More dangerous research: Anthropologist detained, beaten, forcibly disappeared in Egypt

Published on February 7, 2021 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Middle East, politics, University / Academia

UPDATES: He was released by presidential decree on July 30, 2022 and now has successfully defended his Master’s thesis :Following Unjust Imprisonment, Ahmed Samir Santawy Completes Master’s Studies at CEU (28.9.2023) but the Egyptian authorities have imposed an arbitrary travel ban on him (amnesty, 3.6.2023)

Not only in Iran but also in Egypt authorities feel threatend by anthropological research. Especially when the topic has something to do with human rights – in the following case – women’s rights and abortion.

When graduate student Ahmed Samir Santawy December last year arrived at Sharm el-Sheikh airport from Vienna (where he studies at the Central European University), he was taken aside by the National Security Agency and questioned about his research. One month later, his family home in Cairo was raided, and the security forces looked through the family’s phones. As Ahmed Samir was not present, the NSA officers told his family to send him to the police station as soon as he’s back.

The anthropologist went to the police station on January 30 and 1st of February. Since then, nobody has seen him anymore. He never returned.

He was – as many reserachers, journalists, and activists before him – forcibly disappeared.

Forced disappearance are usually defined as cases when a state actor or collaborator secretly abducts or imprisons a person and refuses to acknowledge their fate or whereabouts. In Egypt, forced disappearances have become a common way for the regime to deal with its (perceived) opponents and critics.

In Egypt, the case of the Italian PhD student Giulio Regeni from the University of Cambridge is maybe the most famous one internationally. Regini was researching workers’ rights in Egypt. Five years ago, while on his way to meet a friend in downtown Cairo, he disappeared. More than one week later his dead body was found on the side of a highway on the outskirts of Cairo bearing marks of severe torture.

But it is only one year ago when another academic, the Egyptian Erasmus student Patrick George Zaki who was pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Bologna, was arrested from the Cairo airport and forcibly disappeared, beaten, stripped, and electrocuted on his back and his stomach, and threatened with rape. "A new Zaki case in Egypt" was therefore the headline when Italian news wrote about Ahmed Samir Santawy*s dispperance two days ago.

Ahmed Samir Santawy reappeared a few days ago, frightened and with a swollen face, he was beaten. He was not with his family, though, but behind the bars of the State Security Prosecution of Cairo. He was – as the other journalists, researchers and activists before him – charged for joining a terrorist group and dissemination of false information. He has been ordered held in remand for 15 days by the State Security Prosecution.

In the meantime both the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) andthe Central European University in Vienna call for his release. University rector and president Michael Ignatieff said to Austrian public broadcaster ORF that cooperation with Egypt will be stopped until Ahmed Samir is released.

*Tweet by the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA)*

EASA writes:

The European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) is deeply concerned by the detention without charge of Mr Ahmed Samir Abd El-Hai Ali, a Sociology and Social Anthropology Masters student at Central European University, Vienna, by Egyptian security services in Cairo. Mr Abd El-Hai Ali is a researcher and student of good standing, working on the history of reproductive law and policy in Egypt.

EASA urges the government of Egypt to take all steps necessary to ensure Ahmed’s swift and safe release, that his legal rights are respected and that he is afforded all legal assistance necessary.

The American Anthropological Association also called for his release in an open letter to the Minister of Interior Tawfiq:

(…)
As scholarly associations with a combined membership of more than 20,000 worldwide, we are committed to the principles of academic freedom and freedom of expression in a democratic society. Our Associations stand for advancing understanding of the human condition through anthropological research, and for applying this understanding to addressing some of the world’s most pressing problems. As an Egyptian student pursuing his Master’s degree in anthropology at Central European University in Vienna, Ahmed is making significant scholarly contributions to help build these bridges of understanding.

We strongly urge the Egyptian Ministry of Interior to do what it can to effect Mr. Samir’s release and safe return to his family. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if we can provide additional information.

