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Open Access: New alliances threaten the American Anthropological Association

Published on August 18, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, journal articles / papers, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing

(via media anthropology) What is the purpose of organisations like the American Anthropological Association? What is the point of publishing articles? The free software movement forces anthropologists to rethink these questions, Christopher Kelty says in a conversation about anthopology and open access to scholarship.

The discussion between seven anthropologists was published in the journal Cultural Anthropology. The article Anthropology of/in Circulation: The Future of Open Access and Scholarly Societies is of course available online.

They talk among other things about new divisions between scholary organisations like the AAA and anthropologists who want to engage with the wider world by making their research more accessible online. Now, the largest part of anthropological research is locked behind login forms that only members of subscribed institutions can pass through. The AAA has not taken side with the open access movement but with the commercial publishing industry.

“All anthropologists who want to be part of the revolution in scholarly communication must do so outside of the AAA”, Alex Golub says. The AAA has “made exactly the wrong allies”.

One common argument against free access to scholarship has to do with economics: Journal subscriptions are an important part of the budget of organisations like the AAA.

But Jason Baird Jackson explains:

(I)f we want to think seriously about “sustainability” we must realize that sustaining anthropology means more than sustaining the AAA budget—it means sustaining the viability of research libraries and of our not-for- proﬁt university press partners as well.

More and more research libraries today are responding by partnering directly with scholars to “publish” (…) research, and thus they are expanding the library’s role in new ways. They are trying to make scholarship more open and more sustainable by cutting out the middleman, the publishing companies. In doing so, they might make commercial publishing less proﬁtable and scholarly societies built around toll access publication proﬁts less sustainable.

So whose interests do you align with?

I’d like my efforts to help sustain the AAA, but the association’s interests are now more congruent with those of the publishing industry, not my library or the university presses. As a result the interests of my ethnographic consultants, my university library, my students, and my colleagues are increasingly in conﬂict with those of my professional society.

Alex Golub adds:

One of the key things about Free Software and Open Access (…) is that it allows things to get done extremely cheaply if you have the people who know how to work the technology. The AAA has failed to develop low-cost solutions using these methods, it has alienated much of a generation of younger scholars willing to devote their time to developing these solutions, and as a result it has thrown up its hands and outsourced this work to institutions like WB (Wiley-Blackwell).

WB then doubles the price of American Anthropologist, and makes money off of the AAA’s inability to manage its own publications program. We are all literally paying the price of the AAA’s inability to keep our house in order.

The AAA has developped AnthroSource where AAA members can browse through hundreds of journals. Jason Baird Jackson says we do not need AnthroSource anymore because of all the blogs, open access and other online initiatives that he calls the “Shadow AnthroSource”:

(I)n a way what is happening now outside of the AAA is a “shadow AnthroSource” that fulﬁlls the ambitions of the original AnthroSource. In its visionary phase, AnthroSource was going to have a subject repository in which we could have put our ﬁeld notes, white papers, unpublished book manuscripts, etc. I saw this vision die during my ﬁrst year as an editor.
(…)
However, we do not actually need AnthroSource anymore because we have already built it up out of various bits and pieces outside the AAA framework. We have a subject repository (Mana’o), we have a constellation of weblogs and key metablogs (such as antropologi.info), we have people like Mike Wesch and Chris showing us how to mix and match readily/freely available tools to build powerful research collaboratories (like Digital Ethnography and Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory / ARC
(…)
We have organizations like the EVIADA project (Ethnomusicological Video for Instruction and Analysis Digital Archive; ) and individual researchers like Kim building powerful, innovative database tools for use in our research and our collaborations with students and communities, there are people (like Rob Leopold at the National Anthropology Archives) in many archives and museums building great projects to make the archival database more accessible, we have folks like the team organized by the American Folklife Center and the American Folklore Society building metadata tools like the new ethnographic thesaurus, and as Chris noted recently in a SavageMinds blog post, we have more and more OA journals spanning the topical and international diversity of world anthropology.

Will all this stuff somehow function better if it is centralized and put under the control of the home ofﬁce?

