Anthropologists should send a thank you to the Govenor of Florida, Rick Scott, who a few days ago in a radio show said “We don’t need anthropologists in the state”.

We don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It’s a great degree if people want to get it, but we don’t need them here. I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, and math degrees. That’s what our kids need to focus all their time and attention on, those types of degrees, so when they get out of school, they can get a job.

What an unique opportunity to promote anthropology!

Daniel Lende at Neuroanthropology gives you an all-inclusive overview over the reactions to this attack on anthropology and the social sciences.

Anthropologists love talking about themselves and the importance of their discipline, so Lende’s list is long.

Personally, I think the students at the University of South Florida gave the most powerful response. They put a slide show together with short portraits of anthropologists and their work and put in online at prezi.

“This is absolutely a brilliant presentation. The American Anthropological Association should use it as a model for communication, education and lobbying”, commented Jonathan Hass, and it’s difficult to disagree with him.

Even anthropologists will be impressed and maybe also surprised about how diverse their discipline is - and how “relevant” and “useful” from the perspective of state bureaucrats.

Their presentation is still in the making, more and more slides are being added.

>> Watch the presentation “This is anthropology” at Prezi

Two years ago, Canadian anthropology student Dai Cooper became a YouTube star with another innovative introduction to anthropology. She explained anthropology in her anthropology song

“Muslims, Christians, One Hand”: A Salafi is leading chants at funeral march of murdered protestors. Photo: Omar Robert Hamilton, flickr (via Hossam el-Hamalawy, facebook)

(preliminary notes, still in progress, last updated 16.10., 00:30 ) As everybody else, I am trying to make sense of Sunday night’s outbreak of violence in Cairo. While I was - unsuspectingly - walking through the streets of Cairo, trying to find the pasta stand I stumbled upon a week ago, the military was massacring protesters less than ten minutes by foot away from me at the Maspero State-TV building. At least 27 people were killed, more than 300 were wounded during a protest against religious discrimination and a recent destruction of a church in Upper Egypt.

Army vehicles run over protesters

It is both interesting and disturbing to see how the event has been covered by international mainstream media in comparison to local and social media.

International media has framed the clashes mainly as a religious conflict while they also could have chosen a totally different perspective: instead of “Muslims against Christians”, they could have chosen “the army against the people”. They could have described the clashes as conflict between forces who support the pro-democracy revolution (the people) and those that rather oppose it (the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, SCAF), as a conflict more of power than of religion.

UPDATE:“The atrocious killings in Maspero are not so much sectarian as a staging point in a full-scale counterrevolution“, writes sociologist Mona Abaza in Ahram Online

UPDATE: This sectarian language in Western media is, as Paul Sedra explains on Jadaliyya, not only inappropriate but dangerous.

As several local commentators stated, the protesters who were attacked by the military were not exclusively Christians.

Journalist, blogger and activist Hossam El-Hamalawy writes in his eyewitness account:

Many Muslims joined the clashes, and fought against the army and police. At one point a Muslim cleric carried a cross over the 6 October Bridge, leading Coptic protesters in marching on Maspero [the TV-building].

The demonstrators chanted repeatedly: “Muslims, Christians.. One hand!” and denounced Mubarak’s minister of defence, who is controlling the country now - Field Marshal Tantawi.

El-Hamalawy sees the current attacks on the Copts as an “attempt by the ruling military generals to split the ranks of the Egyptian poor and pit them against one another”. The presence of Muslim protesters alongside Copts are according to him “a hopeful sign”.

Al-Jazeera’s Sherine Tadros has made similar observations:

“There were people on the streets from all different sectors of society. Copts, Muslims, other Christians, secularists, even Salafists. ”What united them was not anything to do with sectarian issues or demands but actually a frustration directed at the army for what they feel is the army’s betrayel of the revolution."


Social justice for all, including religious minorities, was one of the demands of the january revolution.

Omar Tarek, an activist and journalist, was one of the Muslim protesters. Around 300 Muslim and Coptic protesters were gathered at state TV-building Maspero, holding candles, chanting and calling for unity according to Daily News Egypt .

Omar Tarek told the newspaper that the Coptic cause is the same as the Muslim cause.

You can’t demolish a house of worship. (…) I am here as an Egyptian, supporting an Egyptian cause.

Headlines like BBC’s Copts mourn victims of Cairo unrest suggest that Muslims or secularists don’t care which is not true. Many muslims joined the Copts at funerals.

Amira Abdel Hamid was one them. He said to Daily News Egypt:

I am here supporting the families of the martyrs and I was hoping that a lot of Muslims would make it to show the whole world that it is not sectarian strife, but an army against its people.

