journal articles / papers | antropologi.info

Free access to the 25 most popular Anthrosource articles!

Published on October 5, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, journal articles / papers, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, University / Academia

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) and their publisher Wiley-Blackwell will be offering two months of free access to 10+ years of Anthrosource content during November and December 2009.
As a preview they invite us to view the Top 25 Anthrosource Articles of 2009 free of charge according to the AAA blog.

“It is our hope that this limited-time offer will encourage students and researchers from across the disciplines to discover anthropology’s rich legacy of scholarship as the study of humankind”, the AAA writes.

The list of the Top 25 articles is interesting in itself. Here we find much stuff about islam, terrorism, genitical cutting, neoliberalism and human rights. A quite political list, in other words.

The number one hit is Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others by Lila Abu-Lughod. The article was written in 2002 and “explores the ethics of the current ‘War on Terrorism’, asking whether anthropology, the discipline devoted to understanding and dealing with cultural difference, can provide us with critical purchase on the justifications made for American intervention in Afghanistan in terms of liberating, or saving, Afghan women”.

Number 7 hit is by the way Working for the Federal Government: Anthropology Careers by Shirley J. Fiske that also addresses the topic military anthropology.

A very exciting list, I’d love to start reading right away. A great idea to showcase what’s happening within anthropology. Let’s hope this will be a permanent offer!

SEE ALSO:

AAA: “Open access no realistic option”

Open Access: New alliances threaten the American Anthropological Association

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

Is it time to boycott SAGE?

antropologi.info survey: Six anthropologists on Anthropology and Internet

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

Overview over Open Access Journals

How can anthropology help us understand Swat and Taliban?

Published on October 2, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Asia, journal articles / papers, politics

The Swat Pathan have been the subject of classic ethnographies in anthropology for many years. Now they are at the centre of a bigger battle for control between Taliban, Pakistan, the U.S. etc. – a <a href="conflict that forced more than one million people to flee their homes.

What, if anything, can anthropologists contribute to understand and ameliorate the conflicts that rage in this region that in December 2008 was captured by the Taliban? In an interview with Gustaaf Houtman in the new issue of Anthropology Today, anthropologist Akbar Ahmed looks at the latest developments among the Swat Pathan.

He says, anthropologists can help in two ways – one of them is visiting Swat:

Anthropology can help on two levels. Anthropologists can use the internet, broadcast media and the press – and conferences – to argue for a strong, clean judicial and administrative structure in Swat. They can use their understanding of Swat social structure and history to explain why it collapsed and what can be done to replace it. They must not underestimate the power of outside comment on the bureaucrats and politicians of Islamabad. To their own home audiences, they can explain the significance of Swat in the larger context of Af-Pak (Afghanistan-Pakistan).

On another level, anthropologists can help by visiting Swat, in the safe areas of course, and arranging for colleagues and students to help in the reconstruction of the educational system. Girls’ schools in particular need to be rebuilt and then organized. A visit to Swat will thus not only provide moral satisfaction but also the promise of advancing anthropological knowledge of a fascinating area.

“Swat was an anthropologist’s paradise waiting to be discovered when Fredrik Barth first went there to conduct fieldwork in the 1950s”, he says. “It was a remote, tiny and scenic state up in the foothills of the Himalayas in north Pakistan”:

Here, the legendary Wali of Swat ruled over fiercely independent tribesmen who lived according to custom and tradition. Following his fieldwork, Barth wrote Political leadership among Swat Pathans (summary), published in 1959. In it he analysed the political alliances and networks around ‘the Pakhtun chief, with his following, and the Saint with his following’ (ibid.: 4). The book became an instant classic in the discipline and established Barth as a towering figure in it.

When Akbar Ahmed registered for a PhD in anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1973 he read Barth’s work on Swat “with admiration”. But Barths “neat theoretical constructions” did not match the Swat society that he knew through his wife Zeenat, who was from Swat, so he went on to research and write Millennium and charisma among Pathans: A critical essay in social anthropology that was published in 1976.

Since then many articles and several books have been written about Swat. One of the two he mentions is written by a native female anthropologist of Swat Amineh Ahmed (his daughter actually). Her book “Sorrow and Joy among Muslim Women The Pukhtun’s of Northern Pakistan” gives us, he says, “fascinating insights normally denied to men”.