Chris Kelty has recently published a book that is also available online. He compares the internet with a bookstore:

The Open Access argument is simply that making the book available on line was in my interest, because it will mean that it will be easy to ﬁnd, easy to cite, and easy to use in classes.

But it might also be in Duke’s interest; I made the argument that people are more likely to buy the paper book if they can get a look at the book in its entirety digitally (Harper Collins buys this argument, and has just begun a similar experiment)

I told Duke to think of the website as a bookstore with a huge number of potential visitors, and the on-line version as the browseable version of the book. If a million people download my book, but only 1 percent of them then go on to buy a copy, Duke will still be selling far more copies then they ever dreamed. And what if I sell 5 percent? I’ll be a superstar!

>> read the whole article

>> blog of this publication

UPDATE See also Owen Wiltshire’s comments

SEE ALSO:

AAA: “Open access no realistic option”

American Anthropological Association opposes Open Access to Journal Articles

Open Access: “The American Anthropological Association reminds me of the recording industry”

For Open Access: “The pay-for-content model has never been successful”

Danah Boyd on Open Access: “Boycott locked-down journals”

Is it time to boycott SAGE?

The unacknowledged convergence of open source, open access, and open science

Why were they doing this work just to give it away for free? Thesis on Ubuntu Linux hackers

Plans to study anthropological online communities and Open Access movement

2006 – The Year of Open Access Anthropology?

(via media anthropology) What is the purpose of organisations like the American Anthropological Association? What is the point of publishing articles? The free software movement forces anthropologists to rethink these questions, Christopher Kelty says in a conversation about…

Study: Drug smuggling as vehicle for female empowerment?

Published on July 15, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, gender, journal articles / papers, Latin- and Central America

An increasing number of women are becoming involved in Mexico’s drug trade. Anthropologist Howard Campbell has conducted fieldwork among female smugglers on the U.S.-Mexico border, The Dallas Morning News reports.

Dallas Morning News refers to Campbells paper that was published in the Anthropological Quarterly Winter 2008 issue.

The anthropologist has resided and worked in the border region for 15 years. He writes that women’s involvement in drug trafficking has expanded dramatically. Yet there are few studies of female drug smugglers, the causes of female involvement in smuggling, and the impact of smuggling on women’s lives specifically:

Ethnographic research on drug issues tends to focus on drug use and abuse; anthropological studies of trafficking organizations, because of the dangers such work entails, are limited. The major studies, with some exceptions (Anderson 2005) have little information on women, treat them as secondary and subsidiary to men, or else focus on women’s mostly subordinate, victimized role in street-level crack-dealing in American cities

He portraits a variety of drug smugglers, among others Zulema who belongs to the “high-level female drug smugglers” who enjoy “a pleasurable lifestyle and relative autonomy from men.

He argues that women, like men, may obtain excitement, adventure and thrills from engaging in illegal activities such as drug smuggling. We should not assume, that women’ s sole motivation for engaging in crime is narrowly economic or subsistence oriented:

Zulema revels in the money, power and independence she reaped from cocaine and heroin smuggling . Although she was raised in an upper-middle-class Catholic household in a small north central Mexican town, as a teenager Zulema left the comforts of her bourgeois home and nun’ s school to live with a “wild aunt” in a poor barrio of Ciudad Juárez on the U.S.-Mexico border.

This aunt was – in Zulema’s words “a whore, a drunk, a crazy woman, and considered the black sheep of the family”.

The anthropologist writes:

Contrary to standard interpretations of women’ s motivation for entry into drug smuggling, Zulema was initially attracted to crime, including drug-selling, by the opportunity it presented for adventure and revolt against bourgeois lifestyles.

Consciously rebellious, Zulema discarded the discreet attire of her social class and donned a masculine chola outfit. (…) Zulema’s macho style and determination gained her acceptance in the then male-dominated drug world and allowed her to move upward.
(…)
Drug trafficking profits allowed her to achieve a freedom from male control that was available to few other women of her background. After “ El Mexicano’ s” death Zulema became the leader of her own heroin and cocaine smuggling ring in maj or Texas cities in the 1990s.
(…)
Zulema’ s life and that of other female drug lords, though not typical of average smugglers, sharply contradict cultural stereotypes about Mexican female passivity or that the only role for women in the drug life is that of “trophy wife.
(…)
Although Zulema’s case may seem extreme, there are other similar cases of powerful female drug lords, though they seldom appear in social science literature on drugs which emphasize women’s victimization.