During their march from the Coptic Hospital to the largest Coptic cathedral in Cairo, protesters chant, “Muslims and Christians are one hand!”, reports newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm. And: “Down with military rule!” “This is not a sectarian conflict, this is a military massacre.”

Ahram Online writes about the funeral for Mina Daniel, a young Christian revolutionary “who never forgot the importance of Muslim-Christian unity”:

Hundreds of Egyptians who had never met Mina Daniel – or, in many cases, had even heard of him before his death – attended the young man’s funeral, chanting, “We are all Mina Daniel.” (…)

Following the funeral, hundreds of mourners, including both Christians and Muslims, solemnly headed to Tahrir Square bearing Mina’s coffin.

A Muslim girl who came to support her Christian friend after her brother was killed during the battles Sunday night. Photo: Lilian Wagdy, flickr

There is no doubt that Reuters and others are right when they write that Copts are discriminated. Even tourists like me are realising that the Muslim-Christian relationship is a sensitive issue. But the news agencies neglect to mention that many conflicts have been initiated and provoked by the regimes in power (“Divide and rule”).

Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor at Reuters, for example went so far to claim the following:

The clashes, in which Christians say they were fired on and charged down by armored vehicles, highlighted an irony of the Arab Spring that the region’s dictatorships may have been better guardians of minorities than budding democracies.

But in Egypt, many believe the recent clashes are a result of ousted president Hosni Mubarak’s policies, which nurtured sectarian strife, writes Heba Fahmy in Daily News Egypt.

As Omnia Al Desoukie stresses in another Daily News Egypt article::

While many are quick to point out the marginalization of Egypt’s Copts, less are inclined to label the country as a sectarian state.

Many observers have said that these underlying issues are often manipulated by authorities seeking to cling to power, an accusation often leveled against the Mubarak regime. Incidents such as Sunday night’s events are usually followed by widespread calls for national unity and shows of solidarity between Muslims and Christians.

“We now know a previous massacre, the bombing of the Church of the Two Martyrs in Alexandria in December, in which 21 were killed, was the work of Mubarak’s ministry of the interior”, explains Egyptian short story writer Ahdaf Soueif in the Guardian.

It was beyond sickening that a government would kill its citizens in an attempt to turn them against each other – and Muslims flocked to stand with their Christian friends at Christmas mass.

The attack on Egyptian Christians last Sunday “was not sectarian”, she writes, “this was the army murdering citizens.”

So instead of accompanying their articles with background information about Christians in the Middle East (BBC) or Christians under siege in post-revolution Egypt (AP / ABC News), international media could have chosen to highlight the role of the military generals in Egypt as for example CBS’ 60 minutes did. As bonus track one could add a feature about the role of the West, especially the U.S. as sponsor.

Here, the media, especially state media, seems to play a crucial role.

Zeinab El Gundy writes in Ahram Online:

A number of critics say that Egyptian state television not only failed to help resolve the crisis, but actually played a role in aggravating the already-tense situation.

In an unprecedented move, broadcasters on state television at one point called on the Egyptian public to head to Maspero en masse to defend Egyptian soldiers from angry Christian protesters, thereby further fuelling the sectarian flare-up.

On top of this, Issandr El Amrani writes at the Arabist, the military cut off the live TV feeds of several satellite TV stations, including Al Jazeera.

Some more observations at the end

• Foreign media relied largely on accounts by the large international news agencies like Reuters and ap. Few journalists bothered to launche their web browser and do some research on their own. Egypt has an impressively large English language blogger og twitter scene, but only few of their accounts make it into mainstream news. One of them who took a look - Robert Mackey from the New York Times had to conclude “Social Media Accounts of Violence in Cairo Challenge Official Narrative“

• International media treated Egyptian state and military officials as trustworthy sources. Manar Ammar from the Egyptian news site BikyaMasr had to conclude that "international media outlets largely reported on Sunday night Cairo what state television was reporting.

At the end of this already too long post, I’d especially like to recommend the analysis The Last Choice by Mahmoud Salem aka Sandmonkey, one of Egypts best English language bloggers I’ve read so far. He not only analyses the massacre but also discusses possible local and global consequences. Sandmonkey is ending optimistically with an account from the Sunday night clashes:

After engaging in a street brawl where not a single person could tell who is with who or against who, they stopped a started chanting. One team started chanting “The People and the Army are one hand” and the others started chanting “Muslims and Christians are one hand”, thus providing us with the choices that we as Egyptians were told to make yesterday.