How has Swat changed from the time of Barth, Gustaaf Houtman asks. Akbar Ahmed answers:

Barth wrote over half a century ago. Swat then had a clear-cut political structure in place: the central authority of the Wali in alliance with the powerful Khans. Religious clerics worked for the Wali in his mosques or were hired locally by the Khans. There was little challenge to the Wali’s rule. He could impose his will on the state. He introduced compulsory education for both boys and girls. He invited Catholic nuns to open a girls’ school and gave them protection. He encouraged archaeologists to come and dig for ancient Greek and Buddhist statues and stupas. The magnificent statue of Buddha at the entrance of Swat came to symbolize the spirit of the state and its ruler.

I was fortunate in having visited Swat during the rule of the Wali, after he was removed and after his death. Over the last few decades I have seen a steady decline. The Wali’s rule was replaced by officials of the government of Pakistan. Pakistani bureaucracy became increasingly known for its incompetence and corruption. A disputed case between two parties which would have normally taken a couple of hours in the Wali’s courts would now drag on for years. The Khans too began to leave Swat for the bigger cities of Pakistan. Absentee landlords soon found their authority challenged. Their relationship with their tenants began to break down.

Why could this happen. Into the vacuum created by the disappearance of the Wali and the fading of the Khans stepped the religious clerics, he explains:

Mullah Fazlullah grew in importance over the years and gained notoriety in Pakistan through his FM radio station: to Swatis he came to be known as ‘Radio Mullah’. He thundered against the corruption and incompetence of the administration. He incited tenants against the Khans and their un-Islamic ways. He said he would bring the Sharia or Islamic law which would ensure justice and law and order for ordinary people. Swatis flocked to the Mullah’s standard. Women gave him their jewellery, with prayers that he succeed in his mission.

The Taliban now saw Swat as a safe haven and flocked to it. They came from the tribal areas in Pakistan and beyond. Soon Swatis were getting a taste of life under the Taliban. Over 200 girls’ schools were closed. The Wali’s special projects, the convent and statue of Buddha at the entrance to the state, became targets for Taliban wrath. The Taliban now felt confident enough to march into neighbouring Buner. They were within striking distance of Islamabad, the capital of a nuclear state.

The Pakistani military was alarmed, as was the US administration. The Pakistani army launched a military operation and Washington promised financial and military aid. As a result almost the entire population of Swat fled to neighbouring districts in the south. Swat was then sealed off from the outside world and an ominous silence descended upon it. Reports suggested that Swat society was being turned upside down.

Swat has seen the dramatic decline and collapse of all the pillars of authority over the last decades. Today’s Swat has neither the authority of the Wali nor that of the central government that replaced it, nor of the Khans. The Taliban, who dominated Swat for a few months, giving a taste of their brutal administration, have also been toppled. The only authority in Swat today is the army. There are already rumours of mass graves and extra-judicial killings in Swat. Some blame the Taliban, others the army. Neither is popular.

This is only an excerpt of the interview. ~~Unfortunately it is available online for subscribers only~~. Just found out (via media/anthropology) that it is a free article. Read Swat in the eye of the storm: Interview with Akbar Ahmed here (pdf).

Anthropology Today has by the way started up at forum for readers and authors at http://anthropologytoday.ning.com/ And the Swat Pathans have their own Facebook group – a global network “to unite against the stereotypical portrayal of Swatian and to let the world know the true beauty and harmony of the people and area”.

Akbar Ahmed is an active blogger. He runs his own blog called Latest News and Commentary by Akbar Ahmed and has also started a (group) blog about his recent project Journey Into America, a new book and film, an anthropological study of American identity as seen through the eyes of Americans – both Muslim and non- Muslim (is also reviewed in Anthropology Today).

In my archive, I found also an interview with anthropologist Saadia Toor about the situation in Swat.

Anthropological activism in Pakistan with lullabies

Akbar Ahmed’s anthropological excursion into Islam

The Anthropology of Suicide – World Suicide Prevention Day

Published on September 10, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, journal articles / papers, medical anthropology / ethnobothany, politics, Us and Them

(Links updated 9.9.2019) It was around four months ago, I received the message of my friend’s sudden death. “Nobody knows”, I was told, “why she stepped in front of a train”. Afterwards I often wondered if her life could have been saved if we as a society had known and talked more about so-called mental health issues.

For these topics are still taboo. I was shocked to hear the stories from friends and colleagues who I told about what had happened: Many of them suddenly started telling about people they knew who have tried to end his/her life or who have committed suicide. They even mentioned people I know. Worldwide, more people die by suicide than by criminal acts or war – around one million per year. And up to 20 million people try to take their life every year. Europe and Asia have the highest suicide rates.

But this topic is hardly discussed. Neither in media (it was banned in Norwegian media until one year ago) nor in social sciences. The World Suicide Prevention Day that is held today (10.9.) wants to “improve education about suicide, disseminate information, decrease stigmatization and, most importantly, raise awareness that suicide is preventable”.

