As you may have noticed, our website has been running sluggishly lately. We’re moving to a shiny new box at the moment that will hopefully get us back up to speed, but there will be a brief period of strangeness, including a temporary lockdown on comments and posts. So bear with us… will be back soon…

UPDATE: And we’re back. Hopefully we should have quicker load times for y’all now.

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Agamben move over—my money for the ‘high-concept’ theorist to hit the AAA this year (unless I am so far ahead of the fashion trend I am two years ahead of my peers) is Gabriel Tarde, who is not only getting a conference in his honor but also an entire special number of Economy and Society.

On the one hand I applaud the Strathern-Latour axis’s attempt to create a coherent movement by forging a disciplinary history by excavating the loosers of Edwardian theory wars since, on the whole, I have a soft spot in my heart for Edwardian theory wars. On the other hand… Tarde? Don’t you think it’s about time we dusted off someone who could at least write, like Bergson?

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There has been some discussion on SM concerning the possibilities and implications of digital technologies in relation to indigenous communities, most notably when Michael Brown was a guest blogger. I mentioned in my first post that the reason I was in Tennant Creek over the last two months was to install a digital archive in the Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre in town. I’ll just give a brief overview of the project and then discuss the possibilities I see growing from these types of projects.

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari archive was developed collaboratively over the last two years by myself, Warumungu community members, Craig Dietrich, Tim Dietrich (software developers) and Chris Cooney (designer). Mukurtu means ‘dilly bag’ in Warumungu. Dilly bags were used as safe keeping places for sacred materials. The archive is thus a “safe keeping place.”

The gist of the project is this: Warumungu community members wanted a way to manage the digital materials they received from a number of sources—mainly researchers, teachers and missionaries who had once worked in the community. How could they store, organize, distribute, and allow access to these images based on the Warumungu cultural protocols that surround viewing and distribution of images and the associated knowledge that goes with them?

Over two years of consultation, we developed a browser-based digital archive (using a MySQL database and PHP scripting language, the archive runs locally on an iMac in a MAMP web environment—Mac OSX, Apache, MySQL, PHP—for those techies out there) using the cultural protocols to drive the technology. That is, the information architecture of the system was driven by the specific Warumungu cultural protocols for the viewing, distribution, and reproduction of images. There is a detailed summary concerning the functionality of the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive on my blog.

Over the last few years of development I have met several people involved in similar projects—mainly in Australia (I’d love to know about others). Finally having Mukurtu installed in Tennant Creek though gave us the opportunity to 1) think of ways to develop it further in the context of Nyinkka Nyunyu as an art and culture centre and 2) reach out to others to find ways to improve and share what we have. We have begun to develop a framework for a flexible system that would allow other communities to customize the system to fit their own cultural protocols—what we need now are more developers! Although at present most of the content in Mukurtu is from personal collections, the goal is to now reach out to museums and begin a process of virtual repatriation of Warumungu cultural materials. The South Australian Museum and the Museum of Victoria have already loaned physical objects to Nyinkka Nyunyu for their museum space. These objects are displayed at Nyinkka Nyunyu and are accompanied by Warumungu narration.

The local archive allows for thousands more objects to be virtually repatriated at a fraction of the cost. Mukurtu allows for the content to be curated by individuals in the community. People can tag the content with restrictions, add multiple stories and recollections, and sort it by culturally relevant categories. People can also print images or burn CDs and thus allow the images to circulate more widely to others who live on outstations or in other areas. In fact, one of the top priorities in Mukurtu’s development was that it needed to allow people to take things with them, printing and burning were necessary to ensure circulation of the materials.

Digital archives—powered by Indigenous protocols and intellectual property systems—have the potential to create a mutually beneficial relationship between the institutions that hold Indigenous materials and the communities to whom they belong. Even if one thought that all objects should be repatriated, most Indigenous communities don’t have the money or facilities to store the objects properly. Many communities want museums to keep their objects safe—they want a voice in the way they are displayed and curated. Digital projects can provide one avenue for Indigenous curation. One great example of this is the Virtual Museum Canada project. The Canadian government has funded many First Nations web based museum projects (see the Dane Wajich project by the Doig River First Nations community).