And then, strangely, both sides at the same time changed their chants to “One hand”, and both sides started chanting that fiercely, stopped fighting each other, and joined each other into one big marsh chanting “One hand, One hand”, and thus showing us that they made the right choice. They were presented with the choice between the Army and National Unity, and they refused to make that choice and collectively and organically made the only correct choice: Each Other. Egypt.

In the midst of the battle, they realized on a very basic level that they can’t chose one over the other, and that, even if they have prejudices, they really do not want to fight each other. There is a lesson in that incident for all of us, and it may just hold the key to our salvation.

MORE UPDATES

• “What was schemed as sectarian vandalism and a plot against the unity of Egyptians", writes Nermeen Edrees on Global Voices, has turned out to be “a unifying force and a concrete wall to prove that what happened on the night of Black Sunday in Egypt is a Governor versus People clash rather than Christian versus Muslim one.” She quotes Sandmonkey’s tweet: “Don’t say the army killed Christians. Say the army killed Egyptians.”

• Anthropologist Samuli Schielke, who has just returned to Egypt, has written a less optimistic account called The Arab autumn? (also published on the blog Closer)

• Hanna Yousef posted a picture with two grieving mothers, one Christian, the other Muslim, supporting each other and writes:
  
  

  I am so angry. I can’t get over it. How dare they? I mean the shooting, the snipers, the crushing by tanks, the torture and the horrible ugly abject poverty are already too much to handle, and now I am supposed to hate Copts? Now, I am supposed to define them as the other. the other who is different than me, the other I should protect myself against? Well, I won’t. I refuse. (…) The God I believe in doesn’t like fascists.

• Today, Friday, people chant for Christian-Muslim unit at Tahrir Square and after the Friday prayers, a march is taking place from Al-Azhar Mosque to the Abbassiya Cathedral where the funerals for Sunday’s victims were held.

• Wonderful story by Marwa Nasser: Cairo marches for unity: “Christians, Muslims. Hand in hand!” (Emaj Magazine 11.10.)
• Great presentation by the Guardian: Egypt’s deadly night: what really happened - a collection of testimonies have been translated from Arabic from the website Maspero Testimonies (Arabic/English),

SEE ALSO:

Saba Mahmood: Democracy is not enough - Anthropologists on the Arab revolution part II

Thesis: That's why there is peace

Thesis: Neoliberal policies, urban segregation and the Egyptian revolution

Muslim Christmas Parties in Egypt = Celebration of religious diversity?

Extremism: "Authorities -and not Imams - can make the situation worse"

The dubious behaviour of Western researchers sightseeing the “Arab Spring”

Egyptian sociologist Mona Abaza has written an interesting article about “growing inequalities” between researchers from the Middle East and the West.

“While the Arab Spring has enhanced global interest in the Arab world, local academics have often been reduced to service providers for Western ”experts“ who jet in and jet out”, she writes in the Egyptian news site Ahram Online.

Many belonging to our scientific community have recently felt somehow “misused” through being overwhelmed by Western tourist-revolutionary academics in search of “authentic” Tahrir revolutionaries, needing “service providers” for research assistants, for translating, and newspaper summaries, for first hand testimonies, and time and again as providers of experts and young representatives for forthcoming abounding conferences on the Arab Spring in the West.

These Western experts “typically make out of no more than a week’s stay in Cairo, a few shots and a tour around Tahrir, the ticket to tag themselves with the legitimacy and expertise of first hand knowledge":

Many overnight Middle East experts show a remarkable tendency to pursue sensational and market-driven topics and readily switch interest as the market forces fluctuate. One day they are self-proclaimed experts on “political Islam” or “Islam and gender” and another, they are authority on “the Arab Spring” and “pro-democracy revolutions”. This superficial and business-oriented handling of crucial developments and changes in the area affects how the peoples of the region are perceived and how policies are shaped in the West.

She adds that “there is nothing wrong with providing services, had the relationship been equal, which was unfortunately never the case":

Without sounding xenophobic, which is a growing concern that personally worries me more than ever, there is much to say about the ongoing international academic division of labour whereby the divide between the so called “theoreticians” of the North and the “informants” who are also “objects of study” in the South continues to grow.

There’s still a lot of orientalism in sociological textbooks as Malaysian sociologist S Farid Alatas pointed out, Abaza stresses:

Namely, that European thinkers remain pervasively as the “knowing subjects” whereas non-Europeans continue to be the “objects of observations and analyses of European theorists”.

Unless these issues are not brought up on the table of research agendas I am afraid that much will be said in the name of the revolution while perpetrating the same inequalities and Orientalist attitudes that are mostly felt in the job market, and in evaluating “whose knowledge counts more” in academe.

