Since we are talking about how stereotypes explain “more about the people making the statements than the people described in them” I thought it worthwhile to take some time in order to translate this map which has been floating around the Taiwanese internets.

I have no idea who the original author is, but I can promise you that my Taiwanese colleagues find this map to be both accurate and hilarious (“its funny because its so true”). It purports to show what anthropologists wish to study: how Taiwanese view the world.

I’ve been informed that some of my translations lack the local nuance which makes this map so funny. For instance, where I wrote “blonde babes” one friend implied that I should have written something more like “blonde hos” and the word I translated as Aborigine is far less polite, etc. In some cases I’ve included additional notes on the map which you will only be able to read at full resolution.

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There is a short piece today in the Guardian about HTS, Minerva, global counterinsurgency, etc., tied to the Michael Bhatia story.  The story also reports on the recent conference hosted by the department of anthropology at the University of Chicago that Oneman attended.  While the story mentions a host of characters we have seen quoted in the press before on this issue, including Fosher, Sahlins, McFate, et al, it also quotes John Kelly, who I haven’t yet seen discussing this issue in the press.

The Bush administration is just trying to buy more time, says John Kelly, chair of the University of Chicago’s high-ranked anthropology department and joint organiser of a conference on anthropology and global counterinsurgency held there last month….  The conference also dissected the Counterinsurgency Manual, a military document that became a US bestseller. The manual implies “an endless future of counterinsurgency interventions,” Kelly notes. “It contains no section on withdrawal.”

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Jay’s Around the Web column that featured the Missions for Dummies post about how Latin Americans ‘are touchy feely’ has been rolling around in my head for some time. Mostly this is because I have spent a lot of time reading cultural history of America as background for my new research project on World of Warcraft and have been thinking a lot about American theories of selfhood, markets and commodification, what constitutes human flourishing, and so forth.

I was struck by Irwin’s (the Missions for Dummies guy) insight that ‘Latins’ are ‘touchy feely’ since, in much of the United States, this is a stereotype that ‘white ethnics’ (Italian American, Irish American, Jewish, etc.) have of themselves—that they hug, kiss, and touch each other with a frequency and gusto that is a bit unseemly. The other stereotypes that I’ve heard from my friends in these communities is that ‘their people’ are 1) too loud and 2) prone to serve Too Much Food at family functions – or any functions really.

Now, an anthropologist you always want to ferret out the unexamined side of the contrast—the ‘what is taken for granted in my assumptions’ that goes unsaid. In this case I think what these stereotypes point to is not some distinctive way that white ethnics act, but an implicit contrast with the anglo-protestant norm, which appears to be that anglo-protestants prefer to sit together without touching, silent and hungry. Which is, actually, not a bad way of summing up a certain interactional style which I must admit I have witnessed in certain areas of rural Wisconsin and Minnesota during my time with local church parishioners there. (more…)

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HTS participant dies in Afghanistan- Someone should correct this if it is wrong, but the email I received with the links to articles in the Chronicle on Higher Ed and Wired reported that Michael V. Bhatia is the first social scientists working with HTS to be killed in action. Bhatia was in Afghanistan, when a roadside explosion near the Pakistani border killed him and two NATO soldiers. Both articles contain links to papers and public comments Bhatia had made about his views on HTS.

Said it ain’t so. The Times Online Literary Supplement reviewed two new books critiquing Edward Said’s Orientalism and its legacy. Indeed, the article becomes a harsh critique in its own right.

NPR asks Linda Thomas, a professor of theology and anthropology at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago: What is the Black Church? The interview recounts the history and diversity of Black churches in the U.S. Click on the listen now button at the top of the page to hear the streaming audio.

Faint Praise of Folly: Maurice Bloch was recently quoted that human beings are uniquely evolved because they have the imagination to invent religion. Anthropologi.info and Open Anthropology both posted comments on the original Bloch article.

The Green Global South: National Geographic published a report on the globe’s greenest citizens, and found that Brazilians and Indians had the most green consumption patterns of the countries surveyed, (admittedly, only 14 countries. But we can guess who had the least green consumption; it isn’t a big surprise). For the full article, click here.

All around the world in 20 minutes: Michael Wesch posted a new youtube video on Digital Ethnography showing how his class used twitter and Jott to simulate world history since 1450 in approximately 20 minutes?

Life Lessons: Cindy at Ethnography.com muses upon the much-used trope, Everything I Need to Know I learned in an Anthropology Class.

