One month before Katrina resulted in floods in New Orleans, a similar “natural” disaster occurred in Mumbai, India. Judy Whitehead, associate professor at the University of Lethbridge in Canada the United Kingdom, has conducted disaster research in partnership with an NGO that brought together organizations working with slum dwellers. In Anthropology News December, she sums up some similarities between the disaster in Mumbai with the Katrina disaster in Florida.

Both disasters reveal "common problems in both neoliberal states’ disaster management":

States that minimize public safety, leaving “civil society” and the market to meet social needs, may well be ones that are deficient in safety planning and provisioning.

Similarities:

- Like New Orleans, Mumbai has de-industrialized in the past two decades. The city’s textile industry has closed down under competition from the power loom sector.

- Like New Orleans, Mumbai, too, has a vulnerable topography.

- Like New Orleans, the vacuum created by state inaction was filled by the press who excelled in Mumbai in “speaking truth to power.”

Her conclusion:

Since economic reforms were installed in India in 1991, “good governance” has come to mean that state and municipal governments should be pared down, while social services are contracted out to non-governmental organizations. The notion of a state that relies on “civil society” to meet its social programs ignores long-term investment in infrastructure to prevent disasters and long-range planning that focuses on preparedness for the worst-case scenarios.

Comparative studies of flood management in neoliberal, social-democratic states provide important insights in resulting problems in disaster management.

>> read the whole article

SEE ALSO:

"Disasters do not just happen" - The Anthropology of Disaster (2)

When applied anthropology becomes aid - A disaster anthropologist’s thoughts

New website: Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences

Anna Tsing, professor of anthropology, has received the 2005 Senior Book Prize from the American Ethnological Association (AEA) for her book, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton University Press, 2004). Tsing shares the prize with Michael Fischer, professor of anthropology and science and technology studies at MIT, who was honored for his book Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice, University of Santa Cruz reports:

In Friction, Tsing challenges the widespread view that globalization invariably signifies a "clash" of cultures, and she develops the concept of friction in its place as a metaphor for the diverse and conflicting social interactions that make up our contemporary world. She focuses on the Indonesian rainforest, where local and national environmentalists, international science, North American investors, advocates for Brazilian rubber tappers, UN funding agencies, mountaineers, village elders, and urban students, among others, all combine in unpredictable, messy misunderstandings, but misunderstandings that sometimes work out.

>> read the whole story

Amazon writes on Fischers book:

A vigorous advocate of the anthropological voice and method, Fischer emphasizes the ethical dimension of cultural anthropology. Ethnography, he suggests, is uniquely situated to gather and convey observations fundamental to the creation of new social institutions for an evolving civil society. In Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice Fischer considers a dazzling array of subjects—among them Iranian and Polish cinema, cyberspace, autobiographical and fictional narrative, and genomic biotechnologies—and, in the process, demonstrates a cultural anthropology for a highly networked world.

Anthropology, Fischer explains, now operates in a series of third spaces well beyond the nineteenth- and twentieth-century dualisms of us/them, primitive/civilized, East/West, or North/South. He contends that more useful paradigms—such as informatics, multidimensional scaling, autoimmunity, and visual literacy beyond the frame—derive from the contemporary sciences and media technologies.

It's the probably the largest meeting of anthropologists in the world, nevertheless it's hard to find information on what has been discussed the recent days. I was about to write that I've found more news reports on an anthropology conference in Borneo (Meeting of minds on Sociology & Anthropology in Borneo opens and Closing ceremony of sociology and anthropology conference), than on the much larger Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) (no articles, conference homepage seems to exist!). A more indepth search revealed some news stories on two topics, though:

Easter Island's demise caused by rats, Dutch traders says new theory (several sources)
Rats and European traders may be responsible for the mysterious demise of Easter Island according to research presented last week by a University of Hawaii anthropologist during an American Anthropological Association meeting. >> continue

Science snapshot: Early humans hunted, not hunters (US Today)
Some anthropologists are suggesting that being hunted, rather than hunting, was the daily fare of humanity's ancestors. At a presentation here at the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting, anthropologist Donna Hart of the University of Missouri in St. Louis argued that fossil evidence and the experience today of monkeys and apes "supports a 'Man, the Hunted' theory of evolution." >> continue

There hasn't been much blogging during the conference as it is the case in other disciplines. So I'm not sure if we can conclude that blogs are a better news source than corporate media. There are more blog posts than articles, but most of them are more personal than anthropological - "Rachel" just writes about food:

My trip to Washington, DC to give a paper at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association started with French ravioli smothered in gruyere

.