PS: “Service providers” is a term she borrowed from her colleague, political scientist Emad Shahin

>> read the whole text in Ahram Online

UPDATE: Interesting comment by a reader at Ahram Online:

Thank you Mona Abaza for having the courage to speak on behalf of local academics like yourself and journalists as well who are expected to offer their insight, information, years of hard work with the western tsunami that’s bombarding them (us). I’m personally sick and tired of having to do their homework for them. Where where they before the revolution and why do I have to give them my ideas?

Her article about this dubious academic tourism was also published in the magazine Jadaliyya. A Egyptian-American researcher writes she has “mixed feelings about this article” and notes among others:

Judith Orr, a British leftist academic said earlier this year that the Egy revolution is a monumental historic event that will be studied for generations. So whatever difficulties in the relationship with Western academics exist, they will need to be worked out somehow. Or maybe not.

UPDATE 2 (30.9.11): “The frustrations expressed by Mona Abaza and her colleagues in Egypt are also shared by a good number of scholars from the region who currently live and teach in Western universities” according to a commenter on Ahram Online

Great comment by Kevin at the Arabist blog. Kevin, a “(white) PhD candidate in History at the University of Michigan working on modern Iraq, suggests the following to American/European academics working on the Middle East:

(1) Reject the practice of organizing your bibliography around the three categories of archival sources, Arabic/Persian/Turkish sources, and secondary sources in European languages. Arabic sources should not all be lumped together - the primary sources of Arab ’subjects’ should be listed alongside those of European subjects and the secondary/theoretical writing of Arabs should be listed alongside that of Europeans and Americans, not in its own special category.

(2) Take Arabs seriously as not only ‘informants’ but also ‘theoreticians.’ As Chakrabarty said, Indians feel compelled to site the authority of Western theorists (Marx, Gramsci, etc.) while Westerners writing on India never feel the need to site Indians AS theorists. For my part, I’ve learned a great deal by seriously reading the work of Iraqi historians and thinking about what their insights can add to the historiography in English and French. (I’ve been particularly struck by the significance of poetry as an historical source and the poet as an historical agent - something totally elided by white men and women.)

Another commenter linked to a text on academic freeloaders that was posted on the Arabist blog four years ago.

UPDATE 3 (1.10.2011): Anthropologist Mark Allen Peterson comments on Ahram Online. He writes that he agrees with Abaza’scomments, but adds that not all “experts” are “self-appointed":

What expertise I have was won by extended research in the country over time–but I’ve not been back since 2010. Yet because my book (set in pre-revolution times) just came out, and because I maintain a blog in which I speculate on what’s going on in Egypt, the media contacts me and asks me to pontificate as an expert. It’s one thing when it’s local news media–many companies are trying to survive by “localizing” even the international news–but just this week I was contacted by a European journalist stationed IN CAIRO calling me to speak as an “expert.” I did redirect her to AUC [American University in Cairo] and to a colleague at Cairo University, but clearly many in the media privileges our academic affiliations in North America above people with greater immediate expertise in the region.’

UPDATE 4 (3.10.11): David Judson comments on Abaza from a Turkish journalism perspective in the Hürriyet Daily News: Citing the sightseers ogling the Arab Spring

—

Similar points about inequalities can be made about anthropology. As Brazilian antropologist Gustavo Lins Ribeiro pointed out six years ago:

Globalisation in anthropology has mirrored unequal relations existing within larger structural processes. Theory, for instance, has flown from metropolitan centers to non-metropolitan centers while the flow of “raw data” makes the opposite movement.

In order to trancend ethnocentrism and orientalism, he and several others edited the the book World Anthropologies. Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power .

Kenyan anthropologist Mwenda Ntarangwi discusses similar questions in his book Reversed Gaze. An African Ethnography of American Anthropology.

(UPDATE:) David Graeber: Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination (Guardian 25.9.2011)

While the Guardian is sending an anthropologist on fieldwork among bankers to give us insight in the destructive culture of finance, thousands of people in New York are occupying the Wall Street, “the financial Gomorrah of America” and “greatest corrupter of our democracy”.

Inspired by the massive public protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and Madrid’s Puerta del Sol Square, hundreds have slept outside near Wall Street for the past three nights. The campaign “Occupy Wall Street” began on Saturday when thousands gathered in New York City’s Financial District.

As Egyptian researcher Maha Abdelrahman said a few months ago, we might be witness to a global revolutionary movement against neoliberalism.

Most protesters are under 30, and “over-educated and under-employed” according to the Guardian.

