Dean Saitta (University of Denver) is one of the four anthropologists in David Horowitz’s book The Professors: The 101 most dangerous academics in America. The reason? His involvement in a debate on the erosion of free public and academic speech in the US.

In his guest editorial in the August edition of Anthropology Today, he describes the consequences of Bush's "war on terror" for academics and calls for action: Anthropologists, he writes, "need to step up and engage in more and better conversations about the university’s status as a site of critical, creative and civically engaged inquiry":

The subsequent declaration of a ‘war on terror’ and the passage of the Patriot Act have threatened the civil liberties of many citizens, and brought new fears of government intrusion into our lecture halls and seminar rooms. (...)

As US troops settled into Afghanistan and Iraq the campaign against the academy intensified. Aided and abetted by a resurgent conservative student activism on campus, this campaign accuses the American professoriate of harbouring a pervasive and long-standing liberal bias – with ‘liberal’ variously understood as leftist, Marxist and anti-American.

The campaign’s single most militant crusader, Saitta writes, is David Horowitz. He is a source of advice on political strategy for the Bush administration. Since 2003, Horowitz’ organization Students for Academic Freedom (SAF) has mobilized conservative students and politicians in 20 states to propose an ‘Academic Bill of Rights’ (ABOR) for state-supported institutions. This bill is according to Saitta "clearly aimed at critics of President Bush and the war in Iraq".

In his book The professors:The 101 most dangerous academics in America (published in february 2006), Horowitz reveals the pervasive ‘intellectual corruption’ of the American university by providing an alphabetized list of "some of the worst violators of professional obligations and standards".

Four anthropologists are included. As Savage Minds already has noted, Diane Nelson of Duke University is another "dangerous" anthropology professor.

Many more anthropologists could have been included, Saitta stresses:

Horowitz has indicated in several of his writings and interviews that anthropology is one of the more intellectually corrupt disciplines within the social sciences (...), fraught with political correctness and partisanship.

All academics should be concerned about Horowitz’ crusade, he argues. It seems that a large part of the American public agrees with Horowitz in some way. The American public has - as a recent survey reveals - very strange understandings of what the university is and does:

Nearly 70% believe the university should, as its primary function, provide job training rather than cultivate critical thinking. Over 60% believe that professors should be fired for associating with ‘radical’ political organizations. Over 50% think that too much scholarly research today is irrelevant to the needs of society. Finally, nearly 40% believe that the political bias of professors is a serious problem on campus.

Therefore, American anthropologists are faced with at least three major challenges in Saittas opinion:

First, we need to demonstrate that (...) our obligation as university faculty is to teach a breadth of ideas, critically examine their social causes and consequences, boldly experiment with new ones and, from time to time, actively champion particular ideas that can advance what we know and change for the better (whatever we take ‘better’ to mean) how we live. If we make some of our publics uncomfortable in the process, then we’re probably doing something right.

(...)

The second challenge is to better justify and develop the sort of engaged pedagogy and scholarship that landed many of us on the ‘dangerous 101’ list. Horowitz’ model of appropriate pedagogy is hierarchical and elitist. It evokes an image of tweedy professors filling up empty-headed and easily indoctrinable students with what is presumed to be disinterested, value-free knowledge. (...) Significant research in higher education over the past several decades has shown (...) the utility of more philosophically self-conscious and collaborative approaches for cultivating critical powers of mind.

(...)

The third challenge is to show how anthropology’s unique ‘deep time’, cross-cultural and bio-behavioural understanding of the human condition can enrich the entire academic curriculum and inform wider public discourse. (...) [B]ecause of the qualities identified above, anthropology should be the linchpin of a liberal arts education and any truly informed approach to policy-making in a globalizing world.(...)
Anthropology’s particularist conversation about human rights (...) provides a useful counterpoint to the universalist rights conversations of other disciplines.

>> read the whole text: Higher education and the dangerous professor: Challenges for anthropology (760kb, pdf - published on his homepage)

Saitta and many other ‘dangerous professors’ have stepped up to challenge the errors in Horowitz’ book, and to clarify what academia is about and set up two websites and blogs: www.teachersfordemocracy.org/ and www.freeexchangeoncampus.org .

Dean J. Saitta has by the way an excellent homepage with lots of articles.

