books | antropologi.info

A link between food resources and social hierarchies?

Published on July 13, 2006 by lorenz Posted in aboriginees, anthropology in the news, books, culture traditions, ecology nature, Pacific Oceania, persons and theories

In a portrait on the website of The National University of Australia, anthropologist Ian Keen, tells about his research among Aboriginees in Australia. Among other things, he wanted to find out why pre-colonial Aboriginal societies tended to be more egalitarian than some of their counterparts elsewhere in the world:

In a paper published in the journal Current Anthropology, Keen argues that for any society to develop lasting social hierarchies, it must have access to plentiful, localised resources that could be defended. In this event, some people can assume authority over others. On the northwest coast of North America, for example, recent hunter-gatherers enjoyed a stable climate and concentrated, defendable resources, especially plentiful salmon. As a consequence, these societies developed such enduring inequalities as inherited chiefly office and marked social classes, while some even kept slaves.

In contrast, Aboriginal societies did not develop such enduring inequalities. (…) Keen argues this relative egalitarianism was the result of constraints arising from variable food resources and an unstable climate, meaning there was limited scope for people to assume dominion over others by asserting exclusive access to territory and resources.

Keen explains:

“It’s not exactly an environmental determinist argument, but it is suggesting that those conditions imposed restraints. I make the assumption that wherever they can, some humans will take the opportunities given to them to establish some kind of dominion over others. So my paper argues that even if people knew how to dominate one another, and wanted to do so, the opportunities were not there.

>> read the whole article

Brian Hayden, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, is not convinced and criiticizes that Keen does not put enough weight on the ecological and economic aspects of complexity that develop among some hunter-gatherers in Australia.

Keen is the author of the book Aboriginal Economy and Society. The website of the book is quite informative. If you click on Supplementary Materials you’ll find several cases studies and several pages about aboriginal technologies. In the paper Variation in Indigenous Economy and Society at the Threshold of Colonisation, Keen tells about more about his book:

Just how similar and how distinct were Aboriginal societies in different parts of the continent at the time of British colonisation of Australia? The book I am currently writing attempts to answer this and related questions by comparing the economy and society of seven very varied regions of the continent as they were at the threshold of colonisation.

(…)

Such a comparative study is long overdue. There have been no recent systematic comparisons of Aboriginal ways of life in different parts of Australia, comparable to, for example, Marshall Sahlins on Polynesia or Rubel and Rosman on New Guinea.

>> download the paper (pdf)

Book review: An Anthropological Challenge to Assumptions about War and Violence

Published on July 6, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, Us and Them

In Evolutionary Psychology, anthropologist Craig T. Palmer reviews the book The Human Potential for Peace: An Anthropological Challenge to Assumptions about War and Violence. Douglas P. Fry shows in this book how anthropology “can provide unique insights into the nature of war and the potential for peace”. The description of the book sounds promising:

Challenging the traditional view that humans are by nature primarily violent and warlike, Professor Fry argues that along with the capacity for aggression humans also possess a strong ability to prevent, limit, and resolve conflicts without violence. (…) The Human Potential for Peace includes ethnographic examples from around the globe, findings from Fry’s research among the Zapotec of Mexico, and results of cross-cultural studies on warfare. In showing that conflict resolution exists across cultures and by documenting the existence of numerous peaceful societies, it demonstrates that dealing with conflict without violence is not merely a utopian dream.

But the reviewer isn’t convinced. Fry’s book is according to him too polemical, his presentation too biased, most of his claims are untestable:

The various problems with the book all stem from Fry’s decision to structure it as a contest between two supposedly opposite views of human nature, instead of a straight-forward presentation of his massive array of anthropological data on both violence and peace. (…) A straightforward presentation of the data on human violence and peace would have been much more useful to researchers actually trying to reduce war and violence by identifying its causes. However, such a presentation would have made for a much less dramatic book. This is because it would have revealed little if any difference between Fry’s view of human behavior and those he portrays as his opponents.

>> read the whole review

“Standard model of the acculturation process is inadequate for understanding immigrant identity”

Published on June 11, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, migration, Us and Them

The magazine India New England writes about a psychologist who has been doing ethnographic fieldwork for two years! :

Sunil Bhatia, associate professor of human development at Connecticut College, uses the tools of ethnography to explore the unspoken, invisible experiences beneath the successful exterior of middle-class Indian immigrants, sometimes referred to as the “model minority.” He conducted two years of research as a participant-observer at community and family events among members of the Indian Diaspora in southern Connecticut.

His research shows that the standard model of the acculturation process is inadequate for understanding changes in immigrant identity:

In the standard model that Bhatia has questioned, an immigrant successfully deals with the new culture of his adopted country by integrating it with the old culture of his native land, shedding values and practices that no longer work, or providing space, often in the home, for the old values to live alongside the new. (…) He notes that the standard model ignores the particular historical and economic circumstances that lead people to move to a new culture. It also treats both old and new cultures as fixed entities practically synonymous with nation states, and its heavy emphasis on assimilation misses intriguing personal struggles where individuals adopt or reject values.