PS: He is both called Ahmed Samir Santawy and Ahmed Samir Abd El-Hai and Ahmed Samir Abdelhay Ali – Arab names are a complicated matter!
PPS: Embedding of Tweets did not work well on all devices, I replaced them with screenshots

UPDATES 8.2.2021

Austrian news sites have started writing about Ahmed Samir Abd El-Hai today, and the Austrian National Union of Students federal body of Representatives callis for his release (in German only):

Forsea – a NGO fighting for human rights in Southeast Asia – also calls for his release:

Ahmed has been involved in several projects with human rights organizations and NGOs in Egypt as a vocal human rights defender. Ahmed’s case is the latest in a series of cases of students being harassed and forcefully detained by Egyptian authorities.

Forced disappearance is a threat to those that oppose regimes. In Southeast Asia, forced disappearance has long been a tool for dictatorial regimes to silence critics. For example, in the Thai case, in the past 5 years, there have been 10 dissidents abducted, forcedly disappeared and killed. The disappearance of Ahmed Samir Abdehay Ali reflected this trend of state crimes across the region.

UPDATE 12.2.2021: AMNESTY CAMPAIGN

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL STARTS CAMPAIGN: EGYPT – PRISONER OF CONSCIENCE DETAINED INCOMMUNICADO: AHMED SAMIR SANTAWY: Amnesty asks you to take action and write an appeal. They provide a model letter (pdf)

Update 16.2.2021: Support from Scotland: An Edinburgh University graduate is calling for the release of her classmate from an Egyptian jail (The Scotsman 16.2.2021)

Update 3.3.2021: PEN America today joined with free expression allies globally demanding the release of Egyptian student Ahmed Samir Santawy: Detention and Abuse of Egyptian Student is Part of Ongoing Assault on Free Expression, Academic Freedom

In Europe, more than two thirds of all academic anthropologists are living in precarity

Published on February 1, 2021 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Europe, politics, University / Academia

(via FocaalBlog) In the general public, academics are often viewed as being part of an elite, who lives comfortable lives. In reality this is only true for a small minority of well-paid professors, while the situation for most academics rather ressembles those of other underpaid workers like cleaners or delivery or Uber-drivers – especially since universities are no longer run like public institutions but as corporations with managers and PR departments that all compete for being "world leading".

A recently published survey among anthropologists in Europe provides us with neat but disturbing statistics. The survey was carried out online and before Corona, between 18 June 2018 and 22 July 2018.

"Anthropology in Europe is increasingly a precarious profession", we read in the 102 page survey among members of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), an initiative by the PrecAnthro Collective, whose members mobilised since 2016 to raise awareness about the challenges of developing an academic career in anthropology.

Increasing precarious employment conditions is a major issue here:

Much corridor talk at the 2014, 2016 and 2018 EASA conferences, and many informal chats during the online-only 2020 conference were neither about the latest ground-breaking study nor even about the latest careerbreaking scandals, but rather about the lack of career prospects, which ultimately prevents highly skilled scholars from conducting groundbreaking academic work

Permanent contracts are rare, at least until you get tenure as professor in the age of 50 or so if you are lucky. Short term contracts are the norm, instead, often shorter than six months, thus leaving anthropologists in a constant state of insecurity:

Among those who identified ‘employed in academia’ as their primary status, 44.3% had a permanent contract, and only 31.3% were on permanent and full-time contracts. This means that over two thirds of all academic anthropologists in Europe are in some form of precarious employment.

There are huge differences within Europe and – as expected from my site – Germany, one of the most inequal countries in Europe with growing poverty rates, comes out as one of the worst – or worst country to be. While 49.4% of the respoindents in the UK had permanent contracts, in Germany it was only 12.1%. The numbers for women are of course even worse than for men:

While men and women were equally represented among those on fixed-term contracts, women held a higher proportion of very short-term contracts, i.e. under six months. Women were also less likely to be in senior positions (29% of men versus 19% of women).