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Via Danger Room, news that the Minerva Project (or Consortium) may not be quite the cash cow for social science research some might have imagined. There was a ‘blogger roundtable’ with Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning, Thomas Mahnken, on Wednesday. (Bloggers were from Kings of War, Blackfive.net, Mountainrunner, COMOPS Journal, and others I gather. So much for the ‘olive branch’: I wonder why weren’t we invited? Transcript of the roundtable here; it is well worth a look for those tracking this issue.) Mahnken fleshed out some numbers in relation to the money question:

And on funding, I mean, I think we’re—you know, we are talking millions of dollars. You know, we’re probably not talking tens of million dollars but, you know, one of the virtues of social science research as opposed to, you know, the physical science research is it’s relatively inexpensive… And certainly the—you know, the program I would anticipate growing over time, and I think it will be—you know, the funding will be driven by the—you know, the number of quality proposals we receive in—you know, in each area. This is—I mean, this is an area where, you know, 2 (million dollars) or $3 million actually goes a long way.

A few of the participants explicitly asked about ‘pushback’ from anthropologists. Mahnken responded by saying that AAA does not represent the entire community of anthropologists while also acknowledging the vexed history of anthropologist / military relations. I sensed in his response to these questions that DoD thinks that younger scholars (the “9/11 generation”) might not have the same qualms about the idea of Minerva (and related programs like HTS) as do those who hold offices within the various relevant professional societies. Some other information came out: Minerva will fund multi-year consortia and they seek to get this going by the end of 2008 (so, prior to the change in US administration). Also, Mahnken specifically refers to Hussein-era archival materials apparently in the hands of DoD as a possible resource for those working in Minerva connected consortia. I don’t know anything about this, but am wondering if the Pentagon is holding archival and historical materials related to Iraq, and who these are open to and under what conditions. This gets right into freedom of inquiry questions that Oneman was asking. There are also some comments about why the Defense Department is doing this when similar State Department or Department of Education programs may overlap.

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I mentioned back in February that I was excited to be attending this year’s IUAES conference in Kunming, China. I even arranged a Savage Minds party for the event, which had 10 confirmed guests and 22 “maybes.” So I’m very sorry to hear that the Chinese government has decided that anthropologists pose a security threat during the summer Olympics (which are being held in Beijing, 1,200 miles away), and canceled the event for fear of protests.

China is on the lookout for protesters seeking to disrupt the Beijing Olympics in the name of Tibet, press freedom, or religious rights.

Now anthropologists and ethnologists, academics who study human development, appear to have been added to the list.

Without giving a specific explanation, Chinese organizers have pulled the plug on July’s world congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, the latest in a slew of events to be canceled or postponed ahead of the games in August.

“I’m not very happy with it,” Union Secretary-General Peter J.M. Nas said by telephone from his office at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. “And I hope still that they will listen to our arguments.”

Although distant from Beijing, Kunming is home to many minorities and, as the article says: “China is extremely sensitive to critiques of its policies toward minority ethnic groups and their languages, even more so since anti-government protests broke out in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa and spread to other Tibetan areas in March.”

UPDATE: A blog post from the Chronicle:

On Tuesday the association’s Chinese affiliate wrote to the group’s international executive committee, saying that it had “encountered complex difficulties hard to resolve in its preparation work recently, which makes it impossible for us to hold the congress at the time originally planned.”

The executive committee has rejected the idea of a postponement, but it has not yet received a reply from its Chinese colleagues. “We still have no concrete information about the results of our plea not to postpone the congress,” wrote the association’s president, Luis Alberto Vargas, a professor of physical anthropology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in an e-mail message to The Chronicle today.

Mr. Vargas and other members of the executive committee declined to comment further, citing the delicacy of the situation.

UPDATE: From an article in the Chronicle: “Ms. Harrison, who is a member of the association’s international executive board, said that the conference might be postponed for a full year.”

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Just a random couple of notes on two tools that I’ve looked at recently.

1) Mary Murrell points out that the Institute for the Future of the Book has released Sophie 1.0 and has announced a competition for a workshop at the institute for multimedia literacy at USC. Sophie is a multi-media authoring tool—a bit like Macromedia Director, for those who can remember that far back into the last millenium, but much much better. It’s open source, it has a very nice interface that allows for rapid construction of multi-page documents which can incorporate sound, video and images. It has a timeline for creating time-based presentations and it handles most of the main formats without trouble. It does take a bit of energy to learn, but it could be used to create really rich presentations or documents. It’s kind of the perfect in-between-film-and-text tool. The only shortcoming is that it produces its own file format which requires the sophie reader (also free, and available on mac-windows-linux) to read a book produced in sophie. This means that docs can’t be easily displayed on the web, but requires the viewer to download and install a piece of software. Better for presentations than stand-alone docs, I guess. However, it looks like one could export the time -based stuff to a movie format, and the text-based stuff to a pdf, so it’s not that bad.

