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Chinese media propaganda at IUAES anthropology conference in Kunming

Published on July 27, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Asia, indigenous people / minorities, University / Academia, Us and Them

(update 30.7: IUAES-anthropologists “praise” Chinese government’s relation to minorities) As I wrote a few days ago, the vice president of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) Petr Skalník decided to boycott the IUAES congress in Kunming, China due to the recent massacre where several hundred Uyghurs were killed.

“I do not want to be part of overt and/or tacit legitimation of evidently erroneous handling of nationality question in China”, he wrote in an open letter.

The conference started today and it is interesting to see how the Chinese authorities use the conference to promote both China and to legitimize their minority policy.

China anthropology enters new stage, more active in global study is the headline in People’s Daily Online.

They write about the vice-chairman of the 16th congress’s organizing committee, Hao Shiyuan, who said that “Chinese anthropology mainly focused on application research”. And in one case, he said, “more than 1,000 local anthropological scholars had took up fieldwork in 1950s to collect first-hand data and advise the government on the management of ethnic groups.”

Then they quote the IUAES President Vargas with these words: “Many anthropologists are interested in studying specific questions in China, as well as looking at the solutions that our Chinese colleagues have proposed to problems that are similar in other countries.”

The headline of an article by the offical Xinhua news agency is China listening to int’l experts in pursuit of coexistence of diversified cultures. We read that the Chinese Vice Premier Hui Liangyu delivered a speech at the opening ceremony. He said that the Chinese government “has attached great importance to the development of anthropological and ethnological sciences, and actively promotes theoretical studies, innovation and application.”

In a critical blog post at gokunming.com, we read that Yunnan University, which is hosting the congress, is off limits to the general public: “entry is only granted to registered participants who must display passes. Additionally, the university’s perimeter is under heavy police watch”:

No official explanation for barring the general public from Yunnan University’s main campus has been given, there are several possible reasons, including the attendance of Chinese Vice Premier Hui Liangyu at this morning’s opening ceremony.

In his address to the congress, Hui said that “pushing forward dialogues and cooperation among different civilizations is a joint responsibility of individuals and governments.”

Despite Hui’s upbeat statement, the recent ethnic violence in Xinjiang that left hundreds dead is likely a cause for ramped up security. Another potential reason for government uneasiness may be the occasional overlap between anthropology and intelligence gathering operations.

UPDATE 29.7.09: More from the offical Xinhua news agency: China says its ethnic policies “on right track”:

A senior Chinese official said Monday the government’s policies on ethnic affairs are “on the right track” and have helped create conditions for equality, unity and common prosperity among the country’s different ethnic groups.

Jia Qinglin, chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), China’s top political advisory body, made the remark in his meeting with Luis Alberto Vargas, the President of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES), who is in China to attend The 16th IUAES World Congress held in China southwest province Yunnan.

Jia said the living standards of the ethnic groups were rising steadily and their political, economic and cultural rights were well safeguarded.

UPDATE: More propaganda: IUAES-anthropologists “praise” Chinese government’s relation to minorities (Xinhua 30.7.09)

The Problems with Chinese Anthropological Research

Anthropology: a Taboo Topic in China?

(update 30.7: IUAES-anthropologists "praise" Chinese government's relation to minorities) As I wrote a few days ago, the vice president of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) Petr Skalník decided to boycott the IUAES congress in Kunming, China…

Militarisation of Research: Meet the Centre for Studies in Islamism and Radicalisation

Published on June 20, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, ethics, Europe, politics, religion cosmology, University / Academia, Us and Them

We have discussed a lot about the strengthening ties between the military and universities in the USA and Britain, but similar things are happening in Scandinavia. And there is no public debate about it here.

One example is a research center that was founded last year by the Danish Ministry of Defence: the Centre for Studies in Islamism and Radicalisation.

It is part of the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus and focuses according to the website on radicalisation, ideologies and the international consequences of “Islamism”:

The Centre for Studies in Islamism and Radicalisation will assemble anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists and theologians, who can contribute to the understanding of what happens when Islam becomes a political ideology with the objective of overthrowing Governments.

