cosmopolitanism | antropologi.info

Anthropologist explores heavy metal in Asia, South America and the Middle East

Published on August 3, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, cosmopolitanism, culture traditions, globalisation, music, Us and Them, Visual Anthropology

In 2005 his movie Metal – A Headbanger’s journey took the world with storm. Now anthropologist and metal musician Sam Dunn has released “Global Metal” – a film about the global expansion of heavy metal music.

Together with his co-director Scot McFayden, Dunn visited metal fans in Brazil, Japan, China, Indonesia, Israel and Iranian metal fans in Dubai.

The film seems to be especially relevant for theories on globalisation, cosmopolitanism, and social movements. As we read on the film’s homepage:

GLOBAL METAL reveals a worldwide community of metalheads who aren’t just absorbing metal from the West – they’re transforming it. Creating a new form of cultural expression in societies dominated by conflict, corruption and mass-consumerism.

Reviewer Liz Braun notes in the Winnipeg Sun:

In every country, metal has been bent and remade to reflect the culture. In India, metal fans talk about Bollywood music. In China, kids learn metal licks at a music school devoted to rock. Kaiser Kuo of the band Tang Dynasty talks about the underground metal scene in Beijing. In the Middle East, a Muslim says, “I got caught by the religious police for wearing a Slayer T-shirt and having long hair.”

(…)

Global Metal confirms that music is an international language. Particularly in countries where war and oppression are the norm, metal seems to represent a crucial outlet for emotional expression.

Unlike many facets of so-called “Western culture”, metal has not been spread by mass media, but rather by word of mouth and the internet. After the success of their first film, Dunn began receiving emails from places he didn’t even know had a metal culture, he tells to The Age:

There were a lot of countries that didn’t get proper distribution of the film, and we started to get emails from India and Iran, from people saying, “We’ve heard about the film or downloaded it, but come and check out metal in our country.”

We knew about metal in places like Brazil and Japan; we didn’t know the full extent of how metal is spread around the world.

In an interview with twitchfilm.net, Scot McFayden says that they even hired researchers for their movie.

Sam Dunn tells that he was especially surprised about heavy metal in Israel:

I was really struck by our experience in Israel actually and the degree to which the Metal that the Israeli kids listen to and perform has such a strong personal relevance for them.

When I was growing up as a Metalhead, the lyrics were never necessarily reflecting something I was going through as a person. (…) But to go to Israel and talk with people that are living through a day to day reality of conflict and war. It was quite eye-opening for me and I realized that Metal can mean something very different to people depending on where you come from.

In an interview with Victoria Times Colonist he says learning about metal communities in other countries changed his views on Heavy Metal:

Being a fan of metal in Iran means you’re putting, at some extent, your personal safety at risk. Kids have had their hair cut [off], their T-shirts taken away, rehearsal rooms raided and gear confiscated, so we realized being a metal-head is a far greater statement [there] than being a snotty-nosed teenager with a Slayer shirt who wants to piss off your parents.

According to the SeeMagazine, “Dunn is a major reason the film is so charming”:

He’s tall and lanky, forever wearing the same Mastodon t-shirt and awkwardly tucking his shoulder-length blond hair behind his ears. That earnest, unassuming quality makes him a likable character, but it also makes him an extremely effective interviewer: everyone seems to want to talk to the guy—not just Chinese record store owners and struggling metal bands from Iran, but ex-Megadeth guitarist Marty Friedman (who now makes his career appearing on Japanese variety television) and even Lars Ulrich, the notoriously prickly drummer for Metallica.

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In 2005 his movie Metal - A Headbanger's journey took the world with storm. Now anthropologist and metal musician Sam Dunn has released "Global Metal" - a film about the global expansion of heavy metal music.

Together with his co-director Scot…

Ethnographic study of anti-corporate globalization movements

Published on August 3, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, cosmopolitanism, development empowerment, globalisation, politics

“I had never seen anything like it. I knew immediately that I wanted to study this phenomenon”, says   anthropologist Jeffrey S. Juris. In 1999 he participated in the protests against the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. Now he has published an ethnography of the transnational anti-corporate globalization movements called Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization.

The book chronicles his experiences organizing and participating in protests from Seattle to Prague to Barcelona. From his base in Barcelona, he followed their connections and movements around the world. He explains how activists are not only responding to growing poverty, inequality, and environmental devastation but also building social laboratories for the production of alternative values, discourses, and practices.