2) On the extremely cool, but maddening side is Apture. Apture is an amazingly clever add-on to a web-site that allows beautifully clever links that pop-up and move the window around and allow you to quickly add photos and video to any site. It’s hard to explain (go play with the the demo). The down side is that this is 1) so NOT free and open source software, and as far as I can tell a direct route into allowing apture to basically display whatever it wants on your site, in order to get this functionality (it uses a remote application server that essentially serves content on top of your site, so it’s a bit like an annotation service); and 2) it ruins the “view source” aspect of the web by overlaying content that cannot be easily investigated, as one can with normal content displayed in a browser. Apture is hardly the main culprit here, but they are part of a trend towards the obfuscation of web technologies, towards a re-closing of the source so that it becomes harder and harder for individuals to teach themselves such new tools. Indeed, Apture is not intended to be learned and re-used by anyone except at the interface level, unlike the wealth of tools (HTML, PHP, perl, python, ruby) that we have come to expect as part of our information environment. This makes me sad and mad. I wish they could see the light

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Headhunters, The Musical! Material World posted on the theatrical rerelease of Edward Curtis’s In the Land of the Head Hunters. The travelling show will include a rendition of the original, rediscovered score to the 1914 silent film, as well as contemporary Kwakwaka’wakw dance presentations. Assuming none of them vanish that is. Check out the official website for presentation dates.

More on Pacific Northwest…Ted McIlwraith at Fieldnotes posted a link to the online videos of the Aboriginal Reconciliation lectures at Douglas College in British Columbia.

Forging Community: The Detroit Free Press had an interesting article on the history and changing social dynamics of Detroit’s Asian American communities.

Lost in Universal Translation: A recent talk by Terrence Deacon at the 2008 Astrobiology conference is making ways with technophiles. According to NewScienceSpace, Deacon’s talk centered on the possibilities of communication with non-human extra terrestrials through translation of the universal referents to the physical world.

Deacon argues that all languages arise from the common goal of describing the physical world. That limits the way a language could be constructed, he concludes ... An alien race could use a strange medium like scents as their language, Deacon says, but the scents would still describe objects in their world. An odor that communicates “rock” or “tree” would be analogous to our words for the same objects.

Some blogs, like Technovelgy, have taken the news with some excitement, announcing that the scifi-inspired universal translator is possible.

Conspicuous Consumption Saves Lives: Paul Farmer was recently quoted in the Greenville News:

The Haitians he knows mostly asked for food when he arrived in the Caribbean nation 25 years ago. But now they want something else, he said.

“They say, ‘I want a Razr cell phone,’ or ‘I need a DVD player,’” Farmer said. “I can get annoyed by that or I can say, ‘That’s progress.’”

Or maybe communication and media technologies are real economic and material needs today in Haiti?
On a Mission: Every so often, missionfordummies gets updated, and I find their sociocultural analysis to be amazing, in so many ways. Here is the latest nugget of wisdom on how Latins are touchy/feely.

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The April 21 number of the New Yorker features a long article by Jared Diamond entitled Vengeance Is Ours: What Can Tribal Societies Tell Us About Our Need To Get Even. Anthropologists have a tendency—increasingly shrill and kneejerk these days—to be very critical of Jared Diamond. Mostly I think this is because he does what they wish they did: write popular, widely read books. I’m not as affected by this sour grapes syndrome as some, and in the case of this article I’ve already had my druthers because I helped fact check it (this consisted in talking for ten minutes on the phone with a New Yorker employee). However there are still some kvetchable things in the article that deserve a going over.

The basic idea of the article is simple. In it, Diamond contrasts a tribal fight in Nembi distict, Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), and the death of his father in-law’s mother (wife’s father’s mother, or WFM as we say in the kinship biz) in the holocaust. In PNG, Diamond’s friend Daniel undertook a long vendetta to avenge his uncle and was eventually successful. In the holocaust, the killer of Diamond’s WFM was arrested, detained for a year and then freed. Daniel was well-adjusted and emotionally reconciled to his uncle’s death—vengeance satisfied him. Diamond’s father in-law was haunted the rest of his life by the fact that justice was never delivered. The moral of the story, Diamond says, is that procedural justice under a state may not be as obviously superior to vengeance in tribal fighting as we might think. Its a typical anthropological technique: compare The West to The Rest, and open people’s minds by pointing out that They might know something We don’t, and that Our Ways may not be as hot as we imagined.

