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Neoliberal applied anthropology: Who owns the research — the anthropologist or the sponsor?

Published on May 12, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, ethics, University / Academia

At the Society for Applied Anthropology Meetings this year Hugh Gusterson had a startling experience: A “practicing anthropologist” refused to tell me him who or what, she studies. That has never happened before. In the article Where Are We Going? Engaging Dilemmas In Practicing Anthropology in Anthropology News May 2006, Guterson poses fundamental quiestions. The number of anthropologists working for industry and government agencies grows. So:

Who owns applied anthropological research—the researcher or the sponsor? If applied research is confidential, and thus exempt from peer review, how do we assure its quality and integrity? What recourse is there for an anthropologist under contract of confidentiality who decides they have an obligation to make public what their sponsor wants to keep quiet (say, information about indigenous opposition to a dam, or native Americans’ experience of abuse at the hands of the Department of the Interior, or corruption in the Pentagon or the World Bank)?

Is it acceptable to study people not in order to advocate for them or to interpret them in the open literature, but for the purpose of providing privileged information to sponsors who want to control them? What will happen to our professional meetings, to their warm conviviality, if more people come to them refusing to discuss their research? And how is our discipline even to keep track of possible conflicts of interest if anthropologists are refusing to identify their research in public?

He continues and concludes:

One colleague suggested that we acknowledge two separate communities: those doing academic anthropology and those doing what he called “dirty anthropology” (as, I think, in “quick and…”). He suggested each have its own ethical guidelines. But do we really want to say that anthropologists are no longer a single community guided by a common code of conduct?

The rise of neoliberal applied anthropology is a scandal waiting to happen. We ignore it at our professional peril. It is time to lay out some clear rules of the road to give guidance to applied anthropology colleagues working on this new frontier, and to enhance their bargaining power with powerful contractors.

>> read the whole article in Anthropology News (link updated)

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Too engaged anthropology? The Lumpenproletariat on the US-Mexican Border

Published on March 26, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, books, ethics, migration, Northern America, poverty, Us and Them

“The most important information, which we can get out of this study, is how and what kind of action one can take.”

How much should anthropologists get involved in changing the lives of their informants? Johannes Wilm didn’t limit his research to presenting his findings about the daily life in in Douglas, an US-mexican border town. In his conclusion of his book On the Margins: US Americans in a bordertown to Mexico, he considers several forms for action.

The challenge: More than half of the 14000 inhabitants in Douglas are unemployed, 53% of the under 18 years old are officially living under the poverty line. The main source of income for the town: Smuggling of people and drugs. He proposes among others:

Constantly high unemployment figures can tell us, that an organization of the lumpenproletariat is neccessary in the planning of a world revolution or some more localized struggle for a democratic and economically just society.

It becomes obvious that Wilm works within a Marxist framework. He is an peace and media activist and has been socialized through the globalisation from below movement.

People in bordertowns are especially skilled, he found:

Also, in a border town, knowledge is spread according to a much more heterogeneous pattern, and a group of people cooperating across the various barriers will therefore be likely to build up a great amount of knowledge of how to circumvent the power apparatus of either of the involved states. Just for this, in the planning of a cross-national or global change, towns like Douglas should not be ignored.

In bordertowns, we find more ethnic diversity than in other areas. This might be a hinder? Wilm denies:

While ethnic diversity often has been seen as a hinder to organisation, it seems that combined with unemployment, its force is not as negative. In cases where people are forced to live close together and each person only has access to a part of the things seen as desirable (…), it even integrates rather than segregates.

The inhabitants with Mexican background are often “the better Americans”:

And while lots of Hispanics with strong personal ties to Mexico in Douglas seem to believe in the “American way of life”, it is Anglos that are the first ones to actively break out of the hegemonic space once they have the chance. (…) It is Anglos that represent resistance and not Hispanics.

He quotes an Hispanic father who has returned from the war in Iraq:

“Seen to many dead children”, he explains, while he almost seems to start to cry. However, he finds time commenting on the amount of Anglos in the military. “I guess white people don’t like serving their country that much” as he puts it.

Generally, he found, that ethnicity / race or class don’t play a role in the daily life in Douglas. That’s due to the economic crisis in his view:

Even though Douglas has had a history of segregation based on ethnicity, the complete lack of any kind of job for vast proportions of the population, and consequently the prevalence of the lumpenproletariat, has also done away with the ethnic model of stratification. None of my Anglo informants are in any position of power due to their ethnic background.

(…)

Had I been in Douglas during the good days of American capitalism, while Phelps Dodge still was there, they would have been strictly segregated according to race in the earlier period, or according to income layer in the latter period. Keoki, Art and Tim, all with somewhat more of an intellectual background also find themselves in this classless society in which everyone is part of the lumpenproletariat.

While I agree that advocacy is one of anthropologists’ jobs, we should, I think, be cautious about presenting final solutions as he does when he describes the problems connected with organizing people:

(…) A fourth problem (…), the amount of Marxist or anarchist literature read by the members of the lumpenproletariat seems quite low, and is often replaced by the Bible, Adam Smith or, in the case of the cultural elite, various critics who are looking at single issues. This means that agitation has to start from the very beginning.
(…) What has to be done, is to develop a generic psychologic strategy to win over people with background from “serving the nation”.

>> more information on the book

>> download the whole book (pdf, 30 MB )

"The most important information, which we can get out of this study, is how and what kind of action one can take."