>> more information on the Arizone State University website

>> website of the book

I’ve been fascinated by this topic as well. When I was considering starting with a doctorate a few years ago, I wanted to do multisited field work at the World Social Forums where activists from all over the world meet. In 2004, I wrote an article for the Norwegian Attac magazine Utveier about the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India:

Hindus and Muslims eat breakfast together; Christian nuns join Tibetan monks in a chant. At the World Social Forum in India, getting to know the person sitting next to you was at least as important as hearing the speeches by the stars in the movement for a just globalisation.
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The Indian newspapers were thrilled at the amount of people from all countries of the world who came seeking knowledge. “There’s something intoxicating about ordinary people from all parts of the world gathering at one place,” The Times of India writes, telling enthusiastically about an Australian woman trying to understand the struggle of the Telugu farmers, and about a burly Austrian asking a petite Tibetan girl about her leaflet against the Chinese occupation.

>> read the whole article

John Postill on media anthropology and internet activism in Malaysia

David Graeber: There never was a West! Democracy as Interstitial Cosmopolitanism

New journal: “Radical Anthropology” with David Graeber

Get Out of the Library and Into the Streets – new book by David Graeber

“Anthropology needs to engage in an activist way”

"I had never seen anything like it. I knew immediately that I wanted to study this phenomenon", says   anthropologist Jeffrey S. Juris. In 1999 he participated in the protests against the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. Now he has…

Interviews about moral cosmopolitanism, India-Pakistan, faith, populism, minoritiy-issues

Published on April 10, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, cosmopolitanism, Europe, interdisciplinary, religion cosmology, Us and Them

Recently, several of my interviews with researchers of the interdisciplinary research program Cultural Complexity of the New Norway (Culcom) have been translated into English. Here are the most recent ones:

Does the answer exist in human nature?
What is justice? Can research on infants give us new insight into global moral questions? Yes, according to Culcom’s Ph.D. fellow Odin Lysaker. Drawing on theory from psychology, sociology, and biology, the philosopher will try to find out what unites people on this earth with regard to moral questions

Taking the India-Pakistan-conflict to Norway?
A million and a half people were killed under the Partition of British-India into India and Pakistan. How has this conflict affected the relationship between Norwegian-Pakistanis and Norwegian-Indians and their integration into Norway? Lavleen Kaur is going to interview three generations of Indians and Pakistanis in Norway, Pakistan, and India.

– A symptom of large societal changes
It is important to understand the growth of these parties in connection with an elitist and normative judgment of populist parties, says Culcom Master’s student, Tor Espen Simonsen. In his Master’s thesis, the historian studied right-wing populism in Denmark and Norway.

– Focus on minority background undermines the principle of equality
Students who end up in the “minority language speakers” category risk receiving an inferior education. All students should receive an individually adapted education. But this principle does not seem to apply to everyone according to Nina Lewin.

Going their own way without breaking away from the family
The parents are concerned with status, relations with their home country, and job possibilities. Even though obedience and respect for the parents is important, the girls are concerned with choosing an education that they are interested in. This is shown in Culcom Master’s student Vibeke Hoem’s thesis.

Different life histories lead to different faiths
“Through studies of individual faith we can gain a better understanding of a religion,” says Culcom’s Master’s student Marie Toreskås Asheim. For her Master’s thesis she studied young Muslims’ personal relationship to Allah.

Forced to be a victim?
In doing research, start out with people’s experiences, not theory! Sociologist Helga Eggebø has put Dorothy Smith’s theories into practice. With the help of Smith’s “institutional ethnography” she shows how the victim discourse can help reproduce stereotypes and create a divide between “us” and “them”.

>> all interviews

Does the answer exist in human nature?
What is justice? Can research…

“Putting Aboriginal languages on the curriculum has improved ‘race’ relations”

Published on March 28, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, cosmopolitanism, language, Pacific Oceania, Us and Them, youth

He’s not an aboriginal Australian. Nevertheless he has to learn the local indigenous language. He and many other children say it’s fun. Teachers, parents and linguists say it is improving self-esteem, literacy and school attendance, rescuing indigenous languages from near oblivion and bringing communities closer together, according to a story in the Sydney Morning Herald.

“Putting Aboriginal languages on the curriculum in Walgett has improved ‘race’ relations”, the newspaper informs.