SEE ALSO:

Engaged anthropologists beaten by the Mexican police

Censorship of research in the USA: Iranians not allowed to publish papers

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

"War on terror": CIA sponsers anthropologists to gather sensitive information

Fear of Small Numbers, the new book by Mumbai-born anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has received attention across America. He discusses why, in the age of globalisation, opening of markets, free flow of capital and liberal ideas, minorities in many countriesare facing greater hostilities than ever before.

In an interview with Rediff, he argues for "moving away from national loyalties towards urban and metropolitan loyalties, which put a premium on active tolerance and deliberate cosmopolitanism".

He explains:

One of the basic arguments of the book is that the idea of a majority can create uncertainty about the primary identity of a nation. In the book, I call this the anxiety of incompleteness.

What I mean is that in every nation State without exception, somewhere beneath the surface is the idea that a nation is composed of a single ethnic substance, some kind of ethnic purity -- and the idea of ethnic purity leads to the feeling that only people belonging to that ethnicity should be full citizens in that State.

And in a society like India, this is a huge problem because a certain group, in this case the Hindus, can view themselves as almost completely defining India but not totally. The problem -- the incompleteness -- is due to the presence of other groups, whether you call them minorities or strangers or guests or visitors.

Every Hindu Indian recognises that the land is not completely Hindu. In the book, I argue that this sense of incomplete purity does not necessarily lead to an effort to obliterate the minorities. But in many circumstances, it can lead to that. And we have seen increasing efforts in some parts of India, Gujarat in particular, to obliterate the minorities.

Thinking in the categories minority and majority is something new according to the anthropologist:

I have been interested in census statistics, how populations are actually enumerated. Apart from the question of being weak or subordinate, official enumeration is one of the ways minorities are created in the modern world.

The point here is that the idea of minority and majority was not always a part of human society. Human societies always had different groups; some were larger and some smaller; but the twin categories of minority and majority are modern phenomena.

For him as an anthropologist, he says, it is "painfully obvious that it has become culturally respectable to run down and suspect the Muslim community."

The fear of the minorities is in his opinion "irrational":

I believe that the radical, terrorist voices one hears in the Muslim communities in India are few and small. The average Muslim in India today has this request to the majority community: Give us the room to survive. Muslims in rural and urban India are not thinking of taking over India, but are asking whether they can live there at all.

>> read part 1 of the interview with Arjun Appadurai: The average Indian Muslim wants room to survive

>> part 2 of the interview: Indian society is still interdependent

>> review by Jeremy Ballenger: "A considered, fascinating and somewhat disturbing look at the ‘other side’ of globalisation"

SEE ALSO:

For an Anthropology of Cosmopolitanism

Interview with Benedict Anderson: "I like nationalism's utopian elements"

"Anthropologists Should Participate in the Current Immigration Debate"

They believe in witches but are catholics at the same time. In a forthcoming book, anthropologist Kathryn Rountree describes surprising links between paganism and traditional Catholicism in Malta. It will be the first book to explore neo-paganism in an overwhelmingly Catholic society, Rountree tells Massey University News:

What fascinated Dr Rountree was the observation that although Maltese pagans and witches shared a kind of global pagan culture with feminist and New Age spiritual movements elsewhere through books and the internet, they did not share the same antipathy towards orthodox Christianity.

Maltese pagans maintain an affinity with Catholicism simply because they are so deeply imbued with it.

“There is little choice about being Catholic in Malta,” she says. “It is not so much a religion which an individual accepts (willingly or not) or rejects as it is the cultural ‘ground of being’ for all Maltese.” As one of the pagans she interviews says: “For me, trying not to be Catholic would be like trying not to be Maltese.”

By accepting an invitation to attend a Summer Solstice celebration, Dr Rountree met other pagans and witches in Malta who gathered to participate in these and other pagan rituals.

But because of Catholic disapproval of alternative religions, she has had to conceal the identities of those she interviewed to protect them. She believes the people she interviewed for a book could risk losing their jobs if they became known as practising pagans in the strongly Catholic country.

