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Jack Goody: "The West has never been superior"

Published on September 7, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, books, cosmopolitanism, history, persons and theories, Us and Them

(LINKS UPDATED 8.9.2020)

Are democracy, capitalism, freedom and the concept of romantic love unique inventions of the West? No. In his new book, anthropologist Jack Goody shows that the superiority of the West is largely unreal, even if we look to the recent past.

In “The Theft of History”, Goody criticizes both Western historical writing and his own discipline anthropology, professor Alfredo Ascanio writes in a review at OhMyNews:

For example, it was always believed that democracy was born in Athens and in fact there appeared a particular form of democracy, but democracy existed first in Carthage, even in some cities in the Mediterranean, India, China and other “tribal” societies.

Karl Max and Max Weber were wrong in their thesis about capitalism, because capitalism — despite the industrial revolution — was far more widespread. It was first a product of sowing cotton and the exploitation of silk in India and China.

In another example, Goody explains how Elias and Braudel have overemphasized the European contribution in relation to modernity, when in fact this happened first in India and China. The concept of capitalism is rather a concept of the 19-century, says Goody, which should be used more carefully and has only been used for overvaluation of the differences between Europe and Asia.

And in Asia, the reality was always more advanced than the West in art and science, even in what was considered romantic love. It was not a Western invention but is a universal sentiment that already existed.

>> read the whole review at OhMyNews

In the introduction, Goody explains the title of the book:

The ‘theft of history’ of the title refers to the take-over of history by the west. That is, the past is conceptualized and presented according to what happened on the provincial scale of Europe, often western Europe, and then imposed upon the rest of the world.

The books is inspired by his research in Africa:

After several years’ residence among African ‘tribes’ as well as in a simple kingdom in Ghana, I came to question a number of the claims Europeans make to have ‘invented’ forms of government (such as democracy), forms of kinship (such as the nuclear family), forms of exchange (such as the market), forms of justice, when embryonically at least these were widely present elsewhere.

These claims are embodied in history, both as an academic discipline and in folk discourse. Obviously there have been many great European achievements in recent times, and these have to be accounted for. But they often owed much to other urban cultures such as China.

(…)

The closer I looked at the other facets of the culture of Eurasia, and the more experience I gained of parts of India, China, and Japan, the more I felt that the sociology and history of the great states or ‘civilizations’ of Eurasia needed to be understood as variations one of another.

>> read the whole introduction (Cambridge University Press)

The book has also been reviewed by The Canadian Review of Sociology and Keith Hart.

Amartya Sen: Democracy Isn’t ‘Western’ this text was also debated on Savage Minds

For an Anthropology of Cosmopolitanism

Ethnocentric anthropology and Working towards a global community of anthropologists

Anthropologists condemn the use of terms of “stone age” and “primitive”

(LINKS UPDATED 8.9.2020) Are democracy, capitalism, freedom and the concept of romantic love unique inventions of the West? No. In his new book, anthropologist Jack Goody shows that the superiority of the West is largely unreal, even if…

How to challenge Us-and-Them thinking? Interview with Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Published on August 28, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, globalisation, interdisciplinary, migration, persons and theories, University / Academia, Us and Them

As some of you might know, I work as a journalist at the interdisciplinary research programme Culcom – Cultural Complexity in the New Norway. I’ve just put online the English translation of my interview with Thomas Hylland Eriksen, research director of Culcom.

We talk about how hard it is to challenge conventional academic thinking and to establish a new analytical view of the world.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen says:

– What we are trying to do is shift the analytical gaze in a direction where the nation-state and the ethnic group are not viewed as the most important unit. It is here researchers like Knut Kjeldstadli have been vital in insisting on the significance of class, or Oddbjørn Leirvik, who points out that differences in value-based questions cuts across the majority and minority population.

– In this way, lines of distinction that are somewhat different than those common to immigrant research, in which an us-and-them way-of-thinking is common, get established. And in addition, the transnational perspective leads to a de-centering of the nation-state; it is almost like a small Copernican revolution.

We also talk about open access and dissemination via our website. He says:

– Working in a place where most of what is published is electronically available and can be downloaded as a PDF has been a dream of mine for many years, even in the transnational sense: Then people who are in Switzerland and India can get onto our webpages, download texts and use our research in their own work. There is no reason why this should cost money.