In its factual reporting, Diamond’s account of tribal fighting in PNG more or less rings true to me, and the things that don’t ring true are most likely simply variants between what is done in Nipa and what is done in west Enga, where I lived. I also appreciate Diamond’s spin on the topic—that tribal fighting is comprehensible and not mere barbarism, and that the people who do it are humans who live normal, albeit culturally distinct, lives.

That said, I do have some issued with what Diamond actually does with his data. (more…)

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William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology:

The Cambridge University Department of Social Anthropology has great pleasure in announcing the election of Professor Henrietta Moore to the William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology. Professor Moore will take up her appointment on October 1st, 2008. She is currently Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Culture and Globalization Project, at the London School of Economics. For three years (2002-05) she was the Deputy Director at the LSE. Professor Moore’s very distinguished research career encompasses anthropology and psychoanalysis, anthropological theory and cultural analysis, culture and globalization, and gender, sexuality and social change. She has conducted research in East, Central and West Africa, Europe and India. The Department is greatly looking forward to welcoming her to Cambridge and to working closely with her in the years to come.

Professor Moore succeeds Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern, who was elected to the William Wyse Chair in 1993. In this her retirement year, the Department wishes to express its deep and abiding appreciation to Dame Marilyn for the unfailing dedication, collegiality and scholarly leadership she has provided over the last 15 years, and to pay tribute as well to the unique contribution she has made to anthropology both in the UK and worldwide.

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Recently Kevin Kelly wrote a thought provoking post about how artists might function in the internet age.

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

The problem I had with his post is the word “only.” Having relied heavily on internet fundraising to produce a documentary film I know how much work goes into getting just a few hundred donations. A recent Savage Minds poll, which involved nothing more than clicking a button, was only able to garner 400 clicks from our own true fans. Kevin Kelly later posted a letter from musician Robert Rich, making a similar point, saying that

In reality the life of a “microcelebrity” resembles more the fate of Sisyphus, whose boulder rolls back down the mountain every time he reaches the summit.

If it is that difficult for a musician or a filmmaker to secure the patronage of 1,000 true fans on the internet, what is the anthropologist to do? Is it possible to even talk about bypassing traditional research institutions and appealing directly to the internet to support our projects? I think so.

We may not be able to live off of it, but it seems to me that small scale research projects which have a strong element of public interest should be able to secure funding in this way. Just look at the success of DonorsChoose, a charity which funds projects proposed by elementary school teachers. Only projects which are able to reach their fundraising goals get funded. Otherwise you can reassign your money to another project.

Anastasia Hudgins, a lecturer and former classmate at Temple University’s department of anthropology is trying to do something similar for her summer research project. She and two undergraduate students are trying to raise $4,000 in the next two weeks to fund a research trip to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. She wants to followup on earlier research with Cambodian sex workers, to see how they have been impacted by recent laws outlawing prostitution. Like DonorsChoose, you only pay if enough people agree to fund the project before the May 15th deadline.

My personal experience tells me that this is a lot of money to raise in a short amount of time, but I’m curious to see if this works – and if it doesn’t I get to keep my $20. I can envision a DonorsChoose like site dedicated to anthropological research, where people can request small grants to replace a broken camera, buy a plane ticket, hire a translator, etc. After all, if we don’t want to depend on the military to fund our research, we need to find something better!

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Below is an occasional piece by my friend and colleague Timo Kallinen. Timo has conducted years of research in Ghana and is presently completing a monograph that explores how traditional Akan ideas about power and authority affect the ways in which Ghanaians see contemporary political leaders.

“Penis-snatching epidemic hits the press?” by Timo Kallinen, Helsinki University

It has become more or less a commonplace notion that in Africa magic, witchcraft, sorcery, occult practices (or whatever term one wants to use) do not only belong to the traditional societies of rural villages, but that they are also found in urban settings and in modern sectors of society. During the 1990s, this observation brought witchcraft topics in anthropology from the field of classical ethnography to more current and broader discussions about the very idea of modernity itself. However, along with this discussion has come a strand of news journalism that produces coverage of African witchcraft that seems to mix traditional (exotic) with modern (familiar). According to press reports of this kind, the occult has now made its way to settings such as soccer clubs, university campuses, overseas immigrant communities, and high-tech surveillance, just to mention a few examples. The fascination of these stories seems to lay in the ways in which things that “we know do not exist” are viewed against a background where they seem to be particularly “out of place.” Hence the beliefs and practices of Africans appear even more “unbelievable” through surprising juxtapositions. Furthermore, these stories rarely pay attention to local categories and witchcraft is discussed as a phenomenon that the audience already knows from movies, fantasy novels, computer games, and other similar sources. The implication is that there are Africans who take such things seriously, who still believe in their concrete existence, while others have moved on. The disregard for local knowledge also blurs the differences between regions, countries, ethnic and linguistic groups and so on. As Terence Ranger has recently pointed out, the idea of Africa as a single “occult culture” is becoming dominant in the Western media. When considering the premises and aims of this kind of journalism, one question comes to mind: To what extent do we know that the phenomena in the media reports really exist?

