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Interview with Arjun Appadurai: "An increasing and irrational fear of the minorities"

Published on August 9, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Asia, books, cosmopolitanism, indigenous people / minorities, migration, persons and theories, Us and Them

Fear of Small Numbers, the new book by Mumbai-born anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has received attention across America. He discusses why, in the age of globalisation, opening of markets, free flow of capital and liberal ideas, minorities in many countriesare facing greater hostilities than ever before.

In an interview with Rediff, he argues for “moving away from national loyalties towards urban and metropolitan loyalties, which put a premium on active tolerance and deliberate cosmopolitanism”.

He explains:

One of the basic arguments of the book is that the idea of a majority can create uncertainty about the primary identity of a nation. In the book, I call this the anxiety of incompleteness.

What I mean is that in every nation State without exception, somewhere beneath the surface is the idea that a nation is composed of a single ethnic substance, some kind of ethnic purity — and the idea of ethnic purity leads to the feeling that only people belonging to that ethnicity should be full citizens in that State.

And in a society like India, this is a huge problem because a certain group, in this case the Hindus, can view themselves as almost completely defining India but not totally. The problem — the incompleteness — is due to the presence of other groups, whether you call them minorities or strangers or guests or visitors.

Every Hindu Indian recognises that the land is not completely Hindu. In the book, I argue that this sense of incomplete purity does not necessarily lead to an effort to obliterate the minorities. But in many circumstances, it can lead to that. And we have seen increasing efforts in some parts of India, Gujarat in particular, to obliterate the minorities.

Thinking in the categories minority and majority is something new according to the anthropologist:

I have been interested in census statistics, how populations are actually enumerated. Apart from the question of being weak or subordinate, official enumeration is one of the ways minorities are created in the modern world.

The point here is that the idea of minority and majority was not always a part of human society. Human societies always had different groups; some were larger and some smaller; but the twin categories of minority and majority are modern phenomena.

For him as an anthropologist, he says, it is “painfully obvious that it has become culturally respectable to run down and suspect the Muslim community.”

The fear of the minorities is in his opinion “irrational”:

I believe that the radical, terrorist voices one hears in the Muslim communities in India are few and small. The average Muslim in India today has this request to the majority community: Give us the room to survive. Muslims in rural and urban India are not thinking of taking over India, but are asking whether they can live there at all.

>> read part 1 of the interview with Arjun Appadurai: The average Indian Muslim wants room to survive

>> part 2 of the interview: Indian society is still interdependent

>> review by Jeremy Ballenger: “A considered, fascinating and somewhat disturbing look at the ‘other side’ of globalisation”

SEE ALSO:

For an Anthropology of Cosmopolitanism

Interview with Benedict Anderson: “I like nationalism’s utopian elements”

“Anthropologists Should Participate in the Current Immigration Debate”

A link between food resources and social hierarchies?

Published on July 13, 2006 by lorenz Posted in aboriginees, anthropology in the news, books, culture traditions, ecology nature, Pacific Oceania, persons and theories

In a portrait on the website of The National University of Australia, anthropologist Ian Keen, tells about his research among Aboriginees in Australia. Among other things, he wanted to find out why pre-colonial Aboriginal societies tended to be more egalitarian than some of their counterparts elsewhere in the world:

In a paper published in the journal Current Anthropology, Keen argues that for any society to develop lasting social hierarchies, it must have access to plentiful, localised resources that could be defended. In this event, some people can assume authority over others. On the northwest coast of North America, for example, recent hunter-gatherers enjoyed a stable climate and concentrated, defendable resources, especially plentiful salmon. As a consequence, these societies developed such enduring inequalities as inherited chiefly office and marked social classes, while some even kept slaves.

In contrast, Aboriginal societies did not develop such enduring inequalities. (…) Keen argues this relative egalitarianism was the result of constraints arising from variable food resources and an unstable climate, meaning there was limited scope for people to assume dominion over others by asserting exclusive access to territory and resources.

