Eric Kansa, who has new job (congrats!), recently posted this article to iCommons about the possibilities and limitations of open access/creative commons models for indigenous communities. After discussing the benefits of openness to indigenous communities, as well as some examples of successful online projects, he discusses the limitations of existing legal frameworks to protect open content on the web:

While openness is empowering we need to remember that participation in open, collaborative systems should be a matter of choice and not compulsion. Few advocates of the commons would argue that it is ethical to broadcast confidential medical records or other personal secrets without the consent of people who are well informed of the risks of such exposure. Putting an “Attribution” licence on such content won’t make it any more ethical. In the same way, members of the global Commons need to recognise that ideas of privacy and secrecy vary widely, and indigenous ideas of what’s sacred, private, shareable, or secret vary tremendously. While Creative Commons licences can be a powerful tool for indigenous cultural expression, there are some cases where Creative Commons licence choices map poorly to local needs (Kansa et al 2005). To fill these gaps, other, non-standard, and incompatible licences may emerge as a result. Many elements of indigenous cultural heritage will probably never be neatly and cleanly compatible with global conceptualisations of “free culture” operating on a bedrock of compatible open licences. Much cross-cultural communication will likely take place in a necessarily “messy public sphere of contest, debate, and protest” (quoting Hayden 2003:46).

Related posts on Savage Minds: Libraries and Indigenous Knowledge, Languages as Intellectual Property, Indigenous Cultural/Intellectual Property News RSS Feed

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We want very quickly to thank Fuji Lozada for his contributions in August to the site.  We hope to introduce future guests in the coming weeks.

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One way to look at the history of (American?) anthropology is through the rise and fall and rise of the four field configuration of subdisciplines. In The Beginning the four fields were easily combined for a number of reasons: each field was not very specialized, which meant that individual anthropologists could learn a bit about all of them while the Boasian predisposition to particularizing research made close study of a phenomenon using multiple approaches seem attractive. Since then (one possible narrative might go) the subfields have split up and specialized and now are ready to be reintegrated into a new Even More Holistic disciplinary configuration.

Of course this narrative is the line ‘the subfields have split up and specialized’. It does not take very long to conjure up images of the methodological advances made by biological anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics over the past century. But… what about cultural anthropology? (more…)

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As far as I know there is no service which offers anthropology conference alerts via RSS. ConferenceAlerts.com offers updates via an e-mail newsletter, but not via RSS. So, following the method I used for the “Who Owns Native Culture” feed, I hacked one together for their “Anthropology, Cultural Studies, and related fields” category.

You can subscribe to the RSS feed here. Please in mind that this is a hack and could easily stop working if they update the code on their website just the slightest bit. I’ve tested it for a few days now and it seems to be working so far…

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Two recent stories about the AAA’s decision to drop the University of California Press for (possibly?) Wiley-Blackwell have been making the rounds in the blogosphere: one piece on the Chronice of Higher Education and another, longer piece in Inside Higher Ed.

The AAA’s response to requests for more information has been to not say anything at all other than the fact that they have no comment. I think that this is unfortunate. I get the feeling that the AAA has been an organization which dislikes conflict and does its best to avoid it by keeping things private and personal among decision makers, and I fear that all this coverage has just exacerbated the problem. Back in the day we used to call this ‘complementary schismogenesis’—we get more and more insistent in our demands for transparency, and the AAA staff and leadership push more and more furniture in front of the door to keep us out. Since it looks like the AAA is not going to create its own blog any time soon, or develop a mailing list to update people regarding what is going on, I wonder if there is some way we could facilitate communication among section leaders or other interested parties to get people talking to one another?

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Many SM readers are headed inexorably for the first day of classes of the fall semester, but for those of us at the University of Hawai’i classes have already started. I’m teaching two classes this semester and thought I would share the syllabi with people. If others have their syllabi online it would be great to have links to them in the comment section—and I’m sure the other Minds will chime in with their syllabi as well, when the time comes.