“We have a president who tells us to do the right thing, to go to school, to get a better life, but I’m not getting a better life. I am a new college graduate and I have $50,000 of college debt built up while studying business management at Berkeley. I can’t find a job to pay it off”, says one of them, 26 year old Romeo.

“Who is here? Young people and students with college debts. They want to talk to the people who took away their future”, explains anthropologist David Graeber who is one of the protesters.

Graeber has just a few weeks ago published his new book Debt: The First 5,000 Years where he highlights the exploitative nature of debts and “virtual credits”. According to a review in the Financial Times by anthropologist Gilian Tett:

Graeber insists that debt is intrinsically linked to power, since credit can be used to exploit or control people. And the power is doubly effective, he adds, because debt is so overlaid with moral context. There is no better way to justify unequal power relations than “by reframing them in the language of debt … because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim which is doing something wrong”

In an interview with Democracy Now Graeber compares the current economic crisis in Europe and the U.S. with the so-called Third World debt crisis.

The austerity regimes that are being imposed now on Europe and on America are remarkably similar to what happened—you know, what used to be called the Third World debt crisis. First you declare a financial debt—a financial crisis. You bring in these people who are supposedly neutral technocrats, who are in fact enforcing this extreme neoliberal ideology. You bypass all democratic accountability and impose things that no one ever possibly have agreed to. It’s the same thing.

And one reason it’s happening to us now is that there was really successful mobilization around the world against those policies. In a lot of ways, the global justice movement was successful. The IMF was kicked out of East Asia. It was kicked out of Latin America. And now it’s come home to us.

After quick googling it seems that American mainstream media covers the protest mainly as a police story with focus on arrests, see New York Times or CBS or Business Week.

So we have to turn to Russia Today: Occupy Wall Street – America’s own Arab Spring? or the Guardian: Wall Street protesters: over-educated, under-employed and angry and The call to occupy Wall Street resonates around the world.

Or of course to alternative media and the official website of the campaign https://occupywallst.org/

For more information on Graebers new book see his essay Debt: The first five thousand years (Mute/Eurozine) or an interview with David graeber: Debt’s history, implications, and critical perspective (No Borders) and Debt Came Before Money: An Interview with Economic Anthropologist David Graeber (Naked Capitalism)

UPDATE: EGYPT SUPPORTS PLANNED US-PROTEST

“Egyptian activists are lending their support to a planned protest in Washington, DC, which US activists hope will become an open-ended sit in modeled on the Tahrir Square protests that helped bring down former President Hosni Mubarak", according to the newpaper Al-Masry Al_Youm:

The demonstration, which is being organized under the banner “human needs not corporate greed,” will be held on 6 October, on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the start of the US occupation of Afghanistan and as the recently passed US budget takes effect.

Egyptian activists plan to hold a concurrent protest in Tahrir Square.

SEE ALSO:

Financial crisis: Anthropologists lead mass demonstration against G20 summit

UK Riots: Let's talk about class and oppressive states

From Tahrir to Israel: "Protest movements inspire greater human understanding"

How anthropologists should react to the financial crisis

Anthropologist uncovers how global elites undermine democracy

Saba Mahmood: Democracy is not enough - Anthropologists on the Arab revolution part II

Thesis: Neoliberal policies, urban segregation and the Egyptian revolution

– Use Anthropology to Build A Human Economy

Can you make a complex subject like the world of finance accessible to outsiders? What about sending an anthropologist into the world of bankers in London’s financial district and let him blog his findings?

That’s the new project of the Guardian. They have engaged Dutch anthropologist Joris Luyendijk who has also a background as a journalist (perfect combination) to start an anthropological banking blog.

It’s a project in the spirit of public anthropology and anthropology 2.0 - at least in theory.

The anthropologist explains in his introductory post:

When I started interviewing financial workers this summer, I knew as little as the average Guardian reader. So I plan to start at the beginning. Every interview will be posted on the web, with comment threads open to let other outsiders to ask questions and, who knows, to let insiders to elaborate on the material. Over time I hope to build an intellectual candy shop full of interesting stuff about the world of finance, stuff that will then help you as a reader make better sense of the news.

It is important for outsiders to learn more about this sector, he stresses:

Finance directly affects everyone’s interests, but many have a hard time maintaining their interest in it. But as the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the following three years have shown, the financial world is too important to leave to the bankers – in fact in some countries democracy is beginning to look like the system by which electorates decide which politician gets to implement what the markets dictate.

The people in this very powerful sector are worth learning more about. And the good news is, when you listen to them in their own words, that can actually be pretty entertaining. And humanising.