Recurrent stories about “penis-snatching” in Africa are a case in point. A recent news report by Reuters, titled Penis theft panic hits city, describes how popular panic and attempted lynchings were triggered in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, by accusations of penis-theft. According to the report, rumors about sorcerers stealing or shrinking men’s genitalia with “black magic” had circulated in the city for at least a week and led to mob attacks on the suspected sorcerers. Finally, the police had detained the accused sorcerers and their alleged victims in order to avoid the escalation of violence. The same story mentions that the Congolese police did not want to see the sort of bloodshed that had occurred in Ghana roughly a decade ago, when several suspected penis-snatchers had been beaten to death by angry crowds. True enough, during my own fieldwork in Ghana in the late 1990s and 2000s I had heard numerous stories about chopped-off penises, mysterious cases of impotence and infertility, and the like. I had also seen the accounts in the local press about the mob violence. In fact, I can even remember reading similar stories about Ghana in Finnish newspapers sometime in the late 1980s. So, if we are to trust the media, we have an Africa-wide penis snatching problem on our hands that shows no signs of stopping. (more…)

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Those kernels of wisdom imparted to students leaving for the field. These are often conveyed in the hallway, or on the phone, or in office hours, from mentor to student; they seem most frequently to circulate after the formal presentation of a research proposal. And I think they often have much more impact than the sophisticated advice transmitted through ‘official’ channels. Sometimes they are very telling. Two off the top of my head:

‘Don’t eat unwashed lettuce.’ (Marilyn Strathern actually published a piece under this title in that symposium that Rena put together on IRB issues in Æ™.)

‘Never refuse an invitation.’ (This is attached to Chicago I believe {apparently, a few of our readers live, or have lived, there}.)

As concerns the relationship between anthropologist and informant, these two pieces of advice would seem to be diametrically opposed: one cautioning distance, the other refusing it. Anyway, recently a student here was presenting his final research proposal concerning Istanbul and modernity, and we staff were giving advice. Afterward, I realized that I had forgotten to tell him my new idea. The idea occurred to me, actually, in Bangalore International Airport: “Note the titles for sale in the business section of the airport bookstore.”

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Recently Anthropologi.info blogged a new anthropology site, American Ethnography. American Ethnography is a very pretty site with monthly thematic collections of articles from AAA journals. My initial response was: “wow, how happy will the AAA be to see entire articles they are selling for money on AnthroSource being reproduced on the web for free?” So I was surprised—astonished would be a better word—when Martin, the proprietor of AE, pointed out a paragraph on the AAA website’s permissions page which states that:

AAA article content published before 1964 is in the public domain and may be used and copied without permission. The AAA asks only that you include a complete reference to the original publication and a link to AnthroSource.

I would actually prefer a little more specification of what “public domain” means exactly here, but its still an extremely positive step forward—well done AAA! And as for the rest of us, I we should take this opportunity to start making some of the foundational works in our discipline available as soon as possible. Not only will this enable everyone to learn about anthropology as a discipline, but it will also be interesting to see if subscriptions to AAA journals are affected. And if they are not, then perhaps we could convince AAA to make the moving wall on their content shorter than its current forty-four years…

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The April 14th edition of The New Yorker includes a long piece on the controversy surrounding Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropology professor whose tenure case became caught up in contemporary politics in the Middle East when the topic of her book, the politics of archaeology in Israel, became known to alumni of Barnard, where she teaches. It is a good article and—as far as I can tell from my vantage point far, far from Manhattan—balanced. The timing was fortuitous for me, since my class just finished reading her book Facts on the Ground. The response was, I’ll admit, not positive—the topic is pretty distant from local concerns in Hawai’i, and the academic writing and close detail can be off-putting for undergraduates. But I mention the New Yorker piece here since in the future if people are interested in ‘teaching the controversy’ as they teach the book it will be a good resource to them (its not online, unfortunately). I also mention it because I imagine (wrongly?) that all I have to do to get an active comment thread on this post is to say Abu El-Haj’s name out loud and people will have an opinion so… did anyone else read the article, and what did they think?

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