At Vanderbilt University, students will work with health organizations in Uganda this summer as part of that country’s response to HIV/AIDS. They are part of a project called "The Kampala Project on Global Citizenship" that has a nice website and they will even run a blog as soon as they have arrived.

Anthropologist Greg Barz, who has studied the successful role music has played in the fight against AIDS in Uganda is the students’ academic adviser during the trip. He says:

These students will be immersed in a different culture, learn firsthand about a global health crisis and have the opportunity to interact with Ugandan political leaders, artists, doctors and non-profit leaders in an innovative human rights dinner seminar series. The experiences gained by these students will be invaluable to them and will enhance the university community once they return.

The program director for the Kampala Project is Mark Dalhouse. He explains:

Our aim is to foster lifelong civic involvement among our students. Their academic coursework helps them become even brighter students, but we encourage them to take that a step further to explore how they can apply that knowledge to promote social justice and public awareness as active citizens serving the community.

>> read the whole article at Vanderbuilt

>> Homepage of The Kampala Project

Germany's real problem isn't "honor" killers or skinheads. Instead, what keeps this increasingly diverse nation from gaining a strong sense of social cohesion is its self-made confusion over what it means to be German in the first place, Gregory Rodriguez writes in a great article in the Los Angeles Times.

He quotes Barbara John, professor of European anthropology at Humboldt University in Berlin, who says: "We stick to the ethnic definition probably more than any other European nation." He writes:

Indeed, long before Germany's terrible experiment with ethnic supremacy during the Nazi years, Germans had a narrow view of themselves as a people. Unlike, say, the French, who acknowledge that their culture and language derive from the Romans and that they are akin to other Latin peoples, the Germans see themselves as unique.

What he (and many others as well) wonder about: Have the Germans learned from the nazi-period and World war II?:

Even after World War II, when West Germans did everything in their power to rid their culture of chauvinism and racism, they left intact a citizenship law that was based on blood kinship rather than on place of birth. That meant that the children of Turkish guest workers, born in Germany, were not automatic citizens, yet an ethnic German from Romania whose family had never resided in contemporary Germany was.

(...)

It wasn't until 2000 that a more open citizenship law took effect. In arguing for a territory-based notion of citizenship, then-Interior Minister Otto Schily proclaimed that Germany needed to rise above "the destructive principle of ethnocracy."

Six years on, Germans are only beginning to differentiate between their ethnic and civic identities. Ethnic Germans still tend to look on non-ethnic Germans as auslander, or foreigners. Even the media, when they acknowledge minorities as German citizens, use tortured phrases, describing someone as a "Turk who carries a German passport," for example. Not surprisingly, such marginalization has negative consequences.

Rodriguez believes that the shaping of Germany's future identity lies in popular culture. He mentions a popular sitcom "Turkish for Beginners," and Turkish-German novelist Feridun Zaimoglu who says:

"The truth is you can't talk anymore of a foreign population and a native population, as if they were enemies. As I understand myself, I am a German," Zaimoglu says. "I love my country, but I don't make a Wagner opera out of it. I don't try to define what it means to be German. I just live it."

>> read the whole article in the Los Angeles Times (link updated 14.10.2019)

SEE ALSO:

For Turks, Germany is home

French versus Germanic national identity

What’s all this fuss about national identity?

What's a German? The Search for Identity Continues

Germany Survival Bible - a cultural guide for visitors by Spiegel Online

Recent political events have shown an alarming lack of awareness in western countries of life in the Middle East. Anthropologists play an important role in making social and cultural developments in the Middle East more comprehensible to a wider world, states Berghahn publication in its announcement about their new journal - Anthropology of the Middle East.

This journal will be run with the editorial of Soheila Shahshahani, Iranian anthropologist in Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran and managing editorial of Brigit Reinel from University of Tubingen.

“There are so many journals in the area of anthropology in the world, but it will be the first special journal in the field of anthropology in the Middle East” Soheila Shahshahani says in an article by the Cultural Heritage News Agency.

In the Australian magazine On Line Opinion, Anthropologist John Morton criticizes public views of Aboriginess in Australia and argues for avoiding the term culture:

Ever since Europeans first came to Australia, public views of Aborigines have veered between two extremes. Aborigines have been promoted either as disgusting savages or as admired paragons, uncivilised riff-raff or as noble bearers of their culture - bad or good, but never ordinary.

As we now enter a new phase of Aboriginal affairs, Indigenous Australians once again enter the public mind as radically different types of people. On the one hand, we are bombarded with material about dysfunctional communities plagued by drug and alcohol abuse, rampant violence, uncontrolled children and chronic sickness. On the other hand, we routinely hear about “the oldest living culture in the world”, Aboriginal people caring, sharing and looking after country, and the profound qualities of Aboriginal art.

In these circumstances, it’s hard to know what “the oldest living culture in the world” might be. Indeed, it’s hard to know what people are talking about at all when they refer to “culture”.