All in all, he divides his informants in four different categories of smugglers. He summarizes:

High-level female drug smugglers may be attracted to the power and mystique of drug trafficking and may achieve a relative independence from male dominance.

Middle-level women in smuggling organizations obtain less freedom vis-à-vis men but may manipulate gender stereotypes to their advantage in the smuggling world.

Low-level mules also perform (or subvert) traditional gender roles as a smuggling strategy, but receive less economic benefit and less power, though in some cases some independence from male domestic control.

A fourth cate gory of women do not smuggle drugs but are negatively impacted by the male smugglers with whom they are associated.

I argue that drug smuggling frequently leads to female victimization, especial y at the lowest and middle levels of drug trafficking organizations. However, it is also, in the case of high-level and some low-level and middle-level smugglers, a vehicle for female empowerment

His paper is only available to subscribers.

>> Mexico’s drug war shows a virulent feminine side (Dallas Morning News

Why borders don’t help – An engaged anthropology of the US-Mexican border

An increasing number of women are becoming involved in Mexico's drug trade. Anthropologist Howard Campbell has conducted fieldwork among female smugglers on the U.S.-Mexico border, The Dallas Morning News reports.

Dallas Morning News refers to Campbells paper that was…

Thesis: How Indian women fight the stigma of divorce

Published on June 29, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Asia, gender, journal articles / papers, persons and theories

Three weeks ago, anthropologist Siru Aura defended her doctoral dissertation Women and Marital Breakdown in South India: Reconstructing Homes, Bonds and Persons at the University of Helsinki. She has studied divorced, separated and deserted women from different socio-religious backgrounds in the city of Bangalore in South India.

In her conclusion she makes several interesting points. We all know that we should avoid essentializing. Particularly since the 1990’s, Siru Aura writes, there has been a tendency to emphasise the differences among the various groups of Indian women, based their cultural, social, religious or regional backgrounds. One should avoid presenting a “monolithic” picture of “an Indian woman” – a representation that does not exist in real life.

But this focus on diversity can make us blind to seeing what these divorced and separated women have in common. In her thesis, she challenges the popular notion that religion is a main determinator of a person’s social position in India. It’s rather being a wife and being in an unequal power relationship with the husband.

The Indian proverb “there are only two castes: men and women” highlights that the inequality between men and women is so enormous that it overpowers differences between the women, Siru Aura writes:

The significance of wifehood in the South Indian environment leads to my suggestion that there is such a thing as a South Indian marital breakdown. Although the women of different religious communities (Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Parsi) each have their own religious personal laws concerning marriage and divorce, they share similarities in their ways of constructing wifehood. Therefore the practical reasons and consequences of marital problems are often similar in different religious groups.
(…)
The women, from the richest to the most impoverished; from the most highly-educated and sophisticated to the most illiterate women; from their various religious backgrounds: all tolerated severe harassment throughout their marriages and their threshold of leaving the marriage was very high.

But as her study shows, more and more women question male domination. They use the cultural and social structures of their society creatively in order to improve their situation – for example by adopting the prestigious family roles of sons or fathers and by the means of legal procedures and public demonstrations and by the other activities of women’s organisations.

The anthropologist thinks that the womens’ activities “could gradually lead to a greater acceptance of divorce as an unfortunate but not unavoidable state of affairs and the abolishment of the stigma attached to divorced or separated women”:

I suggest that the transformation of social and kin relations will continue because marital breakdown may become a more common occurrence in Bangalore and even broaden further in South India and consequently the number of love marriages as well as the number of single women will also increase. Despite the importance of wifehood in South India, the conditions of wifehood are changing.

