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Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relations

Published on May 19, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, ethics, fieldwork / methods, politics, Us and Them

Call you call it prostitution if anthropologists work for the military? Opinions are divided on this issue. As a pacifist, my answer is obvious. Others will stress that they’ve done their job as an anthropologist if they have succeeded in teaching soldiers cultural awareness and respect to other customs (as stated on a conference in Norway last year).

In a long article in Red Nova, cultural anthropologist Montgomery McFate discusses anthropologists’ possible role in the U.S. military. She criticizes anthropologists’ “retreat to the Ivory Tower” after the Vietnam War. Does she want anthropologists to take up their questionable role they played role during the colonial era? It seems so. She writes:

“From the foregoing discussion, it might be tempting to conclude that anthropology is absent from the policy arena because it really is “exotic and useless.” However, this was not always the case. Anthropology actually evolved as an intellectual tool to consolidate imperial power at the margins of empire.”

On CENSA’s website we read that McFate “has spent the past few years trying to convince the Department of Defense that cultural knowledge should be a national security priority”.

>> read the whole article on Red Nova

UPDATE (20.5.05): I’ve only quickly scanned the article. Shortly after, Savage Minds’ author Dustin M. Wax has written a detailed review (!) of the McFate’s article:

“Her long article is a backhanded compliment to stubborn anthropologists whose knowledge and expertise is “urgently needed in time of war” but who, “bound by their own ethical code and sunk in a mire of postmodernism”, “entirely neglect U.S. forces”. I’ll cut straight to the chase: a functioning anthropology can never be on the side of “U.S. forces”. This is a practical as well as an ethical argument—it simply is not possible, even were there enough anthropologists who shared McFate’s priorities.

>> continue

Call you call it prostitution if anthropologists work for the military? Opinions are divided on this issue. As a pacifist, my answer is obvious. Others will stress that they've done their job as an anthropologist if they have succeeded in…

More and more blogging anthropologists – but the digital divide persists

Published on May 18, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, internet, websites

Savage Mind – the new anthropology group blog is big news and is being discussed in many blogs (interesting to see how fast the news is spread). Recently I mentioned several new anthro-blogs – Kerim Friedman has discovered even more, for example The Old Revolution by “tak”, a cultural anthropologist and New Yorker and a Tokyoite who has compiled a list of Anthropology and Japan blogs – even more to explore.

I began to work with this blog (which also includes a kind of Norwegian anthropology journal), because I missed anthropological content on the web. Much has changed since then. But nevertheless, my impression is that Internet is still a quite new medium for many anthropologists – at leasts in Norway. People here do read the national and regional newspapers online, send mails and transfer money. But none of my friends and people I know at the University know what a blog is, let alone RSS. Only a few have heard about Wikipedia. They’re not familiar with the gift economy principles on the Internet either (I heard of anthropologists who don’t publish online because they don’t want their ideas to be “stolen” (!) before they can elaborate them in a traditional paper-journal.

Those people (the majority) don’t participate in discussions. They are the unknown passive readers. It’s quite striking: All the (few) comments to entries in my Norwegian blog are made by people who already have a website or an own blog.

I think here we see another type of a digital divide – between those who know how to use the internet actively (or are interested in it) and those who don’t.

UPDATE: See also the post by Alexander Knorr on xirdalim on academic blogging and its difficulties: “What struck us most was the fact that the vast majority of our institute’s anthropology-students (and we have 1200+ !) never made good use of the ethno::log >> continue

Savage Mind - the new anthropology group blog is big news and is being discussed in many blogs (interesting to see how fast the news is spread). Recently I mentioned several new anthro-blogs - Kerim Friedman has discovered even more,…

Today’s National Day – or “Something rotten in the state of Norway”

Published on May 17, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, culture traditions, Europe, Us and Them

As today the people here in Norway celebrate the National day you might want to take a look at the essay collection SOMETHING ROTTEN IN THE STATE OF NORWAY, written by anthropologists and other social scientists four years ago.

From their introduction:

“In spite of the fact that the country possesses enormous financial resources, Norway is unable to administer this capital in an appropriate manner on behalf of the population. It is not invested in education, either at school or university, the health service is deteriorating, cultural institutions are not regarded as important and become balance sheet items.

We have brought about a country that stigmatises and excludes those inhabitants who do not conform to an increasingly uniform and standardised citizenship ideal. In the Norway of today market liberalism is the dominant attitude among the people and leaders.”

>> continue to Something Rotten in the State of Norway

See also:

Sámi flag will not fly in Oslo
Oslo Municipality will not hoist the Sámi flag on Constitution Day, 17 May, the Oslo Municipal Board decided. “We are not one people with two flags, but rather one people with one flag,” stated Labour Party member Runar Gerhardsen. >> continue

Of course you can read an official description of the National Day with typical Norwegian statements like “there’s no celebration quite like it anywhere else in the world.” or take a look at some 17.may-pictures with lots of people in their national costumes. There are also some photos on flickr. Or check Aftenposten (newspaper) for today’s photos.

From their…

New anthropology group blog: Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology

Published on May 17, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, persons and theories, politics, websites

Great! A new anthropology group blog! Something like an American version of the German Ethno::log. It was started the day before yesterday. We know some of the authors from other blogs. The authors are Alex Golub, Kerim Friedman, Dustin M. Wax, Nancy Leclerc, Antti Leppänen and Christopher M. Kelty.

From their self-description:

“Savage Minds is a collective web log devoted to both bringing anthropology to a wider audience as well as providing an online forum for discussing the latest developments in the field. We are a group of Ph.D. students and professors teaching and studying anthropology and are excited to share it with you. You can find out more about the contributors by clicking on the ‘about’ pages on the right for each of us.”

>> continue to Savage Mind

PS: Their newest entry deals with Anarchists in the Academy: Yale anthropologist David Graeber has been recently fired for his anarchist activism – something that was mentioned in Kerim Friedman’s blog before and shortly afterwards by Alex Golub. See some reviews of Graebers “Fragments of an anarchist anthropology”. Or download the whole book (pdf, 220kb) and visit the webpage Solidarity with David Graeber

One more blogging anthropologist: Antti Leppänen’s notes on Korea

Published on May 14, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Asia, fieldwork / methods, websites

Spring (or summer) has finally arrived in Oslo, so just a short note about another anthropology blog. Just saw it in my site statistics: Antti Leppänen is cultural anthropologist, a Ph.D. candidate at the University in Helsinki, Finnland, working on a thesis about Korea. In an earlier post he explains:

“I have been making net notes on Korea since last spring, to keep up with the developments since my last visit in summer 2002 and make notes of what interests me. Beginning this year I finally decided to change to a blog format. As my anthropology thesis is about keepers of small neighborhood shops, and that kind of an environment is where I’ve spent the longest periods of time in Korea, my blog entries are mostly about small businesses, “ordinary people”, social categories, urban space, and the like.”

>> continue to Antti Leppänen’s notes on Korea

In his most recent entry he links to a beautiful website: Cycles of Life in a Bengali Town based on the fieldwork of the anthropologists Ákos Östör and Lina Fruzzetti. (I see that also Ideas Bazar commented on this website yesterday)