One consequence is that you constantly need to look for new employment opportunities. Especially early career researchers "spend an excessive amount of time at work applying for jobs". Half of all respondents spent more than one month a year applying for jobs. Less than 10% had not applied for a job in 2018.

Changing jobs means in many cases leaving your country, being constantly on the move:

Among those aged 31–35 years, only one third had not left their countries for work or education (excluding fieldwork), while a quarter had changed countries for work three or more times over the last five years.

In most countries, the salary is generally below avarage. Especially academics in East Central and South East Europe said their incomes "did not meet their needs", and that they were "unable to save or manage unexpected expenses". Among all respondents, only one in four anthropologists had money left at the end of the month.

Less than half of the respondents reported an ability to cover their living expenses solely with the wages from one full-time job. Over one fifth of EASA members also rely on parents and one tenth on family members to support them in making a living.

Temporary teaching fellows or instructors (that are growing in number) were the most vulnerable:

Of these, 68.8% said their income did not cover their needs, 80.7% had no money left at the end of the month, only 6.2% were ‘completely’ in a position to deal with an unexpected expense, and 53.1% were ‘not at all’ able to do so.

Generally, universities do not seem to be a nice place to work in, as also discrimination, harassment, unfair treatment seem to be widespread.

Very worrying: The interests of precarious anthropologists are not sufficiently represented in their academic context:

Precariously employed academics did not join unions because they felt that unions did not represent their interests as the unions were dominated by senior faculty or administrative staff. Insecurity regarding staying in academia or in the country of employment was another reason for not joining.

Membership in unions differs extremly, though. While in Scandinavia most academics are members (Denmark 96% and Finland 84%), the opposite is true for Germany (23%) or Poland and France (4% both).

The situations is probably even grimmer as the report is not representative for whole Europe. Most of the 809 EASA members who completed the questionnaire resided in the West and North of Europe – only 9.7% were residents of East Central and South East Europe.

Susana Narotzky from the University of Barcelona, Spain, sees this underrepresentation as a structural problem within the EASA. In her blog post A History of Precariousness in Spain in the FocaalBlog she writes:

In Spain, many of the part-time non-tenured teaching positions have extremely low salaries and their holders juggle a plurality of jobs that make research difficult. As a result, membership in EASA –which is fundamentally tied to participation in the biennial conference—is rarely sought.
Therefore, a large contingent of (probably) the most precarious voices, many of which are not proficient in English, is not represented in the survey. This may also explain why a large majority of respondents work in Northern institutions which have more resources than those in other countries.

Exclusion by language is also a issue that Natalia Buier from the Central European University criticizes in her post What sample, whose voice, which Europe? at the FocaalBlog. "The reality of EASA is", she writes, "that for an association that calls itself European it is a surprisingly monolingual one."

Furthermore, middle-class respondents are overrepresented in the survey. The situation of anthropologists with working class background needs more attention.

In Spain a common experience is that of the grinding of working-class lives not only through exclusion, but also through inclusion into academic spaces.

And while the authors of the report seem to imply that working-class students are at risk of being increasingly underrepresented, there is at least one level at which we are likely to see an increase of the presence of working-class students: the doctoral level. (…). In a world of increasing exploitation, (…) the stability of a four-year PhD scholarship of roughly 1000 euros offers many of working-class background the possibility of more stability than most alternatives. (…)

Increased abilities but diminished resources do not change the fact that the professional machine will probably spit out the student of working-class background at the first opportunity: but that cut out point seems to be increasingly moving towards the post-doctoral phase, where the prolonged subsistence on no or below subsistence level income requires resources that are less likely accessible to colleagues of working-class background.

So, what to do? The recommendations in the report are written in diplomatic language and seem tame and weak.

