Jill Walker reports about censorship of research in the USA:

Recently, two articles by teams from the University of Bergen were accepted by prominent US journals and then turned down because, the publishers said, "we cannot publish your paper because the United States government restricts publishers from publishing papers that have an affiliation with the government of Iran." Some of the authors were Iranian citizens.

She comments:

Isn’t that astounding, though? The results results are presumably important, since they were accepted in an internationally reknowned, peer reviewed journal. They have nothing to do with bombs or weapons of mass destruction or politics - this is geology and oil and such. And yet the US government refuses to allow US journals to publish this, just because some of the authors - scholars, not politicians - have Iranian passports? How peculiar that the country that (in theory) has the strongest tradition of freedom of speech and democracy stifles research and communication like this.

>> read the whole post and the comments

The rector of Bergen University said to the Norwegian media that this was "unacceptable political censorship", "previously known only from totalitarian regimes". Matthias Kaiser from the National Committees for Research Ethics in Norway says, the American science community can no longer be regarded as a part of the international science community.

There's no English language coverage available,

>> information from the University in Bergen on this issue

>> information on the Patriot Act which is the reason of this problems

A few weeks ago, the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the world's largest association of scholars of religion, criticized a similar "ideological exclusion" of knowlewdge and scholars. They joined a lawsuit that challenges a key provision of the USA Patriot Act, according to the blog Mirror of Justice:

Citing the 2004 revocation of a travel visa for noted Swiss scholar of Islam Tariq Ramadan, the suit contends that an "ideological exclusion" provision of the Patriot Act is being used to impede the free circulation of scholars and scholarly debate that are integral to academic freedom.

Commenting on the suit, AAR Executive Director Barbara DeConcini stated that "preventing foreign scholars like Professor Ramadan from visiting the U.S. limits not only the ability of scholars here to enhance their own knowledge, but also their ability to inform students, journalists, public policy makers, and other members of the public who rely on scholars' work to acquire a better understanding of critical current issues involving religion.

>> read the whole post "Religion Scholars Challenge Patriot Act"

>> AlterNet: Banned in America: Tariq Ramadan of Switzerland, one of the world's most important Muslim scholars, ran right into the USA Patriot Act

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

>> News on Patriot Act and Academic Freedom

>> The Patriot Act and Civil Liberties. Information and Resources

In the book Engaging Anthropology, Thomas Hylland Eriksen writes:

In spite of its considerable growth, anthropology still cultivates its self-identity as a counter-culture, its members belonging to a kind of secret society whose initiates possess exclusive keys for understanding, indispensable for making sense of the world, but alas, largely inaccessible for outsiders. (...)Anthropologists simply did not want their subject to become too popular.

Recently, I had to think of this quote several times. As noted, I've registered for the conference Cosmopolitanism and Anthropology. As the conference fee is cheaper for members of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth, I thought: Why not have a look at the organisation.

On the homepage section Membership, the first thing you read is this here:

Not a member? Why not lend your support to the discipline? If you would like to join, and fulfil the requirements below, use the NEW online form to apply.

Requirements?? Read on:

The ASA offers membership to persons of academic standing who, by virtue of their training, posts held and published works can be recognised as professional social anthropologists. Nominations and applications are considered once a year, at the Annual Business Meeting of the Association. These must be submitted by December 31st in the academic year in which they are to be considered.

But that's not enough. You can't just apply by yourself:

Applications may be made by nomination through a member of the Association or by a person applying in their own right. In the case of the latter the names of two members of the Association should be provided to whom the committee may refer if necessary.

You should also take a look at the detailed membership application form

In contrast, there are no such "requirements" when applying for membership in the American Anthropological Association (AAA) or in the Norwegian Anthropological Association.

By the way, some days ago, the first conference papers were published on the website. Try to download them and see what happens when you (try to) open them...

(LINKS UPDATED 18.9.2020) Gated communities are becoming more and more popular in America. They are no longer ghettoes for the rich and wealthy. Behind fences and walls, more than eight million Americans live in their own parallel societies. Setha Low, professor of environmental psychology and anthropology, has conducted ten years of fieldwork in gated communities in New York, Texas and Mexico City and why there has been an increase in Americans moving to gated communities. The University of California at Irvine’s campus newspaper, New University reports about a recent lecture by Setha Low:

Her research revealed that gated communities don’t necessarily have less crime than the surrounding area. In addition, residents did not find the friendly community that they were looking for. She found that residents did feel safer, but they worried all the time about the guards and the workers, and the residents had their home security systems on all the time.

>> read the whole story in New University (Link updated with copy)

In an earlier text at arcadejournal.com (no longer online), Setha Low writes:

Most people who move to gated communities are not aware of what they lose in this quest for safety and privacy. Growing up with an implicit fortress mentality, many children may experience more, not less, fear of people outside the gates.

In an review of Setha Low's book Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America, Alan Greenblatt provides more details:

Gated communities "preselect a ready-made community of socially and economically similar people," Low writes. But as her interviews reveal, in time that self-selection feeds upon itself and fear of outsiders grows. Low quotes a San Antonio woman identified as "Felicia" as saying "if you go downtown, which is much more mixed, where everybody goes, I feel much more threatened." Due to lack of exposure, Felicia's young daughter has grown afraid of poor people on the rare occasions she encounters any. Other residents are even more open about such issues. A teenager dressed in a tennis skirt for a Fourth of July party casually tells Low that the Mexicans downtown "are dangerous, packing knives and guns." Low blames gated communities for exacerbating these segregationist or even racist tendencies.

>> read the whole review on findarticles.com (Link updated with copy)

SEE ALSO:

Interview with Setha Low on NPR

Gated communities more popular, and not just for the rich (USA Today)

Wikipedia on Gated Communities

Thomas Hylland Eriksen: Risking security. Paradoxes of social cohesion

Some days ago I registered for the conference Cosmopolitanism and Anthropology at Keele University (UK). As a preparation, here some notes on anthropology and cosmopolitanism.

After the controversis around the Mohammed-cartoons, media loved talking about culture and religion wars and Huntingtons clash of civilisation. But maybe we should have talked more about cosmopolitanism than culture war. Isn't cosmopolitanism more common than fundamentalism? In his article Anthropology as cosmopolitan practice? (subscription required) published in Anthropological Theory in 2003 (3):403–415, Joel Kahn writes:

I would suggest that a certain cosmopolitanism governs the practices of localized individuals and institutions, everyday interactions between individuals and groups, popular cultural activities, forms of economic relations, and institutions of village government.
(...)
Could one go further to argue that in instances where a breakdown of such cosmopolitan coalitions has taken place - in Aceh, West Papua, Kalimantan, the Moluccas more often than not this has been precisely a result of the imposition from above (by the Indonesian state, outside powers and institutions) of disembedded, supposedly universal, culturally neutral forms of power, jurisprudence and so on (that is, of liberal versions of the cosmopolitan ideal)?

In his paper he wants to recover "cosmopolitanism in recent social and political theory, a project to which according to him "surprisingly few anthropologists have so far contributed":

The world which anthropologists seek to study is a world not of discrete and isolatable other cultures and societies, but a world of ‘intercultural’ or ‘intercommunal’ relationships.

A quick internet-search revealed that many anthropologists and social scientists make similar points as Kahn.

In the book Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Authenticity in the Middle East, Roel Meijer writes, that the Middle East was, in the past, "an open undefined territory in which groups of different religious and ethnic backgrounds intermingled and exchanged ideas and lifestyles". In his review (source url-lost), Fred Halliday from London School of Economics concludes:

The main message of this collection of studies is that in the past the Middle East did embody certain forms of cosmopolitanism, but that modern forces - the modern state, anti-imperialism, the mass politics of secular and religious forces alike - have overwhelmed these forms. Globalisation now substitutes a different kind of superficial and consumerist, universalism.

The researchers stress that cosmopolitanism is no elite-phenomenon - it's everyday practice. Per Wirten points to studies on the Bosnian war by peace - and conflict researcher Mary Kaldor:

As it turned out, those who defended cosmopolitan ideas often lived in small towns and villages where they hid refugees, saving them from ethnic cleansing and paving the way for continued co-existence. Many of them had never gone to university or even once left the place where they were born. In contrast, many of the most militant Croatian and Serbian nationalists had in many ways lead what we tend to think of as a cosmopolitan life: educated at foreign universities they felt at home in all of the major airports around the world and could converse in a relaxed manner with the global political and financial elite.

And in the anthology Cosmopolitics. Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (red: Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins), Wirten writes, a number of philosophers, anthropologists and cultural sociologists are inspired by the Dominican migrant, the Kurdish refugee, the stateless Palestinian, the indigenous propertyless of Chiapas.

The conference organizers introduce the concept of cosmopolitanism this way:

One tendency has been to think of cosmopolitanism as transgressing the parochialism or ethnicism of the nation-state. In this view, cosmopolitans are travellers who move beyond national boundaries, and hence a cosmopolitan social science must study these flows and movements, or reflect on issues of global justice, human rights and governmentality.

This apparently commonsensical view has been challenged, however, in a deservedly much cited article by Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’. (...) Appiah speaks of a ‘rooted’ cosmopolitanism, and proposes that cosmopolitans begin from membership in morally and emotionally significant communities (families, ethnic groups) while espousing notions of toleration and openness to the world, the transcendance of ethnic difference and the moral incorporation of the other. His vision opens up scope for a cosmopolitan anthropology which builds on anthropological strengths of fieldwork in particular locales.

In her thesis on British Asian cosmopolitains, anthropologist Cicilie Fagerlid explains the difference between multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism:

While the prototype multicultural society is made up of enclosed cultural units with different but equal rights, the cultural flows do not stay within bounded groups, in a cosmopolitan society. Instead they intersect and mix in various ways in various individuals.

Doing cosmopolitan anthropology means questioning assumptions on "us" and "them", she writes:

It has been important for me to show that the world is interconnected; I did not only share subcultural preferences with my informants, but we reflected on identity formation in similar ways as well. (...) My aim has been to make use of these parallels between lived urban life and life as an urban researcher.
(...)
We all need to acknowledge that there is no such thing as 'us' and 'them'.

UPDATE: POSTS ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

What's the point of anthropology conferences? (general summary)

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

Owen Sichone: Poor African migrants no less cosmopolitan than anthropologists

MORE TEXTS:

Per Wirtén: Free the nation - cosmopolitanism now!"

Book review: Cosmopolitanism. Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds (updated link)

Kwame Anthony Appiah on Cosmopolitanism: The Case For Contamination

Q&A with Kwame Anthony Appiah: Deepening the conversation about identity

Cicilie Fagerlid: "Beyond Ethnic Boundaries? British Asian Cosmopolitans" (459kb, pdf)

Steven Vertovec: Trends and Impacts of Migrant Transnationalism (updated link)

Steven Vertovec: Fostering Cosmopolitanisms: A Conceptual Survey and A Media Experiment in Berlin (pdf)

Rebecca Graversen: Imagining Other Places. Cosmopolitanism and exotic fantasies in multicultural cities

Mary Kaldor: Cosmopolitanism and organised violence

Per Mouritsen: Can Patriots Be World-Citizens? (pdf)

Edward Spence: Cosmopolitanism and the Internet

How can we create a more plural anthropological community?

Transnational Communities Programme - lots of working papers

Cosmopolitanism - from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

I've blogged about this in my Norwegian blog already, but this might be interesting for you out there as well. It seems that blogging has become mainstram in academica. Jill Walker, one of the first academic bloggers in Norway has won the Meltzer Foundation’s prize for excellence in research dissemination - because of her blogging! >> read Jill Walkers blog post

SEE ALSO:
More and more academics use blogs

Migrants from the same country often form communities in their new country. This is not the case with Russians in London and Amsterdam. They live in separate, often competing subgroups. This is one of the main points in the book East to West Migration: Russian Migrants in Western Europe by anthropologist Helen Kopnina. "I discovered that the concept of ‘subcommunities’ describes Russian migrants’ circumstances more accurately than that of ‘community,’” Kopnina writes.

In his review, Boris Kagarlitsky writes:

Among the Russian emigrants in London one can meet the oligarch Boris Berezovsky as well as half-starving dishwashers. These migrants can hardly manage to feel kinship. A common culture and language are of no help in this regard.

(...)

The new Russian emigration in the West reflects the same tendencies in play in post-Soviet society. It is startling that contemporary Russian society has been quickly marked by an almost complete absence of altruism, solidarity, and community. No longer under the dominion of the Communist Party, society has turned to primitive individualism.

>> read the whole review on Transitions Online

Most homepages of anthropologists at universities only consist of a boring list of non-clickable publications. One of the few exceptions is the homepage of Joshua Barker at the University of Toronto. Eight papers can be read, including papers that have been published in exclusive journals like Current Anthropology. His research focuses on Indonesia, on urban studies, crime and security, and new technologies. Barker is currently conducting a three-year research project 'Engineers and Political Dreams: Indonesia's Internet in Cultural Perspective'.

Some weeks ago, he's started his blog Metropolis 347

Carolyn Schwarz spent 17 months in the most remote part of northern Australia to conduct field work for her dissertation on how Christianity and Western religious systems either came together or conflicted with one another. "There hadn’t been much work on introduced religious practices in aboriginal Australia", she says to the journal Advance at the University of Conneticut:

In Western society, “religion is treated as being something separate,” she says, “But in aboriginal societies, religious beliefs are not as separated – politics and religion are one and the same. Religion is a way of life. It carries over into mundane activities, such as exchanging food, negotiating for money and receiving access to vehicles.”

>> read the whole story in Advance