>> read the whole interview with Thomas Hylland Eriksen

There are two more new interviews online about related issues.

Hans Erik Næss criticizes in his thesis the methodologicial nationalism in sociology text books. Sociology does not focus enough on transnational aspects in society. His thesis contains not only suggestions for a better sociology, but also an alternative required reading list.

>> read the whole interview: “In favor of a more transnational sociology”

Gunn Camilla Stang has written one of the first studies on Polish labour migrants in Norway. She says that debates about migration should focus more on the possiblities of learning. In viewing Polish laborers primarily as (cheap) labor, companies miss out in a great deal of knowledge they could have used to improve routines and products.

>> read the whole interview “More than “social dumping””

And Arnfinn Haagensen Midtbøen explains us why Scandinavia should be illuminated as an interesting region in migration research.

>> Interview: Does migration strengthen the nation-state?

We have relaunched our website, and our English pages are “still under construction”

As some of you might know, I work as a journalist at the interdisciplinary research programme Culcom - Cultural Complexity in the New Norway. I've just put online the English translation of my interview with Thomas Hylland Eriksen, research director…

Thesis: How Indian women fight the stigma of divorce

Published on June 29, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Asia, gender, journal articles / papers, persons and theories

Three weeks ago, anthropologist Siru Aura defended her doctoral dissertation Women and Marital Breakdown in South India: Reconstructing Homes, Bonds and Persons at the University of Helsinki. She has studied divorced, separated and deserted women from different socio-religious backgrounds in the city of Bangalore in South India.

In her conclusion she makes several interesting points. We all know that we should avoid essentializing. Particularly since the 1990’s, Siru Aura writes, there has been a tendency to emphasise the differences among the various groups of Indian women, based their cultural, social, religious or regional backgrounds. One should avoid presenting a “monolithic” picture of “an Indian woman” – a representation that does not exist in real life.

But this focus on diversity can make us blind to seeing what these divorced and separated women have in common. In her thesis, she challenges the popular notion that religion is a main determinator of a person’s social position in India. It’s rather being a wife and being in an unequal power relationship with the husband.

The Indian proverb “there are only two castes: men and women” highlights that the inequality between men and women is so enormous that it overpowers differences between the women, Siru Aura writes:

The significance of wifehood in the South Indian environment leads to my suggestion that there is such a thing as a South Indian marital breakdown. Although the women of different religious communities (Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Parsi) each have their own religious personal laws concerning marriage and divorce, they share similarities in their ways of constructing wifehood. Therefore the practical reasons and consequences of marital problems are often similar in different religious groups.
(…)
The women, from the richest to the most impoverished; from the most highly-educated and sophisticated to the most illiterate women; from their various religious backgrounds: all tolerated severe harassment throughout their marriages and their threshold of leaving the marriage was very high.

But as her study shows, more and more women question male domination. They use the cultural and social structures of their society creatively in order to improve their situation – for example by adopting the prestigious family roles of sons or fathers and by the means of legal procedures and public demonstrations and by the other activities of women’s organisations.

The anthropologist thinks that the womens’ activities “could gradually lead to a greater acceptance of divorce as an unfortunate but not unavoidable state of affairs and the abolishment of the stigma attached to divorced or separated women”:

I suggest that the transformation of social and kin relations will continue because marital breakdown may become a more common occurrence in Bangalore and even broaden further in South India and consequently the number of love marriages as well as the number of single women will also increase. Despite the importance of wifehood in South India, the conditions of wifehood are changing.

Marital breakdown is an anomaly in South India. In Siru Aura’s view, the focus on the margins of the kinship relations revitalises kinship studies:

It emphasises the importance of looking between the structures and highlights the worth of looking beyond the kinship rules and into the “exceptions” to the rules, which are, as I suggest, as frequent as the rules themselves.

As I have shown, although the exceptions are hard to pin down, they are of great consequence: ignoring them may in fact distort kinship theory. Moreover, this study demonstrates that examining something truly significant in Indian society such as personhood, gender or law, or the interplay between an agent and the structure, leads us to study kinship. This keeps the study of kinship at the heart of anthropology in India and makes the renewal of it an anthropological mission.