So enjoy! This semester I’m teaching

The Anthropology of Virtual Worlds

and

First Contact and Its Aftermath in Highlands Papua New Guinea

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In the wake of Ward Churchill’s firing from Colorado University and his subsequent decision to sue for reinstatement, I’ve been thinking a lot about how (and, I admit, whether) to read Churchill’s work in the wake of revelations (or allegations, depending on your point of view) of academic dishonesty including plagiarism, fraudulent claims of Indian identity, and shoddy use of (or misuse of) historical sources. Some of the claims lodged against Churchill push to the edge of absurdity, including the use of articles ghostwritten by himself to support claims made in other articles.

For those who have been sleeping off a bender these past few years, here’s the story. (more…)

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While the news has not been made official yet, many of us have already heard unofficially that AnthroSource is dropping its contract with University of California Press and moving to Wiley-Blackwell. We don’t know much about the deal so far, but at this point a couple of obvious things jump out that are worth mentioning.

First, the University of California press was very author-friendly and interested in exploring new forms of digital scholarship, including ones that attempted to innovate traditional publishing business models. Wiley-Blackwell, on the other hand, is a newly-minted merger of Wiley and Blackwell in which Wiley acquired Blackwell for 572 million pounds, and altogether the new company will publish over one thousand journals. Compared to the UC’s relatively modest journals program, Wiley-Blackwell is clearly ‘big content’ with a capital ‘C’. Library groups opposed the merger writing letters to the Department of Justice and European Commission.

The original goal of AnthroSource was to do something new and innovative—to find a way to transform a scholarly publishing program. While everyone wanted the AAA’s publishing program to be sustainable they wanted to try new ways of achieving this goal, and this was a goal that the University of California Press was interested in exploring with us. The move to Wiley-Blackwell, then, signals that the AAA has given up this goal and decided instead to get into the business of digital publishing in a very traditional model. It marks, as one commenter put it in a private email, “This is not only a sad day for scholarly publishing, but a sad commentary on the state of scholarly publishing. By going with Wiley-Blackwell, AnthroSource is destined to be just another electronic journal package, and anthropological scholarship will be no more accessible than during the print era, locked behind closed silos.”

Overall, then, it appears that publishing in anthropology is polarizing into large organizations interested in enforcing scarcity in the digital space and smaller groups trying to find ways to allow scholarship to flourish under the new circumstances that it finds itself. It is a bit sad to find that, as the middle drops out of this field, the AAA has chosen to ally itself with Big Content in this regard. (more…)

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Last year, in a post I wrote after visiting the British colonial archives, I commented on the fact that millions of photos from the colonial era are still sitting in boxes, yet to be cataloged. And those photos which have been archived often have nondescript titles, such as “Indian boy in native dress.” I suggested that archivists could use the power of the web, just as Madonna is doing with her photos. So I was happy today to learn about Project Naming.

Project Naming started in 2001 when Inuit youth took 500 digitized photos taken by Richard Harrington during the 1940s and 50s and asked their elders to help identify the people and places in the pictures. This program was slowly expanded to include more and more photos, but in 2005 they started a new phase of the project in which “more than 1,700 photographs” from Canadian archives “were digitized and sent to Nunavut Sivuniksavut for identification.”

Although much of the project has been about bringing Nunavut youth together with their elders in a very personal way, the project has a page entitled “The Naming Continues” where web visitors can help identify those photos which have not yet been cataloged.

I think it would be great if more archives had sites like this. One possibility I see is that anthropologists could help out by doing what these Nunavut youth are doing. Before going off to the field you could download relevant uncataloged photos and then ask your informants about them. Talking about photos is a great way to start an interview, and who knows, maybe someone will recognize some faces! And it needn’t just be uncataloged photos. That photo listed as “Indian boy in native dress,” surely someone can identify the specific type of clothing and the region of India where it is worn … even if we never find out his name.

