Anyone whose seen the movie Rabbit Proof Fence, or read about the Stolen Generation knows that the history of government intervention on the behalf of Aboriginal children has been quite tragic. So the chances of anything good coming out of Prime Minister John Howard’s drastic new proposals aimed at curbing child abuse in Aboriginal communities seem quite slim. Here is a roundup of some of the reaction in the blogsphere:

Culture Matters offers some background:

Howard, in reaction to a recently released report about child abuse in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory called Little Children are Sacred [pdf], has introduced sweeping measures, including banning alcohol in certain communities for six months, cracking down on pornography (both legal and illegal, it would appear), and introducing a raft of other measures aimed at forcing Aboriginal parents to ensure the welfare of their children. These include tying welfare payments to certain outcomes, such as school attendance or holding payments in reserve to ensure that money is spent on food and other necessities, though I’m not entirely sure how this would be implemented. This Associated Press article outlines many of the measures to be taken.

Kimberly Christen echos the thoughts of many bloggers when she writes:

Many commentators have noted the outright racist overtones of the plan, the problems with linking government welfare to “benchmarks,” and the undermining of indigenous rights and self-determination. This is all true, as it has been for some time under the Howard government. But the truly scary part is Howard’s admission that he is trampling on constitutional rights, but oh well. This is the same logic the Bush administration used to push through the Patriot Act after 9/11–in times of crisis “we” have to sacrifice some “freedoms” for the good of all. The illogic disregards the fact that constitutional rights are not crisis-optional, they are, in fact, meant to withstand crisis and maintain rights.

(more…)

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Now for a little self-promotion: I’m very proud to announce the publication of Customary Land Tenure In Australia and Papua New Guinea by the Australian National University Press, which includes a piece by me entitled “From Agency to Agents: Forging Landowners Identities in Porgera”. It is a great volume edited by Katie Glaskin and Jimmy Weiner—both prominent in Australian circles—and the contributors list is a who’s who of people who have been active in policy, anthropology, and activism surrounding customary land registration.

But best of all: the entire book available open access so you can read it in its entirely online in either PDF or HTML. For instance, you can get my article here.

Working with Jimmy and Katie has been a good experience—this volume has gone through peer review from outside readers, is professionally copy-edited, and has high production values. It is available print-on-demand. The ANU press is, to a certain extent, neither fish not fowl as a press, and as such it demonstrates how open access is not an either-or proposition but enables a variety of different—and very flexible—publishing models.

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How far in time and across space do the shadows of the Cold War reach? Masco persuasively argues that Cold War logics live with us today, not least in the way that US culture continues to constitute itself through fantasies of its own demise. Americans are weirdly obsessed with their own annihilation, whether at the hands of communist revolutionaries or Islamic radicals. But Estonia, a country of 1.3 million, actually was invaded by the Soviets. The country, an hour and half by boat from Helsinki, continues to confront—or bury—that memory. What Masco argues for the US, recent events in Estonia have perhaps also revealed: repression doesn’t work very well.

Estonia’s ‘Museum of Occupations’ sits just outside Tallinn’s famous old town. It is a modern structure (opened in 2003); you enter through a courtyard cleverly enclosed beneath a glass-sheathed reading room and lecture hall. I was excited to visit the Museum a few weeks ago. Estonia had made international headlines for moving a memorial to Soviet soldiers in WWII (soldiers who expelled the Nazi occupiers of Estonia) from central Tallinn to a less visible cemetery outside the city. Riots erupted across the country for reasons I could not fully grasp at the time. When I visited in May I could still see broken glass in many storefronts. I hoped that the Museum would provide context for understanding the rioting.

In fact, throughout Tallinn, there are very few signs of the former Soviet Union. There is one Soviet era theater in the Old Town. But other than that one building, you might never know that Estonia had been a part of the Soviet Union for 50 years. In order to find the Soviet presence, you have to look underground—literally. (more…)

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I have—I think?—mentioned C.J. Pascoe on this blog before. A sociology Ph.D. from Berkeley and post doc at the unstoppable Digital Youth Project, Pascoe’s work looks really interesting. Her research focuses on gender and discourse in highschool—hence the title of her book Dude You’re A Fag. I’m always on the lookout for high school ethnography (it is the only thing you can teach in intro courses that everyone has in common) and the title alone looks like it should hook students—it certainly hooked me.

I bring up Pascoe’s work here for another reason—it’s an excellent example of how we academics boil our work down when necessary. Pascoe’s writing on masculinity in high school can be found in her dissertation (a slim 232 pages!), or her book (only 8 pages longer). But you could also just read the article and then there is even the one-page op-ed/ad that appeared on Inside Higher Ed this morning.