What is going on in a person’s mind who has decided to step in front of a train? Many people – around one in ten – have contemplated suicide, but only a minority of them made an attempt. Why did they take this step? What has happened in their life? How could the worsening of their situation have been prevented? Are there warning signs? Would psychological treatment have helped? But after all those horrible stories about mental health clinics – can we trust such institutions? Might they even increase the risk of suicide? And is suicide always committed by people who are ill? Maybe their decision to end their life is rather rational and should be respected? Will it therefore be wrong – and selfish – to force people to continue living?

After lots of discussions with friends and googling the same terms again and again, I learned that there are no simple answers.

I also found out that literature about suicide is dominated by psychology and biomedical sciences. Committing suicide is presented as an individual issue. People who commit suicide seem to be people who for some reason no longer were able to cope with their life. There was something “wrong” with them. But maybe there is also something wrong with society or with specific developments? According to Eugenia Tsao, there many reasons why anthropologists should politicize mental illness.

Maria Cecília de Souza Minayo, Fátima Gonçalves Cavalcante and Edinilsa Ramos de Souza write in their paper Methodological proposal for studying suicide as a complex phenomenon in the journal Cadernos de Saúde Pública that “few studies have simultaneously examined the individual, social, anthropological, and epidemiological aspects of suicide”. The micro and macro dimensions “remain dissociated in polarities that prioritize either the individual or society.”

They present an interdisciplinary approach to suicide that also includes an ethnographic study in a mining town. They show how the increase in suicide rates can be explained by a mix of factors, like radical structural changes that preceded and followed privatization of the mining company and also personal life histories of the workers.

But there seems to be an growing awareness also among researchers in biomedical sciences that their approach is reductionistic.

In a book review in the journal Jama – Journal of the American Medical Association, Antolin C. Trinidad explains that “suicide is best approached by getting out of the confines of biomedical sciences and into the domains of anthropology, sociology, and disciplines in the humanities”:

It is not a surprise that physicians spend the lion’s share of whatever interest they have in suicide studying its prevention, treatment, and the sundry clinical bullets that are potentially deployable in the clinics, rather than its history or the vicissitudes of individual despair and anguished self-awareness of pain that breed self-destruction. This is exactly what John C. Weaver, author of A Sadly Troubled History: The Meanings of Suicide in the Modern Age, calls “meta-pain.”

And also Diego De Leo calls in his editorial Why are we not getting any closer to preventing suicide? in the British Journal of Psychiatry for “multi-disciplinary teams to set up more integrated approaches for large- scale, long-term and thoroughly evaluated projects”. But “multi-disciplinary approaches to the prevention and investigation of suicide are often flagged up but virtually never practised”.

Anthropologists have been almost completely silent concerning the problem of suicide, writes Stefan Ecks in the abstract of his paper “Suicide: reflexions on Medical Anthropology research of suffering”. For hardly any other topic presents such great methodical and ethical difficulties for Medical Anthropology research:

Many methods that normally are standard for Medical Anthropology studies have to be radically re-evaluated when researching suicide: What role, for instance, does “participant observation” play in the context of extreme “tabooisation” on the part of the relatives? When is it acceptable to talk with relatives, how much time must have gone by? Also the ethical aspects of such research are enormous: Trauma, shame and speechlessness turn direct interviews into an ethically questionable method. How can suffering caused by suicide be examined as phenomenon in social context?

But Falk Blask who has taught suicide in his anthropology classes in Berlin, soon found out that it is a topic that attracts students. He prepared the course for 15 students, but 90 showed up according to today’s Mitteldeutsche Zeitung (updated link). Blask isn’t interested in suicide for no reason: Three years ago, one of his best friends took his life.

In his paper Urug. An Anthropological Investigation on Suicide in Palawan, Philippines (published in the journal Southeastasian Studies in 2003), Charles J. H MacDonald gives an overview over anthropology and suicide.

Also MacDonald states that anthropologists have dealt with suicide and suicidal behavior “much less frequently than their colleagues in the other social sciences”. He didn’t travel to the Philippines to study suicide either. But ever since he set foot on that place, he heard constant references to self-inflicted death. Figures show that the suicide rates are probably the highest or second highest in the world:

Why? Why would suicide, in such staggering numbers, affect those people whose society and culture is in no basic way different from other Palawan people, their immediate and non-suicidal neighbors in the hills and mountains of Southern Palawan? Why would such happy-looking and comparatively well-off people, going about their lives in orderly fashion, fall victims to despair? So far I have found no clear answer. The phenomenon remains mysterious and a complete puzzle.