Marital breakdown is an anomaly in South India. In Siru Aura’s view, the focus on the margins of the kinship relations revitalises kinship studies:

It emphasises the importance of looking between the structures and highlights the worth of looking beyond the kinship rules and into the “exceptions” to the rules, which are, as I suggest, as frequent as the rules themselves.

As I have shown, although the exceptions are hard to pin down, they are of great consequence: ignoring them may in fact distort kinship theory. Moreover, this study demonstrates that examining something truly significant in Indian society such as personhood, gender or law, or the interplay between an agent and the structure, leads us to study kinship. This keeps the study of kinship at the heart of anthropology in India and makes the renewal of it an anthropological mission.

>> download the thesis

Unmarried Women in Arab Countries: Status No Longer Dependent upon the Husband

China: Where women rule the world and don’t marry

On African Island: Only women are allowed to propose marriage

Is it time to boycott SAGE?

Published on June 23, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, journal articles / papers, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, University / Academia

It sounds like a satire on capitalism but reality is often even worse. If you have written an article for SAGE you cannot send your own article to colleagues, you cannot copy nor save it. You can read it on one computer only according to anthropologist and Culture Matters blogger Lisa Wynn.

Wynn had published an article in the Journal of Social Archaeology. Instead of getting a PDF of the published article, which is what she gets from all the other journals, she received this e-mail:

Dear Contributor, Thank you for submitting your article titled “Shape Shifting Lizard People, Israelite Slaves, and Other Theories of Pyramid Building: Notes on Labor, Nationalism, and Archaeology in Egypt” to Journal of Social Archaeology, which was recently published in volume 8 issue 2 of the journal.

We invite you to visit http://articleworks.cadmus.com/doc/872534 to download an electronic version of your article (we are no longer sending out paper offprints/tearsheets). You can download this file as an .exe file, which will allow you to view and print the PDF an unlimited number of times on your own computer, and you can forward it as a link up to 25 times to your co-authors and other colleagues. Please note that it is a protected file and you will not be able to forward the file itself or upload it to a website.If you have difficulty please check our FAQs section http://articleworks.cadmus.com/open/sagehelp.html

“I will NEVER again consider publishing with them as long as Sage is running things this way”, she comments.

I have followed the download-link and made these two screenshots.

PS: Strangely enough, as a SAGE-subscriber via my university account, I could download a conventional pdf-file of her article.

Christopher Kelty wrote about similar difficulties to get a free copy of his own article, published in the journal Cultural Anthropology in his Savage Minds-post Recursive public irony.

UPDATE

The above procedure applies only if the author is no subscriber of the journal, as Lisa Wynn writes in reply to my question:

Yes, according to what Sage sent me, if your university subscribes, you can download a conventional PDF (and then spread it around as much as you like). But if you don’t belong to a subscribing university, then you can only get this executable file (and only 25 people, too). The irony is that even if an AUTHOR doesn’t have a subscription, then the author doesn’t get the normal PDF, just the executable protected PDF. Maddening!

“A boycott would be swell (but don’t see that happening). digital disobedience is even better”, somebody commented on the blog laguayabita.blogspot.com

Greg Downey has similar thoughts and comments on Culture Matters:

Yeah, I got one of these, too, recently from another journal, but I cheated on the whole thing: I printed off a copy and then scanned it as a .pdf on our departmental copier. It’s a bit bigger than a normal .pdf, so it’s harder to circulate, but it does give me a way to send the article to overseas colleagues.

Open Access: “The American Anthropological Association reminds me of the recording industry”

For Open Access: “The pay-for-content model has never been successful”

Why Open Access?

New open access journal: (con)textos. revista d’antropologia i investigació social

Published on June 21, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, journal articles / papers, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing

PhD students at the Social and Cultural Anthropology Department of Barcelona University have started a new journal called (con)textos. Their aim is to make known the research that is carried out during the doctoral period and to set up a space for debate and training.

The texts in the first issue are in Spanish only, but in future issues, texts in English will appear as well (“Texts may be written in Catalan, Spanish, English, French, Italian and Portuguese”). All texts ate published with a Creative Commons licence. It is even possible to comment articles.

>> visit (con)textos