Without touching the root of the problem, the commercialization of academia, little can be done as Don Kalb from the University of Bergen writes in his post Anthropological Lives Matter, Except They Don’t at Focaal:

Academia should not be run as McKinsey would like it. Our own discipline nowadays has really no other professional rationale than helping to produce democratic, intelligent, and progressive people and societies, not just “more stuff” – research articles, students, diplomas, scholars – against lowest cost. (…)

Outdated academic structures and hierarchies, as well as actively managed neoliberal ones (Netherlands, UK), will have to change if the continent wants to respond creatively and progressively to the massive transformations that are coming to us. Anthropologists should actively make that case and show that they must be part of the creative dynamism.

>> read the whole report

There is a growing amount of scholarship on academic precarity that I might come back to later. For now check precarity in The Anthropology Newspaper.

SEE ALSO EARLIER ON ANTROPOLOGI.INFO:

Protests at Yale: When Walmart’s management principles run an anthropology department

University reforms – a threat to anthropology?

Minority scholars treated as second class academics: Still a racial bias in anthropology

How can we create a more plural anthropological community?

(via FocaalBlog) In the general public, academics are often viewed as being part of an elite, who lives comfortable lives. In reality this is only true for a small minority of well-paid professors, while the situation for most academics rather…

Why are academic articles so expensive?

Published on October 8, 2012 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, journal articles / papers, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, University / Academia

Academic paywalls: No access to knowledge. Photo: noboder network, flickr

30 US Dollars in order to read a single academic article? Why? Is it about making money? No. “The high price is designed to maintain the barrier between academia and the outside world. Paywalls codify and commodify tacit elitism”, writes anthropologist Sarah Kendzior in Al Jazeera.

She gives a good overview of some important issues that restrict the circulation of knowledge. Most academic articles are hidden behind paywalls. People without affiliation to a well-off university that can afford to subscribe to (often overpriced) journals are denied access.

Many researchers would like the public to engage with knowledge, she writes. But many are not able to pursue that goal “due to the tyranny of academic publishers and professional norms that encourage obsequiousness and exclusion”.

In todays’s academic world, academic publishing is not about sharing knowledge:

Publishing is a strategic enterprise. It is less about the production of knowledge than where that knowledge will be held (or withheld) and what effect that has on the author’s career. New professors are awarded tenure based on their publication output, but not on the impact of their research on the world. (…)

One of the saddest moments I had in graduate school was when a professor advised me on when to publish. “You have to space out your articles by when it will benefit you professionally,” he said, when I told him I wanted to get my research out as soon as possible. “Don’t use up all your ideas before you’re on the tenure track.”

This confused me. Was I supposed to have a finite number of ideas? Was it my professional obligation to withhold them?What I did not understand is that academic publishing is not about sharing ideas. It is about removing oneself from public scrutiny while scrambling for professional security. It is about making work “count” with the few while sequestering it from the many.

>> read the whole story in Al Jazeera

Sarah Kendzior is a frequent contributor to Al Jazeera and other media. She has received lots of attention for her articles, among others about the elitist American academia and academics with salary below the poverty line (The closing of American academia) and The fallacy of the phrase, ‘the Muslim world’ where she explains why is time to retire the phrase “the Muslim world” from the Western media.

On her blog she keeps us up to date with her new publications and the reactions she has received.

She has recently received her PhD from Washington University in St Louis. The title of her thesis The Uzbek Opposition in Exile: Diaspora and Dissident Politics in the Digital Age.

Anthropology and the challenges of sharing knowledge online: Interview with Owen Wiltshire

Democratic Publishing = Web + Paper

Interview: Self-publish your thesis!

Danah Boyd on Open Access: "Boycott locked-down journals"

Overview over open access anthropology journals

Academic paywalls: No access to knowledge. Photo: noboder network, flickr

30 US Dollars in order to read a single academic article? Why? Is it about making money? No. “The high price is designed to maintain the barrier between academia and the…

Teenthropologist: Reasons for studying anthropology instead of medicine

Published on July 5, 2012 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, University / Academia, websites

“At the age of 18, why do I want to settle down and commit myself to Medicine when I can really investigate for example why there are health differences between the different classes and areas in Britain?”

