Not so easy to be researcher in the USA: There's more and more censorship. Not long ago I wrote about Iranians not allowed to publish papers. Another form of censorship are the Internal Review Boards (IRB ). In Anthropology News May, James Boster calls for a three graded stages of response: Reform, Resolve and Resist:

The faculty head of the University of Connecticut IRB recently told me that the IRB would not now permit me to do the field work I have recently completed with the Waorani, because she considered Waorani as far too belligerent for me to have risked my own safety in doing research with them. It was a shock to learn that I could be regarded a human subject of my own research.
(...)
Many human scientists, anthropologists included, have experienced ever-increasing burdens of regulation and oversight by IRBs in their research with human subjects. Most of what is onerous about the regulation has nothing to do with providing protection to human subjects and has everything to do with requiring human scientists to submit to the arbitrary exercise of power and authority.
(...)
IRBs at a number of universities have instituted policies that have no foundation in ethics or law, ones that violate our most sacred academic freedoms and civil rights. The first amendment to the constitution states: “Congress shall pass no law abridging the freedom of speech.” Yet what is regulated here is speech—the freedom of investigators to speak with other members of the society. The freedom to find things out is a basic human right, not a privilege to be licensed, especially when the obstacles to inquiry have never been demonstrated to prevent any actual harm to human subjects. The unconstitutionality of these restraints on free speech are clearly and comprehensively laid out by Philip Hamburger in a 2005 article for the Supreme Court Review, “The New Censorship: Institutional Review Boards.”

>> read the whole text in Anthropology News May 2006 (link updated)

Another anthropology-specific problem is mentioned in an article by As Rena Lederman: IRBs are comprised mostly of researchers from non-ethnographic disciplines "folks whose picture of “real research” looks nothing like ethnographic fieldwork." Therefor this advice (!):

So it is crucial that your board view participant observation as a sound, productive research method. This cannot be taken for granted. If IRB members are mystified or horrified by participant observation—if they imagine that it is useless or even itself unethical—then your proposal may be denied even if your project’s topic is completely innocuous!

>> read the whole story in Anthropology News

>> Blog: Censorship and Institutional Review Boards

"There is ample need for anthropologists and other social scientists to contribute to the immigration debate by providing greater context to the discussion and by describing the effects that immigration policies would have", JC Salyer argues in Anthropology News May 2006. Anthropologists and the AAA (American Anthropological Association) should counter the many false claims which depict immigrants as national security threats or as hoards depleting the nation’s economic, health care and educational resources, he writes:

While it is always difficult to translate anthropological work into publicly accessible statements, AAA members should support AAA taking immediate steps to assure that the knowledge gained from the valuable body of research conducted by anthropologists on the subject of immigration is not ignored during this crucial period. Whether AAA’s action should take the form of a statement, the creation of an annotated bibliography, or some more creative proposal is for AAA’s leadership to decide, but it would be a true shame if AAA chooses not to join this important public discussion at all.

>> read the whole text in Anthropology News May

Rose Wishall Ediger has attended two rallies in Washington DC — the seventh largest immigrant gateway in the US and home to immigrants from over 30 countries, she writes in another Anthropology News article:

I was struck by the religious and patriotic overtones of the rallies. Both drew on prayer and included regional religious leaders of diverse faiths. In fact, churches have been important to the movement’s organization, helping to kick it off when Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles stated that HR 4437 countered the Church’s teachings to “feed the poor and welcome the stranger.” But also there was a display of US patriotism at the second rally: a great many demonstrators wore red, white and blue—especially white, which organizers advocated as a symbol of peace. And instead of the homemade signs of the first rally, attendees at the second event overwhelmingly waved US flags.

These rallies call in , Rose Wishall Ediger's view, anthropologists to address issues of “race,” “human rights” and “engaged anthropology.”:

While rally participants and the media compare the movement to the 1960s civil rights movement, the relationship between ideas of race, racism, and immigration are still surrounded by open questions. For instance, while there is widespread agreement that those falling into the diverse category of US immigrant—legal or not—face discrimination—there are also claims that immigrants fill occupations and class positions that natives do not. And, how does the competition for resources among and within various minority groups complicate civil and human rights issues?

