anthropology (general) | antropologi.info

Twitter bans Sci-hub: Interests of the publishing mafia more important than access to science

Published on January 13, 2021 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Asia, journal articles / papers, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, politics

When Twitter announced that it had [suspended Donald Trump’s account](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/trump-is-banned-who-is-next/617622/), Twitter [also censored](https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-founder-criticises-sudden-twitter-ban-over-over-counterfeit-content-210108/) the voice of [Alexandra Elbakyan](https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16985666/alexandra-elbakyan-sci-hub-open-access-science-papers-lawsuit), the 32 year old creator of the probably most cherished website in the global scientific community: [Sci-hub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub).

This website, as most of you will know, provides free access to paywalled scientific knowledge to anybody – both rich and poor, old or young, man or woman – regardless where on earth they live. The journal Nature listed Elbakyan among [top 10 people that mattered in Science in 2016](https://www.nature.com/news/nature-s-10-1.21157).

But such a person gets – in a world as ours – powerful enemies. For there are lots of men and women who have become richer and richer by selling articles, that scientists write for free, at highest possible prices. They have formed gangs with names as Elsevier or Wiley. Over time, a huge publishing mafia came into existence that threatens university libraries – their main victims – all over the world. For years they have chased the Sci-Hub funder from Kazakhstan, but she has been smarter than all of them.

A few days before Christmas this mafia has launched a new attack, this time with the help from an old buddy, [the American Chemical Society that also opposes the idea of free access to science](https://www.nature.com/articles/445347a). And they thought: Maybe we will be luckier in a different location, India for example? Wouldn’t it be cool, if we could control the whole subcontinent, prevent the whole country from accessing Sci-Hub? And that’s what happened. The gangs [field a lawsuit with the Delhi High Court, asking Indian internet service providers to block Sci-Hub and similar site Libgen](https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-libgen-face-isp-blocking-in-india-after-publishers-file-high-court-complaint-201227/).

Will the publishing mafia succeed this time? It does not seem so – although they have found a new buddy: Twitter. [Right after Alexandra Elbakyan posted on Twitter about the danger of being blocked in India and lots of Indian scientists revolted against Elsevier & Co, Twitter suspended her account](https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-founder-criticises-sudden-twitter-ban-over-over-counterfeit-content-210108/).

The court, though, listened to the concerns of scientists and [rejected pleas for the sites to blocked immediately and instead ordered pleadings to be completed within the next six weeks](https://torrentfreak.com/judge-sci-hub-blocking-case-important-for-science-community-representations-will-be-heard-210107/).

The scientists wrote in their intervention application:

> “Unfortunately, scientific publication is controlled by an oligopoly of publishers who charge exorbitant fees and practice anti-competitive business models that seriously hamper the ability of the scientific community to access and share research.”

The Delhi Science Forum and the Society for Knowledge Commons argued that [Indian law does not allow the commercialisation of and profiting from scientific knowledge which is a “public resource”](https://www.medianama.com/2021/01/223-libgen-scihub-copyright-case-scientists/).

Indian tech site Medianama also mentions [a statement released on December 29 by the All India People’s Science Network (AIPSN](https://aipsn.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/SciHub-AIPSNStatement29Dec2020FinalP.pdf)) where they explain that this in reality is a case against all Indian research scholars:

> The case filed by the copyright holders in Delhi High Court asking for a blanket ban of the sites is not against Sci-Hub and Libgen; it is against the research scholars in this country. Most of whose research would come to a halt if this case by the robber barons of the publishing industry succeeds. It is the future of research in India that is at stake, not Alexandra Elbakyan or Sci-Hub’s future. AIPSN demands that the monopolistic model of access to knowledge be given up and the process of free access to knowledge by the public accepted.

[2,000 researchers, scientists and students from across the country have signed a petition](https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/academic-publishers-vs-libgen-and-sci-hub-make-research-academic-papers-accessible-to-all-2k-scientists-students-appeal-to-court-govt/story-iid8Q847AQt6O4ZlLM6r8N.html) Sites as LibGen and Sci-Hub do not violate any norm of ethics or intellectual property rights, as the research papers are actually intellectual products of the authors and the institutions, they stressed:

>“Those who produce this knowledge – the authors and reviewers of research papers – are not paid, and yet these publishers make windfall profit of billions of dollars by selling subscriptions to libraries worldwide at exorbitantly inflated rates, which most institutional libraries in India, and even developed countries, cannot afford. Without a subscription, a researcher has to pay between $30 and $50 to download each paper, which most individual Indian researchers cannot afford. Instead of facilitating the flow of research information, these companies are throttling it,”

Anyway, as scholar James Heathers wrote four years ago, [regardless of what anyone thinks, Sci-Hub is going to win](https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/why-sci-hub-will-win-595b53aae9fa). After he explained that academics always had to circumvent the current system he suggests to make the *The Garbage Strike Test*:

> Let’s say all large publishers suddenly refused anyone any access to any of their copyrighted materials at 9am tomorrow morning — what would they be replaced with?