There is potential, then, for digital archives and other web-based projects (that take seriously and integrate Indigenous protocols) to reanimate the terrain of museum display, curation, and information management and to establish collaborative development projects between technologists, anthropologists and communities. Local archives, “safe keeping places,” that use Indigenous cultural protocols to define access and distribution parameters should not be read as closing down the commons or sealing off information. Instead, these projects give us a way to interrogate the limits of commons-like narratives about information or information freedom. They give us a way to redefine access and control apart from big business models. They allow us to examine different modes of information distribution and reproduction and the ways in which these systems maintain and create knowledge through their specific protocols. These archives are as much about production as they are preservation—in these cases the two are intertwined. Can these systems also inform the larger debate about access to information in relation to digital technologies? They seem poised to do so.

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I am very gratified to see the AAA has taken a stance on HTS, and that it has taken the stance that it has. Even more to the point, I am glad to see that it has taken this stance in the way it has, which includes a blog on which people can discuss this issue. I think both the stance and the blog signal a couple of things about the AAA that deserve mention:

1. The AAA statement is extremely ‘narrowly written’—it takes a position only on a) this conflict and b) the ‘thin’ consensus on ethics that exists within the AAA, which is focused particularly on human subjects. This begs many bigger questions about participation in the war, which I think is a good idea on their part since they are not germane to the AAA’s decision at the moment.

2. The way to go forward is probably to start ‘thickening’ this initial statement and build off of it.

3. The statement clearly (in my humble opinion) shows the influence of SM and the anthropological noosphere more generally on the AAA exec board and every reader, commenter and Mind should be proud to see that this is really a case of our community forming a ‘civil sphere’ that can inform AAA decision making. (more…)

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Just a quick post to let everyone know that the several groups in Australia, including the Green party, have planned rallies for November 17 as an “International Day of Action on the NT Invasion.”

The Government’s current top-down approach in the Northern Territory simply will not succeed. But John Howard doesn’t seem to want to listen. Join groups around Australia and the world on November 17th – an International Day of Action on the NT Invasion.

For more information check out the Green Party Blog here—the Greens are one of the only national political parties to openly denounce the intervention since day one. Like I said in previous posts this issue has not gotten very much attention outside Australia. This is a chance for folks to spread the word and let people know what the Australian government is doing to thousands of Aboriginal people. I’ll post more about it on my blog, Long Road, on November 17, hopefully others will too.

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A report published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association and reported on by the NY Times adds weight to my “thin hypothesis” of well over a year ago: death rates for overweight people in 2004 were lower—100,000 lower—than for “normal” people.

Linking, for the first time, causes of death to specific weights, they report that overweight people have a lower death rate because they are much less likely to die from a grab bag of diseases that includes Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, infections and lung disease. And that lower risk is not counteracted by increased risks of dying from any other disease, including cancer, diabetes or heart disease.

As a consequence, the group from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute reports, there were more than 100,000 fewer deaths among the overweight in 2004, the most recent year for which data were available, than would have expected if those people had been of normal weight.

One expert, a Dr. JoAnn Manson from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, comments critically that “Health extends far beyond mortality rates… [The public needs to look at] the big picture in terms of health outcomes.” However, that’s what Health at Any Size advocates ave been advocating for year, rather than the simple-minded focus on BMI sorting people into “overweight” and “underweight” categories and automatically assuming these were “unhealthy”—and that the “normals” were “healthier”.

This new report gnaws at the seams of this construction, calling into question the meaning of normalcy and healthiness; although Dr. Manson and her “fat is bad” family are correct that some people experience quality of life issues (another huge construction), many don’t other than people—including doctors—pointing at them and yelling “fat bad, skinny good, you ugly and lazy and nasty”! Meanwhile, I think most people would rather not die this year, and would consider dying to be a sign of poor health (and something that also has some quality of life issues…).

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I didn’t see that anyone had posted this yet, and though people might be interested in the AAA Executive Board’s resolution against the involvement of anthropology in HTS. From the conclusion:

In the context of a war that is widely recognized as a denial of human rights and based on faulty intelligence and undemocratic principles, the Executive Board sees the HTS project as a problematic application of anthropological expertise, most specifically on ethical grounds. We have grave concerns about the involvement of anthropological knowledge and skill in the HTS project. The Executive Board views the HTS project as an unacceptable application of anthropological expertise.