(...)

An even broader question about immigration that we should consider is what does it say about global inequalities and how human rights are practiced and demanded of different governments, and how do global, transnational, and national public and private policies differentially affect the movement and well-being of people, and what might that mean in terms of social justice. And, finally, on a more personal note, how do our own consumer practices play into it?

>> read the whole article in Anthropology News May 2006

SEE ALSO:

Proclaiming the birth of a new civil rights movement: Mass demonstration against a tougher immigration policy

Immigration laws: More Global Apartheid?

In their Anthropology News May article Urban Violence and Civil Rights in Postcolonial France, Paul A Silverstein
and Chantal Tetreault analyse the riots in France in november 2005.

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin announced a “state of emergency” across over a quarter of the nation:

Deploying this law, an instrument of colonial governance, both challenged the basic civil rights of France’s suburban citizens and revealed an enduring logic of colonial rule. Like colonial settler cities, contemporary French urban centers cast their impoverished peripheries as culturally, if not racially, distinct.

The anthropologists are not surprised over the riots:

Nearly every euro France has saved by “tightening the belt” on the public sector has been redeployed into the forces of security. Every attempt at “integrating” (or “civilizing”) underclass residents of the cités has been undermined by policing practices that continue to demarcate these populations as racially and spatially “other.”

The result is a form of postcolonial urban apartheid, in which the French state is equated with repression by many cité inhabitants. The October-November violence reflected this unity of social marginalization and anti-police sentiment. In the end, the French state’s treatment of its own citizenry as racially suspect and intrinsically violent—as potential enemies within—may prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

>> read the whole article in Anthropology News (Link updated, was removed)

SEE ALSO:

Riots in France and silent anthropologists

Who Are the Rioters in France? Anthropology News January

Read this (we've had many stories like this before, but this one here is extremly "funny" - or let's rather say ethnocentric. The people are escaping from the Colombian drugs war, but this article reads more like an explorers account 200 years ago):

SAN JOSE DEL GUAVIARE, Colombia — Since time immemorial, the Nukak-Maku have lived a Stone Age life, roaming across hundreds of miles of isolated and pristine Amazon jungle, killing monkeys with blowguns and scouring the forest floor for berries.

But recently, and rather mysteriously, a group of nearly 80 wandered out of the wilderness, half-naked, a gaggle of children and pet monkeys in tow, and declared themselves ready to join the modern world.

(...)

The Nukak have no concept of money, of property, of the role of government, or even of the existence of a country called Colombia. They ask whether the planes that fly overhead are moving on some sort of invisible road.

(...)

Perhaps as many as 250 now live in settlements around the town, about as many as anthropologists suspect are still alive in the wilderness.

The journalists start approaching them, asking "What do you like most?"

"Pots, pants, shoes, caps," said Mau-ro, a young man who went to a shelter to speak to two visitors.

Ma-be added, "Rice, sugar, oil, flour."

Others said they loved skillets. Also high on the list were eggs and onions, matches and soap and certain other of life's necessities.

"I like the women very much," Pia-pe said, to raucous laughs.

>> read the whole story in the Times Argues

In an earlier article in The Scotsman with the headline Jungle tribesmen flee Marxist killers, we get this additional info:

The locals, embarrassed by the natives' nakedness, have given them clothes and a television set that they look at with a mixture of fear and bewilderment.

An article in Cultural Survival Quarterly (December 1988) by By Leslie Wirspa and Hector Mondragon shows that there has been contact between the Nukak and "the outer world" also before 1988.

More info on the Mukak and the Colombian drug war by
Survival International:

(...) their lands have been occupied by coca growers, left-wing paramilitaries and the Colombian army, with the Indians caught in the middle.

On Survial International's website, there are even videoclips about the hunt, building and moving the house.