Suicides, I want to conclude, are not primarily a sign of “that there was something wrong with a person”, but also that something might be wrong with society as a whole. Suicide prevention does not only or necessarily mean preventing people from committing suicide but also working towards a society where there are no reasons to take one’s life.

Unfortunately, these larger societal factors are totally missing in the current campaign for the World Suicide Prevention Day. Suicide prevention is also a political question. But the International Association for Suicide Prevention focuses on individual or so-called cultural factors (“People who are alienated from their country and culture of origin are vulnerable to various stresses, mental health problems, loneliness and suicidal behaviour.”).

I would like to leave you with maybe the best article about suicide that i found in the section mental illness at neuranthropology . It is A Journey through Darkness by Daphne Merkin. It actually answers all my questions that I asked in the beginning. Merkin’s beautifully written text also shows that there are no final answers.

I found also this article with facts about suicide and depression and how to help very helpful

Shanghai: Study says 1 in 4 youths thinks about taking own life

Financial expert jumped in front of train after predicting recession

Vandana Shiva: The Suicide Economy Of Corporate Globalisation

UPDATE 9.9.2019: It seems a lot has happend since I wrote this post ten years ago. Just search anthropology AND suicide, f.ex. the section on suicide in the Anthropological Perspectives on Death blog or the post about Special Issue: Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, “Ethnographies of Suicide” at Somatosphere or Situating Suicide as an Anthropological Problem: Ethnographic Approaches to Understanding Self-Harm and Self-Inflicted Death by James Staples and Tom Widger

(Links updated 9.9.2019) It was around four months ago, I received the message of my friend's sudden death. "Nobody knows", I was told, "why she stepped in front of a train". Afterwards I often wondered if her life could…

Why anthropologists should politicize mental illnesses

Published on August 24, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, journal articles / papers, medical anthropology / ethnobothany, persons and theories

(Links updated 8.9.2019) How to deal with “mental illness”? Are people who are labelled ill actually ill? Is it ok that psychologists call “adolescent rebellion” for “Oppositional Defiant Disorder”? What is anthropologists’ role here? Eugenia Tsao discusses these questions in an article in Counterpunch and in a paper in the open access anthropology journal Alterities.

The extent to which our lives and livelihoods have been “colonized by the reductive logic of pharmaceutical intervention” is breathtaking, she writes. Drugs are touted with increasing regularity as a treatment of choice for entirely natural responses to conditions of unnatural stress – although medical textbooks and even drug advertisements have admitted uncertainties in psychiatric research (“While the cause [of depression] is unknown, Zoloft can help”):

How have we been persuaded to equate such things as recalcitrant despair (“Dysthymic Disorder,” DSM-IV-TR 300.4), adolescent rebellion (“Oppositional Defiant Disorder,” DSM-IV-TR 313.81) and social apathy (“Schizoid Personality Disorder,” DSM-IV-TR 301.20) with aberrant brain chemistry and innate genetic susceptibilities rather than with the societal circumstances in which they arise? What does it mean when increasing numbers of people feel as though they have no choice but to self-medicate with dubious chemical substances in order to stay in school, stay motivated, stay employed, and stay financially solvent?
(…)
As Laurence Kirmayer of McGill University has suggested, the millennial rise of a “cosmetic” psychopharmaceutical industry, wherein drugs are “applied like make-up to make us look and feel good, while our existential predicaments go unanswered,” raises disturbing questions about the consequences of our willingness to use chemicals to treat forms of distress that would seem to signal not biological but social maladies.

When psychiatrists lament that over half of depressed people are “treatment-resistant,” Tsao stresses, they do not consider that it is a strenuous aversion to being told that one’s existential grievances are irrational, a mere result of a pathological neurochemical imbalance, that discourages many people from seeking medical help.

Anthropologists have an important role to play here, Tsao explains:

(A)nthropologists who seek to honor their informants’ narratives and confute clinical meta-narratives may find it useful to illuminate the perils of overliteralization: to explain why it is that those who are sick and suffering will so often thumb their noses at those who presume to offer help; to highlight the tragicomedy in the seemingly bottomless capacity of highly educated MDs and PhDs to overlook simple things like the anaesthetizing comforts to be found in a bottle or at the edge of a razor blade, or why a person might choose to act out of anguish rather than economic rationalism.
(…)
I ultimately argue that an efficacious anthropology of psychiatry must adopt as its point of departure the candidly transformative objective of repoliticizing mental illnesses as historical rather than congenital events. Anthropologists must, in short, develop ethnographic, historiographic, and rhetorical strategies for destabilizing the biological with the biographic.
(…)
(A)nthropologists should pay careful attention to regional histories, local processes of identity formation, and other kinds of social transactions paradigmatically excluded from biomedical narratives in order to distinguish necessary etiological agents from sufficient ones. While certain congenital factors may precondition an individual’s susceptibility to, for example, schizophrenia, the cultural factors that activate the disorder will in most cases determine whether or not an individual ultimately develops the condition – as corroborated by numerous studies on identical twins (Levy 1992:215-216).