And the role of anthropologists? (source):

The anthropological part of the project will mainly focus on processes of radicalisation, on how radicalisation manifests itself gradually, through adaptation of new world views, values and lifestyle. Data will be collected through field work and surveys. The main hypothesis is that interaction between an individual in search for identity and a radicalised group play an important role in the process of radicalisation.

It is described as an independent research institute but I wonder how free it is when the establishment of the research center is part of the U.S-led “war on terror” and the premises are so clear. The project regards terrorism as a phenomenon that is mainly linked to islam. “Islamism” is according to the Minister of Defence, Søren Gade, the biggest threat to peace on earth. The Minister of Defence said that the research findings will play a central part in Denmarks policy in their so-called “war on terror”.

This world view is also reflected in many project descriptions, for example “Islamic Radicalisation among Muslims in Denmark. A Policy-oriented Empirical Study” by Shahamak Rezaei and Marco Goli:

Islamism is designated as the primary enemy of the democratic world, the omnipresent threat, and when, at the time of writing, at least two major wars are being fought against Islamism (in Afghanistan and Iraq). A vast number of billions drained from the Western state funds are being invested in national and international security.

The aim of this project is to provide empirical knowledge about factors that characterise the processes of radicalisation among young Muslims, e.g. from faith to politics, from religion to ideology, from civic society to the enemy.

The project’s key empirical questions to be answered are:
1. Which processes characterise the movement from “normal”, cultural or religious Muslims to radical Islamists, mainly from the group of young Danes with an immigrant background from third countries?
2. What motivates this process?
3. How can we identify radical Muslims?

Or take a look at Lene van der Aa Kühle’s project, called “The Cultic Milieu“:

The development of a European Islam has not followed the expectations of most researchers. Instead of forming and reforming in a liberal and secularized manner, radical Islam has developed as perhaps the most distinctive form of European Islam.

But the question of why some Muslims become radical has not been easy to answer. Studies propose that there is no single pattern which can explain how and why some young European Muslims become radical. Marginalization, deprivation and resentment may provide part of the explanation, but Muslims who are radicalized are often fairly well integrated and at least not any more marginalized and deprived than large part of the Muslim community.

Studies have failed to find any psychological deficiencies and while the impact of radical religious authorities seems in some cases to have had an influence, in others the process seems to be one of self-radicalization.

Then there is one project with a different perspective. Jonathan Githens-Mazer actually challenges much of what is said on the website. From his description of his project “Causes and Process of Radicalisation among Young Muslims in Leicester (UK)“:

While there exists a very real threat of violent extremism in the UK, this threat comes from an extremely small minority, and many young Muslims feel as though they are under constant surveillance and scrutiny despite rejecting any form of political violence.

These same young people also often feel as though their own individual efforts to empower communities to be resilient against violent radicalisation and violent extremism aren’t being understood and/or heralded by non-Muslim communities, politicians and the police and security services.

This project will seek to act as a corrective to this neglect of Muslim community perspectives on issues of radicalisation and violent extremism – by conducting a series of qualitative structured interviews with young Muslims, their parents, community social workers and Imams from Leicester (UK).

I’m not 100% sure what I should think of this but it reminds me of a British initiative, see my earler post Protests against British research council: “Recruits anthropologists for spying on muslims”

There are lots of papers and links on the website that might be worth a study. Among the institutions they link to, we find The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence.

Maximilian Forte has written several interesting posts on his Open Anthropology blog recently, among others What are the Pentagon’s Minerva Researchers Doing? and Militarizing the Social Sciences and Humanities in Canada

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

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

Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relations

Two Books Explore the Sins of Anthropologists Past and Present

Cooperation between the Pentagon and anthropologists a fiasco?

One example is a research…

The Open Anthropology Cooperative – A Worldwide Anthro-Community in the Making

Published on May 28, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, University / Academia

(updated)~~What about creating~~ A worldwide community for anthropological discussion and collaboration away from the restrictions of formal academic structures has been created at http://openanthcoop.ning.com/ (already more than 140 members Thursdag night!) It started as a twitter-conversation, now the debate also takes place on Keith Hart’s website.

