end of this process we find ourselves in possession of a lot of data we cannot use. This "extra data" is an opportunity.

>> read his whole post

Read also part II and part III

SEE ALSO:

Anthropology and the World: What has happened at the EASA conference?

Conference blogging at EPIC 2005

As noted earlier, Inuit film maker Zacharias Kunuk explores in his film The Journals of Knud Rasmussen how missionaries force-fed Christianity to the Inuit in the 1920s.

Now the film has made its way to the International Film Festival in Toronto and to movies across Canada. In an interview with the Edmonton Journal, Kunuk tells about how film making has contributed to a revival of Inuit shamanism:

"For our Inuit audience and for our young people, we're showing that we survived 4,000 years under shamanism: Be kind to animals, use only what you need. We had everything -- food, clothes. You had to be a good hunter to be rich. Christianity came, all that was put aside. Growing up, the minister was telling us don't do drum dances, don't tell legends because they're the work of the devil. It's brainwashing. It happened in New Zealand, Australia, Africa. It probably all happened the same.

(..)

"I wanted to put it down on record. For 4,000 years of our history, it is only the last 85 years that Christianity came. It doesn't balance. We traded 100 taboos -- laws of nature -- for Ten Commandments, which now I don't have any trust for after looking at where they came from. Love thy neighbour? They're bombing the hell out of each other! But we had to throw away all these rules of the land, taboos we just dumped so we could go to heaven."

(...)

"Shamanism was here, and it's going to be here, that's what my elders tell me. After Atanarjuat [an earlier film], the elders started to talk about shamanism more. With this film, because their families are in this community, people learned about their namesakes. We live by namesakes. When I was born, I was given five names, but the government couldn't pronounce them so we were given tags and family names."

>> read the whole interview

Read also film reviews in the Edmonton Journal, in the Toronto Sun, and on Cinematical.com.

EARLIER COVERAGE:

The Journals of Knud Rasmussen: The impact of Christianity among the Inuit

(via Xirdalium) Understanding Media Practices was the name of one of the numerous workshops at the conference Europe and the World by the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA).

Some papers are now freely available:

The online nomads of cyberia (PDF, 337 Kb)
Alexander Knorr (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen)

Foreign correspondents/ foreign news production (PDF, 260 Kb)
Angela Dressler (University of Bremen)

Game pleasures and media practices (PDF, 160 Kb)
Elisenda Ardèvol, Antoni Roig, Gemma San Cornelio, Ruth Pagès and Pau Alsina (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)

Finding our subject: media practice, structure and communication (PDF, 240 Kb)
Daniel Taghioff (School of Oriental and African Studies)

SEE ALSO:

Anthropology and the World: What has happened at the EASA conference?

Introduction to "Media Worlds": Media an important field for anthropology

Working papers in Media Anthropology

The Gotham Gazette has interviewed Urban anthropologist Katherine S. Newman about her research and the situation of the urban poor in New York.

Newman has written No Shame In My Game, an ethnography of fast food workers in Harlem. In October the follow up called Chutes and Ladders will come out.

First, a few words about No Shame In My Game:

Her major findings are the strong work ethic among these minimum-wage workers and the value they place on personal responsibility; to blame their difficulties on personal shortcomings would be too simplistic.

(source))

An excerpt from a review in The Progressive:

In No Shame in My Game, she argues that social science research has disproportionately focused on the plight of the unemployed ghetto-dweller or mothers on welfare. The media, too, depict welfare dependency as the natural state of poverty, while neglecting the majority of inner-city poor people who work.
(...)
She writes, "The nation's working poor do not need their values reengineered. They do not need lessons about the dignity of work. Their everyday lives are proof enough that they share the values of their mainstream, middle class counterparts."

She talks in very positive way both about the workers and the employers ("Newman sees everyone she meets in a similarly flattering light, as if she is afraid to make any judgments", The New York Times remarks). She is asked if there have been conflicts between "illegal" immigrants and native-born Americans at the work place. She answers that the work created both tension and friendship:

But the thing that I found most striking was that people created a community of friends out of the people they worked with. Workers had friendships or relationships with each other; they went to the movies together. The workplace is a great generator of cross-racial contact and friendship.

The employers, she writes, were "more honorable people than most readers would ever think":

Now, I don’t want to say that they were saints. They were business people, and they were looking to make a profit. But they were much more invested in the lives of their workers then most people realize. They helped people get eyeglasses; they helped people get ID; they cosigned leases; they were offering young people money if they got good grades; they paid for their schoolbooks. (...) Very often these employers were the only ones who were paying a good deal of interest in the school performance of these kids.

So one of the things that I argue in the book is that really contrary to common wisdom school and work are not antithetical to one another. These young people were doing better in school than the young people who weren’t working, because the discipline that they learned on the job and the oversight the business owners and mangers exercised over them was having a positive effect on their school performance.

(...) I must say that I was surprised at what I found in the businesses that I did study. And that has taught me as a social scientist that you shouldn’t prejudge anything. It's all open for investigation.

>> read the whole interview

The blog A Constrained Vision quotes from another interview with her:

It was also important to me to show how qualitative research could give us a deeper understanding of the daily lives and real values of inner city workers. Most of the information we have on labor markets and the workforce naturally comes from economists or sociologists who work with large data sets.

That research is crucial, especially for explaining the big picture. But it doesn't help us understand how ordinary people in poor communities view their lives, their options, or how they put the resources together to survive, to raise their kids, to balance going to school and keeping a job.

You need a different approach for that and it seemed to me that anthropology has something important to add to the picture. Besides, a good anthropologist can communicate with a larger audience that won't sit still for statistical arguments, but will listen to a well-crafted account of real lives.

MORE ON "NO SHAME IN MY GAME"

An unusual view of poverty- Review in The Progressive

Flipping Burgers - Review in The New York Times

Pennies From Hell - Review in The Village Voice