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Elise Edwards is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Butler University in Indiana. Her research interests include issues of gender, sexuality, and national identity in Japan, particularly as they are articulated and disciplined through technologies of sports, recreation, and physical education. She is currently working on a book about soccer, corporate sport, and national identity construction in Japan in the late 1990s and into the present, which is tentatively titled Fields for the Future: Soccer, Nation, and Citizens in Japan at the Turn of the 21st Century. Elise played for three seasons in Japan’s women’s professional L-League in the mid-1990s, and continues to be involved with the sport, serving as the goalkeeping coach for Butler University’s varsity women’s team.

Fuji. One of the reasons I study sports is that in both China and the United States, I’ve found that everyone has something to say about sports – not always positive, which makes it more interesting – and it’s a good way to get a conversation going. Plus, as a teacher, it’s a good way to grab students’ interest and get them to think more critically about their own culture. What motivated you to study sports?

Elise: You’re right, almost everyone has something to say about sports, even if it’s simply that they “hate them,” which is a response that can actually lead to some very productive conversations if that person is willing to expand upon what it is that they hate about sports.

My own interest in studying sports stemmed first and foremost from my own experiences as an athlete. I played a variety of different sports – volleyball, basketball, softball, and soccer – throughout most of my childhood and on into high school. I ended up playing soccer in college for Division I program. In many ways, sports was what I knew best, but not really in any kind of critical, or analytical sense…although now that I think about it, from early on, but only at a rather basic level, I was aware that sport played an important role in structuring gender relations, and that it was both reflective and reaffirming of normative ideas about sexuality. I think that most girls who are labeled “tom boys” – or, boys who are called “sissies” because they skate – are well aware of some of the powerful ways that sports impose meanings on bodies and help maintain a particular gendered order. Personally, I think I felt both frustrated and empowered by various cultural meanings attached to sport, and that long before I began my graduate research I was curious about why and how sport worked the way it did. In addition, I think that some of my early childhood questions about why only boys were supposed to play certain sports, or girls were supposed to be “naturally” better at others fueled my early interest; and, the fact that many people continue to think that way inspires me to continue to teach about the history and anthropology of sport, and to do my research.

I guess I got derailed a little bit with my answer above. Despite my general interests in sports, I did not plan on working on sport issues, and definitely didn’t imagine doing fieldwork on women’s soccer in Japan, before I entered into graduate school. After I finished my undergraduate degree, I actually played soccer for the professional women’s league in Japan that is one of the main focuses of my current work. I spent three seasons with a team in the Tokyo area that was sponsored by what was one of the largest securities firms in the world at that time. The experience was amazing and definitely cemented my conviction that I wanted to go to graduate school to learn more Japanese and a lot more about Japanese history and culture. When I returned to the states to begin my graduate work, my advisor strongly encouraged me to do fieldwork on the league. I’m embarrassed to admit that the idea had never crossed my mind before that point – what can I say, I was young and naive – but I knew it was an excellent one as soon as she said it.

As soon as I began seriously studying sport, my interests rapidly broadened and deepened. I was fascinated, for instance by the ways that physical education and sports were used in the late19th and early twentieth centuries by the newly formed Japanese Meiji state to train new dispositions and forms of discipline that would serve the needs of the rapidly modernizing and industrializing country. Or, the fact that up until the final days of WWII, sports and physical fitness initiatives were central parts of government programs aimed at cultivating male bodies to become strong and regimented soldiers, and female bodies to become strong reproductive vessels that could produce plenty more soldiers for future years. I am fascinated by the ways that the women’s volleyball team that won gold in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, as well as other teams, were drawn into broader cultural discourses ranging from how to reconcile the pain and suffering endured over more than a decade of wartime hardship, to how to explain the double digit GNP growth and new affluence the country was experiencing in the 1960s and ‘70s. And, arguably, I’m most fascinated (since this is the focus of my own research) by the cultural role of soccer in Japan in the 1990s as a medium through which various commentators – including plenty of sports journalists, coaches, and players – waged debates about the kinds of citizens needed to help Japan overcome its serious recession and make Japan competitive in the “new global market.” It should be added, that many of those same people also saw soccer as the ideal means of training those new “global citizens.”