In some way, this community already exists – in the anthropological blogosphere. But also non-bloggers shall be included, and The Open Anthropology Cooperative – that’s what it is supposed to called – is actually much more. Maybe we can call it the web 2.0 version of the conventional (mostly national) anthropological associations.

More than 30 comments have been posted so far. They include following ideas and suggestions about the new community:

* A place to share ideas
 * A place to find like-minded anthropologists
 * A place to collaborate 
* A place to hold virtual conferences 
* A place to host podcasts 
* A place to ask questions
 * A place to learn about new tools for anthropology (online tools, field tools, etc.) 
* a place to find resources (e.g. databases, good grad programs, upcoming colloquia, software, field opportunities) 
* A place to publish
* The idea of an engaged anthropology for the 21st century in relation to the digital revolution
* Group blog with posts from both Keith and others
* Forum for discussion
* Online press to publish longer pieces
* The incorporation of Twitter, social bookmarking, wiki, etc

>> read the whole discussion

>> follow the debate on twitter

Anthropologist “Fran” at http://ethblography.blogspot.com likes to see the Open Anthropology Cooperative “become a comfortable channel for discussion which does not intimidate amateurs or first-year undergraduates, yet remains useful for doctoral students, fieldworkers, lecturers and specialists in all fields”. She also hopes “that it will become truly international (and multilingual)”.

She continues:

In my opinion, there is no reason for an invented divide that reduces web-based academic content to a second-rate substitute for formal (read: expensive, elaborate, bureaucratic) channels. Why not overlap “open” and “official” academia until they are one and the same? If the technology and demand can sustain it – which I believe they can – making anthropological and ethnographic knowledge freely available should be a priority. This can reflect back heavily upon the academic method itself, both in theory and in practice.

>> read the whole post

World Anthropologies Network – Working towards a global community of anthropologists

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

Keith Hart and Thomas Hylland Eriksen: This is 21st century anthropology

(updated)What about creating A worldwide community for anthropological discussion and collaboration away from the restrictions of formal academic structures has been created at http://openanthcoop.ning.com/ (already more than 140 members Thursdag night!) It started as a twitter-conversation, now the debate also…

Journal of European Ethnology is going (a little bit) Open Access

Published on May 27, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Europe, journal articles / papers, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, University / Academia

Is Open Access the new buzz-word? Do we see some change in the world of anthropology journals? Angels Trias i Valls recently announced the birth of a new open access journal, Anthropology Reviews: Dissent and Cultural Politics.

And last week, I received an email by Thomas Mogensen, the editor of Ethnologia Europaea. Journal of European Ethnology. He promoted his journal among other things by informing that they support open access publishing. Back issues (older than three volumes) are open access.

And he wrote:

As part of our policy in support of open access publishing, we also would like to offer you a free copy of one of the articles from the latest issue (vol. 38:2). You can access and distribute the article free of charge by using this link: http://www.mtp.dk/pdf/Is_East_Going_West-Or_is_the_West_Moving_East

If we take a look at the previously published volumes, we’ll find out that only back issues from 2004 and newer are freely available. Marketing Manager Niels Stern explains that they only had funds to digitize volumes published since 2001 (they were digitized in 2004). “But of course we would like to go further back”, he writes in an email to me. Being a non-profit publisher, they are still looking for funding initiatives that could aid in this respect.

At the same time, one of the larger commercial publishers is involved in a scandal. Elsevier has been lobbying against the open access movement for a long time on the grounds that open access journals can’t be trusted. Now they confirm that they have put out six fake journals. They look like peer reviewed but were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies. >> more info at Open Access News

Is East Going West – Or Is The West Moving East is the title of the open access article in the most recent issue og the Journal of European Ethnology.

For her doctoral thesis on (East) German identity-formation in today’s uniﬁed Germany, Sofi Gerber has conducted biographic interviews with persons who were born and grew up in the GDR and who now live in uniﬁed Germany.

