anthropology (general) | antropologi.info

Chinese media propaganda at IUAES anthropology conference in Kunming

Published on July 27, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Asia, indigenous people / minorities, University / Academia, Us and Them

(update 30.7: IUAES-anthropologists “praise” Chinese government’s relation to minorities) As I wrote a few days ago, the vice president of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) Petr Skalník decided to boycott the IUAES congress in Kunming, China due to the recent massacre where several hundred Uyghurs were killed.

“I do not want to be part of overt and/or tacit legitimation of evidently erroneous handling of nationality question in China”, he wrote in an open letter.

The conference started today and it is interesting to see how the Chinese authorities use the conference to promote both China and to legitimize their minority policy.

China anthropology enters new stage, more active in global study is the headline in People’s Daily Online.

They write about the vice-chairman of the 16th congress’s organizing committee, Hao Shiyuan, who said that “Chinese anthropology mainly focused on application research”. And in one case, he said, “more than 1,000 local anthropological scholars had took up fieldwork in 1950s to collect first-hand data and advise the government on the management of ethnic groups.”

Then they quote the IUAES President Vargas with these words: “Many anthropologists are interested in studying specific questions in China, as well as looking at the solutions that our Chinese colleagues have proposed to problems that are similar in other countries.”

The headline of an article by the offical Xinhua news agency is China listening to int’l experts in pursuit of coexistence of diversified cultures. We read that the Chinese Vice Premier Hui Liangyu delivered a speech at the opening ceremony. He said that the Chinese government “has attached great importance to the development of anthropological and ethnological sciences, and actively promotes theoretical studies, innovation and application.”

In a critical blog post at gokunming.com, we read that Yunnan University, which is hosting the congress, is off limits to the general public: “entry is only granted to registered participants who must display passes. Additionally, the university’s perimeter is under heavy police watch”:

No official explanation for barring the general public from Yunnan University’s main campus has been given, there are several possible reasons, including the attendance of Chinese Vice Premier Hui Liangyu at this morning’s opening ceremony.

In his address to the congress, Hui said that “pushing forward dialogues and cooperation among different civilizations is a joint responsibility of individuals and governments.”

Despite Hui’s upbeat statement, the recent ethnic violence in Xinjiang that left hundreds dead is likely a cause for ramped up security. Another potential reason for government uneasiness may be the occasional overlap between anthropology and intelligence gathering operations.

UPDATE 29.7.09: More from the offical Xinhua news agency: China says its ethnic policies “on right track”:

A senior Chinese official said Monday the government’s policies on ethnic affairs are “on the right track” and have helped create conditions for equality, unity and common prosperity among the country’s different ethnic groups.

Jia Qinglin, chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), China’s top political advisory body, made the remark in his meeting with Luis Alberto Vargas, the President of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES), who is in China to attend The 16th IUAES World Congress held in China southwest province Yunnan.

Jia said the living standards of the ethnic groups were rising steadily and their political, economic and cultural rights were well safeguarded.

UPDATE: More propaganda: IUAES-anthropologists “praise” Chinese government’s relation to minorities (Xinhua 30.7.09)

The Problems with Chinese Anthropological Research

Anthropology: a Taboo Topic in China?

(update 30.7: IUAES-anthropologists "praise" Chinese government's relation to minorities) As I wrote a few days ago, the vice president of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) Petr Skalník decided to boycott the IUAES congress in Kunming, China…

Anthropology in China: IUAES-conference boycott due to Uyghur massacre

Published on July 24, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Asia, ethics, indigenous people / minorities, politics, Us and Them

(UPDATE 27.7.09: Chinese media propaganda at IUAES anthropology conference in Kunming? / UPDATE 30.7: IUAES-anthropologists “praise” Chinese government’s relation to minorities )
Last year, the conference was cancelled by the Chinese government for fear of protests. Next week, the 16th congress by the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) finally will be held – but without the IUAES vice president Petr Skalník. He decided not to participate due to the recent massacre where several hundred Uyghurs were killed.

“I will not meet and shake hands with people who must be responsible for the above tragedy”, Skalnik writes in a letter to the State Ethnic Affairs Commission of the People´s Republic of China that he also emailed to a large number of anthropologists (and that was forwarded to me), hoping many will read it.

Two weeks ago, Skalnik received an invitation letter from the State Ethnic Affairs Commission, indicating that on July 26, on the eve of the 16th World Congress of International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES), “several IUAES high officials” will meet in Beijing with “a senior State leader of China”:

This invitation was a surprise to me as I was not at all planning to travel via through Beijing on my way to Kunming. No agenda for the meeting was mentioned except that it is „in honor of the IUAES leadership“.

At the same time as the letter was coming, there was this massacre happening in Urumqi:

Although this grave event directly touching the field of activities of your Commission, namely ethnic affairs, there were no signs either directly from PRC SEAC or from the Chinese Association of Anthropology and Ethnology.

My life experience of studying ethnic problems in other countries (e.g. South Africa, West Africa, Soviet Union and Europe) have taught me that conflicts of the size like that in Urumqi this July or Lhasa last year are not and cannot be caused just by some malicious plotters. There must be also a deal of responsibility on the side of the power holders, your Commission not excluded. However, no self-criticism and constructive proposal for remedy has come out from China till this very day.