The Executive Board affirms that anthropology can and in fact is obliged to help improve U.S. government policies through the widest possible circulation of anthropological understanding in the public sphere, so as to contribute to a transparent and informed development and implementation of U.S. policy by robustly democratic processes of fact-finding, debate, dialogue, and deliberation. It is in this way, the Executive Board affirms, that anthropology can legitimately and effectively help guide U.S. policy to serve the humane causes of global peace and social justice.

Update: This seems to be the official link.

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I know that there has been a lot of discussion here at SM over the role of anthropologists in war situations, particularly in Iraq. As I said in my last post, the state of emergency and militarization of Aboriginal communities in Australia is by no stretch Iraq. Still, anthropologists are (to continue the military metaphors) on the front lines in many cases (not just anthropologists though, linguists—a lot of linguists). Many work in Aboriginal communities long term as part of organizations or on-going projects, as consultants, etc. There is more “applied” anthropology work in Australia than in the US (from what I can tell—others might be better placed here to know if this is the case). So consequently many anthropologists (and other degreed folks) are caught up in the intervention. My most recent field trip coincidently overlapped.

One of the things that struck me the most when I got to Australia in August was the state of depression, for lack of a better term, that had taken hold of many of these folks. In Alice Springs I met several anthropologists and linguists who worked in several of the communities in the region at an event one night. The mood was very somber. Not in a pity me sort of way, of course their lives weren’t being upended by racist policies, perspective was in tact, but the feeling was one of utter disbelief. The Howard government has been hostile to Aboriginal issues for the last eleven years, but even this seemed extreme.

At the beginning, with little in the way of information about what was going to happen, many people felt like their hands were tied—what were they to do? No one knew what exactly the intervention was going be like. The Brough intervention team went out of their way to ignore and dismiss the people who worked in Aboriginal communities. Non-Aboriginal people—especially academics and other so-called “lefties”—have been painted as part of the problem. If self-determination failed then it did so with these “outsiders” as part of the problem. People working in Aboriginal communities, where abuse and other social problems were documented, were indeed as much to blame as anyone—or so the logic goes.

The first week in October, (about three months since the declaration of a state of emergency) Jack Waterford (a reporter) wrote an article in the Canberra times called “Anthropologists’ Silence makes them Complicit.” The first sentence of the article sets the tone:

“Has there ever been a more contemptible, despicable or obvious silence than the silence of academics in the Aboriginal industry—anthropologists, linguists, sociologists, et al—over the Federal Government’s invasion of Aboriginal Australia?’

Although he singled out anthropologists in the title, other academics, according to him, are equally silent and complicit.
In the wake of the article a sometimes heated discussion erupted on the Australian Anthropology Society listserv debating Waterford’s accusations. I won’t quote anyone since it is a semi-private discussion board (although I believe anyone can join). I’ll summarize some of the views.

1. Anthropologists haven’t been silent, they just haven’t been listened to—or the venues in which they have spoken in are not well publicized and the mainstream media have been fairly pro-intervention


2. The issues of abuse are too complex to boil down to a sound bite, so anthropologists are left out because their views don’t lend themselves to sound bites.


3. There is a danger of anthropological work being used against Aboriginal people—i.e. one never knows how or where ones work will circulate or if parts of it will be used to uphold policies antithetical to its argument, so some material may not be published


4. Anthropologists have failed to adequately deal with the harsher realities of Aboriginal life focusing instead on more “traditional” aspects


5. Anthropologists know that the solutions to the social problems must involve long term collaborative work and the crisis mentality undermines the type of work that needs to be done


6. Ethically anthropologists have a responsibility to the people with whom they work and that is complicated when they work for/with government.

The “it’s too complex” argument seems the weakest. I remember hearing Fred Myers give a talk in which he said it was incumbent on anthropologists to make our arguments in ways that many audiences could hear. Complexity exists in all situations and yet solutions need to be found and be articulated.

Over the course of the few weeks that the discussion went on it became clear that ethical issues within the field are hotly contested and that there isn’t one view of the intervention (as to be expected). Some of the points link up with the discussion of anthropologists in the military, in fact this was directly brought up by a few people on the AAS listserv, that working with government “compromises” anthropologists work.

How should anthropologists work in these times of crisis? If it is not a war zone, but has become a de facto militarized space do different sets of criteria apply? Should anthropological work inform government policy? Is there a dividing line between anthropology and advocacy?