>> read the whole story in Massey News

SEE ALSO:

Kathryn Rountree: Goddess pilgrims as tourists: inscribing the body through sacred travel (Sociology of Religion, Winter 2002)

BBC on Paganism and Neo-Paganism

Pagan Network - to promote the acceptance and tolerance of Paganism as a faith system within the UK

Refugees are no longer treated as clients but as 'participants'. They no longer receive social benefits but a salary for learning Norwegian and jobtraining. All recognised refugees in Norway have 'the right and duty' to attend a two year full-day Introductory Programme. Anthropologist Oddveig Nygård did fieldwork in one of these introductury centers in a small town in Western Norway.

She found that the new program on the one hand had positive effects on the relationship between refugees and the caseworkers - partly because the introductory programme allows the caseworkers to focus on other things than merely payment of benefits:

The fairly cold and bureaucratic environment of the social security office, in which the caseworkers are placed behind their desks and the refugees come to receive their social benefits, now belongs to the past. Instead, the refugees daily attend a centre where they see the caseworkers on a frequent basis. (...) The new framework has created a better basis to see the individual behind the refugee label and to obtain a more contextual image of the client. (...) The frequent encounters in more than just one setting have led to a more subtle relation between the two parties.

But the closer relationship between caseworkers and refugees creates ambiguity. There is a short step to the caseworkers being conceived of as a helper or a provider. Careworkers have to balance between care and control:

My study demonstrates how the motivation/sanction intersection of the introductory programme involves an element of control. Yet, the authority role tends to be diverted by the 'fellow-being' as they seem to have some empathy for the participant and his personal situation.

A drawback of the program is its focus on future planning and job acquirement, she writes. The role refugees seem most familiar with and accustomed to is the student role:

The majority of the refugee informants said they found it somewhat difficult to plan their future. (...) The main reason seems to be an expressed scepticism towards what they regard as limited job opportunities. (...) Several referred to their poor chances of getting a desirable job because they were 'foreigners', and some pointed to how even Norwegians face difficulties on the current labour market. Other spoke with resignation of the long process it would take to complete possible re-training and higher education. (...) As a result, the vagueness of the future planner role is likely to curb the overall role as 'the active participant'.

She also describes her research process. As often the case, the anthropologist's role is unclear to people in the field:

My mingling with both the caseworkers and the refugees certainly involved some challenges, probably causing some confusion as to "where I actually belonged". I attempted to balance my involvement with the two groups by spending most time with the caseworkers during the refugees' daily classes, and socialising with the refugees before and after classes, and in their lunch breaks. As a result, I sometimes had an unusual feeling of being a 'social butterfly' trying to be everyone's 'friend'.

At the same time, I may have been perceived as a somewhat curious element, primarily among the refugees, in the sense that that I was a young woman apparently having lots of time, and being more than willing to talk to people. I believe my relatively young age and my perceived student role may have made me less "threatening" and arguably made it easier to get in contact with people.

>> read the whole paper by Oddveig Nygård: "Between care and control: Interaction between refugees and caseworkers within the Norwegian" (pdf) (Working paper 32, Sussex Centre for Migration Research)

(post in progress) "Strangely, you rarely see anthropologists on the front lines at times like these", anthropologist Maria Teasdale Brodine wrote at anthropology.net on the war in Lebanon nine days ago:

It seems that anthropologists might have the tools to go into a place like this and help opposing sides understand one another. After all, being a cultural anthropologist takes both a lot of diplomatic skill, and being able to respect and attempt to represent the people you're working with.

Since then, some (not many, though!) anthropologists have raised their voice or have been asked to do so by journalists.

Gabriele Marranci, lecturer in the Anthropology of Religion, is one of the authors at the anthropology blog on the Middle East called Tabsir. He makes some comments that are typical for anthropologists (in a positive sense - in my view):

First, it is important to deconstruct one point. “Israel is not ‘the Jew’”, my very religious Rabbi friend repeated again and again to me. I have no problem to believe him: a state cannot be a person or represent what today is a very heterogenic faith: Judaism. (...) Zionism is not Israel; leave aside ‘the Jew’. An ideology can help to build a state, but a state cannot be an ideology, leave aside the personification of a person, ‘the Jew’.

Hence, to really understand what is happening today (...) means to stop observing the antithesis (terrorist vs. non-terrorist, axis of evil vs. axis of good, pro-Israeli vs. anti-Israeli and so on) and focus on more complex macrostructures.

