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Book and papers online: Working towards a global community of anthropologists

Published on February 10, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, cosmopolitanism, globalisation, journal articles / papers, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, University / Academia

How many Siberian anthropologists do you know? What are Chinese anthropologists engaged in? The discipline of anthropology is quite ethnocentric. It is dominated by research institutes in the U.S and Britain. Only a small elite interacts on a global level. It’s time to globalize anthropology! To connect anthropologists from all over the world, to make anthropology more multivocal, richer and diverse. We need to create World Anthropologies.

That’s the endeavor of the World Anthropologies Network.

One year ago, Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar published the book World Anthropologies. Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power. Now, you can read the whole book online, including more recent papers.

Among others, you can read Reshaping Anthropology: A View from Japan (by Shinji Yamashita), Anthropology in a Post-Colonial Africa: the Survival Debate (by Paul Nchoji Nkwi) or World Anthropologies. Cosmopolitics for a New Global Scenario in Anthropology (by Gustavo Lins Ribeiro) and many more.

“We intend this volume as a contribution to the making of a new transnational community of anthropologists”, Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar write in their introduction. “Anthropologies everywhere will benefit from the scholarship already existing in globally fragmented spaces”:

We see a tremendous transformative potential in embracing this project. Whether conceived in terms of diversifying anthropological practices while maintaining a unified sense of the field or adumbrating a ‘post-anthropological era’ in which the idea of a single or universal anthropology is put into question, we believe there are great gains to be made by opening up to new possibilities of dialogue and exchange among world anthropologies.
(…)
Eurocentrism can only be transcended if we approach the modern colonial world system from the exteriority, i.e. from the colonial difference (modernity’s hidden face). The result of this operation is diversality or the possibility of epistemic diversity as a universal project.

>> continue reading the introduction

>> overview over all papers of the World Anthropologies Network

The network already has quite a lot of members from all continents – except from Africa (typical somehow!)

In Anthropology News October Gustavo Lins Ribeiro wrote about the lacking globalisation of anthropology, see my summary How can we create a more plural anthropological community?

(Thanks to the journal Ethnologic at the University of Munich for the link. The World Anthropologies website has been down for several month, but now it’s up and running again)

Open Source Anthropology : Are anthropologists serious about sharing knowledge?

For an Anthropology of Cosmopolitanism

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

More and more anthropologists, but they’re absent from public debates – “Engaging Anthropology” (1)

The Five Major Challenges for Anthropology

No longer access to “Anthropology Today”

Published on February 7, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, journal articles / papers, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, University / Academia

The new issue of Anthropology Today is out – one of my favorite journals. I used to summarize the most interesting articles here but from now on I’ll no longer be able to do that. The Norwegian University libraries have cancelled their subscriptions as a protest against the publisher’s (Blackwell) “unacceptable conditions and price increases”. I was reminded of that when I tried to download an article a few minutes ago.

This brings us back to our favorite topic Open Access and an disturbing article on Savage Minds on PR- firms hired by the American Anthropological Association to fight open access to scholarship (not related to the Blackwell issue, though, but nevertheless a must-read!)

The new issue of Anthropology Today is out - one of my favorite journals. I used to summarize the most interesting articles here but from now on I'll no longer be able to do that. The Norwegian University libraries have…

Five new anthropology theses online!

Published on February 7, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, journal articles / papers, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing

More and more anthropology theses are published online in digital archives. Recently, five new theses were added in DUO (Digital publications at the University of Oslo):

Frank Magnussen: Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital. A medical anthropological look at complementary medicine in public health care

First, I have wanted to show how alternative medicine (in this case mainly homeopathy and acupuncture) is offered in public health care in Britain. Secondly, I have briefly discussed this from a Norwegian context and looked into the possibilities of CAM in public health care in Norway.

Katrine Ree Holmøy: “All we want is our freedom”. An intersectional approach to Kurdish lives in Istanbul

Within the context of the ongoing conflict between the Kurdish minority and the Turkish state, what I describe and analyse is the everyday lives of differently situated young Kurds in Istanbul. Applying an intersectional perspective, I explore how these symbols of collective identity naturalise the difference of power within the group, while obscuring differences deriving from individual positionings on grids of power connected to other social divisions, such as gender, age, level of education, or economic status.

Sverre Søyland: The Need for Otherness. Spaces of Tourism in Nepal

In this thesis seek I to find identify and explain relationships between tourists and the places visited, consumption and identity. I show how the there can be said to exist a moral order among tourist. In this order status is best achieved in finding a balance between frequenting places perceived as authentic and off the beaten path, while not appearing to be overly concerned with doing so.

Camilla Frøseth Wedul: Defending nature in Beijing. An analysis of a Chinese environmental organization and their efforts for a greener China

Friends of Nature (FON) is China’s oldest existing environmental NGO and their aim is to establish and disseminate respect and understanding for nature in the Chinese population, especially among the young. I look at FON’s human resources and other capital forms to explain how their projects come about. I also look at the political and legal restrictions within which they must keep and the strategies they employ in dialogue with these.