> The answer is a system which differs in almost every respect from the status quo, and one which would start seamlessly and immediately. (…)

> My bold prediction is in about two days, the whole thing would be strongly framed as an opportunity, and various calls for assistance in sticking back together our entire library of knowledge would travel over the whole planet.

> In a fortnight, we would have quasi-formal channels of storing, disseminating, reviewing and publishing information.

> In three months, they would be established, and serious steps would be taken to make sure these channels were never corporatised or exploited ever again.

Also check this Twitter thread:

Sci Hub is such a perfect example of the difference between the legal and the moral. Significantly illegal, constantly on the verge of being shut down / blocked / excluded from platforms as a result, and a huge net positive for humanity with almost zero downsides.

— David R. MacIver (@DRMacIver) January 8, 2021

Sci-hub’s website is still available, there are lots of mirrors, working addresses can always be found at [Sci-hub’s Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub) and on [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/) where also a new [uncensorable Sci-Hub site is discussed](https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/kvb9eu/scihub_moves_to_decentralized_uncensorable_dns/).

**SEE ALSO:**

[Why are academic articles so expensive?](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2012/academic-paywalls)

[“Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist”: A call for action](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2011/academic-publishing)

When Twitter announced that it had suspended Donald Trump's account, Twitter also censored the voice of Alexandra Elbakyan, the 32 year old creator of the probably most cherished website in the global scientific community: Sci-hub.

This website, as most of…

New anthropology show in Arabic: "Anthropology helps us to understand who exploits us – and who we exploit"

Published on January 6, 2021 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Middle East, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, websites

*Mai Amer: “I really hope the show encourages viewers to reflecting on and critique certain things they think”. Screenshot from her Facebook page*

How can we better understand the world we live in? Not only here in Europe, but also in many Arab countries, many people don’t know what anthropology is and how it can provide them with new perspectives. What to do? In the beginning, there were blogs. Now other kind of media have become popular: podcasts, video channels and shows.

[MadaMasr, my favorite Egyptian news site and magazin, interviews anthropologist Mai Amer](https://madamasr.com/en/2020/12/12/feature/culture/detox-a-tuk-tuk-ride-through-the-world-of-anthropology/), who has created of a new show titled [Tuk Tuk](https://www.facebook.com/watch/248380561859286/277641040341499/) *(El Tok Tok in Arabic)*. Her aim is to make anthropological concepts more accessible for a wider Arabic speaking audience. The show is published on Facebook and produced by [Al-Nahda Scientific and Cultural Association](https://www.cuipcairo.org/en/directory/el-nahda-jesuit-cairo-association-de-la-renaissance-culturelle-et-scientifique).

Three episodes are so far available: a short introduction to anthropology, discussions about the issue of women’s bodies and how culture defines the standards of femininity (including what women should or shouldn’t wear) and a episode about men’s bodies (particularly the use of Viagra and Tramadol). The next episodes will be about social media, popular religious imaginary and [mahraganat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahraganat) – popular Egyptian dance music which is Mai Amer’s special field: She wrote her master’s thesis about Mahraganat songs.

The idea sounds brilliant. She explains in this interview:

With the Tuk Tuk through the old town of Cairo. Photo: Mondo79, flickr

> This season, I hope the show does exactly what the tuk tuk does: you get on and from your seat you watch everything going on outside in that neighborhood you don’t know, while the driver knows everyone and keeps greeting people he passes by. And you’re discovering all this from the perspective of your seat in the tuk tuk — not your car or an Uber with the windows rolled up. The tuk tuk means you’re part of the street.

I also like her definition and view about anthropology. Its role is for her to help us understand “where we stand in life: who exploits us, who we exploit, when we are performing and who we are performing to, and when other people are performing for us.” She wants us to “reflect on and critiquing certain things they think, say or do by posing questions or opening up ideas for discussion”:

> We usually go through life with pre-made judgments, deeply rooted biases and values instilled by the social class in which we were raised. We’re unaware of our privileges, unaware of others’ privileges, and we’re oblivious to our prejudices and how they affect our everyday behavior.