She writes:

The most striking thing in the interviewees’ picture of the Eastern parts of Germany is their general de- scription of a society falling into decay. Contradictory to the hopes invested in the program Aufbau Ost (Re-Build the East), which has invested enormous amounts in the New Federal Republics’ infrastructure and buildings, the interviewees seem, rather, to describe an Abbau Ost (Dismantling the East). My interviewees’ narrations include an othering of big parts of Eastern Germany, as a place in which it is impossible or undesirable to live.

But the East–West boundary is not only reiﬁed, but also transcended by the interviewees:

This is articulated both implicitly, in that the interviewees stress other identiﬁcations, and explicitly, in that the dichotomisation is described as irrelevant or outdated. (…)
The identiﬁcation with a region or a town can be described as superior to the East–West identiﬁcation (…).
Most of the interviewees now living in Berlin identify themselves with the city, mostly because of what they describe as its openness, rawness and charm. Berlin is then not only a geographical place, but also a way of living, which is contrasted with the narrow-minded life in the countryside or the superﬁcial life in other cities.
As described earlier, both of these contrasts can be associated with the East and the West respectively, but the special aura of Berlin can also be described as something extraordinary, transcending this dichotomisation. Even when the interviewees identify themselves with one district, this identiﬁcation is often described as independent of the former border.

>> visit Ethnologia Europaea. Journal of European Ethnology

Open Access Anthropology in Africa – an introduction

Open access to all doctoral dissertations at Temple University

Why Open Access?

And last week, I…

Marianne Gullestad and How to be a public intellectual

Published on May 26, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, University / Academia

Today I’ve been at symposium in memory of one of Norway’s greatest anthropologists, Marianne Gullestad who died last year.

She was a public intellectual. She often took part in public debates and sometimes after she had published an article in a scientific journal, she sent a short version of her paper to a local or national newspaper. It must be because of her (and a few others later) that most people in Norway know what anthropology is or have a better understanding of it than in many other countries.

One of the speakers was Richard Jenkins (University of Sheffield). Later in the discusson, he made interesting points about being a public intellectual. He actually questioned the term “public intellectual”. For is there something like a “private intellectual”?

You can also be a public intellectual in the classroom – it might even be a more lasting contribution to the society than writing articles in newspapers, he said:

The term public intellectual presumes that during the rest of the academic work we’re doing something else, that we are private intellectuals. The point is that we are communicating to the public. We are teaching or we are writing. Sometimes we forget how many people who are reading our papers and books around the world, including students.

Being in the public sphere is not just writing for newspapers and being on television. Being a public intellectual is actually a core part of our practice.

We systematically neglect that responsibility, partly by virtue of the way many of us write. We write as if we are writing to a very small circle of people who can understand sentences that are 26 lines long. We have the responsibility to write in a different way when we are doing our academic work. We should not make this distinction between writing for the public and writing academically.

We have a responsibility for intellectual democracy. It does not mean that we have to simplify what we say. One of the many nice things about Marianne Gullestad is that she did not make this distinction. She wrote always in a very clear and straight format, and she did it in both Norwegian and English. This is a responsibility that many of us not take seriously. We should take Marianne Gullestad as an example.

The role of the intellectual doesn’t stop when you walk into the lecture room. It starts there. And it is probably a more lasting contribution to the society out there than writing articles in newspapers.

(edited quote, based on my low quality recording)

For more information on Marianne Gullestad including links to her papers online, see my earlier posts: Marianne Gullestad has passed away and Marianne Gullestad: The Five Major Challenges for Anthropology.

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

Why anthropology fails to arouse interest among the public – Engaging Anthropology (2)

The Secret of Good Ethnographies – Engaging Anthropology Part III

Why is anthropological writing so boring? New issue of Anthropology Matters

Six reasons for bad academic writing

The most compelling ethnographies

Nigel Barley: “Fiction gives better answers than anthropology”

Open Source Anthropology : Are anthropologists serious about sharing knowledge?

Today I've been at symposium in memory of one of Norway's greatest anthropologists, Marianne Gullestad who died last year.

She was a public intellectual. She often took part in public debates and sometimes after she had published an article…