Keen explains:

“It’s not exactly an environmental determinist argument, but it is suggesting that those conditions imposed restraints. I make the assumption that wherever they can, some humans will take the opportunities given to them to establish some kind of dominion over others. So my paper argues that even if people knew how to dominate one another, and wanted to do so, the opportunities were not there.

>> read the whole article

Brian Hayden, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, is not convinced and criiticizes that Keen does not put enough weight on the ecological and economic aspects of complexity that develop among some hunter-gatherers in Australia.

Keen is the author of the book Aboriginal Economy and Society. The website of the book is quite informative. If you click on Supplementary Materials you’ll find several cases studies and several pages about aboriginal technologies. In the paper Variation in Indigenous Economy and Society at the Threshold of Colonisation, Keen tells about more about his book:

Just how similar and how distinct were Aboriginal societies in different parts of the continent at the time of British colonisation of Australia? The book I am currently writing attempts to answer this and related questions by comparing the economy and society of seven very varied regions of the continent as they were at the threshold of colonisation.

(…)

Such a comparative study is long overdue. There have been no recent systematic comparisons of Aboriginal ways of life in different parts of Australia, comparable to, for example, Marshall Sahlins on Polynesia or Rubel and Rosman on New Guinea.

>> download the paper (pdf)

Savage Minds starts “Anthro Classics Online”

Published on May 24, 2006 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, culture traditions, persons and theories

Kerim Friedman at Savage Minds recently announced a new series about classical works in anthropology which are available online. The idea, he writes, is to “both encourage newbies to read some classical anthropological texts as well as allow those with Ph.D.s in the discipline to debate the contemporary value of these works”.

The first entry: Laura Bohannon: “Shakespeare in the Bush” – the essay that turned Kerim on to anthropology:

It explores how difficult it is to translate Shakespeare’s Hamlet into the cultural idiom of the Tiv in West Africa (the Tiv are mostly located in Nigeria). While the article takes on a straw-man argument (the idea that there is something universal about Shakespeare’s plays overlooks just how hard it is for even American school kids to learn to appreciate Hamlet), it is a well written article which I believe holds up to the test of time.

>> read the whole post at Savage Minds

Kerim Friedman at Savage Minds recently announced a new series about classical works in anthropology which are available online. The idea, he writes, is to "both encourage newbies to read some classical anthropological texts as well as allow those with…

Conference blogging: “Quit using the word ‘culture’ wherever possible”

Published on April 9, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, culture traditions, persons and theories

On the recent conference by the Society for Applied Anthropology, Mary Odell Butler from Battelle suggested that anthropologists ought to quit using the word ‘culture’ wherever possible, according to Judd Antin at Technotaste who writes:

“The larger and more interesting point she made, is that talking about culture instead of more specific perceptions or processes, is a scapegoat. It relieves us of the burden of talking about specific ideas, habits, and histories. She gave an example that I remember well. Contrast these two statements:

Many African-American women have developed a culturally-based perception that they will be disrespected in community healthcare clinics.

vs.

Many African-American women have learned through their experience and that of their friends and family that they will be disrespected in community healthcare clinics.

Culture, in other words, is too often a gloss for actual perception and practice. Why not call a rose a rose?”

>> read the whole post on TechnoTaste

Judd Antin has written two more posts about the conference: Wednesday Morning at SfAA and SfAA 2006: To Start. There was no press coverage (no surprise). Jen Cardew at anthroblogs did some conference blogging, but the notes aren’t especially reader-friendly.

Jen made an interesting remark about getting in touch with people at conferences. It’s an advantage to be a smoker:

I would like to note that the only people who have approached me, or that I have approached at the conference thus far have been smokers outside on a smoke break. I am actually thankful that I am a smoker right now, what a wonderful social tool! I’m kind of shy, so it is not too often that I approach people to chat.

Jen has also written about Smokers as a Subculture

The Culture Struggle: How cultures are instruments of social power

Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Savage Minds: An old warhorse revisited: Do we need another book about culture?

Thomas Hylland Eriksen: Why culture should be brought back in

The Secret Society of Anthropologists

"The larger and more interesting point…

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.