Teenthropologist is the name of a new anthropology blog, written maybe by the youngest anthro-blogger around. She is 19, from Durham University in Britain. In her opening post she explains why she chose to study anthropology instead of medicine (or before studying medicine sometime later as anthropology provides useful perspectives for doctors).

Interestingly, she also asks “How on earth had we never been told of this course [anthropology] at school before? And why were so few people doing it?”

A very promising blog, I think, with so far two more posts: Train Journey – Class, Caste, Kinship…anthropological heaven? and a review of In Search of Respect (one of my favorite ethnographies…).

I also like the way she defines anthropology in her about page. She does not use the standard and somehow outdated views about anthropology = dealing with “understanding foreign cultures”. Instead, she uses Gillan Tett’s work about the financial crisis and her own study about teenage girls shopping to explain what anthropology is about.

>> visit Teenthropologist

PS: I’m going to update the anthropology blog newspaper at http://www.antropologi.info/blog/ soon. Currently, the overview over new anthropology blog posts at http://www.antropologi.info/feeds/anthropology/ is more up to date

AIDS:”Traditional healers are an untapped resource of great potential”

“Ethnographic perspectives needed in discussion on public health care system”

Teenthropologist is the…

The need for more spectacle in academic presentations: What anthropologists can learn from wrestlers

Published on November 12, 2011 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, journal articles / papers, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, University / Academia

Now, only a few days before the largest gathering of anthropologists in the world, it’s time to take up again the banner of the well-prepared, well-written, well-presented conference paper, writes Rex in his post Defending the form at Savage Minds .

In the following text, antropologi.info contributor Tereza Kuldova and Jan Martin Kvile explain why we need more spectacle in academic presentations:

Wrestling With Others for Self for Others: on the Need of Spectacle in Academic Presentations

Tereza Kuldova & Jan Martin Kvile

PhD Fellow in Social Anthropology at Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo & The Ultimate Math Teacher, Holmen High School

Intro

Have you been recently at a conference? How many people could you count dozing off at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the presentations? Or maybe, you too were dozing off, unable to even count your fellow colleagues who shared that miserable state of existence at an utterly boring presentation…

Or, maybe, you are one of those who really try to give people a chance and engage with their ideas, but you are on a verge of becoming disinterested in even the most spectacular and thought provoking subjects just because the presentations kill it? Or maybe you are the presenter who makes people doze off? In that case, you need to learn something from wrestlers.

Read on…

So here we are, at yet another anthropological conference. We, anthropologists, write about incredibly interesting, exciting things in the world, cultures, myths, religions, hierarchies, imaginations from all corners of the world. Yet, when you come to an anthropological conference, with some exceptions that merely confirm the rule, you will see a room full of people with almost disinterested expressions on their faces – these are possibly intended to signify the seriousness and depth (oh yeah, the anthropological obsession with ‘depth’) of their intellectual endeavor (however, it is enough to wait for the dinner and a little wine and, before you know it, you are listening to stories from the very same people’s bedrooms /possibly a way how to get ‘deeply’ familiar with each other/).

Better to get back to the conference room now. So they have a script and a plan. Each gets 20 minutes to present a paper. For some reason very few understand the simple concept of 20 minutes (yet all of them seem to be heavy users of watches) and for some even more miraculous reason most do really believe that presenting equals reading. Some basic arithmetic would make this clear immediately, if 2=2 and an apple is an apple, then presenting and reading can hardly be equal. These are namely two very different concepts.