Fuji:. But Japan already seems so global, what with all the technology, exporting of Japanese culture through Pokemon and anime, and exporting of Japanese people as tourists and businesspeople. Is there something about soccer that makes it seem like a more appropriate medium to making Japanese feel global?

Elise: Well, of course, Japan already is global, and in fact, has been global for quite a long time, in the sense that it has interacted and traded with regions and nations around the world for centuries. I think contemporary commentators’ assertions of the “newness” of current globalization stem from two facts: 1) the common but inaccurate belief held by many in Japan that until recently (literally the last couple decades) the country has been incredibly insular and ethnically homogeneous; and 2) despite the fact that Japan was part of global networks and flows for many centuries, in just the past couple decades the nature of those interactions has changed quite dramatically due to the communicative power of the internet, the liberalization of international financial markets, and so on.

Of course, ultimately, whether Japan – or, the world – is more global is a question worthy of debate, but for my purposes the most important thing is that policymakers, journalists, coaches, and others have felt like it is, and that they point to soccer as both resulting from, and being emblematic of this new global system. Many have drawn comparisons between baseball and soccer, with baseball and its militaristic-style training symbolizing the hardworking, group-oriented, and hyper-disciplined Japan of the past, and soccer representing the rapidly changing, foreign derived, and more individualistic post-industrial economy and culture of the present. In this overdrawn binary, baseball is marked as the “national” or “domestic” sport, in contrast to the “international” game of soccer. This is rather ironic since the two sports were actually both introduced to Japan in the early 1870s. (Of course, baseball, as some of these commentators have pointed out, has no equivalent to soccer’s World Cup Tournament, making it less of a “global sport.”) Other writers have suggested that the skills required of soccer players on the field – as individual decision makers in a complicated web, or network, of 21 other players – are exactly the skills required of workers in the new 21st century economy. Of course, for many soccer represents things other than globalization and its requisite dispositions; players, fans, and plenty of sports writers have characterized soccer as embodying a new found individuality and a spirit of change in the country. In 1993, the year the J-League launched, I remember a forty-year old female friend gesticulating wildly as she explained how these young soccer players expressed the freedom and rebelliousness of youth culture in a way not found in baseball. In her opinion, it was wonderful – to watch and for Japan.

Fuji: Back to your point about gender. One of the common complaints against Title IX is that equal opportunity can never really be attained because men are more interested in sports than women, and there will always be more men than women wanting to play varsity sports. Do you think that’s really true?

Elise: I’m always annoyed when I hear this kind of argument against the legislation. To suggest that men are simply more interested in sports is to mistakenly suggest that this is somehow a natural quality of the male sex and deny the cultural forces behind that interest. I think this is the kind of the question that is easiest for me to comment on from a personal perspective as a player and a coach. I’ve worked with female and male athletes for years, and I’ve never seen anything that’s made me believe that either sex inherently likes sports more than the other. Why they play sports and what they get out of them do at times appear to be different, but this I’m quite sure can be attributed to the power of culture.

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This article in Inside Higher Education, which comments on a survey showing that more professors today feel their academic freedom is threatened than did during the McCarthyist era, is the kind of thing you’d expect me to have a lot to say about.

Gross surveyed social science professors last year about whether they had felt that their academic freedom was threatened, and found that about one-third did. In 1955, Paul Lazarsfeld, the late Columbia University professor, did a similar survey and found only one-fifth of professors feeling affected by attacks on their academic freedom.

However, I’m going out of town with my family in a little over an hour and won’t be back until the weekend, so I don’t have time to comment on it very fully. So here’s your assignment: imagine what you think I’d say about it, and then argue over what you’ve imagined in the comments.

Thanks—you’re a lifesaver!

