journal articles / papers | antropologi.info

Thesis: The limits of youth activism in Afghanistan

Published on November 9, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Asia, development empowerment, journal articles / papers, politics, youth

What possiblities have Afghan youth to rebuild their country and to work for a better future? Which constraints do they meet? Anthropologist Elisabet Eikås has been on fieldwork among young people in Kabul from October 2003 to June 2004. The result is the thesis ‘It is open, but not so open’ – gaining access to participation among Kabuli youths.

Young people are often seen as agents of change. But they don’t act independently of the wider society. Eikås’ study provides an ambivalent picture of the young peoples’ possiblities.

There are lots of young people in different organisations who work for a better future. Many of them want to replace the political model of the elder and ethnicity & affiliation with a model based on equality: “All generations or sects should be involved in politics, everybody, every group should be represented in politics”, informant Amin said.

But the young peoples’ activism is a continuous struggle with the structures of the society.

A big problem for many young people is the strong position of the family. As the government is not able to provide satisfactory social services and security, the extended family is still regarded as the safety-net. The strong reciprocity of obligations and rights within the family is limiting the time young people can spend on political activism.

Eikås regards personal autonomy from the family as the main entrance to change.

Being in their 20s, the young activits are expected to marry – something that would mean further responsibilities and less time for political activities. Many informants try therefore to delay the time of marriage. One of her informants decided to move away from his family.

The tradition of respect of the elders was often mentioned as one of the major obstacles for the youths to contribute to society, this being in the family, at university, at work or in other social arenas, she writes. Patriarchy is not only concerned with male domination over females, but also dominance by seniors (“elders”) over juniors.

She describes a meeting with some board members in a youth organisation, when suddenly the leader of the organisation enters the room.

All stand up to greet him. (…) He sits down behind his 3X2 meter teak desk where there is a picture of himself, a framed table sign with his name and an Afghan flag. One of the others pours him a cup of tea and serves him. (…)

The feedback of the members to the leader, their behaviour towards him, shows similarities with how the youths describe the elders, or how the teachers at university expect to be treated. In the interaction with the regular members, the behaviour by the members are characterised by loyalty and respect towards the leader. They are hesitant to state critical comments, they usually wait for him to invite them to speak, and some of them to a certain degree expect the leader to have more knowledge and provide the answers.
(…)
The hierarchy within the youth organisations suggests that these organisations are not able to change the model of the elder for that of equality within their own organisations, and as such they alternate but still reproduce the patriarchy, however through a young leader

The most promising place for an alternative form of politics to evolve is the university. Despite the prohibition of political activities on campus enforced by the Ministry of Higher Education, student groups are established, and seminars, also concerning participation by students, are held, she writes.

At the university, students with diverse backgrounds, both ethnically, regionally and regarding gender, meet:

The proximity of these students, the diverse forums they meet in, in class, in the canteen (although that is segregated according to gender) and outside the classroom, builds the foundation for diverse networks to mingle and also the possibility of bridging networks to evolve, where their common status as students can be the main source of their solidarity.

The fact that they were able to arrange a seminar, where representatives from different student groups were gathered, further substantiates the potential, through co-operation, of a change in the political culture towards a more universalistic culture where equality between the different students can be the guiding principle.
(…)
On the other hand, there is also evidence that bonded loyalties prevail, also among the students. (S)ome students see their possibility of participation best secured through a bonding network adhering to particularistic values, whether this be family, kin, an external patron, political group or ethnicity.

Many problems are related to the long periods of war in Afghanistan. War leads to the breakdown of trust, and networks are usually narrowed:

My data seem to support Putnam’s understanding of trust to be developed through face-to- face contact, in lack of institutional trust, exemplified through how relations to political activities or aspirations only were discussed with ‘people one knows’. As such, Kabul University can be a promising place for increased trust to develop.

As I interpret much of the data in this thesis, I believe the lack of trust in the Afghan society, is one of the main reasons why both bonding networks and also patron- client relations prevail. It takes time to build trust in a population which has been at war. The people in Afghanistan have just started this process.

>> download the thesis

Online: Thesis about Up-Country Tamil Students

Conflict Resolution and Anthropology: Why more scholarship on violence than on peace?

Who has the right to vote? Anthropology News on US-election

Published on November 4, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, journal articles / papers, medical anthropology / ethnobothany, Northern America, politics

If you need anthropological perspectives on the US-election Obama-McCain, you’ll find them in the new issue of Anthropology News. One of the articles is about a study on voting, politicial participation and citizenship among individuals with psychiatric disability.