(…)

Bhatia says focusing on the immigrant’s own role in constructing both old and new identities, “changes the notion of what it means to assimilate or to be multicultural, shifting the question of what ‘otherness’ means.”

Bhatia sees the modern Indian immigrant constructing a home culture or “Indian identity” in the new country that is markedly different from life in the old. The family that shunned television in India as a waste of time may now have any of seven Indian satellite or cable channels in their American home to be sure their children are exposed to the language, news, and entertainment from “home.” Mothers often have dual roles: college-educated wage earners during the day, and cultural care-takers at night, cooking Indian meals, supervising their children’s Hindi language education, and dutifully securing a distinctly Indian home life — though often without the presence and counsel of their own mothers or the extended family.

These identity-building projects undertaken by Indians — what Bhatia calls “creating a space for themselves” in newspapers, celebrations, temples — require time, energy, individual choice, and struggle.

>> read the whole article in India New England

The magazine India New England writes about a psychologist who has been doing ethnographic fieldwork for two years! :

Sunil Bhatia, associate professor of human development at Connecticut College, uses the tools of ethnography to explore the unspoken, invisible experiences…

New Ethnography: The Deaf People – A Forgotten Cultural Minority

Published on April 2, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, culture traditions, globalisation, indigenous people / minorities, language, technology, Us and Them

It is insufficient to understand deaf people as disabled. Most deaf people rather see themselves as members of a cultural and linguistic minority. They are proud of their culture. And they face identity obstacles similar to those faced by many other minority members. Therefore is it important to change the attitudes from the medical definitions and into an understanding of the deaf as a linguistic cultural group. These are some of the main findings in a new book by Norwegian anthropologist Jan-Kåre Breivik called Deaf Identities in the Making. Local Lives, Transnational Connections.

As deaf-activist Asbjørn puts it:

“Why fix healthy deaf children through CI surgery? We do not need that. What we need are more hearing people that want to play on our team – as we are – as Deaf people. we need more people willing to use the key to our culture – the sign language.”

See among others this quote by one of Breiviks informants – it might have been told by Native Indians, black people, Saami people etc:

“I did not accept myself as deaf. My family and the local environment did not give me the means to appreciate that side of my self. I was the only local deaf person and what I head about deaf persons was almost exclusively negative. The “deaf and dumb” stereotype was around me and became part of my own experience. I was constantly trying to be part of my hearing environment, but of course I couldn’t pass as a hearing person. I was constantly frustrated, never getting access to what the others were speaking about.
(…)
At the age of eighteen, (…) I stated to visit the deaf club. Here I also found a new friend. I began to accept my deafness, and gradually I aquired a sense of pride for being deaf.
(…)
I felt as if I had been given a new life, when I began accepting myself as deaf. I got more out of life and the companionship with other deaf persons. We shared the same identity, the same culture, that we were facing the same problems of communication and language in society.

Deaf people’s identity politics also resemble those of other minority groups. To create a collective identity, borders have to be drawn. But where? This is of course an widely debated issue. There is some kind of hierarchy: Some people are regarded as “more deaf” than others according to Breivik:

Within the Deaf signing community, deafened people are often viewed as suspect figures. This is because they are not accepted as being really deaf, and they are often accused of being too willing to pass as hearing people.

An informant says:

“In the United States, there are extremely deaf conscious, and where you must be second- or third-generation deaf to be counted as a real deaf person.”

Many informants fear for sharper boundaries between the deaf and the hearing world. One of them says:

“Deaf Power can be compared to being proud to be from Norway, and be extremely conscious of that. Such self-consciousness can turn into nationalism. This scares me, and I experience this constantly. At each youth camp, there are always some extreme types. Their messages do not differ from other extreme nationalists. It is always us vs. them.”

Many deaf people live transnational lives: They travel a lot in order to meet other deaf people. In contrast to many hearing people, deaf people don’t link equality and sameness, Breivik found out:

One of the key lessons I have learned, as a hearing person who has been immersed in deaf life through my anthropological research, is that the phrase “being at home among strangers” (Schein 1989) goes to the heart of the identity question. This is about deaf people’s frequent departure from biological roots and the hearing, settled world, and their search for “equals” in distant places.

Their language – the sign language is of great help. It is much more suitable for transnational lives than spoken languages. It’s quite easy to learn foreign sign languages. Albertine from Norway tells about her time in the USA:

“I was present one month before school started up, and by that time I was able to make myself understood and I could capture most of what they told me. After three months, I was almost fluent in American Sign Language.”

Japanese, she tells, is totally incomprehensible. Nevertheless she’s convinced that she would have managed Japanese “after a few weeks.”

Deaf people embrace the new communication technologies like internet and email. For many of them, the Net is a window toward the world, several informants met their husbands/wives there. On the internet, they are able to communicate with strangers freely without any consideration of hearing status.