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A lot of our readers are graduate students or new Ph.Ds.  This probably means a lot (or at least some) of us are looking for gainful employment.  And the excruciatingly long U.S. job cycle is starting up—oh joy!  Several brand name universities and colleges are currently hiring.  I am curious to hear from readers on impressions of the current anthro job market.  Discussion could include:  topical trends in hiring, approaches to letter writing, styles of job talk, styles of rejection letter, convention interviews, on campus interviews, gossip of any kind.  I realize there are lots of places on the internet for this sort of discussion, but here we have our own special anthropology club.  Anything you want to discuss?

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Forget what’s-his-name. For news on Kazakhstan, check out artpologist.net, the multilingual website of a group of scholars and artists studying the contemporary creative scene in Almaty. They write, “We will work with artists of three generations trying to show continuities and ruptures that have taken place in society since the break-up of the Soviet Union.” One of the members of the group is Stanford anthropology student Zhanara Nauruzbayeva. In an interview, Nauruzbayeva notes intersections between contemporary creativity and its rapidly changing urban context:

Initially we were fascinated with the artists’ studios, artists who live in Almaty, you know, what amazing and unique spaces those are. I just feel like there is so much in there and it would be really cool to show them. And this is something to be really proud of. But as we started here on the project we came across this subject of the transformation of the city, the construction and how it changes people’s daily lives and we just thought that we cannot ignore that subject anymore.

Kazakhstan and particularly bigger cities Almaty and Astana have changed a lot in the past 3-4 years maybe, but I feel like this year it’s particularly strong, it’s escalating. With construction, transformation of the city is affecting all areas, not only the older areas that are being demolished. And those spaces are being transformed into apartment buildings and commercial entertainment centers, malls, and also there’s a huge number of cars here, so lots of roads are being built to accommodate that quantity of cars. What else is the transformation, the construction affecting?

Wallpaper magazine has been tracking the urban scene in Kazakhstan recently, having featured the new capital Astana on the cover a few months ago. Presently, Wallpaper.com features something like ‘artpological’ photos of denizens of Astana. Check out Stefan Ruiz’s beautiful photographs here. Ruiz’s description of the city cracks me up: “North Korea meets Las Vegas.”

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I spent the weekend trying to figure out how to tie together Donald Moore’s book with the recent spate of talk here about sports and the military. No go on the former so far, but I think the book is a good case for thinking about the history of anthropological knowledge and its contribution to geo-political affairs. Comparison with Iraq is obviously apposite—why is Mugabe’s Zimbabwe not the same kind of threat as Saddam’s Iraq, barring the obvious issue of oil? Why is the region considered (relatively, and by the US and EU) stable despite the ravages of AIDS, the super out-of-control inflation or the century-long (and now tit-for-tat) history of racialized dispossession at the center of Moore’s book? But more relevant is the question of how anthropological knowledge has been used in both governance and wartime in the history of Africa. The “colonial” card is one often played in anthropology (and frequently here on SM), but rarely, I think, carefully examined. For my money, Chapter 5 of Moore’s book is one of the few places I’ve seen an anthropologist take really seriously the complicated uses of anthropological knowledge in a colonial and post-colonial setting, and I think it merits a comparison with the question of what, for instance, people like Montgomery McFate, Laura McNamara, or Marcus Griffin are involved in with respect to Iraq are involved in with respect to the use of anthropological knowledge within the government today (NOTE: I didn’t mean to lump all three of these folks together as people working in or on Iraq… only as three different kinds of anthropologists working with or on the miltary or defense. Laura McNamara works for th DOE and has studied defense analysts, but has nothing whatsoever to do with HTS or the DoD.) . (more…)

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Update 8/15: According to the New York Times, NBA referee Tim Donaghy plead guilty to two felony gambling counts.
There is a maxim among sports referees that the best officiated game is one where no one notices the referees.