Therefore, I have to turn down your invitation for the above ethical reasons. Human rights were served a crippling blow in Urumqi by apparently wrong analysis and heavy-handed response of the Chinese state, your Commission included. I will not meet and shake hands with people who must be responsible for the above tragedy. I will not accept reimbursement monies and other perks mentioned from the Chinese state. I protest in this way against policies which smack of demographic aggression and ethnocide.

I also will not participate in the Kunming congress (to be held next week, July 27-31, 2009) because I do not want to be part of overt and/or tacit legitimation of evidently erroneous handling of nationality question in China. As a person with a particularly strong IUAES loyalty who participated in almost all its congresses and other events starting from Permanent Council meeting in Prague back in 1962 I was very keen on participating and playing active role as a Distinguished Speaker, member of the Executive Council (EC) of IUAES, Czech member of the Permanent Council of IUAES, chairperson of the Commission on Theoretical Anthropology (COTA) and thrice paper giver. The above mentioned reasons, however, thwarted these intentions. Under present circumstance I would not feel free to express my thoughts and research findings.

He also indicates possible discrimination of Chinese scholars with ethnic minority background who were not able to register for the conference. Also some scholars from abroad were not able to obtain Chinese visa.

He closes with these lines:

I would like to emphasize that this letter was written by myself alone and I express my views freely as I did when I criticised apartheid policies in South Africa, misguided theories and practices in ethnic field in the Soviet Union or failure of American anthropologists to warn the then U.S. government of the adverse consequences of its war plans and acts in Iraq. Anthropologists and ethnologists by the nature of their work which includes ethics of research, respect for human life and culture, do not know of any „internal affairs“, especially if human rights are violated.

I have made a pdf of the documents, including the letter he sent by email.

UPDATE 27.7.09: Chinese media propaganda at IUAES anthropology conference in Kunming?

UPDATE 30.7.09: More propaganda: IUAES-anthropologists “praise” Chinese government’s relation to minorities (Xinhua 30.7.09)

Concerning the canceled conference, see China Cancels IAES (Savage Minds, 8.5.08) and Anthropology: a Taboo Topic in China? (Angry Chinese Blogger, 24.5.08).

(UPDATE 27.7.09: Chinese media propaganda at IUAES anthropology conference in Kunming? / UPDATE 30.7: IUAES-anthropologists "praise" Chinese government's relation to minorities )
Last year, the conference was cancelled by the Chinese government for fear of protests. Next week, the 16th…

Identity politics: Have anthropologists gone too far?

Published on July 24, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, indigenous people / minorities, persons and theories, Us and Them

Inspired by a lecture by Peter Geschiere, anthropologist Yara El-Ghadban discusses a difficult and central question in our discipline: How to deconstruct a notion without destroying the meaning that it has for people?

In order to challenge stereotypical Us-and-them-thinking, anthropologists show how notions like nationality, the nation state, ethnic group, race or culture are constructions. But for many people, belonging to “artifical” groups is extremly important. Anthropologists should therefore take people’s striving for belonging more seriously, Yara El-Ghadban writes:

Palestinians in diaspora have survived and continue to survive because they can still imagine being part of a shared homeland. Artificial or not, idealized or not, the imagined homeland has served as a catalyst of resistance and getting out of the refugee camps.
(…)
Constructed or not, artificial or not, these notions are invested in meaning, they are used and referred to in everyday life, so unless anthropologists are willing to go back to their old habits of telling people who they are and how they should think, we have an obligation to take seriously the meaning and value that groups and individuals invest in belonging.

The method of deconstruction, she continues, has been fruitful in denaturalizing and exposing implicit discourses of power. But it has been unsatisfying in understanding why people are attached to such notions beyond treating them as being manipulated and helpless.

So how to resolve this dilemma of trying to deconstruct a notion without destroying in the same exercise the meaning that it has or has always had for people, she asks. Anthropologists should change the root question, she suggests:

Instead of starting from the premise that autochtony is constructed and thus inevitably artificial, I would actually build on the premise that human beings are quintessentially social and can only enact their humanity by relating to others, and in that sense, the longing to be part of something, to be attached is a condition of being (be-longing to cite David Goldberg). The question then is not how artificial or hegemonic one form of being is or not, but how individuals and groups strive to find belonging in a contemporary world that is constantly calling into question canonized myths of origin.

>> read the whole post on her blog tropismes.org (LINK UPDATED 7.8.2020)

Interview with Benedict Anderson: “I like nationalism’s utopian elements”

In order to challenge stereotypical Us-and-them-thinking, anthropologists…

How anthropology in Eastern Europe is changing

Published on July 6, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Europe, journal articles / papers

Studia ethnologica Croatica is one of those Open Access journals I’ve found recently. Their latest issue gives an overview over recent delevopments in anthropology in Eastern Europe. The texts are based on presentations made at the conference ‘New Curricula in Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology – Marking the 80th Anniversary of Croatian Ethnology’ in Zagreb.