Reading ≠ Presenting

Reading means comprehending and understanding the written word, deciphering its meaning and interpreting it while engaging with the text and its ideas. It is a relation between the reader and the text, a private and intimate relation too. Reading paper out loud disrupts this. It intends to invite the listener in, yet at the same time it never really succeeds, and by the very nature of this awkward relationship it cannot. Reading out loud does not invite the listener into a dialogue, the listener is not part of that exclusive bond between the reader and the text, and is rather ambivalently included and dis-included at the same time.

Presentation on the other hand stands for performance, act, demonstration, display, exposition, giving. Reading a paper out loud is hardly a performance (if it is, then it must be a really bad one), it is not a demonstration, not an exposition, not a show that invites participation.

And so we are sitting in the conference room, another speaker is being introduced. Interesting topic, the title sounds amazing. We sit back on our chairs and wake up a little. Then the word goes to the speaker himself.

First thing that he says, “eergh, I was rushing to the airport yesterday, was a bit delayed and had to catch the flight, so it happened I forgot my USB somewhere, still have not figured out where and with it the presentation, and it is not even in my laptop or on my email, so I am left without it, but I will really try to make up for that, I promise” (‘so you promise, eh’, we think to ourselves).

And he goes on (as if this was not already enough), “my paper is a little longer, so maybe I talk into the discussion time, but that is fine I guess, it is important” (we are beginning to sense frustration, which is the first stage of dozing off later on). So he sits down (‘oh no, not one of those again’, crosses our minds), and puts his paper right in front of his face and starts reading, as if reading for himself, no intonation, no enthusiasm.

We try really hard to follow with the fast flow of unintelligibly long sentences, five minutes into the reading we lose it, look out of the window and watch the birds outside, think of our lovers or our deadlines, suddenly our minds re-enter the room and we try to re-focus. Impossible, we lost it. This ‘reader’ does not know what highlights and repetition are, we are done and our imagination flies back to our lovers (or deadlines). Thirty minutes into the talk we start wondering, wasn’t he supposed to be finished by now, hell, what’s the time.

Around the 35^th minute the speaker starts blabbering something about finishing off soon, we sharpen our ears, we get one sentence. We match it fast with the title of the paper, get the picture of what was probably going on and then we manage to formulate few relevant questions. Then one of us says, “thank you for the very exciting and stimulating lecture” (though the only thing that in reality really excited and stimulated us was probably the thought of our lovers) and add, “I have one little remark…”.

And so we go on with the theatre.

After the speaker is done the others start coming to him, “very good presentation, you have some nice points, see you at the dinner”. Do you want to know what they really think? “It sucked and I am definitely not going to read your paper, but I am going to pretend I will”.

Good reasons for that, the moment our speaker stepped in on the stage and wasted five minutes on diminishing himself giving us a story of lost USB, he was doomed to fail. The moment he started reading while hiding himself behind the paper, he confirmed that. The moment he went over his time, he showed he does not care for others. Yes, it is disrespectful. And yes, it shows your disinterest in discussion. Creating engaging dialogue should be the aim, yet, instead you fear, fear the questions. Grow up, the questions are there for you, through engaging with others’ reflections you will emerge as a transformed person! Stop fearing what others have to say! Embrace it instead.

‘Argument is war’ is one of the famous metaphors we live by (Lakoff and Johnson 2003). It is through dialogue and juxtaposition of different voices that meaning emerges (Bakhtin 2004). In knowledge, disruption is the goal! If dialogue ends, everything ends, as Bakhtin says. What is the ultimate spectacle of violent conflict, the ultimate metaphor of an argument? Wrestling! Yes, we should learn from wrestling and that too on more than one level!

Can We Academics Learn Something from Wrestling?

A wrestler is charismatic, has a stage presence, he is there to please the audience and that is how his success is determined. His performance is designed to create desired effects. He is a “a self-promotional device to draw the crowds and build reputation that would precede his entrance in the town” (Mazer 1998: 24) – not unlike an academic in this respect. Now don’t you want to be more like that? And less like the one who makes the audience doze off?