Unfortunately for the NBA, the referees have become very visible due to the recent federal investigation of Tim Donaghy, a veteran NBA referee. Donaghy is being investigated for possible tampering of games that he officiated and gambled on; the FBI is also investigating the connections between Donaghy and organized crime, according to various newspaper reports. For the NBA, this follows a report in May of an academic study of NBA officials that concluded racial bias, where white referees called fouls at a greater rate against black players than against white players. This quantitative study was based on public data gathered from box scores, and according to the researchers Justin Wolfers (U. Pennsylvania) and Joseph Price (Cornell), accounted for fouls based on specific positions and status of players (following the commonly held belief that superstars are not charged with as many fouls as average players). Of all the recent scandals in sports, many analysts believe that this officiating/gambling scandal is possibly the most serious of them all (such as doping or off-field crime issues). This is because the issue of fairness, of the level playing field, is vital to the integrity of sports for their fans. Sports fans may recognize other inequalities in competition – some professional teams or universities may have more money than others and can attract better athletes – but outright manipulation by sports administrators crosses the line. On any given playing field or court, referees are the most visible of these guardians on fairness, which makes staying invisible a very delicate situation. Sporting events such as the Olympics or World Cup soccer as spectacles have been widely studied to show how they serve as a social forum for the negotiation and performance of a wide variety of processes such as identity, nationalism, and modernity. There has been less research, however, on the hidden actors and bureaucratic organizations that structure such spectacles.

By examining sports through a focus on the “third team on the field,” I can deconstruct how the performance of sporting events as spectacles are shaped by the sport bureaucracy through: 1) the management, adjudication, and enforcement of game and administrative rules; 2) the social networks built through the training and education of referees shape; 3) the bureaucratic hierarchy and the assignment of particular referees to sporting events. Much of this data was gathered through my own activity as a men’s lacrosse official, at the college, high school, and youth level.

First, there are the rules themselves – these are constructed at the national or international level through meticulous negotiation by league and team officials (with some input by the referees themselves). Rule books read and look like legal documents, with its arcane definitions and simultaneously specific yet vague description of what constitutes a foul. On the field, observing fouls as they are described in rule books is difficult, and individual judgment often comes into play. In the end, however, an official can be technically correct in his or her call, but wrong – this is because of the importance of something referred to as “game management.” As I have gained experience as an official, I have accumulated a number of such incidents – but one good example of game management can be found in this article by Ric Bucher, where the call made by the single woman NBA referee (of approximately 62 referees) is broken down in detail. Game management means calling fouls in such a way that keeps the game under control. This may mean either ignoring or enforcing a rule to send a signal to both teams that they must behave properly. This issue of game management is clearly a case where the wider context is taken into account, resulting perhaps in a more subjective interpretation by referees that in the end makes for a fair and controlled game.

Because game management comes with experience, seniority matters; officiating crews have someone designated as the “crew chief” who sets the tone for his/her crew before the game. Pre-game meetings by officials are thus important in coordinating the judgment and interpretations of the officiating crew; NCAA men’s lacrosse officials, for example, must show up at the game site two hours prior to the start of a game. So the assignment of officials and the designation of the crew chief strongly shapes the conduct of games. This is why the social networks of referees, developed through referee training and past officiating, is an important factor shaping the conduct of a game. This is also one of the allegations made against Donaghy, in that he supposedly tipped off gambling rings as to the composition of officiating crews prior to their official announcement even to teams. This is also a factor neglected by Wolfers and Price (at least in the full study and addendum made available by the New York Times). Crew composition does matter, but the crew chief who sets the parameters for game management matters even more. This system is reinforced by a series of careful post-game evaluations conducted by officials within the hierarchy of sports referees, establishing a disciplinary mechanism that is largely exercised through the assignment of referees.

What I am suggesting is that there is a systematic “misrecognition” in sports, where people see objectivity as the rule, instead of fairness. Being fair is not necessarily an outcome of objectivity. Most coaches, in fact, recognize this, and do not really demand “objectivity” from their referees; instead, they want consistency. I think sports fans would acknowledge that fairness is perhaps more important than technical correctness. The study of referees also brings out the supposedly invisible strands of power that shape the conduct of a cultural event. Like STS studies that have pointed to the role of peer and grant reviewers (such as Bourdieu’s work), supposedly objective structures adhere to a wider institutional purpose, and in ways that are not necessarily for ulterior motives or morally wrong.

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