Janusz Baranski is one of several authors who describe how anthropology in Eastern European countries has changed recently. In his paper New Polish Anthropology, he writes:

(T)he Polish tradition of anthropology differs from Western traditions in at least one aspect. Whereas the main subject of the latter were the so-called primitive cultures of the New World, colonized by Western powers; the main subject of Polish and other East European ethnologies were the so-called folk cultures.

Scholars who wanted to deal with non-European cultures did their research in Western academic centers; Bronislaw Malinowski is perhaps the best-known example. The opposition “our – foreign” or “us” and “them” was, in the East European context, identified with the opposition of “upper classes – the people” or “upper culture – lower culture”. For East European anthropologist, a peasant filled the role that the Trobriander filled for Malinowski.

He thinks he is a good example of recent shifts of interests within Polish anthropology:

I am a graduate of ethnography – this was the formal nomenclature of the discipline in the communist period (with a thesis on Slavic mythology; so, one would say, a “traditional one”); next I completed a postgraduate degree in ethnology – this is the nomenclature of the discipline in the post communist period (the thesis was on the language of political propaganda; say – a “modern one”); finally, I identify, above all, with cultural studies: my post-doctoral dissertation was on material culture and social symbolism of the material world – commodity aesthetics, fashion, lifestyle, consumer culture.

In this respect, I am a typical example of the tendency among anthropologists, mentioned by George Marcus, to shift from the first project, which is framed by the traditional field of anthropology, into the second – experimental and new for the discipline, which, he claims, is a growing tendency in American anthropology. Not only in American, as we see.

>> read the whole paper

Spiritual culture and folk medicine have become popular research topics, as Antoaneta Olteanu writes in her paper “Teaching Anthropology in Romania”:

We should not forget that, under the communist regime, we were forbidden to talk (and write) about the spiritual culture, folk mentality and folk religion (folk Christianity, demonology and such), in order to prevent their interference with the healthy vision of the communist ideology.

This was one of the reasons why, after 1989, Romanians started to publish research of both the ethnological and the anthropological approaches on peasant healing (both text and rituals, but also general representations of illness, demons, personality of the healer, ritual plants, objects and others topics (…).

>> read the whole paper

>> overview over all articles in this issue

Doing fieldwork in Eastern Europe – New issue of Anthropology Matters

“Take care of the different national traditions of anthropology”

How can we create a more plural anthropological community?

Studia ethnologica Croatica is one of those Open Access journals I've found recently. Their latest issue gives an overview over recent delevopments in anthropology in Eastern Europe. The texts are based on presentations made at the conference ‘New Curricula in…

The Open Anthropology Cooperative – A Worldwide Anthro-Community in the Making

Published on May 28, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, University / Academia

(updated)~~What about creating~~ A worldwide community for anthropological discussion and collaboration away from the restrictions of formal academic structures has been created at http://openanthcoop.ning.com/ (already more than 140 members Thursdag night!) It started as a twitter-conversation, now the debate also takes place on Keith Hart’s website.

In some way, this community already exists – in the anthropological blogosphere. But also non-bloggers shall be included, and The Open Anthropology Cooperative – that’s what it is supposed to called – is actually much more. Maybe we can call it the web 2.0 version of the conventional (mostly national) anthropological associations.

More than 30 comments have been posted so far. They include following ideas and suggestions about the new community:

* A place to share ideas
 * A place to find like-minded anthropologists
 * A place to collaborate 
* A place to hold virtual conferences 
* A place to host podcasts 
* A place to ask questions
 * A place to learn about new tools for anthropology (online tools, field tools, etc.) 
* a place to find resources (e.g. databases, good grad programs, upcoming colloquia, software, field opportunities) 
* A place to publish
* The idea of an engaged anthropology for the 21st century in relation to the digital revolution
* Group blog with posts from both Keith and others
* Forum for discussion
* Online press to publish longer pieces
* The incorporation of Twitter, social bookmarking, wiki, etc

>> read the whole discussion

>> follow the debate on twitter

Anthropologist “Fran” at http://ethblography.blogspot.com likes to see the Open Anthropology Cooperative “become a comfortable channel for discussion which does not intimidate amateurs or first-year undergraduates, yet remains useful for doctoral students, fieldworkers, lecturers and specialists in all fields”. She also hopes “that it will become truly international (and multilingual)”.

She continues:

In my opinion, there is no reason for an invented divide that reduces web-based academic content to a second-rate substitute for formal (read: expensive, elaborate, bureaucratic) channels. Why not overlap “open” and “official” academia until they are one and the same? If the technology and demand can sustain it – which I believe they can – making anthropological and ethnographic knowledge freely available should be a priority. This can reflect back heavily upon the academic method itself, both in theory and in practice.

>> read the whole post

World Anthropologies Network – Working towards a global community of anthropologists

The Future of Anthropology: “We ought to build our own mass media”

Keith Hart and Thomas Hylland Eriksen: This is 21st century anthropology

(updated)What about creating A worldwide community for anthropological discussion and collaboration away from the restrictions of formal academic structures has been created at http://openanthcoop.ning.com/ (already more than 140 members Thursdag night!) It started as a twitter-conversation, now the debate also…