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Interviews on Christians and Muslims, Class, Immigration History and Black Feminism

Published on April 5, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Europe, migration, religion cosmology, Us and Them

Four interviews that I’ve conducted for the research program “Cultural Complexity in the new Norway” have been translated into English:

The sacred space between Christians and Muslims – Interview with Oddbjørn Leirvik
Leirvik has been involved in inter-religious dialogue since the middle of the 1980s: “I want to investigate the space in between. The space between Christians and Muslims. I wonder whether there is an open landscape which we share and which nobody has control over.”

– Class, equally as important as ethnicity – Interview with Ivar Morken
For special needs educationalist Ivar Morken cultural complexity is just as much about class differences in a Norwegian valley as it is about immigration from distant lands.

Collecting immigrants’ life histories – before it’s too late – Interview with Knut Kjeldstadli
In the three volume “Norsk innvandringshistorie” ( A History of Immigration in Norway) the historian Knut Kjedstadli, showed that it is wrong to believe that Norway was a homogeneous society before the arrival of Pakistanis and Somalis.

In pursuit of “black feminism” in Norway – Interview with Beatrice Halsaa
What is the relationship between ethnic Norwegian and non-ethnic Norwegian feminists or immigrant women? This is one of the big questions that Beatrice Halsaa, leader of the Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research (SKK) is interested in.

Four interviews that I've conducted for the research program "Cultural Complexity in the new Norway" have been translated into English:

The sacred space between Christians and Muslims - Interview with Oddbjørn Leirvik
Leirvik has been involved in inter-religious dialogue since the middle…

The Five Major Challenges for Anthropology

Published on March 28, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, books, Europe, indigenous people / minorities, journal articles / papers, migration, persons and theories, Us and Them

17.12.2017: This is a very popular post. Therefore I have updated all links.

In her new book Plausible Prejudice: Everyday Experiences and Social Images of Nation, Culture and Race, Norwegian social anthropologist Marianne Gullestad identifies five major challenges for the discipline of anthropology. To understand the problems of the world today, we need to “decolonize anthropological knowledge”, she writes.

Anthropological knowledge is needed more than ever as steoreotypes and lack of knowledge flourish about people from other countries. But on the other hand, Gullestad stresses, anthropology is still influenced by its colonial past.

Here are the five major challenges for the discipline of anthropology according to Marianne Gullestad (page 346-347):

1st CHALLENGE: To regard understanding and confronting racism as worthwhile academic and political concerns, and not as a conflict that was resolved long ago.

2nd CHALLENGE: To look historically and ethnographically at race thinking in relation to colonialism and imperialism, political decolonization, economic globalization, the end of the Cold War, and the new role of the United States as successor to the European empires that were defeated in the 20th century.
Traditional nationally oriented historiography and locally oriented anthropology overlook many processes across continents which represent a store of unexpected connections and complex interpretative resources that will no doubt contribute substantially to the understanding of how the imperial and colonial past continues to shape present-day social categories, boundaries and practices.
This framing or research will often involve carrying out multi-sited and transcontinental fieldwork.

3rd CHALLENGE: To examine not only the ideas and practices of self-professed racists (…), but also the conventional wisdom sourrounding racial thinking and its various forms of institutionalization. Racial categories and negative stereotypes are often both intensely familiar and also vigorously denied and forgotten as expressions of racism. They exist as pernicious symbolic resources which in given situations might potentially be employed more or less by anyone, regardless of gender, age, class, and skin color. (…)

4th CHALLENGE: To take seriously the complexity and variability of race thinking, and how it feeds into and is nourished by everyday life. (…) In this respect, my research has shown that ancestry and descent are particularly central. In fact, I argue that the racial coding of the new focus on ‘culture’ is based on ideas about descent as a form of imagined kinship.

5th CHALLENGE: To do more ‘anthropology of anthropology’ by locating themes, peoples and perspectives that have largely been ignored as anthropologically uninteresting, such as the social life-worlds of majority populations in Europe and the United States, the experiences of formerly colonized peoples with Europeans (as colonizers, administrators, settlers, missionaries, developmental experts, tourists etc.), and the ideas and strategies of political and economic elites, regardless of their location in the world and their physical features.