SEE ALSO:

Ancient People: We are All Modern Now

Primitive Racism: Reuters about "the world's most primitive tribes"

Our obsession with the notion of the primitive society

Ten Little Niggers: Tsunami, tribal circus and racism

(LINKS UPDAtED 4.1.2021) As part of its ongoing market research efforts, a Seattle-based company employs a dozen anthropologists and sociologists. Every one of them has a Ph.D. The researchers are accompanying consumers on their supermarket trips and peeking in their refrigerators and pantries during home visits, we read in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

As usual, anthropologists come up with surprising results to the marketers. Shopping is no economic but also an social activity. The most decisive factor in organic-food buying is not price.

Laurie Demeritt, the company's president, sums up some results:

"It's more about which product, what it means to the consumer and the value they attach. Here's an example: We will be shopping with a woman and she stops to put organic strawberries in her shopping cart. The strawberries cost $2 more than conventionally grown strawberries. The question is, why?"

The answer in this case was the woman was buying those strawberries for her children, and she had heard and read that strawberries have some of the greatest amounts of pesticide residues. (...) Just a minute later, the same shopper is passing on organic broccoli and putting a conventional bunch in her cart. Why, the researcher queries? The organic broccoli is only 50 cents more per pound. Because the woman said she was only buying the broccoli for her husband and 'he's toxic already. She didn't put the same value on the lack of pesticides."

Similarly, organic milk has its own buying logic. Demeritt said low-income mothers consistently buy organic milk for their kids even if the price is significantly more, nearing twice as much in some instances.

>> read the whole story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

PS: Nearly at the same time two more articles on corporate anthropology appeared in the news How To Build A Better Product—Study People appeared in PCMag.com. It contains both many well known facts and some newer information, among others about INTELS research on "transnationals". And in the Toronto Star: Buyer beware: You're being watched. Anthropologists, sociologists and neurologists are feverishly studying how we shop

SEE ALSO:

Food company works with anthropologists for ad-campaign

Open Access journal "Anthropology of Food"

food and drink - news archive

Popular IT-anthropologists: Observe families until they go to bed

Ethnography, cross cultural understanding and product design

The emerging field of commercial ethnography

Designing for Couples: Product Anthropology?

Journalists often draw strict lines between "us" - the modern - and "them" - living in the stone age - although, as anthropologist Kerim Friedman put it we're all modern now.

According to a recent story by Knight Ridder Newspapers, a gift to Maasai people in Kenya "adds fuel to debate on tribe's future". The article starts like this:

For centuries, the Masai people of Kenya have lived in huts without power or running water, used plants and minerals to heal themselves, and survived on a diet of cow milk, meat and blood.

So when Patrick O'Sullivan, a visitor from Silicon Valley entered one of their villages and left behind a school equipped with solar power, laptops and a projector, he sparked an old debate about the tribe's desire to preserve its culture while surviving in a modern world encroaching on its way of life.

What follows is a typical debate that might have taken place in so called modern socities when Internet was introduced: The elder people are rejecting changes:

But with the light came questions for the entire village. Elders - who had spent much of their lives resisting assimilation into the modern world, fighting British colonizers, and lobbying the Kenyan government for the tribe's right to self-sufficiency - felt their work was being lost in the tide of support from parents and teachers for O'Sullivan's school.

"Mostly elder people don't absolutely want the change. They want people to be as they were before," David Ole Koshal, leader of Oloolaimutia village, said on O'Sullivan's video footage.

What is so special about it? Why focus on the resistance by the elder people? As we read, most people embrace the changes:

Most Masai parents and teachers were delighted with the new tools for their children. The school's enrollment doubled from roughly 200 to 410, partly because children tending cattle during the day were able to attend classes at night thanks to solar-powered lights.

But as anthropology professor Lea B. Pellett said:

The more information and knowledge the better, but the Masai will have to take ownership of the change and preserve what is most important to them from their culture.