> We don’t realize we are prisoners of ourselves and of our class. So as members of the middle class for instance, we are convinced that rich people are corrupt, the poor are kind, and those who live in the slums are criminals, and so on. We don’t stop to think how the thoughts that were planted in our subconscious so long ago affect our behavior and our whole perspective of life.

> What anthropology does is it reveals all of this to us; how such processes take place. It helps us figure out where we stand in life: who exploits us, who we exploit, when we are performing and who we are performing to, and when other people are performing for us.

In this interview with Mada Masr journalist [Mostafa Mohie](https://madamasr.com/en/contributor/mostafa-mohie/) she also mentions other initiatives that inspired her, among others [Qira2at](https://qira2at.com/category/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%88%D9%85-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A5%D9%86%D8%B3%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%A9/) — by Amr Khairy who publishes Arabic translations of important texts in the humanities and social sciences, and another show on Facebook called [Anthropology in Arabic](https://www.facebook.com/AnthropologyBel3araby/) by by Farah Halaba.

Mai Amer is currently working on her PhD on gender in pop songs

[ >> read the whole interview at Mada Masr](https://madamasr.com/en/2020/12/12/feature/culture/detox-a-tuk-tuk-ride-through-the-world-of-anthropology/)

[>> visit Tuk Tuk on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/watch/248380561859286/277641040341499/)

PS: My Arabic is too poor to understand anything serious, so I am just referring to the Mada Masr interview here.

**SEE ALSO:**

[Interview. Meet Dai Cooper from The Anthropology Song!](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2009/the-anthropology-song-interview-with-dai-cooper)

[Visions of Students Today – More Digital Ethnography](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2011/students)

[Why anthropology fails to arouse interest among the public – Engaging Anthropology (2)](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2005/why_anthropology_fails_to_arouse_interes_2)

[Nancy Scheper-Hughes: Public anthropology through collaboration with journalists](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2009/nancy-scheper-hughes-on-public-anthropology)

[Anthropology and the challenges of sharing knowledge online: Interview with Owen Wiltshire](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2011/owen-wiltshire)

[Keith Hart and Thomas Hylland Eriksen: This is 21st century anthropology](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2007/keith_hart_and_thomas_hylland_eriksen_th)

Mai Amer: "I really hope the show encourages viewers to reflecting on and critique certain things they think". Screenshot from her Facebook page

How can we better understand the world we live in? Not only here in Europe, but also…

(updated) Iran jails anthropologist for "subversive research", "seeking cultural changes" and "promoting homosexuality"

Published on January 2, 2021 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Middle East, politics

14 years ago I wrote about his website: Visual ethnography and Kurdish anthropology by Kameel Ahmady and Photography as research tool: More engaged Kurdish anthropology. I also remember we had a short email exchange. Now I am shocked to read the BBC headline: Kameel Ahmady: British FGM academic ‘jailed in Iran’.

Ahmady has researched child marriage, female genital mutilation (FGM) and sexuality in Iran. In 2015, the BBC reminds us, he published a study suggesting that tens of thousands of Iranian women had undergone female genital mutilation. Until then, Iran had not been widely recognised as a country affected by FGM.

BBC refers to to the Tasnim news agency that is “linked to Iran’s hardliners”. Ahmady had been sentenced to nine years in jail and fined €600,000 ($730,000; £545,000) for “accumulating wealth through unlawful means from institutes seeking to overthrow the Iranian regime”.

The news agency also said that the anthropologist was also accused of seeking “cultural changes” related to women and children, and that he had allegedly been in contact with foreign media and with the embassies of European countries with the aim of “promoting homosexuality” in Iran.

>> continue reading at BBC News

Kurdistan based journalist Wladimir van Wilgenburg writes on his blog that Kameel Ahmady accused on social media the Iranian judicial authorities of targeting him and trying to stop his research.

According to him, Ahmady wrote:

“The main judicial point of accusations against my research is about the most harmful traditions against the children in the least privileged regions (minority areas of Iran) but the main goal is to accuse my researches’ relation with the cultural influence of 2030 document and halting my activities and research regarding minorities.”

With the “2030 document” he means UNESCO’s education agenda that Iran refused to implement. The goal of the global Education 2030 agenda is to “guarantee access to education for all people, irrespective of age, sex and religion”.