(...)

We’ve heard a lot of arguments about the “true” nature of Aboriginal culture in recent weeks. Some say Aboriginal culture fosters violence against women and children. Others gainsay this and suggest that violence is cultural breakdown stemming from neglect and marginalisation by mainstream Australian culture. There are many more axes to grind in relation to employment, health and education, but always with a view to promoting a good or bad image of Aboriginal people, not to mention a good or bad image of the “mainstream culture” which provides Aboriginal services.

(...)

This blame game doesn’t give us “the truth” about Aboriginal or any other culture. It simply reduces the extremely complicated relationship between Aboriginal communities and all the arms of the state (governments, bureaucracies, the police, land councils, schools, health centres, etc.) with which they engage. Recourse to “culture” always seems to deliver imagined parodies of real life, transforming it into something inordinately valuable or completely worthless.

British cultural critic Raymond Williams once remarked that “culture” is “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language”. (...) In fact, it’s an empty word: you can fill it with pretty much anything you like. That’s why it functions so well in slogans.

In the meantime, there are many people both inside and outside Aboriginal communities who recognise that there are big problems in Aboriginal affairs. It’d be good if they could all be allowed to get on with the job of finding appropriate solutions to those problems without “culture” getting in the way.

>> read the whole article in On Line Opinion

SEE ALSO:

"I'm not the indigenous person people want me to be"

From Stone Age to 21st century - More "fun" with savages

Ancient People: We are All Modern Now

Our obsession with the notion of the primitive society

The Culture Struggle: How cultures are instruments of social power

"Quit using the word ‘culture’ wherever possible"

(post in progress) Threatening deadlines prevented me from updating this blog as often as I should/ would like to and I haven't checked the news for a while. Here are at least some of recent blog posts:

Alex Golub: Article on the Ipili in the Ottowa Citizen

We're at War: Savage Minds about anthropology and the CIA, discussing a recent article by John Gledhill

Cicilie Fagerlid: Politics in the banlieues... encore

New paper by Mizuko Ito: Kids' participation in new media cultures

MindSpace: Notes on corporate ethnography

Mindspace: The ethnographer as an outsider and Fieldnotes: Insiders and Outsiders in Ethnography

FieldNotes: Recent News Stories: East Africa and Corporate Ethnography

Email scams constitute the third largest industry in Nigeria, after oil and drugs. These email-scammers succeed because they play on stereotypical understandings of Africa, anthropologist Elina Hartikainen concludes in paper, that she presented at a conference few weeks ago.

Most of us have received emails from African chiefs and businessmen, or relatives of them, with pleas for assistance in retrieving large sums of money that for some reason is inaccessible for them. As compensation we are promised a sizeable percentage of it. In 2001 alone, “Nigerian scammers” have earned around 500 million dollar from victims all over the world.

The spam filters at Hartikainens university are not that good, so she received lots of these scam-emails and started collecting them. There is no thing on earth that cannot be of interest for an anthropologist! When she finally read through one of the emails, she was totally fascinated by the ways in which it played on stereotypical understandings of Africa.

She writes:

The power of these e-mails to engage their recipients in further interaction is centrally founded on the senders’ artful calibration of both the content and form of the e-mails to Western stereotypes of Africa and African cultural practices. It is by representing themselves as embedded in webs of corruption, oil wealth, religious piety and traditional inheritance customs that the senders of the requests for assistance construct themselves as imaginable characters to their Western audience.

She provides this example. “Mrs.Princess Mawa” writes to her, telling about the death of her father, a wealthy businessman:

Following his death, his family members insisted that I am not entitled to his property (Assets and money) since I am a woman and my offspring is all girl as I do not have a male child for my late husband claiming that it is what our tradition entails. Well, because of this barbaric traditional law here in COTE D’IVOIRE which doesn’t permit a woman to inherit her Husbands property incase of death if she has no male child, the relatives of my late Husband are expected by tradition to take over the management of his business and other properties including myself who automatically becomes a wife to one of his immediate brothers.

Hartikainen comments:

This description of Princess Mawa’s situation in terms of traditional, barbaric kin and inheritance customs plays a dual role in enticing the recipient of the request into responding to it. On the one hand it serves to reinforce stereotypical understandings of African tradition that circulate in the popular media. (...) On the other hand, Princess Mawa’s condemnation of her own society’s “barbaric traditions” and particularly her claim to invest her share of her money in her daughter’s education (...) create the possibility for the recipient of the letter to claim that in the final run their decision to cooperate in the scheme is not motivated by financial profits alone, but it is also morally justified.

One can expect that no one takes these mails seriously. But those who do, respond on the basis of impressions of the senders’ intellectual inferiority, Hartikainen supposes. Many of the victims, she writes, consider themselves to be scamming the scammers only to realize that it was not they who were playing the scammer for the fool, but the opposite.