>> download the thesis

Unmarried Women in Arab Countries: Status No Longer Dependent upon the Husband

China: Where women rule the world and don’t marry

On African Island: Only women are allowed to propose marriage

Lila Abu Lughod: “In Israel and Palestine we have an amazing opportunity”

Published on May 19, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, Middle East, persons and theories, politics, Us and Them

(via CultureMatters) While Israelis celebrate the 60th anniversary of their state’s founding, Palestinians around the world are mourning the “Nakba” – or “catastrophe” – that drove so many into exile. SPIEGEL ONLINE interviewed anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod on the Nakba and today’s Palestine.

Together with Ahmad Sa’di, she published the book “Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory”. Abu-Lughod’s father was Palestinian.

“I don’t see the anniversary as a time of mourning but as an occasion for trying to get the world to listen to what really happened and to think about how this should shape our vision of a solution”, she says:

Palestinians and Israelis are tightly entangled. Any resolution must involve a recognition of the fact that Israel was founded on the expulsion of Palestinians. Then we can think and talk together about restitution, redress, compensation, or whatever it takes for a more just way forward. In Israel and Palestine we have an amazing opportunity — to think about changing history by considering a democratic state with a living future for everyone.

The number of those who actually lived through the Nakba decreases every year. The Nakba commemoration has spurred storytelling, the anthropologist says:

Dr. Rosemary Sayigh, who has been interviewing Palestinians about their experiences for decades, describes her work as a race against time. But Diana Allan, an anthropologist from Harvard who has been videotaping old men and women in the refugee camps all over Lebanon to create a Nakba Archive, would be the first to insist that though it is important to get these stories, it should not distract us from the contemporary problems Palestinians face, in Lebanon and elsewhere.

I have been following with interest, though, the way this particular Nakba commemoration has galvanized people and spurred storytelling: a good example is the series of “untold stories” on the Web site of the Institute for Middle East Understanding.

>> read the whole interview in SPIEGEL ONLINE

For information on her book on Nakba, see the Columbia University Press blog, The Institute for Middle East Understanding, This Week in Palestine and the review on H-Net.

New book by Lila Abu-Lughod: The Politics of Television in Egypt

Interview with Lila Abu-Lughod on women and Islam in the wake of the American war in Afghanistan (Asiasource)

Anthropologists on the Israel-Lebanon conflict

“Voices”: Anthropologist publishes e-book about Palestinian women

(via CultureMatters) While Israelis celebrate the 60th anniversary of their state's founding, Palestinians around the world are mourning the "Nakba" - or "catastrophe" - that drove so many into exile. SPIEGEL ONLINE interviewed anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod on the Nakba and…

Maurice Bloch: Religion is a Figment of Human Imagination

Published on April 30, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, journal articles / papers, persons and theories, religion cosmology

Why did religions evolve? According to anthropologist Maurice Bloch, there is nothing special with religion. It’s just a product of human imagination – in the same way as nations are, Bloch writes in an article to be published in June, the New Scientist informs.

The development of religion is dependent on the development of imagination. We had to evolve the necessary brain architecture to imagine things and beings that don’t physically exist, and the possibility that people somehow live on after they’ve died, Bloch argues according to New Scientist:

Once we’d done that, we had access to a form of social interaction unavailable to any other creatures on the planet. Uniquely, humans could use what Bloch calls the “transcendental social” to unify with groups, such as nations and clans, or even with imaginary groups such as the dead. The transcendental social also allows humans to follow the idealised codes of conduct associated with religion.

“What the transcendental social requires is the ability to live very largely in the imagination,” Bloch writes.

“One can be a member of a transcendental group, or a nation, even though one never comes in contact with the other members of it,” says Bloch. Moreover, the composition of such groups, “whether they are clans or nations, may equally include the living and the dead.”

(…)

“Once we realise this omnipresence of the imaginary in the everyday, nothing special is left to explain concerning religion,” he says.

>> read the whole story in the New Scientist

Bloch has recently been interviewed in Vikerkaar / Eurozine and was presented as an anti-anthropologist: “It may well be that anthropology departments disappear, and that wouldn’t bother me very much”, he said.

UPDATE Maximilian Forte has written a summary of the interview with Bloch, see Maurice Bloch: “Reluctant Anthropologist” or “Anti-Anthropologist”?

Why did religions evolve? According to anthropologist Maurice Bloch, there is nothing special with religion. It's just a product of human imagination - in the same way as nations are, Bloch writes in an article to be published in June,…