The journalist mentions Ahmady’s documentary “In the name of tradition” about FGM in Iran that I am embedding below. Ahmady travels with his colleagues in rural areas in west and south of Iran and talks with women about circumcision of girls: Are girls circumcised here? Why do you do it? Who does it? The film concludes with statements by a doctor and a cleric who condemn this tradition.

In The Name Of Tradtion (Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C) in Iran- Film by: kameel Ahmady)

Ahmady has recently redesigned his website with a large amount of articles and several documentaries.

Kameel Ahmady, who grew up – as he writes – in a “bi-cultural town with Kurds and Turks” and spoke Kurdish at home, Turkish with his neighbourhood friends and Farsi at school, left after the 1979 Revolution home to study in the UK. In Europe, people from Iran (and many other so-called non-Western countries) might face other issues, see my post from 2006 Censorship of research in the USA: Iranians not allowed to publish papers and from 2010: The “illegal” anthropologist: Shahram Khosravi’s Auto-Ethnography of Borders about everyday racism and global apartheid.

I remember having read about several anthropologists that have been detained in Iran, among others French-Iranian Fariba Adelkhah earlier last year and Homa Hoodfar four years ago.

UPDATE 3.1.2020

Kameel Ahmady contacted me to inform that one of the charges against him was a university visit to Ramallah university in Palestine through the occupied territories. According to Iranian law vising Israel is not allowed and carries prison sentence. The evidence of his travel is the article on his website Hijacked nations; Ethnography of Palestine and Israel (2005)

UPDATE 7.1.2021:

British filmmaker and scholar John Chua, who has worked together with Kameel Ahmady, calls in The Independent for help from the UK: Helping the British academic imprisoned in Iran is Boris Johnson’s chance to redeem himself

Engaged anthropologists beaten by the Mexican police

Kameel Ahmady. Photo: Kameel Ahmady, Wikipedia

David Graeber dies aged 59: "One of the most original anthropologists"

Published on September 4, 2020 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, persons and theories

A few hours ago I was shocked to read that David Graeber has died. He was only 59 years old. Graeber was one the most known and most original anthropologists in the world. He was one of the leading figures of the Occupy movement and got famous among the general public with his books on Debt and Bullshit Jobs.

There is still no official information about what happened besides from that he died in a hospital, according to his wife who tweeted:

Yesterday the best person in a world, my husband and my friend .@davidgraeber died in a hospital in Venice.

— Nika Dubrovsky (@nikadubrovsky) September 3, 2020

David Graeber has always been one of my favorite anthropologists. I liked the way he combined anthropology with activism and search for alternatives to capitalism and other oppressive ideologies and systems. One of the first pieces I read by him was Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Everytime there was something in the news about him, I was eager to write about it (while I was still active blogging).

David Graeber in 2006.
Photo: Lorenz Khazaleh

My first encounter with him was here on antropologi.info. He commented om some reviews about his Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology that I linked to and criticized some of his points. Two years later, we met at a conference about anthropology and cosmopolitanism in Britain and chatted a bit about anthropology and the internet and probably also about conference culture. I stíll remember very well that his presentation was one of the highlights, not only because of its content (“Democracy is no Western invention“), but also because of his presentation style. In contrast to most other paper givers, he was actually able to communicate with the audience and use normal language to express complex ideas.

Three years after the conference, in 2009, we ended up in a little fight here on this blog. He had just just signed a petition calling for boycotting Israel and I had blogged about it, using his name in the headline. He did not like this exposure. On the one hand his reaction was surprising, on the other hand it was somehow understandable: His activism had caused him lots of trouble already. A few years before this blog post he was fired from Yale, most likely because of his activism.

The most recent publication by him that I enjoyed is the audio book of his bestseller Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. I listened to it on long walks last summer. “Such a wise book”, I often thought while listening. “You learn so much more than just about the book’s topic. I definitely should blog about it.”

Many more substantial texts have been written about David Graeber’s death already, see among others David Graeber: 1961-2020 by Greg Downey at Neuroanthropology who links to a long post with many videos on the website heavy.com: David Graeber Dead: Anthropologist & Anti-Capitalist Thinker Behind ‘We Are the 99%’ Slogan Dies at 59. Interestingly, all major news sites write about him, see Deutsche Welle: Anthropologist and Occupy activist David Graeber dies or New York Times: David Graeber, Caustic Critic of Inequality, Is Dead at 59 and last time I checked David Graeber, anthropologist and author of Bullshit Jobs, dies aged 59 has been the most read news story on The Guardian.