Here are some posts, more will follow, I hope?

Savage Minds: Neoliberalism: Good. Spy Museum: Better.
Of course, all anthropologist have a love-hate relationship with the crippling reflexivity and desperate networking that is the AAAs, but this year seemed particularly half-cocked. The job market was not particularly exciting this year, and it was hard to find exciting panels. Even particularly popular panels, like ‘the neoliberalism one’ were not as heavily attended as it could be since, as one grad student put it, “the spy museum was cooler.” I am not sure whether this says more about the spy museum or neoliberalism. >> continue

another post: What happens at the AAA, stays at the AAA

Erkan's field diary: A few more words on Washington DC and AAA
After the last AAA meetings, I would somewhat casually say that science and technology studies and ethnographies of neoliberalism are the two hot themes of anthropological work... >> continue

John Hawkes: So how were the triple-A's?
I was on an invited panel discussion of ethical issues in biological anthropology, particularly with relation to property. My part was to discuss concerns relating to genetic research on anthropological variation. >> continue

Photoethnography: Successful anthropology conference in Washington, DC
>> continue (very short entry!)

Mareska Kellemvore: Kick in my complacency
I was super overwhelmed 'cause it's a HUGE conference and I didn't know enough of the names of the important people and everyone was dressed schnazzier than at AFS and I was intimidated because this time I was on a panel of a bunch of professors and me. >> continue

SEE ALSO:
More and more anthropologists, but they're absent from public debates - "Engaging Anthropology" (1)

"I predict that we will slowly see the return of the “armchair anthropologists” Malinowski so famously dethroned." The reason: "The web offers a tremendous, and ever growing database of lived experience", Kerim Friedman wrote in an earlier post on Savage Minds. Via del.icio.us/anthropology I found the article "Visual Anthropology" by trendwatching.com. They list several tips on how to conduct online-fieldwork - anthropology light - to find out about peoples'life. From their introduction:

As consumers around the world pro-actively post, stream if not lead parts of their lives online, you (or your trend team) can now vicariously 'live' amongst them, at home, at work, out on the streets. From reading minute-by-minute online diaries or watching live webcam feeds, to diving into tens of millions of tagged pictures uploaded by Flickr-fueled members of GENERATION C in Mexico, Mauritius, Malaysia and dozens of other countries.

What's so interesting about this feature are the large number of links to explore. In many cases, the photo sharing service flickr gives insight into peoples life. Or obscure sites like What's in your fridge?

>> continue to Virtual Anthropology. An emerging consumer trend and related new business ideas

SEE ALSO:
Rise of armchair anthropology? More and more scientists do online research

(via vrulje) Museums start blogging! It's called Eye Level and is the Smithsonian American Art Museum's blog and according their self-description "the first blog by the Smithsonian and one of just a handful of museum sites in the blogosphere".
Their hope is that their blog "hosts a vital conversation among artists, curators, collectors, and enthusiasts on a broad range of subjects related to American art":

Over the long term, Eye Level will look at both art and museums, offering the kind of close examination that new media affords, in part simply to find out how new media can enhance the museum's role.

Especially interesting from an anthropological point of view:

(...) To cite the old cliché, the eye is the window to the soul. If art is a window to a culture, Eye Level is a way to take it in.

>> visit Eye Level

As anthropology has grown, its perceived wider relevance has diminished. Why is this so? In his second chapter in the book Engaging Anthropology, Norwegian anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen gives us several possible explanations. On the one hand, there are external factors f.ex. recent university reforms, inspired by neoliberalist marked theories:

Universities are being turned into factories. Academics have, as a consequence, lost much of the time they could formerly devote to engagement in greater society. (...) The ongoing formalisation of the recognition of skills through never-ending evaluations of research, auditing and other forms of "professionalisation" threatens to take the creativity out of academic life, and also contributes to isolating it further from society. (...) Students are no longer encouraged to be intellectuals, but to specialize and become professionals.