Many Americans are excluded from voting. Anthropologist Sara M. Bergstresser is conducting the study, using a “community-based participatory research framework”. She writes:

The stigma of mental illness underlies taken-for-granted assumptions about some citizens’ ability to participate in the electoral process. Public discourse about disability in general, and psychiatric disability in particular, often retains historically- conditioned, biologized models of deviance and moral worth, questioning whether these individuals deserve to participate politically. Such assumptions share their origins with rhetoric that has accompanied many other social barriers to voting throughout the history of the US.
(…)
Taken-for-granted concerns about “capacity” to vote may well tell us more about societal levels of stigma than about individual neurological deficiency.
(…)
Just as health disparities have become an important focus of research in the United States, disability-linked disparities in social and political participation should also be brought to the attention of policymakers and researchers.

>> read the whole article (pdf)

PS: I realize I haven’t seen that the October Anthropology News was about the Global Food crisis!

If you need anthropological perspectives on the US-election Obama-McCain, you'll find them in the new issue of Anthropology News. One of the articles is about a study on voting, politicial participation and citizenship among individuals with psychiatric disability.

Many Americans…

George Marcus: "Journals? Who cares?"

Published on October 25, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, fieldwork / methods, journal articles / papers, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, persons and theories

(LINKS UPDATED 20.5.2022) When George Marcus, one of the most influential anthropologists, was in Oslo recently, I asked him what he thinks about Open access. His answer surprised me. “Journals? Who cares?”, he replied. There is in his opinion little original thinking in journals, there are no longer exciting debates. “Maybe it’s because I’m getting older”, he said. “I don’t care.” He explained that “journals are meant to establish people”, to advance careers.

George Marcus offered similar pessimistic views in an interview in the journal Cultural Anthropology (subscription needed) in spring. Among other things, he said, that there are “no new ideas in anthropology”.

Maximilian Forte at Open Anthropology does not agree with Marcus and summarizes parts of the interview in his post George Marcus: “No New Ideas” (2.0) & the After-Life of Anthropology (1.1)

I mentioned Forte’s critique. Marcus replied “Of course Forte does not agree. Younger anthropologists are interested in progress and new ideas.”

Additionally, Marcus explained me his vision of the anthropologist as collaborator. Anthropologists should not study other people, but work together with them, and treat them as co-researcher. Nowadays, our informants may be interested in the same questions as the anthropologst, and they might even have studied anthropology as well. Marcus wrote an experimental book about the nobility in Portugal called Ocasião: The Marquis and the Anthropologist, A Collaboration.

George Marcus talkes about these issues in another interview in the Open Access journal After Culture, see Elise McCarthy, Valerie A. Olson: After Writing Culture: an interview with George Marcus.

George Marcus is best known for the books Writing Culture (edited together with James Clifford) and “Anthropology as a cultural critique” (written together with Michael Fischer)

For those of you who can read Norwegian, there’s an article by me on George Marcus here.

UPDATE: Peter Suber (Open access news) comments:

Did this transcript miss something or did George Marcus miss something? Even if we concede for the sake of argument that there are no new ideas in the field of anthropology, and that journals are more about advancing careers than advancing research, Marcus’ answer was not responsive. Apparently he thinks OA is all about journals, which it isn’t. It’s all about access, which may be through journals or repositories or many other vehicles (like wikis, ebooks, multimedia webcasts, P2P networks, RSS feeds…). It’s as if someone had asked, “What do you think about freedom of speech?” and he answered, “Public speaking? Who cares? It’s all grandstanding and vanity.”

Good point! I have to admit that Marcus was very busy and did not have much time for this interview – and I had lots of questions! We talked just a few minutes on Open Access while we we took the subway from the city up to the university campus at Blindern. He said he admires Chris Kelty’s work on open source and open access, but he does not seem to be up to date in regard to blogging, web2.0 etc (few anthropologists actually are, and most anthropologists have never heard of the Open Access movement)

ANOTHER UPDATE Dorothea Salo does not agree with Peter Suber. Yes, its about journals, she writes.

What is it we’re asking faculty to self-archive? Theses and dissertations, yes; (…) If we weren’t talking about the journal literature, why would repository-rats get so much flak (…) when we take in other things?