I’m halfway-through the book that actually qualifies to become one of my favorite anthropology books. It describes a – for hearing people – totally unknown world and turns some of our assumptions upside down. The book is also an example for good anthropological writing!

>> more information on the book by the publisher

>> read the first chapter of the book

‘I hoped our baby would be deaf’ Most parents would be distressed to learn that their child had been born unable to hear. But for Paula Garfield and Tomato Lichy, it means daughter Molly can share their special culture (The Guardian, 21.3.06)

UPDATE:

Anthropologist Karen Nakamura is going to publish a new book called Deaf in Japan. It will be out in August 2006.

Grace Keyes: “Hearing has been neglected in studies of enculturation and personality development”

The Five Major Challenges for Anthropology

Published on March 28, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, books, Europe, indigenous people / minorities, journal articles / papers, migration, persons and theories, Us and Them

17.12.2017: This is a very popular post. Therefore I have updated all links.

In her new book Plausible Prejudice: Everyday Experiences and Social Images of Nation, Culture and Race, Norwegian social anthropologist Marianne Gullestad identifies five major challenges for the discipline of anthropology. To understand the problems of the world today, we need to “decolonize anthropological knowledge”, she writes.

Anthropological knowledge is needed more than ever as steoreotypes and lack of knowledge flourish about people from other countries. But on the other hand, Gullestad stresses, anthropology is still influenced by its colonial past.

Here are the five major challenges for the discipline of anthropology according to Marianne Gullestad (page 346-347):

1st CHALLENGE: To regard understanding and confronting racism as worthwhile academic and political concerns, and not as a conflict that was resolved long ago.

2nd CHALLENGE: To look historically and ethnographically at race thinking in relation to colonialism and imperialism, political decolonization, economic globalization, the end of the Cold War, and the new role of the United States as successor to the European empires that were defeated in the 20th century.
Traditional nationally oriented historiography and locally oriented anthropology overlook many processes across continents which represent a store of unexpected connections and complex interpretative resources that will no doubt contribute substantially to the understanding of how the imperial and colonial past continues to shape present-day social categories, boundaries and practices.
This framing or research will often involve carrying out multi-sited and transcontinental fieldwork.

3rd CHALLENGE: To examine not only the ideas and practices of self-professed racists (…), but also the conventional wisdom sourrounding racial thinking and its various forms of institutionalization. Racial categories and negative stereotypes are often both intensely familiar and also vigorously denied and forgotten as expressions of racism. They exist as pernicious symbolic resources which in given situations might potentially be employed more or less by anyone, regardless of gender, age, class, and skin color. (…)

4th CHALLENGE: To take seriously the complexity and variability of race thinking, and how it feeds into and is nourished by everyday life. (…) In this respect, my research has shown that ancestry and descent are particularly central. In fact, I argue that the racial coding of the new focus on ‘culture’ is based on ideas about descent as a form of imagined kinship.

5th CHALLENGE: To do more ‘anthropology of anthropology’ by locating themes, peoples and perspectives that have largely been ignored as anthropologically uninteresting, such as the social life-worlds of majority populations in Europe and the United States, the experiences of formerly colonized peoples with Europeans (as colonizers, administrators, settlers, missionaries, developmental experts, tourists etc.), and the ideas and strategies of political and economic elites, regardless of their location in the world and their physical features.

UPDATE:

A very good comment by Bryan McKay (link updated). He writes, these five challenges should not be specific for anthropology:

“Substitute sexism, heterosexism, classism, et cetera for racism (and sex, sexuality/gender, class, et cetera for race) in the above challenges and you have a decent manifesto for any realm of critical cultural studies.”

Kambiz Kamrani at anthropology.net writes that he agrees with Gullestad, but:

Anthropology will never succeed until it clearly defines culture. That’s right, it hasn’t. Anthropology has completely failed the public in not being able to define culture.

>> read the whole post on anthropology.net (link updated, original post no longer available)

Erkan Saka disagrees:

This emphasis on definition is against all I know about social sciences. Not that I am for an all relativistic social science with no substance. But what I know is that an act of defining is part of a power struggle.

>> read his whole post (link updated)

Her book is a kind of “best-of”: It consists of a “remix” of ten previously published papers and three new texts, including the post-script that I’ve quoted from.

Some of these papers are available to download in full-text:

Marianne Gullestad: Blind Slaves of our Prejudices: Debating ‘Culture’ and ‘Race’ in Norway

Marianne Gullestad: Normalising racial boundaries. The Norwegian dispute about the term ‘neger’

Marianne Gullestad: Mohammed Atta and I. Identification, discrimination and the formation of sleepers

Marianne Gullestad: Invisible Fences: Egalitarianism, nationalism and racism

Links updated 2017-12-17

(I might come back with more posts on this book. I’ve just returned from the book launch)

17.12.2017: This is a very popular post. Therefore I have updated all links.