But the main reasons for the diminishing role of anthropology lie within the discipline. Hylland Eriksen lists several "recipes for cocooning":

Recipe Nr 1: Elitism:

Anthropology, unlike some other academic disciplines, has yet to escape fully from the mouldy lounges and pompous hallways of pre-war university life. In spite of the demographic explosion it has gone through since the Second World War, and in spite of the democratization of higher education, anthropology somehow remains an elite subject in the English-speaking world.

(...)

The early predominance of minorities and women at the very center of the discipline was significant. Evans-Pritchard's generation did not even want anthropology to be taught as an undergraduate subject. In Britain, the subject remains dominated by the department of the elite universities.

(...)

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.

Recipe 2: Myopic specialisation resulting from "my ethnography"

The malinowskian glorification of the detailed, synchronic single-society study encourages specialization and gives the highest marks to the colleague who remains loyal to her fieldnotes thoughout her career

Recipe 3: Insisting on irreducible complexity

Anthropologists are skilled at exposing oversimplifications. This is one of our disciplines strengths, but complex answers are non marketable commodities with respect to the mass media and the general reader, as we all know. Few monographs or even articles have a simple point to make, most anthropologists are reluctant to simplify their insights. But there are exceptions, f.ex. Levi Strauss - one "of the normally least readable anthropologists"):

Levi-Strauss' Myth and Meaning (1978) and his interview book with Didier Eribon, De Pres et de Loin (1988), convey the main elements in his structuralism and his intellectual vision without losing, presumably, a single potential reader on the way. Many of us have something to learn from Levi-Strauss in this regard.

Recipe 4: The post-colonial critiques and the loss of the native:

After the post-colonial critique of Western representations, the collaps of classic cultural relativism and the damaging postmodernist autocritique of the 1980s, anthropology has become modest in its claims, introverted in its intellectual perspective and even more reluctant than before to raise the big issues in generally intelligible ways

Recipe 5: Anthropology as a subversive kind of activity

There might be totally different explanations for the failure of anthropology to sustain a visible public presence:

One should not rule out the possibiliy that anthropologists are often understood, but disagreed with - its perspectives threaten to subvert values and ideas held dear by its potential non-academic audience. The very idea of anthropology as a cultural (auto)critique (...) presupposes that there is a great demand for cultural self-criticism out there. This, plainly, may not be the case.

Recipe 6: Priviledging analysis over narrative

Anthropologists are bad writers! This is Hylland Eriksens most important argument:

To my mind, the single most important characteristic of anthropological writings is that it tends to be chiefly analytical. This means that it is more difficult to get into and less easy to remember than narratives. Stories are the stuff of life; analysis is for specialists. (...) There is a tendency to combine a penchant for complexity with a lack of engaging, sustained narrative. (...) As a result, it appears that anthropological texts are readable only by other anthropologists, who have learnt - the hard way - to read them.

But there are exceptions. He mentiones Katy Gardner's "Songs from Rivers Edge. Stories from a Bengladeshi River (1997)" and Tristes Tropiques by Claude Livi-Strauss (1978).

The problem:

There are many brilliant narratives in anthropological literature, but they're usually hidden in analysis. (...) History is almost alone among academic subjects to fuse original research and popular writing in the very same texts

MORE ABOUT ENGAGING ANTHROPOLOGY:

The Secret of Good Ethnographies - Engaging Anthropology Part III

More and more anthropologists, but they're absent from public debates - "Engaging Anthropology" (Part I)

SEE ALSO

Archive: Knowledge Sharing and Open Access Anthropology

"Anthropology is exceptionally relevant as a tool for understanding the contemporary world, yet it is absent from nearly every important public debate in the Anglophone world. In fact, it has almost gone underground in the English-speaking world. Paradoxically, as the discipline has grown, its perceived wider relevance has diminished. There are more of us anthropologists than ever before, yet fewer reach out to communicate with a wider world", Thomas Hylland Eriksen writes in his new book "Engaging Anthropology".

I've just started reading the book and am going to blog more about it the following days. Some of the questions raised in the book are: How can anthropology become more relevant for the "outside world"? What has anthropology to offer? Why do anthropologists fail to engage a wider public?

Thomas Hylland Eriksen takes up issues that have been widely discussed in the anthropological blogosphere before, f.ex. the unwillingness to share knowledge:

Anthropologists have an enormous amount of knowledge about human lives and most of them know something profound about what it is that makes people different and what makes us all similar. Yet there seems to be a professional reluctance to share this knowledge with a wider readership. Translating from other cultures is what we are paid to do; translating for the benefit of readers outside the in-group seems much less urgent.