>> read the whole story in the Central Daily

SEE ALSO:

What Is An "Ancient People"? - We are All Modern Now!

Cultural lag, a lethal drag

Women in Cameroon:Information technology as a way out of the cultural cul-de-sac

"Aboriginal knowledge is science"

(Links updated 28.1.2021) Antropython is the name of a blog by a student of anthropology at the University of Oslo. She has started to blog in English (previously only in Polish), so here is an excerpt from an interesting post by her on the power of medicine and how medicine changes our conceptions of the healthy body. Antropyton reviews the article "What do we mean by health?" by anthropologist Veena Das:

My reading of Das is that the emergence of discipline of geriatrics has brought about new definition of a healthy and “normal” body and has caused confusion between individual and social identities. It has also created a new category of sick people – the older ones. New definition of health has caused that aging has been reconceptualized as a disease and the ideology of the perfectly ordered body, which can be achieve through medicaments, as a sign of normalcy dominates the image of life cycle. Behaviour and health conditions, once normal and even noble (Kawagley, Turnbull), have been transformed to disability and this one to sickness that requires medical treatment.

>> read the whole post "Body redefinition & new social statuses"

Interesting reading also her thoughts before going on her first fieldwork

SEE ALSO:

Veena Das: Stigma, Contagion, Defect: Issues in the Anthropology of Public Health

"Ethnographic perspectives needed in discussion on public health care system"

Poverty and health policies: Listening to the poor in Bangladesh

medical anthropology - news archive

(LINKS UPDATED 6.4.2020) In my previous post, I've quoted anthropologist Owen Sichone about the concept of "Global apartheid":

Whatever the advantages of apartness are (more economic than cultural), the South African system came to an end just as the rest of the world was reinventing it in new forms. Global apartheid policed by the regime of visas and passports in a manner that African migrant workers (...) would easily recognize as colonial still does the job of keeping wealth and poverty apart.

The French government is planning a new immigration law, furthering these developments towards more global apartheid, according to anthropologist Cicilie Fagerlid who writes:

According to this new law, immigration to France should be “chosen” (immigration choisie) rather than “suffered from” or “undergone” (subie). In practice, this means that people who are useful to the French economy are invited in, while the law will be more restrictive on the others – the asylum-seekers, the family reunions and the unregistered sans-papiers.

On yesterdays' demonstration against the law, she writes, "quite a few demonstrators today had come to the conclusion that the interior minister obviously doesn’t love France as she is, so they suggested that he packs his bags and leave."

>> read her whole post

Salih Booker and William Minter define Global Apartheid this way:

Global apartheid, stated briefly, is an international system of minority rule whose attributes include: differential access to basic human rights; wealth and power structured by race and place; structural racism, embedded in global economic processes, political institutions and cultural assumptions; and the international practice of double standards that assume inferior rights to be appropriate for certain "others," defined by location, origin, race or gender.

>> read their whole article in The Nation

UPDATE (8.5.06):

Anthony Katombe from GlobalVoices reviews francophone blogs on African immigrants’ latest tribulations in France and Belgium. Blogger Le Pangolin belies Sarkozy’s assertions that France wants to start “choosing its immigrants” through new, tighter policies:

France has always chosen its immigrants. Remember the Senegalese janitors whom France imported from Senegal and Mali, the Renault and Peugeot auto factory workers they went to fetch in Maghreb to break the communist party and the CGT union’s strong influence between 1950 and 1970.

Le Pangolin ridicules a French government drowning under youth unemployment protests attempting desperately to redirect public attention towards a scapegoat, the African immigrant

>> read the whole post on GlobalVoices

SEE ALSO:

Yash Tandon: What is global apartheid and why do we fight it?

Charles Mutasa: Global Apartheid Continues to Haunt Global Democracy

Owen Sichone on Global Apartheid: Poor African migrants no less cosmopolitan than anthropologists

Proclaiming the birth of a new civil rights movement - demonstration against a tougher immigration policy in the US

Racism and The Five Major Challenges for Anthropology