UPDATES:

Tribute by his friend and anthropologist Vito Laterza on facebook:

Two books stand out from his impressive intellectual production:
– “Debt: the first 5000 years” – a masterly history of debt and how it has been leveraged against people and communities in historical and contemporary perspective.
– “Bullshit jobs: a theory” – a wide-ranging critique of the current system of worth and valuation of jobs that would make you think very differently about the “virtues” of the uncontrolled growth of managerialism and digitalisation in today’s companies and organisations. This work is particularly important to understand the current moment. As David noted in a recent Politico op-ed, the pandemic has clearly shown that those who perform the most important jobs are paid the least.

Anarchist dissident and historian Andrej Grubacic: In loving memory of our friend, comrade, and mentor…David Graeber Including the introduction from the forthcoming Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution by David Graeber and Andrej Grubačić:

When he died, David had just completed his most recent book, one on which he worked for several years. He teamed up with British archeologist David Wengrow to challenge some of the more stubborn assumptions of mainstream social science. This was one of the most ambitious projects David embarked upon, and it should be published in 2021.

In Memoriam David Graeber by focaalblog with comments by several anthropologists, among others Don Kalb, University of Bergen:

David was the most important anthropologist of his generation and by far its most brilliant and effective public intellectual. He reached wider audiences than anyone of us, possibly even larger than Margaret Mead in anthropology’s heydays. His message was as revolutionary as hers, if not more so. It announced nothing less than an anthropology that would research, critique, and go beyond capitalism.

Or by Alpa Shah, London School of Economics:

I often thought of David Graeber as a genius. But of the many things that David taught me, it was that there is in fact a genius in each of us. We can’t see this because we don’t have the collective structures to realise the brilliance within us, because we live in a world that violently excludes the many, that reserves the acquisition of individual heroism for the few, a world today driven by finance capital.
For David, anthropology was important for it was a means to resurrect other possible more beautiful worlds, imagine societies other than our own exclusive one, figure out the larger implications, and then offer those ideas back to the world for an anti-capitalist politics.

David Graeber’s Strength – beautiful tribute by Olivier Coulaux at the footnotes blog:

In your intellectual life, you can sometimes get lucky, and be pulled into writings that give you the wonderful feeling of being released from your intellectual routines and shackles. Numerous people have seen this rupture as the necessary condition to engage in reflexive work. I remember experiencing this feeling more than a few times during my initiation into anthropology, and Graeber’s oeuvre never failed to make me feel that way.
(…)
What is about Graeber’s work that makes you look at your everyday routine, and that makes you feel like re-discovering it for the first time? And what is it that makes that perspective so important?

The new Anthropology Journal Ticker (beta): Get updated with recent open access journal articles!

Published on August 18, 2020 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, internal notes, journal articles / papers, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing

How do you stay up to date with the most recent journal articles in anthropology? How do you navigate the growing amount of texts? How do you find something interesting? While most academics might have their own personal routine, there is as far as I know no public overview online.

The overview over Anthropology Open Access Journals is one of the most visited pages on antropologi.info. I recently updated the list and and then used it to create The Anthropology Journal Ticker. This new site displays the most recent articles from more than 80 anthropology open access journals.

Currently it features articles from Mana, Cultural Anthropology, the Journal of Extreme Anthropology, the New Florida Journal of Anthropology, and Anuac on the front page.

Unfortunately I was not able to include all journals. The reason is that the only automated way to create such an overview works via RSS feeds. In the same way I created a few years ago The Anthropology Newspaper that displays the most recent blog posts. While all blogs publish RSS-feeds by default, this is not the case with journals. I found out that around one in three journals lack RSS feeds. But there are ways to create feeds for websites without feeds and I am exploring the options. With the Feed Creator by Fivefilters I was able to add the journals Cultural Anthropology andf Asian Ethnology to the list. RSS Bridge is another tool.

Categorizing the journals is no easy task. So far I only categorized them by language. Many journals are multilingual, though, they post articles in both English and Spanish for example. Selecting the category English will therefore also display posts in Spanish. I will have to find a better solution. As additionaly only very few journals tag their entries, I was looking for other ways to browse the content of this site. A good solution seems to be the Random Posts page. Each time you visit or refresh this page three random articles are displayed. Have a try!

Visit The Anthropology Journal Ticker at https://journals.antropologi.info

This site is work in progress. Let me know if there are journals to add and how to make the site more useful. Thanks!

Thanks to the Corona slowdown, I had time to do some work with antropologi.info – some updates behind the scenes, correcting dead links, working with the layout etc, I hope it stays like that!

SEE ALSO:

Do we (still) need journals?