He goes on and explains his thesis: "We are witnessing this carnage because of secularism in action."

>> read the whole post: Secularism in action?

Also on Tabsir, anthropologist Daniel Martin Varisco commented several news reports f.ex in the posts The Lobby and Lebanon and Impudence, Impotence and Impunity where he comments an "fascinating article" Indonesia and Malaysia Ready to Send Troops to Mid-East:

Those who are informed by the likes of Daniel Pipes, Bernard Lewis or Sam Huntington would assume that the headline refers to the readiness of the Muslim nations to go fight jihad in support of the Hezbollah. And they would be WRONG! Instead the article talks about how these nations are encouraging the UN Security council to take quick action to end the active fighting and to establish a peacekeeping force. And when that peacekeeping force is established, they will send troops. If we really were locked in a Clash of Civilization, at this point, Hezbollah would be receiving reinforcements from all over the Islamic world.

>> read the whole post: Indonesia, Malaysia Ready to Send Troops

William Anthropologist O. Beeman, explains in an article at New American Media why Iran could play a role in bringing about peace". Last month, the anthropology professor of Brown University has started blogging >> visit his blog "Culture and International Affairs"

A similar point is made by political scientist Bahman Baktiari and anthropologist Augustus Richard Norton. They argue that "the latest Middle East war underlines the need for an effective structure for dialogue, even with adversaries like Iran" >> read the whole text: Beyond the war in Lebanon. Norten is also interviewed in the Harpers Magazine

There are lots of stories about people escaping from Lebanon. Among them, of course, are anthropologists, f.ex. Rosemary Sayigh. Maybe also typical for anthropologists, she says, she "would not have left had it not been for pressure from her children":

I've never left in any war before. I've lived in Lebanon for 50 years, we've had a lot of war in that time, and I've stayed usually. (But) they said that they would worry too much about me. And I've been planning to come to Cyprus for a holiday, so I thought I'd take it now instead of later, and rationalise it that way.

>> read the whole BBC story "Safe in Cyprus, worried about home"

Efstratios Sourlagas another tough anthropologist. He has no plans to postpone his fieldwork on Greek Orthodox communities in Beirut, he says:

I think it's important to do my research here and I guess, when I decided to come here to do research, I knew perfectly well ... the history of the place and the conditions of being here. I'm not going to be intimidated by the attacks.

>> read the whole story: Princeton students are caught in hiatus

At Electronic Lebanon, Sourlagas tells us more about doing fieldwork in this situation - and his doubts:

I came to Lebanon two weeks ago to start my own fieldwork, slightly optimistic that having being before in the region and country several times, feeling as a Greek more at home here with the way of life than in the US where I spent the last three years, possessing a knowledge of Arabic (admittedly poor as it is), and especially my girlfriend being Lebanese, I would not face such problems. (...) However, I find myself now feeling helpless and questioning the purpose and the feasibility of my research here one day after the first Greek nationals have been evacuated from Lebanon via Damascus.

The infrastructure is destroyed, but...

...what leaves one feeling much more helpless and angry is that mainly civilians have to bear the onslaught of the Israeli army (many times with their own lives) as it ushers in its familiar tactic of collective punishment as a response to the capture of two of its soldiers by Hezbollah.
(...)
How this scene of eerie quietness contrasted with the noises of thousands of Lebanese taking to the streets of downtown Beirut honking in their cars and waving Italian (and Brazilian!) flags in celebration after the World Cup Final just a few days ago!

>> read the whole story: Personal Thoughts From A Besieged Country

For more comments see Proxy War by Kevin Friedman and A protracted colonial war by Erkan Saka.

UPDATE 2 (8.8.06):

Hizballah: A primer by Lara Deeb, cultural anthropologist

Several new posts on Lebanon at Tabsir

UPDATE:
GlobalVoices analyses / sums up some interesting coverage by bloggers from Lebanon and the Middle East >> read Globalvoices: Lebanon Resistance & Unity

SEE ALSO:

As Israelis, We Also Fight for Palestinians' - Interview with anthropologist Jeff Halper (OhMyNews, 2.4.06)

Book review: Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change (American Ethnologist)

Do anthropologists have anything relevant to say about human rights?