But how anthropological are portraits of bankers? And does “humanising” mean depoliticising or even legitimizing their actions? Do we get a better understanding of the political economy of finance?

So far he has posted around ten portraits of financial workers, no analysis so far. The project has just started.

What I find striking: The financial workers don’t reflect about the consequences of their work. They seem to be obsessed with pleasing their clients, in making their clients more successful and richer.

You’ll find critical reflections in the comment sections only - like here

..and to generate wealth you have to generate poverty. Success?

It might sound as if anthropological studies of bankers are something extraordinary. No longer. There has been surprisingly much interest among anthropologists for the world of finance. Karen Ho for example has been on fieldwork in the Wall Street: Anthropologist Explores Wall Street Culture. Another anthropologist, Gillian Tett, who works in the Financial Times, explained three years ago that she used anthropology to predict the financial crisis and that it’s important to understand the tribal nature of banking culture.

See also How anthropologists should react to the financial crisis and – Use Anthropology to Build A Human Economy. Check also David Graeber’s comments on the current Occupy Wall Street Protests

While George Monbiot is right when he is attacking the academic publishing industry, it is important not to forget the positive developments.

More and more journals go open access. A few days ago, the first issue of the Nordic Journal of Migration Research was launched.

It is a continuation of two well known journals, the Norwegian Journal of Migration Research (paper only) and the online Finnish Journal of Ethnicity and Migration. These journals chose to close down their independent activities in favour of this larger international venture that gives free access to all their articles.

Nordic Journal of Migration Research will publish three or four issues per year. It is peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary, and focuses on migration theory and analyses of migratory processes, integration policies and intercultural relations. The journal prioritizes Nordic issues, but in a global perspective, and therefore also welcomes comparative studies in Nordic and non-Nordic countries.

Here is an overview over the first issue:

On the Birth and Profile of the Nordic Journal of Migration Research (Ulf Hedetoft and Hakan G. Sicakkan)

The Ethics of Immigration Policy (Nils Holtug)

Migrants in the Scandinavian Welfare State. The emergence of a social policy problem (Grete Brochmann and Anniken Hagelund)

The Multilingual City. The cases of Helsinki and Barcelona (Peter A. Kraus)

Stationarity and Non-Stationarity in Immigrant Problem Discourse. The politics of migrant youth (Yngve Lithman)

Book reviews (including a review of Paradoxes of Cultural Recognition: Perspectives from Northern Europe edited by Sharam Alghasi, Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Halleh Ghorashi

See also an overview over anthropology open access journals

Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? The banks? Oil companies? No, academic publishers! In an article in the Guardian, George Monbiot explains why academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist.

The need for open access publishing has been one of the most debated topics in the anthropological blogosphere. Monbiot has done a great job in transfering the debate into the general public. He shows that the current models represent a democratic problem:

Everyone claims to agree that people should be encouraged to understand science and other academic research. Without current knowledge, we cannot make coherent democratic decisions. But the publishers have slapped a padlock and a “keep out” sign on the gates.

You might resent Murdoch’s paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier’s journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges €34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read 10 and you pay 10 times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That’ll be $31.50.

Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free. The material they publish was commissioned and funded not by them but by us, through government research grants and academic stipends. But to see it, we must pay again, and through the nose.

What we see here is pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it. Another term for it is economic parasitism. To obtain the knowledge for which we have already paid, we must surrender our feu to the lairds of learning.

Monbiot’s piece has received lots of attention, the reactions have been mostly positive, including over at Savage Minds.

Some researchers call for action.

Catarina Dutilh Novaes calls for civil disobedience:

What, if anything, can we do about the tyranny of academic publishers? Here’s an obvious suggestion: so far I’ve been very ‘obedient’ and have never put final versions of my papers online (It’s always the pre-print version, uncorrected proofs etc.), as required by the copyright transfer agreement. But now I’m thinking that that’s not the way to go; and if we all start putting final versions of our papers online, what are they going to do? Are they going to sue everybody, install a special department just to keep track of who has been posting ‘their’ valuable papers online for free?

Moreover, open access journals should receive all our support. Especially established academics who do not need to ‘score points’ with ‘fancy’ publications would do well to contribute to open access journals so as to increase their reputation. If we all do it consistently, the day will come when publishing in a highly regarded open access journal will give you more ‘points’ than publishing in one of the overpriced journals published commercially.

We need a call to arms", Martin Paul Eve writes on the phd2published blog:

Monbiot’s article has served as an excellent wake-up call to researchers, but an alarm clock is not what is needed. We need a call to arms. Researchers: get yourself a copy of Open Journal Systems installed. Get your journal set up and ask your library for support! This game has gone on too long and only through action can the system ever be changed.