I suppose some people would argue that this sort of repacking constitutes some sort of morally suspect double-dipping on publications, and I am sure that there is a sense in which this is sometimes true. But on the whole I think it is a good idea that academics learn how to scope their writing for different degrees of specificity. It is always good to have the full monograph to fall back on, but for non-specialists like me, the article may be all I need—and I may need to glance over the brief write-up to decide whether or not I read the article.

Scoping is important not just for readers doing literature searches, but for authors as well. One of the skills I try to teach my graduate students is the art of cooking their projects down to a sentence (‘I study mining and indigenous people in Papua New Guinea’) or up to a dissertation. They often feel—rightly—that a sentence can never capture the richness of their project. But one of the most valuable things about learning to boil things down is that shifting the form around often helps you get clear on the content. This process of inflation and deflation is thus, I think, one of the keys to getting clear on what specifically you are expending so much lung power on. And clearly Pascoe’s tagline is a great example how even a single sentence can signal to the reader what you study, and why they ought to find it fascinating.

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Last year, Savage Minds embarked on an experiment in blog-mediated group reading circle and discussion with Anna Tsing’s Friction (co-winner, with Michael Fischer, of last years American Ethnological Society Best Book award). It was a success, as far as these things go, and for me another good example of the possibilities of the medium. I did have the pleasure of participating in a AAA panel with Tsing last November, and when I explained that I was part of the reading circle, she was, well, politic. I’m not sure she knew what to make of it: flattery mixed with nonplussedness, I think. Anyhoo, Savage Minds has been discussing targets prospects for this summer’s circular festivities. The plan is to pick a book in the next week and to take a leisurely 6-8 weeks to work through it, together.

As a forum we have (and love) our diverse interests, so no one book is going to please everyone. But we also have an interest in broadening discussion of anthropology and the application of anthropology to contemporary problems, so it should be a book that reflects that, and one that is accessible (monographs on the migratory kinship politics of fricatives are not really what this is about… unless terrorists or Paris Hilton is involved).

There have been a handful of suggestions (listed below), but I’m opening it up to everyone for suggestions. If you’ve got a good idea, suggest it with a reason why you think people should be interested in it. Voting will be conducted in a totally unjust, ad hoc and informal manner, but you can trust that your voice will be heard.

Some starter suggestions:
Typecasting: On the Arts & Sciences of Human Inequality by Ewen and Ewen (All about sterotypes and othering by an American Studies and Film Studies duo).
The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics by Charles Hirshkind (Timely ethnography of Egyptian religious politics and practice).
Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order by James Ferguson (A suggestion from last year’s list, Africa, globalisation and neoliberalism).
Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe by Donald S. Moore (a historical and ethnographic account of the land questions in Zimbabwe).
Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy by Sarah Franklin (All about clones, sheep, geneaology).

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In my constant search to find that book I can hand to students and say: here is anthropology, I am two books richer in 2007. The second book (the first I reviewed below (above?)) is Joseph Masco’s Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico, Princeton University Press, 2006. Whereas Xiang’s book was excellent for its simplicity, Masco’s is excellent for its controlled complexity. Masco seems to have taken to heart the tension between anthropology and science studies: on the one hand science studies too often fails in its understanding of what long-term intensive fieldwork can do; on the other anthropology too often fails to get directly into the heart of science and technology the way it always has language, spirituality and economy. Masco’s book is fusion (that impossible goal of our nuclear culture) of the best kind.

In some ways, in keeping with the various “posts” of the book (Post-Cold War, Post-9/11) this is post-multi-sited ethnography. The focus on New Mexico is inevitable: it is the site of Los Alamos National Labs. And while the nuclear weapons industry is huge and spread around the globe, LANL is the defacto, iconic, and central entity. But Masco’s book is not really about the nuclear weapons industry, nor about LANL per se, nor is it only about the impact of the lab on the people who live around it. Nuclear Borderlands is a frankly cosmological book; it is about how the bomb makes us who we are today. The naive anthropology student might approach New Mexico as a place with many different populations: anglo scientists, pueblo indians, neuvomexicanos, hippie anti-nuke activists—each with their own distinctive lifeworld and worldview. But Masco is having none of that: for him, the bomb is the bomb. It has determined nearly every aspect of our lives (and “our” means basically everyone on the planet) for 50 years… to say nothing of our futures. Thus, in the chapters that explore the lives and thoughts of these different groups, the same cosmological questions about the impact of Nuclear Weapons and the Cold War keep coming up—and keep providing ways to connect these seemingly diverse groups to each other: through the lab, through secrecy and hypersecurity measures, and through politics of race and sovereignty. (more…)

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So over the years that I have been trying to become more of an anthropologist (not having been through any of those anthropology cauldrons so lovingly described in the pages of SM), I have often found myself looking for articles and books that I can give to undergraduates. Books that will “speak for themselves.” The obvious elusiveness of what makes an ethnography good, or what makes for good ethnographic writing, make it hard to find such works. I sigh every time I have to recommend the Cockfight again—especially since I don’t think Geertz is (god rest his soul) any longer a very good guide to what anthropology can do today. This year however, I have found two books that I feel confident using in just this way: as sterling exemplars of what anthropology is and can be today.