Live from Gaza: Blogger and journalist Mohammed Omer

(via Gumsagumlao.dk) One more Danish anthroblogger: Rune Kier Nielsen is doing research on the black consciousness movement in Brasil. In his first post (three months ago) he writes:

I am writing this blog for me to reflect on an upcomming challenge in my life: Anthropological Fieldwork, and later retrace my path of knowledge. Hopefully the challenge will be met, and maybe, just maybe, this can be of some use to other students of anthropology or related -ologies.

This blog may also be of some interest as to the region of my fieldwork: The city of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, or the subject of my study: Narrative constructions of race in the black consciousness movement (o movimento negro) and what that path of life offers in opposition to other possibilities.

I've just scanned a few entries, but it seems that the blog is a quite detailed and interesting account of his fieldwork.

In his most recent blog post he tells us that he has "come a long way since my initial frustrations with lack of participation and canceling informants":

The last couple of weeks have been full of participation, the kind I prayed for in Denmark and thought impossible at first in Brazil. The kind of participation where you follow one activist around, from one social setting to the other and watch the changes that occur. Family, friends, parties, hobbies, introductions, trusted conversations and confidence - and all the other stuff.

This has been great and a important part of my study (and I predict, a big part of my final paper), but it cannot be the only part - it cannot stand alone. For this reason I have stepped up my interview activities to widen the study a bit.

Some days ago he wrote enthusiastically:

I praise my decision to do a urban fieldwork. At the moment I don't know how people can live in a longhouse in a small village on Java for three months without the possibility to withdraw once in a while.

Here, he reflects about having one's girlfriend in the field: Will she hold you back from full participation? Rather not, it seems:

[Trust] is an important word in Anthropology, especially as the trust people give our discipline rests on the trust we gain from our informants, which in turn rests on the trust we give them, although by no means in a deterministic relation.

When I think back, all the times I have mentioned that my girlfriend was coming to visit, there has been enthusiastic responses. People have liked to talk about it and have expressed (repeatedly) that they would like to meet her. The requests have been more insistent than I would expect from politeness or common curiosity. And maybe this is not so strange.

Anthropologists often are the stranger arriving from some unknown land. (...) The anthropologist is alone! He usually has no family in the field, making him 'matter out of place' in a kinship society with strong family solidarity and mutual help. I imagine that here as elsewhere there is a common sensical assumption that if you know someone's family you can trust them. It is quite common to threaten about 'telling' the family (mother, father, brother or sister). Being part of a known family makes you trustworthy and sharing that family with others is a show of trust.

>> visit Rune's Blog: Blogging anthropological fieldwork in Brazil

Wow! Is this the Danish version of Savage Minds? Six anthropologists (partly students) from the Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen have started the blog "Matter Out Of Place". Their first blog post deals with our favorite subject - Public Anthropology and the lack of sharing knowledge on the web.

Jane Mejdahl writes:

First of all anthropologists have to face the obvious and realize the potential in publishing thoughts online and sharing knowlegde. Secondly we have to overcome our fear of being trite and simplifying …

(...)

Surely some of us do our fieldwork in far away places without any access to the Internet, computers etc., let alone access to electricity, but a lot of anthropology’s tradtional fields of study are already embracing the possibillities provided by the digital era.

Take a look at indigineuos people’s use of online communication as a mean of resistance and raising awareness. And I bet that Margaret Mead’s lovesick youth in Samoa is busy creating connections and dating online as we speak. Some of us may study people from the other side of the digital divide, but that doesn’t mean that our texts, thoughts, analysis have to remain there. I know for a fact that most anthropologists know how to use a computer. We know how to study issues of social concern. Would it be to much to ask for some sort of combination of the two? Or are we forever stuck in the wilderness?

>> read the whole post

>> about their blog

To promote discussion about recently published books in anthropology, the Open Access anthropology journal Anthropology Matters has added a new page to their website - a book reviews page. The first book review is by Andrew Irving, who has written about Arnd Schneider's and Christopher Wright's new book, Contemporary Art and Anthropology. Three older reviews can be read there as well.

>> visit Anthropology Matters Reviews

OTHER BOOK REVIEW SITES:

American Ethnologist Book reviews

Danny Yee's Book Reviews (anthropology)

Book reviews by The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology