In his dissertation (published on his blog yesterday), anthropologist Alex Golub challenges popular notions on indigenous peoples, mining and globalisation. He has done research in a region that has gone through major transformations and fulfills every stereotype going "from the stone age to the jet age". Now, the third largest gold mine in the world resides in the once remote valley. Golubs dissertation is about the relationship between the Porgera gold mine and the Ipili-speaking people on whose land the mine is located.

His findings are very interesting and challenge stereotypes among both the general public, political activists and anthropologists. For example, indigenous people are not always "victims of economic globalisation":

While many would expect the intersection of a world-class gold mine and a relatively naïve indigenous people to result in a ‘fatal impact’ (Moorehead 1966), in fact the Ipili have been very successful at
extracting concessions from the mine and government.
(...)

[P]reconceptions of the Ipili as ecologically noble savages (Buege 1996) trampled on and degraded by global capitalism do not capture the complexity of Porgera’s politics.

(...)

[The Ipili] have actually became "one of the most active and successful fourth world people in the world today in terms of pressing claims against the state and transnational capitalism.

Another interesting point: Golub thinks that Papua New Guineans are much further along the road to understanding how "globalization" works than most anthropologists and that anthropologists have more to learn from them than they from us:

Where we see a dizzying flow of transnational entities and fractal, hybrid postmodern geographies, they see ‘Harry.’ Could it be we have something to learn from them rather than the other way around? ‘Landowners’ ability to sniff out the small knot of people behind stories of globalization is an incisive analytic move from which anthropologists who study “globalization” could learn.

Alex Golub goes an writing that studying globalization would require a very particular kind of academic discipline:

A discipline which delivers a richly detailed account of the lifeways of a small network of people as it is actually lived. A discipline attentive to the stories these people tell of themselves without uncritically accepting them as true. A discipline willing to recognize its entanglement in their lives without lapsing into either epistemological paralysis or the easy lie of a comfortable objectivity. In a world where our discipline is beset with doubts about its relevance, ethics, and epistemology, it may be that an anthropology which seeks to make itself feasible may have more to learn from Papua New Guineans than the other way around.

>> download the dissertation "Making the Ipili feasible: Imagining local and global actors at the Porgera Gold Mine, Enga Province, Papua New Guinea" (pdf, 1,5MB )

PS: I have just started reading the 436 pages

SEE ALSO:
Fieldwork in Papua New Guinea: Who are the exotic others?

LINKS UPDATED 19.4.2022

(via Gumsagumlao and anthropology.net ) It has become so commonplace to read about INTEL using anthropologists, that I've overlooked this news: INTEL in the process of hiring more than 100 anthropologists and other social scientists to work side by side with its engineers according to Technology Review.

The reason is simple: Anthropological research pays off - although Pat Gelsinger, a senior vice president at Intel, was sceptical in the beginning: "It's much harder to justify and measure the qualitative research."

Anthropologists had useful insights into a variety of emerging markets:

Intel viewed China and India as countries where people were simply too poor to buy its products -- until anthropologists showed them that extended families in Asia will invest in a PC if it's viewed as helping their children to succeed.

Intel has already released several products shaped by anthropological research:

In February 2005, it worked with a Chinese PC maker to release the China Home-Learning PC; and in October 2005 it launched the iCafe initiative in China, which involves a platform for improving how Internet café owners deploy and manage their technology. Intel has also repeatedly demonstrated early production versions of a Community PC, which is aimed at markets where infrastructure is not as well developed as in the West.

(...)

The rise of the anthropologists may come just in time for Intel. Its traditional Western markets are largely saturated, while many parts of the developing world use cell phones for e-mail and other forms of communication. And Intel's efforts to gain share in the cell-phone market have not been strong. Thus, developing new approaches to potentially huge markets like India and China may help Intel grow faster in the future.

>> read the whole story at Technology Review

SEE ALSO:

Intel is using locally hired anthropologists in new development centers

INTEL-ethnographers challenge our assumptions of the digital divide

Anthropologist helps Intel see the world through customers' eyes

INTEL and Microsoft conference "a coming-out party" for ethnography

When cultures shape technology - Interview with INTEL-anthropologist Genevieve Bell

Research at INTEL

The field: The city has 14312 inhabitants, more than half are unemployed, 53% of the under 18 years old are officially living under the poverty line. The main source of income for the town: Smuggling of people and drugs.

Social anthropologist Johannes Wilm has written an ethnography of the town Douglas in Arizona, a border town to Mexico. It builds on his master thesis at the University of Oslo. He looks "at the complex influence that the two involved countries have on individual actors and how community and identity are shaped thereof."

The book has been published these days, it looks very interesting and written with the reader in mind. I'll write more about it the coming days / weeks.

The whole book can be downloaded as pdf (30MB!)

UPDATE: SEE ALSO:

Too engaged anthropology? The Lumpenproletariat on the US-Mexican Border

Two interviews that I've conducted for the research program "Cultural Complexity in the new Norway" have been translated into English:

Law and multiculturalism: When law crosses borders

How does multicultural society challenge the Norwegian legal system and our interpretation of the law? What happens when different conceptions of the law meet? Should all people be treated alike - regardless of background? Or should groups be given special treatment based on religion and/or ethnicity? Anne Hellum is one of the few jurists in Norway who combine law and anthropology.

>> read the interview

Islam in Europe: Mainstream society as the provider of conditions

- There are many different views on the relationship Islam has to human rights. But no one has investigated processes based on the believer’s needs, considers the historian of religion Lena Larsen. She will be investigating fatwas’ - Muslim legal decrees - interpretations of Sharia legal principles. The answers and bases for fatwas are a unique and as yet unused source of data for finding out what values are imparted by Islamic authorities.

>> read the interview

It seems that Michael Parenti has summarized many of our main points regarding culture and the culture concept in his new book "The Culture Struggle". In an interview on ZNet, he says:

(...) it has long occurred to me that what we call "culture" is not just a set of practices, mores, and beliefs, the "innocent accretion of past solutions," as an anthropologist once said. Much of culture is certainly that, but culture is also a politically charged component of the social order, mediated through institutions and groups that have quite privileged vested interests.

(...)

I draw from cultures from around the world in the hope of demonstrating how beliefs and practices are subjected to manipulation by dominant interests, and how cultures are instruments of social power.

>> read the whole interview

SEE ALSO:

Culture - a definition

On Savage Minds: Debate on the Construction of Indigenous Culture by Anthropologists

Emphasis on ‘culture’ in psychology fuels stereotypes, scholar says

Thomas Hylland Eriksen: Confessions of a useful idiot, or Why culture should be brought back in

For some reason, information on what is going on on anthropology conferences is difficult to obtain. Accidentally, I stumbled upon the website on a conference by the Association of Social Anthropologists on Approaches to Indigenous Knowledge that was held six years ago. Strangely enough, all papers are published in full text.

From the introduction:

Anthropology's enduring interest in people's knowledge systems has recently attracted the attention of development policymakers and practitioners. 'Indigenous knowledge' has emerged with the focus on popular participation and planning-from-below. It has opened up opportunities for anthropology to engage practically as never before. How might it further contribute to, and learn from this current burgeoning of interest, which has taken it somewhat by surprise?

>> overview over all papers

SEE ALSO:

"Aboriginal knowledge is science"

Who owns native culture?

Although race has typically been mobilized to justify and uphold social inequality, recently in Nepal race was used in a political movement to oppose those in power, Susan Hangen writes in her article The Emergence of a Mongol Race in Nepal in Anthropology News February.

During the 1990s, some ethnic groups in Nepal—including Gurungs, Magars, Rais, Limbus and Sherpas, began asserting that they all belong to a Mongol race. Previously, each of these groups was primarily identified as belonging to a jati, a term that means both a caste and ethnic group. Their adoption of this racial identity was inspired by the platform of a small political party called the Mongol National Organization (MNO), which sought to unite and mobilize these social and ethnically diverse people, in part to make major political changes that would increase their social, economic and political power.

(...)

The MNO also believed that adopting a racial identity would help them to bring international attention to their political cause. Race appealed to the MNO as a global language of identity.

(...)

Like the concept of indigenous peoples, race may increasingly serve as a framework through which minorities make political claims, to the extent that it is acknowledged and validated through international institutions like the UN. Thus international efforts to expunge racism may reinforce the salience of race as an identity.

>> read the whole story

"Racialization is part of the current moment of globalization" - as anthropologist Nina Glick Schiller commented.

Priceton University presents a new book which might be an example for good anthropological writing. It's a book about the Hajj-pilgrimage to Mecca by anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi:

Written in the first person, “A Season in Mecca” reads like a novel and is filled with descriptions and personal reflections. It follows a narrative structure, starting with journal entries Hammoudi wrote at his Princeton home before embarking for North Africa and the Middle East, and ending with his departure from Saudi Arabia, which is where Mecca and other sites central to the hajj are located.

Approximately 2 million Muslims travel to Mecca annually. The hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam — along with profession of faith, prayer, fasting and alms giving. It is obligatory for every Muslim man or woman, who has the means, to do once in a lifetime. "According to Muslim tradition, the hajj purifies you from sin, puts you on the right path, and brings the mercy of God in you for a good life here and in the hereafter", says anthropologist Abdella Hammoudi, author of the book which became available in English in January.

Hammoudi grew up in Morocco and moved later to France. He says, he knew that the project would be “problematic” for him because of the tension he felt arose from his dual education (both religious and secular). But, and this is interesting, "it was precisely this cultural and educational hybridity that he saw as integral to his study of the hajj".

"I would not have done this [project] as an anthropologist without that sense of existential risk-taking. I went as a cultural Muslim with empathy, and also with distance. I went also with the openness to take the risk to revise everything I had lived with until now."

>> read the whole story

>> read an excerpt of the book (OpenDemocracy)

>> Review of the book in the Christian Science Monitor: He traveled to Mecca in search of himself

SEE ALSO;

The Secret of Good Ethnographies - Engaging Anthropology Part III