The first of these is Xiang Biao’s Global Body Shopping: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007 (I’ll tell you the other one in the next post). Xiang’s book is phenomenal in the way that Chauncey Gardener was phenomenal in Being There; it has that naive charisma and perfect timing born of simpleness. Of course the genius behind Gardener was Peter Sellers, and I think Xiang might have some of the same going on: it is an honest book, and the introduction (which is worth the price of the book alone) lays out the author’s own tortured attempt to make concepts like “diaspora” and globalization work before realizing that a bizarre, un-explored phenomenon was right under his nose.

(more…)

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Readers of SM who have followed the many discussions here about the role of anthropologists and anthropological knowledge in war (including the Iraq war) will be especially interested in the June 2007 issue of Anthropology Today.

The Editors write: “Everyone supports non-partisan use of academic research for ‘humanity’s sake’. However, since anthropologists cannot research without first gaining and then retaining the trust of the peoples they engage with in the course of fieldwork throughout the world, in open and willing long-lasting relationships, partisan deployment of our research in war constitutes a potentially life-threatening development for the peoples we befriend, for ourselves, our students, our profession and for our family and colleagues. As part of an ongoing engagement with how our research, and that of other social and behavioural sciences, is being appropriated in war, this issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY features discussions on their use in two areas of warfare, with contributions on counterinsurgency, by Roberto González, David Kilcullen and Montgomery McFate, and unwitting input into interrogation techniques, by David Price.”

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Complementing the AAA’s website devoted to contemporary anthropological thinking on race, the SSRC has its own much more academic website devoted to looking at recent developments in scholarship. The site says it is the ‘online companion’ to the three part PBS documentary, ‘Race – the Power of an Illusion.’ Thus, most of the articles, including pieces by AAA President Alan Goodman and anthropologist Roger Lancaster, argue persuasively that race is a consequential cultural construct, not a natural fact. (Interestingly, this puts them somewhat at odds with what I understand Ian Hacking to have recently argued.) I especially like the Lancaster piece published on the website. Lancaster, like Susan McKinnon, sees an ‘elective affinity’ between neoliberal market ideology and ‘bioreductive’ explanations that understand present social and political circumstance as simply the expression of a fundamentally unchanging human nature encoded in genes. He writes:

...the rise of genomania seems inextricable from the long decline of public sociology (and of public intellectuals generally). This decline began in the Nixon years: It first took form as conservative discontent with penal and welfare policies informed by sociological expertise. Highly publicized attacks on public intellectuals like Margaret Mead fed this process, which accelerated throughout the Reagan/Bush years and has yet to be reversed.

This morning, I happened across an interestingly complementary piece in Anthropology Today by Tim Ingold (‘The trouble with “evolutionary biology”’—you have to have a subscription) attacking recent neo-Drawinian attacks on sociocultural anthropology. Lancaster & Co. I think show nicely what Mary Douglas and other anthropologists have been arguing for a long time: that appeals to the putatively ‘natural’ ordering of human affairs are actually ideological statements designed to de-politicize social life as ‘we’ know it.

(Update 27.06.2007:  Coincidentally, yesterday’s New York Times features an article by Nicholas Wade, who especially provokes Lancaster’s ire:  “If scientific racialism now enjoys respectability in the serious public sphere, this development owes much to the labors of a single New York Times science reporter, Nicholas Wade.”)

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This is wrong on so many levels: Nevada has authorized the public university system—two of whose schools I teach in—to train professors and enlist them as “reserve police officers” to respond in case a VA Tech-style shooting breaks out here. Now, I’ve known a few police officers in my time—it’s a full-time discipline requiring an awful lot of on-the-ground experience to be able to make the kind of snap decisions that are demanded of real security work. Security expert Bruce Schneier has pointed out that the best security comes from trained experts that recognize and act on situations that feel “hinky”—not pulling aside every dark-skinned person in the airport, but pulling aside the handful of people who act slightly “off”. Developing this kind of sense, and then recognizing what it means and how to respond to it, takes experience and a certain mindset—which the Board of Regents apparently feels can be developed next to a 4-4 courseload, committee service, office hours, research, professional development, course development, and so on. They must be drinking the Horowitz Juice—that strange brew that convinces people that full-time profs (and adjuncts like me who carry a full-time, or more than full-time, courseload) are only working 15 hours a week and have plenty of time to devote to learning to be security experts on top of teaching.