Sharon Cooke, an Aboriginal education consultant says:

“”It’s the white kids and the black kids. They all learn together and sing together, it’s really quite beautiful, it’s quite emotional when you see it … and not just for the Aboriginal kids. You’ll see the pride on the faces of non-Aboriginal kids as well, that they’re learning this language.”

Aunty Fay Green, a local elder, says:

“I can speak for a lot of our elders who feel the same as I do, and I look at it this way, it’s reconciliation. It brings two cultures together instead of pulling away from one another, which we used to do. They’re together now, they are. You can see that in the school, they stand by one another.”

Indigenous languages are being taught throughout Australia. But New South Wales remains the only state with an indigenous languages policy. 41 state schools in New South Wales were teaching Aboriginal languages to some degree by 2006 – but only a few of them offer it as their mandatory.

>> read the whole story in the Sydney Moring Herald

For more recent related news see entries on the blog Culture Matters: ‘White flight’ in Australian schools and Group removed from hostel for being Aboriginal and Marcia Langton on the parliament’s apology to the Stolen Generation

“A new approach to the collection of traditional Aboriginal music”

“I’m not the indigenous person people want me to be”: Anita Heiss is anthropologist and aboriginee.

For an Anthropology of Cosmopolitanism

He's not an aboriginal Australian. Nevertheless he has to learn the local indigenous language. He and many other children say it's fun. Teachers, parents and linguists say it is improving self-esteem, literacy and school attendance, rescuing indigenous languages from near…

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

Published on September 7, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, cosmopolitanism, cyberanthropology, gift economy gift giving, internet, journal articles / papers, technology, Us and Them

It all started when anthropologist Andreas Lloyd (University of Copenhagen) was browsing on the Internet looking for a new laptop computer and ended up installing the free Windows alternative Linux. Two years later, he finished his master thesis “A system that works for me” – an anthropological analysis of computer hackers’ shared use and development of the Ubuntu Linux system.

The thesis is a study of the Internet Gift Economy. Linux is developped by computer geeks saround the world, collaborating over the Internet, building a computer operating system in their spare time, which can be downloaded, installed, used and modified completely for free. It is among the biggest and most complex engineering projects ever conceived and built:

Based on more than 2 years of daily use of the Ubuntu Linux system and 6 months of online and in-person fieldwork among the developers working to develop and maintain it, this thesis examines the individual and collaborative day-to-day practices of these developers as they relate to the computer operating system that is the result of their labour.
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A group of Spanish computer scientists measured the size of a Linux system similar to Ubuntu, and found that it contained around 230 million lines of source code. When they translated this into the effort spent on writing this code using a standard software industry cost estimate model, they found that it would correspond to almost 60.000 man-years of work (Amor-Iglesias et. al. 2005). By comparison, it took an estimated 3.500 man-years to build the Empire State Building in New York, and 10.000 man-years to build the Panama Canal. This immense effort makes modern operating systems such as Ubuntu among the biggest and most complex engineering projects ever conceived and built.

So the anthropologist was curious to learn more about how the hackers collaborate to build such an intricate system, and to learn why they were doing all of this work just to give it away for free.

How do you do fieldwork among hackers around the world? He explains:

I joined the Ubuntu on-line community on the same terms as the Ubuntu hackers, contributing to and using the same system, sharing their experiences with the system, and meeting them in-person on the same terms as they do at the conferences at which they gather, experiencing the same social and technical means and limitations through which they develop the system.
(…)
In order to do participant observation in this on-line space, I began contributing to the system by writing the system help and documentation, rather than the system itself due to my lack of technical understanding. In this way, I could take part in shaping Ubuntu alongside other community members while slowly developing a feel for the everyday exchanges and work in the community.

His thesis is by the way neither dedicated to any girl friend nor his parents:

In the true digital spirit of this work, I dedicate this thesis to Rosinante, the laptop on which I first experienced the Ubuntu system, and which was my faithful companion during my fieldwork and the writing of this thesis, only to bow out a week before tsafe for so long.

>> download the thesis

(Links updated 11.1.17)

SEE ALSO:

The Internet Gift Culture

Open source movement is like things anthropologists have studied for a long time

Open Source Fieldwork! Show how you work!

Gift economies and open source software: Anthropological reflections

Why you always get a present you don’t want – Social Sciences and Gift-Giving

Mobile phone company Vodafone gets inspired by traditional Kula exchange system

Open Source Anthropology : Are anthropologists serious about sharing knowledge?

2006 – The Year of Open Access Anthropology?