Maybe more easily said than done? On his personal blog he explains why he still publishes in closed journals:

I am not a tenured professor. If I had academic job security, I could afford to publish purely in open access destinations, preferably Gold, Libre. As it is, I am still at the mercy of the metrics and systems that make publishing in closed venues a requisite for obtaining long term employment. Academic freedom is the freedom to hold a view; it does not extend to implementing the view. However, those who can afford to do so, should.

Immanent critique has value. The people who solely value closed-source journals (who I would argue are unaware of the constraints they place upon themselves through such behaviour) undoubtedly perceive OA publications as being of less worth. By publishing critiques of the system they value, within a framework valued by that system, the message can be heard in places it would not otherwise reach, avoiding the “fringe looney” accusation.

By the way, at the UK Scholarly Group conference next year – the biggest gathering of librarians and academic publishers - he will argue for that we don’t need academic publishers!

Open access anthropology needs a civil service, a staff, a personnel, argues Alex Golub at Savage Minds. “Serious institutionalization is a necessary next step for the movement.”

Jon Butterworth points to a different culture of publishing in particle physics:

In particle physics, everything worth reading is posted on the arXiv server, which is why I am able to link original articles from my blogs and you are able to read them free. No one I know would consider publishing in a journal which didn’t allow this.

The Guardian has collected some comments on Monbiot’s pice in a follow up post.

Christoph Stueckelberger and Dr Stephen Brown add an important aspect Monbiot didn’t mention:

If subscriptions to academic journals in Britain consume 65% of library budgets, and three giant commercial publishers from Europe and the US control 42% of scientific journals, imagine what this means for libraries and institutions in developing countries. Not only can it be prohibitively expensive to gain access to the results of research but such practices also accentuate a “knowledge divide” between the global north and south.

Addressing such a divide was one of the reasons for the Geneva-based Globethics.net Foundation setting up a digital library on ethics, which has more than 750,000 full-text articles and books available free of charge. Such initiatives offer a modest but determined attempt to redress the balance in global knowledge transfer. Fair publishing models by commercial publishers and open access efforts are needed to promote benefit sharing in knowledge production between north and south.

Strangely enough, the internet has worsened the situation, Patricia de Wolfe from London comments:

I am a member of the group Sociologists Outside Academia. Our major problem is access to materials. The advent of the internet has worsened the situation because many libraries subscribe to online versions of journals only. So whereas in the past a vacation ticket issued by a sympathetic librarian might enable you to catch up on your reading, it now does not because the relevant journals are not on the shelves, and nobody will give a visitor an electronic log-in. Anyone who is not a member of a university is excluded from academic debate.

While Jason Baird Jackson regards Monbiots piece as “a single article explaining much of what motivates me to work on reform in scholarly communications and academic publishing”, Kent Anderson on the blog by the Society for Scholary Publishing describes Monbiots article as uninformed, unhinged, and unfair.

Important to note: Much what is said here applies to the English speaking world only. In Brazil for example, and Portugal, a large degree of social science articles are available open access online.

As Maximilian Forte pointed out three years ago, innovations in the dissemination of anthropology are coming in large part from the so-called periphery, from the outside of the disciplinary centre of gravity.

See the antropologi.info overview of open access journals and repositories.

And don’t forget, it’s soon time for the global Open Access Week! (24.-30.10.2011)

SEE ALSO:

Danah Boyd on Open Access: "Boycott locked-down journals"

Is it time to boycott SAGE?

Interview: Self-publish your thesis!

Anthropology and the challenges of sharing knowledge online: Interview with Owen Wiltshire

antropologi.info survey: Six anthropologists on Anthropology and Internet

Here they are: Open access anthropology books!

Democratic Publishing = Web + Paper

Open Access: New alliances threaten the American Anthropological Association

George Marcus: "Journals? Who cares?"

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

More and more people are living in slums. What can be done about it?

A few weeks ago I blogged about Safaa Marafi’s thesis about neoliberal policies, urban segregation and the Egyptian revolution. Now she has published a newspaper article that is a good example of public anthropology: Living in Slums … A Historic Dilemma that Needs to be Resolved!.

Here she explains one of the most important anthropological insights. If you work with people, you need to understand their point of view. In order to solve the problems of slum life one needs to listen to the voices of the people who live there.

Efforts to develop Egypt’s slums have been going on for several years, yet without tangible change. The key aspect that is missing in these projects is getting close to these people, understanding their priorities and way of life and meeting their expectations, she writes:

Understanding their culture, needs and way of life is essential to help provide them with the necessary resources they need, whether proper education, job, medical assistance. Moreover, do they need small shops, kiosks, or commercial areas?