Inger-Lise Schwab: Learning to “walk the talk”. Language socialization in an MBA classroom and the production of marginality

The empirical material is drawn from a Masters of Business Administration classroom in Oslo, Norway. I present what I call ”MBA talk” as a discursive activity that privileges words and individual intentionality while simultaneously providing the basis for group identity.

More and more anthropology theses are published online in digital archives. Recently, five new theses were added in DUO (Digital publications at the University of Oslo):

Frank Magnussen: Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital. A medical anthropological look at complementary medicine in…

Doctoral thesis: Towards a transnational Islam

Published on January 21, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Europe, fieldwork / methods, globalisation, journal articles / papers, migration, religion cosmology, Us and Them, youth

Young muslims are moving from an Islam based on the culture of their homeland to an increasingly transnationally embedded Islam of Muslims from many different countries and cultures. That’s one of the findings in the doctoral thesis by Norwegian anthropologist Christine M. Jacobsen that is ~~now~~ no longer available online. (UPDATE 26.3.2020)

Contributing to an emerging “anthropology of Islam in Europe”, she writes, her thesis is concerned with exploring continuities and discontinuities in religious identities and practices in a context of international migration and globalization. She has conducted fieldwork among youth and students who participate in two Islamic organizations in Oslo.

The situation of belonging to a minority group, she writes, means that young Muslims cannot take their religion for granted, and that they must engage in the redefinition of identity/difference and of Islamic traditions. And in this redefinition, young Muslims increasingly aspire to engage directly with Islamic texts in order to “choose” which position or interpretation to adhere to. They increasingly engage in discussion and debate on issues that were previously mainly an area of scholarly debate.

In order to make this thesis relevant to the broader comparative field of studies of Islam in Europe, Jacobsen draws on insights from studies of young Muslims elsewhere in Europe.

She criticizes the prevailing methodological nationalism in studies on immigrants and migration (the paradigm of the nation-state as the principle organizing unit of society). She writes:

Discussions about integration often ignore distinctions related to e.g. class, generation, gender, and urban processes, and tend to reify the distinction between “Us” (the Norwegian society representing Norwegian values) and “Them” (being the foreigners that must be integrated). Often, such discussions proceed without questioning the premises upon which our understanding of “integration” depends, and the way in which integration is part of a nation-making process.

In research that is based in political-administrative and methodological nationalist perspective, immigrants and the cultural and religious forms they represent tend to be constructed as “social problems” and “deviance” that need to be solved and brought into order through governing processes (Lithman 2004).

An example is the issue of arranged marriage:

Depending on the perspective adopted, arranged marriage might appear as an issue of deviancy among immigrants or as a part of how a majority of mankind organizes its social life. The consequences for anthropology as cultural critique are obviously important. When immigrants and the social and cultural forms they represent are constructed as “social problems” and “deviance”, they can neither allow worthwhile and interesting critiques of “our own society”, nor enlighten us about other human possibilities, to paraphrase Marcus and Fischer.

Within this nationalistic perspective, Islam is usually approached in terms of how it hinders or facilitates the “integration” of “Muslim immigrants” into “Norway” (or other European societies, “the West”). Studies of Muslims in Europe based on what Lithman calls “wonderment over society” seem to be less frequent, she writes:

When framed within the perspective of a nationalist methodology, this endeavour necessarily must result in ethnocentrism. Furthermore, this perspective has certain consequences not only for the description of the social and cultural aspects involved in migration, but also for its moral evaluation and as a basis for policy making.

She prefers “methodological relativism”:

Even though it is impossible to exclude all value-assumptions from research, I find striving towards considering different practices and traditions on their own terms worthwhile. If not, it is difficult to grasp the meaningfulness of social and cultural practices to the people that engage in them, or to see them as alternative ways of organizing human life, rather than just as deviance from a norm.

~~>> Download the thesis Staying on the straight path: Religious identities and practices among young muslims in Norway by Christine M. Jacobsen (BORA, Bergen Open Research Archive)~~

For those who read Norwegian: I’ve interviewed Christine M. Jacobsen a few weeks ago, see Doktorgrad på unge norske muslimer: På vei til en transnasjonal islam

LINKS UPDATED 26.3.2020

Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves

Muslims in Calcutta: Towards a middle-class & moderation

What does it mean to be Muslim in a secular society? Anthropologist thinks ahead

Islam in Morocco: TV and Internet more important than mosques

Lila Abu-Lughod: It’s time to give up the Western obsession with veiled Muslim women

Young muslims are moving from an Islam based on the culture of their homeland to an increasingly transnationally embedded Islam of Muslims from many different countries and cultures. That's one of the findings in the doctoral thesis by Norwegian…

Fieldwork reveals: Bush administration is lying about the “war on terror” in the Sahara

Published on December 11, 2006 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, ethics, journal articles / papers, poverty, University / Academia, Us and Them

“The US is sending troops to the Sahara desert of west Africa to open what it calls a new front in the war on terror”, the Guardian reported three years ago. “The ‘official truth’ about the ‘war on terror’ on the Sahara-Sahel is a ‘lie’”, anthropologist Jeremy Keenan writes in Anthropology Today December and argues that in this situation, anthropologists have to act as independent witnesses and have to refuse collaborating with intelligence agencies and government bodies.