Anthropologists, he criticizes, present their research findings in a way "that turns almost the entire potential readership off":

The problem is that all these fine analytic texts, often brimming with insights and novel angles, rarely build bridges connecting them with the concerns of nonspecialists. Also, they are far too rarely supplemented by writings aimed at engaging a wider readership. (...) When did you last read a proper page-turner written by an anthropologist?

It was not always like this, he goes on. In the mid-twentieth century, in the days of Mead, Montagu and Evans-Pritchard, anthropologists were engaged in general intellectual debate and occasionally wrote popular, yet intellectually challenging texts. But as the discipline has grown, its perceived wider relevance has diminished. Since the Second World War, Hylland Eriksen writes, anthropology has shrunk away from the public eye in almost every country where it has an academic presence (Norway is an exception):

Scholarly works of great and enduring importance were published from the 1960s to the 1980s by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mary Douglas, Victor Turner etc. Yet, the response from the nonacademic world was negligible, and this generation seemed to have no Margaret Mead to take current ideas and run with them. The discipline had become almost self-contained.

There are many possible ways of engaging a readership, he writes and gives some examples. He encourages anthropologists to write more personally engaged ethnographies. There is no contrast between professionalism and engagement:

I suspect that not a few anthropologists have lost their original motivation for studying the subject – understanding Humanity, or changing the world – on the way, replacing it with the intrinsic values of professionalism. And yet, just as the anthropological travelogue may be complementary to the monograph, the engaged pamphlet can often be a necessary complement to the analytical treatise. However, that pamphlet is written too rarely. It gives no points in the academic credit system, it may cause embarrassment among colleagues and controversy to be sorted out by oneself. The easy way out, and the solution most beneficial to one’s career, consists in limiting oneself to scholarly work.

Another suggestion: Anthropologists should write more essays:

Assuming that Leach was right in claiming that most anthropologists were failed novelists, here is a chance to become a truly creative writer without having to invent persons and events. The essay, unlike the article, is inconclusive. It plays with ideas, juxtaposing them, trying them out, discarding some ideas on the way, following others to their logical conclusion. In the essay, the writer sees the reader as an ally and fellow-traveller, not as an antagonist to be defeated or persuaded. The essay appeals to the reader’s common sense, it may occasionally address him directly, and the essayist tries to ensure that the reader follows her out on whichever limb she is heading for.

Strangely enough for us behind the screens: Hylland Eriksen doesn't mention blogging. Blogs are as experimental as the essay form (or rather more). Additionally, blogs invite the reader to discuss with the anthropologist.

You can read the whole first chapter on Thomas Hylland Eriksens homepage.

UPDATE - MORE ON THIS BOOK:

Why anthropology fails to arouse interest among the public - Engaging Anthropology (2)

The Secret of Good Ethnographies - Engaging Anthropology (3)

UPDATE: Alun Salt writes:

Engaging Anthropology looks like it will be a fascinating book to read. There’s a post about it on antropologi.info. One of my favourite books is Popularizing Anthropology by McClancy and McDonaugh which makes a strong argument that if anthropology (and science) is publically funded then there is an obligation to make your results accessible to the public. They also make the argument that popular does not automatically mean unscholarly.

SEE ALSO:

Marshall Sahlins wants to make the Internet the new medium for traditional pamphleteering

Open Source Anthropology : Are anthropologists serious about sharing knowledge?

"Minimal willingness to post one’s own work online", survey by the American Anthropological Association reveals

The Future of Anthropology: "We ought to build our own mass media"

An cliché, guaranteed to be found in any newspaper article or TV show about indigenous peoples, is the moniker “ancient people”. The idea is that their way of life has remained unchanged for centuries. It is a nice fantasy, but it is almost never true, anthropologist Kerim Friedman writes and summarizes some central points:

We find it amusing that they might listen to rock music and enjoy Hollywood movies. It must all be so strange for them! But it is really strange for us. We need them to be ancient and traditional so that our own alienation can be better comprehended. (...) It is also an important myth for those who self-identify as members of an ancient people.

>> read the whole article on Savage Minds

SEE ALSO MY EARLIER COMMENT:
Our obsession with the notion of the primitive society