>> read her entry: Writing on Nigerian Scams

The paper is not yet available online. But she has an interesting blog called becoming an anthropologist - about me and my life somewhere between bahia, chicago and helsinki where she will publish the paper when she has "cleaned up the paper", since it is "still in more of a presentation format".

Thomas Hylland Eriksen didn't make it to the conference Cosmopolitanism and Anthropology (delayed plane), but his paper is now available online. It's called "The cartoon controversy and the possibility of cosmopolitanism". Cosmopolitanism, he explains, is like respecting the ban on smoking in the public:

Let us suppose that secularised Danes were to take the religiosity of Muslims seriously and treat it with respect, much as they treat their old parents with respect. In that case, they would easily know how to maneuvre in order not to offend them. Not even trying to maneuvre indicates a strong inclination not to live in the same society even if one lives next door to each other. The kind of cosmopolitan attitude leading to restraint can be compared to the underlying reasoning behind the ban on smoking in public, which is these days being implemented in many parts of the world (...).

The point is, however, that supposing I smoke and you do not, and we are in a room together, I might just tell you that if I smoke and you don’t, we both enjoy our liberal freedom. This is the problem of the cartoon controversy and the simplistic liberal responses to the offended reactions among Muslims. Muhammad cartoons to them are like tobacco smoke to an asthmatic.

>> read the whole paper (pdf) LINK UPDATED 24.6.2021

SEE ALSO:

Anthropologist Pnina Werbner on Muhammad-cartoons: 'Satanic Verses Taught us a Lesson'

Owen Sichone: Poor African migrants no less cosmopolitan than anthropologists

What's the point of anthropology conferences? (general summary of the conference Cosmopolitanism and Anthropology)

David Graeber: There never was a West! Democracy as Interstitial Cosmopolitanism

For an Anthropology of Cosmopolitanism

In 1974, fascinated, I pressed my nose to the window at UMIST and watched huge tapes turning on large metal boxes that filled the ground floor of the building – yes – it was that big! Operators and programmers were hurrying around wearing white lab coats, anti-static caps and shoe covers. My awed guide informed me in hushed tones of the need for a dust-free, climate controlled environment. It was a computer (I believe it was the MU5).

Twenty four years later I had one of my own, albeit slightly smaller, sitting on a table in the corner of my living room at home. What’s more it was connected to the Internet. I was still fascinated, I could go anywhere in the world and speak to anyone in the world. I had to know more: who was out there; what were they doing; why were they doing it and how. So I turned up in the Anthropology Department at the University of Hull in September 1998 and announced that I was going to do an ethnography of the Internet. Little wonder then that they didn’t quite know what to do with me!

Academic works on the subject were pretty thin on the ground, and the approach was mainly that the Internet would revolutionise social relationships. Turkle (1995 Life On The Screen) and Stone (1991 Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?) both wrote extensively about how the perceived anonymity provided by Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) would allow people to explore alternative aspects of their identity and of themselves like never before. Even Benedikt (1991 Cyberspace: First Steps) and Rheingold's (1991 Virtual Reality) early assessments of the revolutionary nature of the Internet led them to believe that it would bring about immense transformations in social life. However, the text that influenced my own work the most was Markham’s 1998 book Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space.

At the time I wrote for the RCCS:

The focus of Annette Markham's book, Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space, is the "lived experience of what it means to go and be online" (18). It constitutes a useful resource for students who like Markham find the writing of online ethnography "more slippery than I ever imagined" (19). Whilst acknowledging the fragmentation of a field that is experienced 'more by individuals that by collectives,' she succeeds in constructing an account that combines scholarly text and narratives into a reflexive ethnography that is eminently readable, both as a scholar and as an Internet user. Although the format of the book is laid out in chapters, Markham adopts the strategy of weaving Interludes into her narrative. These Interludes not only allow the reader to engage with her thoughts as she confronts the interplay of our fundamental, constructing relationships in both the real and the Virtual worlds. Interjected into the narrative are smaller parcels of text that represent her lived experience of her research enabling the reader to understand what she was thinking and feeling at the time. Both strategies act as signposts on the journey to discover how users make sense of their experiences in computer-mediated contexts. Along the way she asks new questions about the issues of self, identity, and embodiment that illustrate how her understanding of these concepts shifts and develops along the journey. Indeed, the notions of shifting contexts, shifting reality, and changing perspectives are dominant themes as the project progresses.

I loved the book (and still do) - it was one of a series of ethnographic alternatives - I almost ran around the department shouting 'look! see! A real ethnography! I am not the only one!' It is still the first text that I advise anyone to read, both inside and outside of academia.

Join me over the next few weeks as a guest blogger here as I chart the changes in perspectives that have informed both my own work and anthropology as a discipline, and discuss the challenges currently facing anthropologists in cyberspace. The Internet has not changed anything. Instead we use the Internet to change the ways we do things.