So follow Dr. Marcus’s train of thought here: if the journal literature isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, why would he waste time fighting for open access to it? There’s a lot to fight for in the world!

Interesting comment by Chris Kelty on journals:

I think George is right that journals are not where the action is—- and this is related to why I and others are so passionate about open access. Journals are increasingly getting slower, more clogged with submissions, finding it difficult to get reviewers, cash strapped and so on. And at the same time, getting published in a “good” journal (i.e. one with “prestige”) is getting more and more important for people who want permanent jobs in the academy.

the result is that the interesting debates and discussions have moved elsewhere… in some fields (though not anthropology, I fear) they have moved online and into the blogosphere. In others (anthropology I fear) they have retreated into departments and enclaves of other sorts, or have produced and increased sense of alienation from things.

(LINKS UPDATED 20.5.2022) When George Marcus, one of the most influential anthropologists, was in Oslo recently, I asked him what he thinks about Open access. His answer surprised me. "Journals? Who cares?", he replied. There is in his opinion…

First reports from Europe’s largest anthropology conference (EASA)

Published on August 30, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, journal articles / papers, University / Academia

Today was the fifth and last day of the 10th Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) in Ljubljana, Slovenia. There are no news stories yet, but anthropology students at the University of Ljubljana have already written an impressive number of reports on workshops, plenaries and poster sessions.

The students have done a real great job and I hope they will inspire other conference organizers. There are exciting things being told and discussed at conferences. But until now, these stories have stayed inside a small community of scholars. Things are changing: The Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) has started podcasting from their annual meetings.

EASA has started an ambitious project. Read this:

You have reached the online database of texts on the 10th Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). During this event, the site is hourly updated, bringing you fresh reports on the venues (workshops, plenaries and poster sessions) as well as several interviews with the lecturers, EASA officials and other guests. All texts will be published in English language.

The reports and interviews are written by students at the Department for Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. Since human resources are scarce, not all venues are covered and are therefore not reported or commented. We are trying, however, to present as much material as possible by covering as much events as possible.

The reports give a great overview over current anthropological research in Europe.

Tjaša Selič and Goran Karim for example write about Michael Carrithers who is interested in the question: How can so many differences between cultures, groups of people and individuals still inspire participation, cooperation, solidarity? (pdf) Tjaša Zidarič also mentions Panayiota Toulina Demeli who is interested in how being in prison effects the social meaning of motherhood (pdf).

Nikolas Kosmatopoulos seems to have given an interesting paper in the workshop “Imagining and Constructing “Terrorism” and “War on Terror”. “Being an anthropologist in the Middle East feels almost like being a spy”, he said according to Vasja Pavlin:

(I)t is possible to be objective in such an intense field as Lebanon. There is a grey zone between the attackers and the attacked into which an anthropologist enters in order to do his or her research. By entering into this zone one immediately becomes a suspicious person.

An anthropologist has to tell his or her informants some of the intimate stuff about what he or she is doing in order to be accepted by them. The situation forces you to take a position but you cannot please everyone; if you do so you are just like a clown. He concluded that being an anthropologist in the Middle East feels almost like being a spy.

(pdf)

“Crowd crystals and birdwatchers: charismatic leadership in volunteer organisations” was the title of Dan Podjed‘s paper. In her summary, Tina Mučič informs us that the meaning of charisma and charismatic leadership is “a black hole in anthropological research” (pdf).

She also writes that “his presentation was very good and in some parts funny”.

I was surprised over the open and honest comments on the papers and the presentations. Maybe these reports may inspire some anthropologists to rethink their way of giving papers.

Tina Kranjec comments on a presentation by Elke Mader at the workshop Happiness: Anthropological Engagements:

I must say this was a very interesting paper. The author explores how fans experience, express, communicate and circulate happiness in relationship with Shah Rukh Khan. There was a lot of visual material, which was also very representative.

(pdf)

But the workshop On ‘Souvenir’: experiencing diversity, objectifying mutuality was less exciting, she writes:

After visiting two other workshops, I can say that this last one was more oriented on giving as much information as possible and not so much on trying to provoke us and making us participate by commenting and asking questions. Almost all of the lecturers were reading as fast as possible, which made the comprehension of the papers quite difficult.

(pdf)

Tina Mučič has also reviewed several presentations. An anthropologist “was reading her paper very quietly so it was difficult to understand everything”, another one “was speaking and reading very fast, almost too fast to understand the meaning of the paper.”