Tsao presents theories by Robert Levy, Hans A. Baer, Merrill Singer, Ida Susser, and Nick Crossley. From them, she extracts “four fundamental methodological criteria that a robust anthropology of psychiatry must be equipped to meet”:

• An adequate means of distinguishing proximate and ultimate causes of specific mental illnesses.
• An explicit aim of recontextualizing, repoliticizing, and rehistoricizing mental health issues through elucidations of pathogenic conditions.
• Methods for critiquing the specific ways in which hegemonic texts (e.g. the DSM, clinical scripts, standardized questionnaires) systematically delegitimize and obscure social etiologies.
• Methods for reinserting alternative etiological narratives into mainstream medical conversations and, ultimately, into lay discourse.

Anthropologists challenge is according Tsao twofold: (1) to sharpen our interdisciplinary literacy with biomedicine and its cognates, but in a critical rather than deferential manner; and, in so doing (2) to elucidate the emergent, rather than immanent, character of illness experiences.

>> Eugenia Tsao: Inside the DSM. The Drug Barons’ Campaign to Make Us All Crazy (Counterpunch 20.8.09)

>> Eugenia Tsao: Primum Non Nocere. Evaluating and Amalgamating Competing Blueprints for a New Anthropology of Psychiatry (Alterities 1/2009)

For more articles by Eugenia Tsao, see her website

The blog Neuroanthropology has more information on anthropology and mental illness.

Shanghai: Study says 1 in 4 youths thinks about taking own life

Poverty and health policies: Listening to the poor in Bangladesh

“Ethnographic perspectives needed in discussion on public health care system”

(Links updated 8.9.2019) How to deal with "mental illness"? Are people who are labelled ill actually ill? Is it ok that psychologists call "adolescent rebellion" for “Oppositional Defiant Disorder”? What is anthropologists' role here? Eugenia Tsao discusses these questions in…

The Anthropology of Wrestling

Published on August 23, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, gender, journal articles / papers, Latin- and Central America, sports

How do you study wrestling as an anthropologist? By becoming a wrestler yourself! Heather Levi’s book The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity is featured in the new issue of American Ethnography on Lucha libre – Mexican wrestling.

A long excerpt from the second chapter can be read there – an example of good anthropological writing and according to Martin Høyem, editor of American Ethnography, the best ethnography of 2008.

I found some reviews of the book. According to the Los Angeles Times the book is actually “entertaining”. And it places wrestling in a political context:

“The success of figures like Superbarrio lay in the capacity of lucha libre to invoke a series of connections between sometimes contradictory domains: rural and urban, tradition and modernity, ritual and parody, machismo and feminism, politics and spectacle,” she writes. And in that tight sentence, Levi nails the appeal lucha libre has had among working-class Mexicans for decades. The various intersections she describes — class, sexuality, gender, xenophobia — are frequently lost on American audiences but make the sport so enjoyable.

“The World of Lucha Libre is one of the most interesting cultural studies of a key pastime in Mexico for many years” according to the Latin American Review of Books, while the Seattle newspaper The Stranger insists that “the first few chapters are pretty dry”. But this is to be expected: “Most anthropological writing simply isn’t for general audiences”.

But the academic nature of the text is something to be overcome:

Levi lays the entire world of lucha libre at the reader’s feet, from the adulation of the crowd to the metallic smell of blood in the ring, and the act of creativity, installing the personal narrative, is the reader’s job. This is excellent reportage on an endlessly fascinating subject, and Levi should be commended for standing back and letting the luchadores take center stage.

As in previous issues, American Ethnography is really interdisciplinary: It includes images from the Bolivian Lucha Libre scene, a review of a book by photographer Lourdes Grobet on the Mexican wrestling scene and a glimpse into American wrestling magazines from the 1970’s on “apartment wrestling”, where women – according to the magazine Sports Review Wrestling in 1978 “clash with the fury of primitive savages fighting for their gods!”

SEE ALSO:

New e-zine: American Ethnography

How do you study wrestling as an anthropologist? By becoming a wrestler yourself! Heather Levi's book The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity is featured in the new issue of American Ethnography on Lucha libre -…