How much should anthropologists get involved in changing the lives of their informants? Johannes Wilm didn't limit his research…

Censorship of research in the USA: Iranians not allowed to publish papers

Published on March 15, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, ethics, Northern America, politics, University / Academia

Jill Walker reports about censorship of research in the USA:

Recently, two articles by teams from the University of Bergen were accepted by prominent US journals and then turned down because, the publishers said, “we cannot publish your paper because the United States government restricts publishers from publishing papers that have an affiliation with the government of Iran.” Some of the authors were Iranian citizens.

She comments:

Isn’t that astounding, though? The results results are presumably important, since they were accepted in an internationally reknowned, peer reviewed journal. They have nothing to do with bombs or weapons of mass destruction or politics – this is geology and oil and such. And yet the US government refuses to allow US journals to publish this, just because some of the authors – scholars, not politicians – have Iranian passports? How peculiar that the country that (in theory) has the strongest tradition of freedom of speech and democracy stifles research and communication like this.

>> read the whole post and the comments

The rector of Bergen University said to the Norwegian media that this was “unacceptable political censorship”, “previously known only from totalitarian regimes”. Matthias Kaiser from the National Committees for Research Ethics in Norway says, the American science community can no longer be regarded as a part of the international science community.

~~There’s no English language coverage available~~,

>> information from the University in Bergen on this issue

>> information on the Patriot Act which is the reason of this problems

A few weeks ago, the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the world’s largest association of scholars of religion, criticized a similar “ideological exclusion” of knowlewdge and scholars. They joined a lawsuit that challenges a key provision of the USA Patriot Act, according to the blog Mirror of Justice:

Citing the 2004 revocation of a travel visa for noted Swiss scholar of Islam Tariq Ramadan, the suit contends that an “ideological exclusion” provision of the Patriot Act is being used to impede the free circulation of scholars and scholarly debate that are integral to academic freedom.

Commenting on the suit, AAR Executive Director Barbara DeConcini stated that “preventing foreign scholars like Professor Ramadan from visiting the U.S. limits not only the ability of scholars here to enhance their own knowledge, but also their ability to inform students, journalists, public policy makers, and other members of the public who rely on scholars’ work to acquire a better understanding of critical current issues involving religion.

>> read the whole post “Religion Scholars Challenge Patriot Act”

>> AlterNet: Banned in America: Tariq Ramadan of Switzerland, one of the world’s most important Muslim scholars, ran right into the USA Patriot Act

>> “War on terror”: CIA sponsers anthropologists to gather sensitive information

>> News on Patriot Act and Academic Freedom

>> The Patriot Act and Civil Liberties. Information and Resources

Jill Walker reports about censorship of research in the USA:

Recently, two articles by teams from the University of Bergen were accepted by prominent US journals and then turned down because, the publishers said, "we cannot publish your paper because the…

“The White House should hire an anthropologist”

Published on February 7, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, ethics, politics

Anthropologist Fazia Rizvi points to an article by Maureen Dowd where she argues that the White House should hire an anthropologist:

Corporations have begun hiring anthropologists to help them improve product designs and interpret markets. And clearly, the Bush foreign policy team doesn’t understand any of the markets where it is barging around ineptly trying to sell America and democracy.

(…)

It’s stunning that nearly four decades after Vietnam, our government could be even more culturally illiterate and pigheaded. The Bushies are more obsessed with snooping on Americans than fathoming how other cultures think and react.

One smart anthropologist reinforcing the idea that “mirroring” – assuming other cultures think like us – doesn’t work would be a lot more helpful than all of the discredited intelligence agencies that are costing $30 billion a year to miss everything from the breakup of the Soviet Union to 9/11 to no WMD to Osama’s hiding place to the Hamas victory.

>> read the whole story in the SGVTribune

Anthropologist Fazia Rizvi points to an article by Maureen Dowd where she argues that the White House should hire an anthropologist:

Corporations have begun hiring anthropologists to help them improve product designs and interpret markets. And clearly, the Bush foreign…

“Tribal Iraq Society” – Anthropologists engaged for US war in Iraq

Published on February 2, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, ethics, Middle East, politics

No good news: In France, they shut down anthropology, in the US, we see the sell-out of our disciplin: “U.S. analysts are starting to apply anthropological models to trying to understand and fight the Iraq”, according to United Press International.

Anthropologist Montgomery McFate (we know her from previous debates on ethics) works at the Institute for Defense Analyses and cooperates with the US government in their so-called “war against terror”. Speaking at a conference, she argued for an “increased understanding of the tribal nature of Iraqi society (!)” as this would “benefit the U.S. forces by enabling them to adapt to the enemy”

McFate has suggested that knowledge of Iraqi tribal groups is useful because it can provide an insight into the reasons for insurgency. In tribal societies, honor is a measure of status. Traditionally, challenges to group honor have been met with violence, and thus the current bombings are a response to the coalition presence.

By working within the Iraqi cultural framework, coalition forces may be able to forward their strategic goal, the creation of a stable society. McFate said blood feuds regulate tribal balance in Iraq. Upon the death of a clan member, it is the duty of the kin to seek violent retribution. This rudimentary justice system provides all groups with an incentive to restrain members, and acts to constrain inter-tribe conflict.

>> read the whole story (link updated)

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No good news: In France, they shut down anthropology, in the US, we see the sell-out of our disciplin: "U.S. analysts are starting to apply anthropological models to trying to understand and fight the Iraq", according to United Press International.

Anthropologist…