She liked Gillian Evans‘ presentation best:

This introduction was the most likeable. Dr. Evans was speaking aloud and her tone was resolute. She was trying to explain some terms which we did not understand and was aware that there were not only experts on this topic in the room.

It seems that more and more paper givers have used PowerPoint presentations than for two years ago when I attended the conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth in Keele. Then, most presentations were so boring that I decided to stay at home. According to the students’ reports, the conference in Slovenia must have been very interesting. Their reports are very inspiring. Maybe I should have gone though?

>> overview over all reports

>> conference website

UPDATE (12.9.08) : Guest post: Review of the Moving Anthropology Student Network conference

UPDATE (3.9.08): Martha Jiménez-Rosano has written a few notes about the conference of the Moving Anthropology Student Network (MASN) that took place before the EASA conference (in Slovenia as well) and has uploaded her paper “Projectionists of Reality. When researchers project images of their own boundaries.”

UPDATE 10.11.08) Another EASA-report by Martha Jiménez-Rosano: A feeling about EASA 2008

How To Present A Paper – or Can Anthropologists Talk?

Academic presentations: “The cure is a strong chairman and a system of lights”

Norwegian anthropology conferences are different

Anthropology and the World: What has happened at the EASA conference?

Conference Podcasting: Anthropologists thrilled to have their speeches recorded

This is conference blogging!

AAA Annual Meeting: Are blogs a better news source than corporate media?

First news from the AAA-conference?

Military spies invade anthropology conferences?

“Untouched” Amazone hosted large cities – a model for the future?

Published on August 29, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, ecology nature, journal articles / papers, Latin- and Central America, Native American

The myth of the “untouched” Amazone is popular. But areas that look pristine today have been the home of large urban areas, anthropologist Michael Heckenberger has found out already five years ago.

In a new paper that was published today in Science he writes that these settlements might be a model for the future.

In a press release Heckenberger says:

If we look at your average medieval town or your average Greek polis, most are about the scale of those we find in this part of the Amazon. Only the ones we find are much more complicated in terms of their planning.
(…)
These are not cities, but this is urbanism, built around towns. The findings are important because they contradict long-held stereotypes about early Western versus early New World settlements that rest on the idea that “if you find it in Europe, it’s a city. If you find it somewhere else, it has to be something else.

They have quite remarkable planning and self-organization, more so than many classical examples of what people would call urbanism.

This new knowledge could change how conservationists approach preserving the remains of forest so heavily cleared it is the world’s largest soybean producing area. “This throws a wrench in all the models suggesting we are looking at primordial biodiversity,” Heckenberger says.

This early urban settlement can be a model for future solutions. Heckenberger and his colleagues conclude:

Long ago, Howard proposed a model for lower-density urban development, a “garden city,” designed to promote sustainable urban growth. The model proposed networks of small and well-planned towns, a “green belt” of agricultural and forest land, and a subtle gradient between urban and rural areas.

The pre-Columbian polities of the Upper Xingu developed such a system, uniquely adapted to the forested environments of the southern Amazon. The Upper Xingu is one of the largest contiguous tracts of transitional forest in the southern Amazon [the so-called “arc of deforestation”], our findings emphasize that understanding long-term change in human-natural systems has critical implications for questions of biodiversity, ecological resilience, and sustainability.

Local semi-intensive land use provides “home-grown” strategies of resource management that merit consideration in current models and applications of imported technologies, including restoration of tropical forest areas. This is particularly important in indigenous areas, which constitute over 20% of the Brazilian Amazon and “are currently the most important barrier to deforestation”.

Finally, the recognition of complex social formations, such as those of the Upper Xingu, emphasizes the need to recognize the histories, cultural rights, and concerns of indigenous peoples—the original architects and contemporary stewards of these anthropogenic landscapes—in discussions of Amazonian futures.

>> press release: ‘Pristine’ Amazonian region hosted large, urban civilization, study finds (University of Florida News)

Heckenberger has put online several papers. On the frontpage of his homepage we read “Come visit our site after August 30, 2008 for latest research results”

The Double Standards of the “Uncontacted Tribes” Circus

Anthropologists condemn the use of terms of “stone age” and “primitive”

Dissertation: Survival in the Rainforest

The myth of the "untouched" Amazone is popular. But areas that look pristine today have been the home of large urban areas, anthropologist Michael Heckenberger has found out already five years ago.

In a new paper that was published today…