From this stand point, I stress on the need to conduct serious research by social scientists to understand the culture of these people through one-to-one interviews and giving them the chance to express their needs and voice their concerns. Thus, this will assist in tackling the slumization phenomenon from its grass-roots.

>> read the whole article in Al-Masry Al-Youm

Anthropologists have stressed the importance of the “native’s point of view” in development projects for many years. Nevertheless, not only in Egypt, but also in Europe, people living in poorer neighborhoods are often stigmatized. Politicians and mainstream media tend to portray them as lazy and often criminal people that have to be “civilized”. So therefore, the poor are in policymakers’ view not worth to be listened to?

Marafi’s piece reminded me of some articles about slum life that have been published recently. All of them attack these misrepresentations.

One of them is the fascinating but sad story The life and death of Khanoufa: A personal account of Cairo’s “most dangerous thug”, written by Mohamed Elmeshad.

Egyptian police claim to have captured a man they called “Cairo’s most dangerous criminal”. Elmeshad questions these and gives us the perspective from his neighborhood where some of them see him as a victim of the system he was born into. A system where being associated with a slum area limits your opportunities in life.

“He turned out how he did because the police left him no other path in life,” Khaled, one of Khanoufa’s neighbors, said. At the age of 14, after participating in a neighborhood brawl, Khanoufa spent the first of a series of six-month stints in juvenile hall for youth misdemeanors. He became “marked” by police as someone they could pin crimes on or extort for money with the threat of imprisonment.

When his father, Abdel Shakour, passed away, Khanoufa’s family could no longer afford to pay-off the police, and he began spending more and more desperate nights in prison.

“That is when he turned to a life of crime. When he realized that he would be treated as a criminal for the rest of his life, no matter what. He reached a level of despair and said, ‘They’d take me in and put me in prison, regardless,’” Khaled said. He ended up spending half of his life in prison, from his teenage years until his death.

Mohamed Elmeshad has written another article from the same neighborhood (Ezbet Abu Qarn): Cairo’s poorest residents help the less fortunate in Somalia – a powerful story about cosmopolitanism from below.

A group of young men were moved by the images they saw in the media, and decided that the famine in Somalia must become a priority during Ramadan. Within four days, they were able to gather a large sum money among the poor people to the relief effort in Somalia.

“There are old widows who rely solely on charity to stay alive, who donated what I know is a really large amount for them,” said Sayed Kamal, one of the organizers.

“We don’t have people dying from hunger in our parts, but we do know poverty better than anyone else in Egypt, and we know about the fear of going hungry,” said Gamal Abdel Maqsood, a scrap metal dealer.

People in poor areas are no passive victims but do fight for their rights. In her story Popular committees bring true spirit of democracy to the streets, political scientist Rana Khazbak describes a campaign in another poor area in Cairo, Imbaba. Ehab Ali, a member in the popular committee in Imbaba, sounds like an anthropologist when he explains their campaign:

“We wanted to do field work in the streets among people. The piece of bread we eat every day is politics, the traffic congestion is politics, and the garbage in the streets is politics. That’s why in order to solve these problems and for Egypt to become a better place, we have to start from the bottom at the grassroots level.”

The popular committees were formed during the Januar revolution to protect neighborhoods when police withdrew from the streets in the midst of nationwide protests that toppled former President Mubarak.

Alia Mossallam, PhD student at the London School of Economics, explains in her article Popular committees continue the revolution:

Born out of a moment of chaos and fear, [the popular committes] proved themselves to be capable of self-organization in the days that followed. But most importantly, they proved to people that the end of “government” did not mean the end of the world.
(…)
In this surge of grassroots activism lie potential forms for popular governance. The committees not only teach us about the specific issues facing each neighborhood, but together they can teach us something about how political representation, accountability and local governance work on the ground.

Finally, just one week ago, Amnesty International has released a report about Egypt’s slums: ‘We are not dirt’: Forced evictions in Egypt’s informal settlements.

SEE ALSO:

Slum research: "Anthropology needs to engage in an activist way"

Poverty and health policies: Listening to the poor in Bangladesh

Anthropologist calls for a greater appreciation of child labor

Urban anthropologist: "Recognize that people want to come to the big cities"

Owen Sichone: Poor African migrants no less cosmopolitan than anthropologists

Why social scientists failed to see the Egyptian revolution coming

Thesis: Neoliberal policies, urban segregation and the Egyptian revolution