It’s an insult to both professors and police officers, especially since we all know that the training Nevada’s “reserve police officers” receive isn’t going to be anything like what I’ve described above—neither time nor money are available for anything like that. Instead, I’ll lay odds that the “extensive training” will consist of an hour or two of basic firearm safety and police procedure (e.g. how to make an arrest and detain someone until the real police arrive) and a time requirement in a firing range. In effect, this policy will provide a ready source of guns on campus, under the protection of poorly-trained non-experts who are more at home with the intricacies of 17th century poetry or the esoterica of subatomic physics than with the demands of real security.

This is offered as an alternative, of course, to real policing, real governance, which would require either passing a new tax to increase police forces (which was voted down in referendums during the last couple elections; I should note that Nevada doesn’t have a state personal or corporate income tax) or increasing the gaming tax that casinos pay and which accounts for about a third of the state’s tax revenues (which of course the casinos that own Nevada would never stand still for). In other words, the state is offering up a classic example of what Schneier calls “security theater” in place of, you know, security.

And I’ll bet it’s coming soon to your state…

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Would it be unfair to say that this image basically sums up the content of mainstream U.S. politics and culture since “9/11”? Where does this picture fit amidst arguments about the clash of civilizations, the politics of oil, the legality of torture, secularism, multiculturalism, or the exercise of sovereign power? Does the image of George W. Bush as a roided-out Uncle Sam basically iconize the post-millenial U.S. zeitgeist?

I have felt since 9/11 that the U.S. is best understood through the psychology manifested in this image, a psychology dominated by the fragile and wounded ego of a national subject understood as ‘white’ and ‘male.’ I see U.S. politics as dominated by the mentality of the grade school playground, where argument takes the form of “I know you are but what am I?” and the insecure bully goes around whopping on whimps because he is afraid that no one loves him. I see U.S. culture in the last several years as fundamentally authoritarian. It doesn’t take a professor of anthropology to argue that “9/11” has catalyzed a backlash against all that ails the modern white male ego. U.S. culture appears fundamentally motivated by a need to build up and defend the poor, damaged male self after decades of onslaught by the feminists and the gays, the intellectuals, the Europeans, the immigrants, whatever. Though the wound that motivated much of the defensive political posturing and putsches of the last several years resulted from the spectacular humiliation of “9/11,” the abject failure of the Iraq war as a demonstration of U.S. prowess has only deepened the cut. The prospects are frightening.

Countless moments in recent memory have contributed to my gut feeling that the whole U.S. thing can best be explained as a Tough Guy response to the sucker punch on 9/11, but none to me revealed the basic psychology underlying U.S. political ideology better than when Ann Coulter called U.S. presidential candidate John Edwards a fag. (more…)

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I recently noticed that Google Books has a cool new feature where (for some books) it will show you a map of places named in the book. I thought it would be good to test it out on a book about globalization, and so I tried Anna Tsing’s Friction, which we discussed last summer. Sure enough, they have a great map of places mentioned in the book:

On the Google Book page you can click on the red tabs and get a relevant excerpt from the book. I think this is a really nifty feature. One can always look up place names in a book’s index, but it is another thing to see them on a map. The service is still a little rough around the edges (most of the US locations mark publishers listed in the bibliography), but I think it has a lot of potential to turn into a truly useful tool for scholars.

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Serendipitously following recent SM posts on Rouch, I just received this notice which might be of interest to Savage Minds readers:

Beyond Text: Synaesthetic and Sensory Practices in Anthropology is nearly sold out so if you are planning to attend you should register asap to ensure a place. There are still quite a few places for the Film Festival left. Prices have been kept deliberately low Film Festival £59 (£39 students and concs). Beyond Text Conference £89 (£59 students and concs). Register now to ensure your place
http://www.raifilmfest.org.uk/registration.htm

For latest details of sessions and speakers and a provisional conference timetable see: http://www.raifilmfest.org.uk/conference.htm

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Just updated the site to WP 2.2, as well as updating all the various plugins we use. Let me know in the comments if you see anything strange; but first try refreshing your browser’s cache as that usually does the trick. (Hopefully this will help reduce some of the spam we’ve been having…)

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When I read (on NewTeeVee) how Google Video had changed to become a search engine rather than just a place for Google to host its own video content, I thought of Strong’s post about Les Maîtres Fous and did a search for “Jean Rouch.” I was amazed at how much I discovered!

There is his famous “cinetrance” Les tambours d’avant Tourou et Bitti, as well as Hippopotamus Hunt : Battle on the Great River and Graveyards in the cliff. There are also some scenes from Petit à petit, and various interviews and discussions as well. Some of these are subtitled some are not. Who knows how long all this will be up there, so watch them while you can!

There are also a bunch of documentaries about Rouch (mostly from DER), like Rouch’s Gang which can be viewed for a small fee.

UPDATE: DER has a Jean Rouch tribute website.

(Disclaimer: DER also distributes a film I made.)

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