Keenan has been – according to himself – the sole ‘external’ or ‘foreign’ witness to a sequence of events associated with the US administration’s ‘global war on terror’ that many Tuareg believe has irreversibly transformed the central Sahara and Sahel, as well as their lives and livelihoods. Keenan has done research in the central Sahara for more then 30 years. He writes:

As a result of more or less continuous and at times microscopically detailed field research, much of which has been undertaken by and in collaboration with local Tuareg in Algeria, Niger, Mali and Libya, and with Toubou in Chad, we now know that all the incidents used to justify the launch of this new front in the ‘war on terror’ were either fiction, in that they simply did not happen, or were manufactured by US and Algerian military intelligence services.

(…)

How and why did such a monstrous deception take place? The ‘how’ is simple. First, the Algerian and US military intelligence services channelled a stream of disinformation to an industry of ‘terrorism experts’, conservative ideologues and a compliant media, whose prevailing ‘cut and paste’ culture has made them the perfect mouthpiece for an administration that operates through the Orwellian concept of ‘reality control’ and ‘proof by reiteration’. The result is that several thousand articles have turned the great ‘lie’ into the ‘official truth’.

Second, if a story is to be fabricated, it helps if the location is far away and ‘beyond verification’. The Sahara is the perfect place – larger than the United States and effectively closed to public access.

As we know, the CIA has started sponsering anthropologists to gather sensitive information in their so-called “war on terror”.

Here, anthropologists have a key role to play, Keenan writes:

The role of the anthropologist in such situations (as in all his/her work) must be to provide field-based information that can counter the propaganda emanating from the ever growing (and now increasingly privatized) intelligence and other war agencies. At the very least, the anthropologist must be the witness, the recorder, perhaps the interpreter and, where necessary, the author of the ‘truth’.

In the present critical juncture, anthropologists have a key role to play in the ‘war on terror’: to remain located outside the corrupting sphere of intelligence agencies and government bodies and to act as independent witnesses and reporters. This requires considerable courage, not necessarily because of dangers in the field situation, but because access to the field, on which the anthropologist’s professional career often depends, is likely to be terminated.

Even more serious for anthropologists in American universities is that such actions, especially in the prevailing‘McCarthyist’ climate of the Bush-Cheney administration, may increasingly lead to self-censorship as the result of threats to employment prospects.

The risks are not so high in ‘old Europe’. But there is no certainty that similar pressures as those in the USA will not be brought to bear on anthropologists and other academics in the UK. After all, it was only in October that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s offer of £1.3 million to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)45 attempted to inveigle academics, anthropologists in particular, to help it in ‘combating terrorism by countering radicalisation’.

In this duplicitous incident, the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) played a key role in getting the project cancelled, at least for the time being. With such potential threats to anthropologists greater now than at any time in the past, it is imperative that our professional associations publicly recommit themselves to the protection of all anthropologists from any such pressures and threats.

The text is not available online (for subscribers only. But Keenan has written on this issue here as well:

Jeremy Keenan: Bush’s Imaginary Front in the War on Terror (AlterNet, 28.9.06)

More information:

Saharan peoples are falsely accused of terrorist acts (ESRC Science Today, June 2004)

Jason Motlagh: The Trans Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative: U.S. takes terror fight to Africa’s ‘Wild West’ (Global Research, San Francisco Chronicle, 30.12.05)

Anthropology Today editor Gustaaf Houtman comments:

If anthropologists, as a particularly exposed branch of academia, are to have any value at all in the ‘war on terror’, we must, to adopt a Quaker maxim coined in Nazi Germany, ‘talk truth to power’. But talking truth is clearly not enough. We must, first, be wary of ‘spin’ and find new and more appropriate ways to converse with government agencies without compromising our academic independence. And second, we must ensure we are actually heard. So let us engage the world of popular communications to our best ability on issues that matter.

UPDATE:

The dangerous militarisation of anthropology

“War on terror”: CIA sponsers anthropologists to gather sensitive information / see also debate on this on Savage Minds

Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relations

Bush, “war of terror” and the erosion of free academic speech: Challenges for anthropology

USA: Censorship threatens fieldwork – A call for resistance

Two Books Explore the Sins of Anthropologists Past and Present

Embedded anthropology? Anthropologist studies Canadian soldiers in the field

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

"The US is sending troops to the Sahara desert of west Africa to open what it calls a new front in the war on terror", the Guardian reported three years ago. "The ‘official truth’ about the ‘war on terror’ on…