UPDATE:

A very good comment by Bryan McKay (link updated). He writes, these five challenges should not be specific for anthropology:

“Substitute sexism, heterosexism, classism, et cetera for racism (and sex, sexuality/gender, class, et cetera for race) in the above challenges and you have a decent manifesto for any realm of critical cultural studies.”

Kambiz Kamrani at anthropology.net writes that he agrees with Gullestad, but:

Anthropology will never succeed until it clearly defines culture. That’s right, it hasn’t. Anthropology has completely failed the public in not being able to define culture.

>> read the whole post on anthropology.net (link updated, original post no longer available)

Erkan Saka disagrees:

This emphasis on definition is against all I know about social sciences. Not that I am for an all relativistic social science with no substance. But what I know is that an act of defining is part of a power struggle.

>> read his whole post (link updated)

Her book is a kind of “best-of”: It consists of a “remix” of ten previously published papers and three new texts, including the post-script that I’ve quoted from.

Some of these papers are available to download in full-text:

Marianne Gullestad: Blind Slaves of our Prejudices: Debating ‘Culture’ and ‘Race’ in Norway

Marianne Gullestad: Normalising racial boundaries. The Norwegian dispute about the term ‘neger’

Marianne Gullestad: Mohammed Atta and I. Identification, discrimination and the formation of sleepers

Marianne Gullestad: Invisible Fences: Egalitarianism, nationalism and racism

Links updated 2017-12-17

(I might come back with more posts on this book. I’ve just returned from the book launch)

17.12.2017: This is a very popular post. Therefore I have updated all links.

Book review: East to West Migration: Russian Migrants in Western Europe

Published on February 27, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, Europe, migration

Migrants from the same country often form communities in their new country. This is not the case with Russians in London and Amsterdam. They live in separate, often competing subgroups. This is one of the main points in the book East to West Migration: Russian Migrants in Western Europe by anthropologist Helen Kopnina. “I discovered that the concept of ‘subcommunities’ describes Russian migrants’ circumstances more accurately than that of ‘community,’” Kopnina writes.

In his review, Boris Kagarlitsky writes:

Among the Russian emigrants in London one can meet the oligarch Boris Berezovsky as well as half-starving dishwashers. These migrants can hardly manage to feel kinship. A common culture and language are of no help in this regard.

(…)

The new Russian emigration in the West reflects the same tendencies in play in post-Soviet society. It is startling that contemporary Russian society has been quickly marked by an almost complete absence of altruism, solidarity, and community. No longer under the dominion of the Communist Party, society has turned to primitive individualism.

>> read the whole review on Transitions Online

Anthropologist Pnina Werbner on Muhammad-cartoons: ‘Satanic Verses Taught us a Lesson’

Published on February 8, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Europe, media, Middle East, politics, religion cosmology, Us and Them

No newspaper in Britain has published the Muhammad-cartoons. “There are some lessons (the British) learned from “The Satanic Verses” that I’m afraid others in Europe still need to learn”, anthropologist Pnina Werbner says in an interview with Der Spiegel:

During the Rushdie affair, there was also a major discussion about the limits of freedom of speech. The debate made it clear that despite our invocations of freedom of speech, even in the West freedom of speech is not absolute. After all, limits are set on pornography, for example.

Freedom of speech today is to a large extent exercised through self-censorship — not only through legislation, but by commercial interests, such as newspapers and publishing houses. They constantly make decisions about what should or shouldn’t get publicized — partly in response to audiences, partly in response to commercial interests, partially in response to the sensibilities of their viewers or readers.

You can say what you like in the privacy of your own home, but if you try to get it published, to get your voice heard in public, you will find that your opinions may be unacceptable for purely commercial or pragmatic reasons.

(…)

Their passionate belief is puzzling and alien to us. But we have to understand that, precisely because ordinary Muslims are also deeply offended, for that reason such apparently light-hearted satire will play into the hands of the extremists, the very people whom these cartoons were meant to criticize.