Did you know that young wrestlers have only twenty minutes in the program of the day to impress the audiences and create ‘heat’? Well, they happen to stick to the time. And most of them create considerable amounts of ‘heat’. Now next time you go out there, think about your audience first and about yourself as a wrestler! You want your audiences’ brains to heat up! You want them to focus their attention on you and what you have to say! Talk briefly but with impact, like a wrestler – Bang! Get your point across – Bang!

You have been researching for ages and you know your stuff, so how come you have to read it (that is just suspicious by the way)? Talk to your audiences, get them engaged in your ideas and thoughts, and create a dialogue instead of killing it. Maybe you are the enemy of yourself in this staged performance that we call ‘presenting a paper’.

Our whole endeavor in anthropology is like wrestling. We wrestle with others and their ideas, for ourselves and for others and when it comes to presenting we have to wrestle with ourselves for others, for the audience. Show the world the power of your ideas, be bold, talk loud and rehearse your stage performance, give us the spectacle! We want to remember what you say and we want to get interested in what it is you do. Get me interested and I read your work, those 20 minutes, those are a teaser, a commercial, an advertisement. So start writing down your punch lines (it is not a coincidence it is called a punch line, come alive wrestler!).

Now to the more profound importance of ‘wrestling’, Roland Barthes once said that “wrestling is a sum of spectacles, of which no single one is a function: each moment imposes the total knowledge of a passion which rises erect and alone, without ever extending to the crowning moment of a result” (Barthes 1993).

Maybe, we should like a wrestler turn our presentations into a sequence of little spectacles, open these up with a puzzle, engaging paradox or ambiguity. Maybe the inevitable ambiguity of the worlds we research and try to describe and thus the ambiguous nature of our findings should be understood as a productive force. The world is dirty and fuzzy; full of artificial categories we create to grasp this fuzziness and mess. Oh yes, and to top it, we create other categories intended to describe these ambiguous cases, such as hybridity and creolization.

We should get rid of those statements beginning with “I argue that” or “I conclude that” (note that wrestling is not about winning, it is about the process) and maybe we should instead open possibilities and let ambiguous voices speak. We are dealing with dialogical materials we are in dialogue with, how can the product be anything else than an invitation into that dialogue, a dialogue that is a part of the ongoing dialogue of humanity?

Maybe loose ends should never be really tied up, never really resolved for the sake of further dialogue and for the sake of knowledge, which itself is only a sort of metadialogue. Words are power and they can carve us versus them very easily, they objectify and transform what is fluid into something static. Categories thrive on pollution and love for purity. The more pollution the stronger the desire for purity (Douglas 2002).

But can it be that tidying all dirt is not such a good idea? Maybe we need to deal with garbage and dirt differently (Eriksen 2011). This struggle for perfect labels and neat categories is no more than an act of violence against life that is an unending and ambiguous dance of merger and division (Anton 2001). If that is so, the question is, could we think of hypocrisy and wrestling as a virtue?

Bibliography:

Anton, C. 2001. Selfhood and authenticity. State University of New York Press.

Bakhtin, M. M. 2004. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Barthes, R. 1993. Mythologies. London: Vintage.

Douglas, M. 2002. Purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. Routledge.

Eriksen, T. H. 2011. Søppel: avfall i en verden av bivirkninger. Oslo: Aschehoug.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. 2003. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mazer, S. 1998. Professional wrestling: sport and spectacle. University Press of Mississippi.

Sources of original images: unknown

Pecha Kucha – the future of presenting papers?

Academic presentations: “The cure is a strong chairman and a system of lights”

What’s the point of anthropology conferences?

Cicilie Fagerlid: Things to remember when presenting papers at conferences

Secret knowledge exchange at Europe’s largest anthropology conference

UPDATE 12.2.2021: AMNESTY CAMPAIGN

Read more / Sources:

Wrestling With Others for Self for Others: on the Need of Spectacle in Academic Presentations