They are the ones who are benefiting most from the cartoons. For them, this is a huge PR coup, which enables them to recruit young people to the radical cause of Islam. In this sense the publication of the cartoons has backfired and that, I think, is the real indictment of the cartoonists. They’ve mobilized people all over the Muslim world against the West.

>> read the whole interview in DER SPIEGEL (International edition)

MORE ANTHROPOLOGISTS ON THIS ISSUE

Daniel Martin Varisco: Much Ado about Something Rotten in Denmark (My own view, even as a satirist who idolizes Montesquieu and Swift, is that the best public course is one of “freedom of discretion” at a time when there is such misunderstanding on all sides) og Loony Tunes: The War Draws On (It is bad enough that we have a war of bombs and bullets exasperated by a war of words. Do we really need to have cartoonists drawn into the fray?)

Erkan Saka: Danish Media’s Representations of Islam by anthropologist Peter Hervik and A call for respect and calm (both posts have many useful links among others Danish paper rejected Jesus cartoons and Trampling others’ beliefs in defence of yours.)

Kambiz Kamrani: Cultural relativism meets freedom of speech with the Danish cartoons and Muslim protests (He reviews several blog comments and concludes: “With the publication of these cartoons, this distance of understanding and communication is further gapped because we’re ultimately fueling an already burning fire.”)

www.sorrydenmarknorway.com – Arab and Muslim youth initiative (The problem with media representation of such issues tends to be that the media only picks up the loudest voices, ignoring the rational ones that do not generate as much noise.)

Arab Bloggers Take on Danish Cartoons

No newspaper in Britain has published the Muhammad-cartoons. "There are some lessons (the British) learned from "The Satanic Verses" that I'm afraid others in Europe still need to learn", anthropologist Pnina Werbner says in an interview with Der Spiegel:

During…

Who Are the Rioters in France? Anthropology News January (I)

Published on January 15, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Europe, politics, Us and Them, youth

In Anthropology News January 2006, Susan J Terrio criticizes main stream medias coverage of the youth protests in the suburbs in Paris. The protests can’t be explained by religion, culture or by pointing to that the rioters are immigrants:

Yet, the “immigrants” are second and, in some cases, third generation French children of non-European immigrants of Antillean, North and Sub-Saharan African and Turkish ancestry who are French citizens. They are not, for the most part, observant Muslims. The riots are not a response to perceived attacks on Islam or a reflection of their cultural distance from mainstream French society.

To assert that the rioters are culturally alienated and difficult to integrate is to isolate cultural difference as a cause for social unrest and to downplay the more significant factors of economic marginalization, spatial segregation and anti-immigrant racism.

(…)

Rioters feel alienated from French police, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and social workers in part because minorities are still underrepresented in all these fields.

>> continue

Anthropologist Cicilie Fagerlid has posted several related entries in her blog: Among others she comments that “I haven’t seen any empirical basis for blaming the riots on neither religion nor ethnicity”. In the same post she mentions a seminar, arranged by the French Association of Anthropologists on the actuality of anthropology and the crisis in the banlieues. She also lists some links.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen sums up:

Some commentators have tried to link the riots to religious revitalisation and militant Islamism in the Arab-speaking world. Yet, others – including the anthropologist André Iteanu, who has done research in these areas for years – point out that the riots have social causes, not cultural ones: The people living in these parts of Paris have no metro, few buses, hardly any libraries – and the majority have no work. Deprived and poor people have rioted in Paris several times before. It has nothing to do with their being Muslim and everything to do with their being socially excluded. Conclusion: Leave culture out of this matter.

(part of an interesting debate on the culture concept!)

Check also Erkan Saka’s coverage on this and the extensive round-up by Perlentaucher: Voices on the French riots

In Anthropology News January 2006, Susan J Terrio criticizes main stream medias coverage of the youth protests in the suburbs in Paris. The protests can't be explained by religion, culture or by pointing to that the rioters are immigrants:

Yet, the…