A friend of mine (non-academic) said that after reading my blog posts on Long Road said that my writing struck him as advocacy not academics. I’m not sure the distinction holds up for me. Where would I draw the line and what would anthropology look like without advocacy-type work? If one works in communities that are being over powered and subject to racist and dehumanizing policies doesn’t one have an obligation to expose these situations?

Update: I fixed up the post the server cut out on me at the end and the whole thing didn’t get saved….but now it’s fine.

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I think we’ve got the comments issue fixed…seems mine were going to the spam filter, to many links in them I think.

Back to the intervention. As Jangari mentioned in a comment below there was a great Four Corners program on yesterday, you can watch the entire program or extended interviews online here.

Once the “emergency” was declared Northern Territory Aboriginal communities the Howard/Brough team set out their plan for action. The ‘intervention’ was given a mission: “stabilize, normalize, exit,” a “team of experts” (list here) and an operational commander: Major General Dave Chalmers. The military language continued as they announced a “boots on the ground strategy,” “command operations” and “strategic plans” and an “embedded” national media presence.

Major General Chalmers assignment is to act as the operational leader. There haven’t been machine guns, IEDs or tanks and the soldiers have playing footy with the kids pretty regularly. This is not Iraq. There is a joke circulating in Australia that Australia is the first member of the “Coalition of the willing” to invade itself (remember Australia was one of the first and remaining supporters of Bush and the war on terror). In Willowra, this sign greeted intervention teams:

Over the first six weeks of the intervention as the command team was moving from community to community a pattern started to emerge. The team would go in, often unannounced or with only a few hours notice. They would convene meetings in which intervention team personnel would often read from pre-written scripts about the changes ahead. The changes (which are part of the bundle of legislation passed on August 17, 2007, a good summary, here) included:

1. Changing the permit system (people need to get permits to enter Aboriginal land in the NT, this is handled by the land councils. The CLC approves over 90% of permit requests each year)


2. Increased alcohol restrictions


3. Restrictions on pornography and x rated television


4. Compulsorily taking over communities through five-year leases (and paying “just compensation” to the landholders)


5. Appointing a “community manager” to oversee the bureaucratic and “law and order” changes


6. Cutting off the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) which employee over 8,000 Aboriginal people in the NT and are the economic lifeblood of most remote communities


7. “Transitioning” people to “real jobs” through STEP programs or when their are no jobs putting them on “work-for-the-dole”


8. Quarantining 50% of people’s Centrelink payments (welfare, old age pensions, etc).

For a good summary guide see the Central Land Council fact sheets, here (more…)

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News that a beta version of an online ethnographic thesaurus has gone live arrived in my inbox this morning.  The editorial board of the Ethnographic Thesaurus seeks input on how to make it better:

Friends:

I’m happy to announce that after a three-year development project funded by the Mellon Foundation a draft of the Ethnographic Thesaurus is now available on the website of the American Folklore Society. We are well aware that this version is not perfect, and we need your help to make it better. Please visit the site, try it out, and send us your comments and/or suggestions for added terms. Below is the official announcement from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and the American Folklore Society:

Ethnographic Thesaurus Goes Live!

The American Folklore Society is pleased to announce that the Ethnographic Thesaurus is now available in a dynamically-searchable draft version on the Society’s website at: http://et.afsnet.org.

The Ethnographic Thesaurus is a hierarchical listing of subject terms from folklore, ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, and related fields. The Thesaurus will improve access to cultural materials and scholarship by
affording researchers, archivists, indexers, librarians, and others a common language for description.

During the past three years, The American Folklore Society developed the Thesaurus in cooperation with the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, supported by a generous grant from the Scholarly Communications Program of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The editorial board of the Ethnographic Thesaurus requests your comments on existing thesaurus terms, as well as suggestions for terms to be added in the future.

Suzanne Flandreau (for the ET Editorial Board)

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Thanks to the gang here at Savage Minds for inviting me to guest blog for the week!

I returned a few weeks ago from a two-month field trip to Tennant Creek a small town in Australia’s Northern Territory. I’ve been working in Tennant Creek since 1995 with Warumungu people. This trip was focused on installing a community digital archive—a collaborative project that we have spent about two years on. I’ll get to that at the end of the week, but I want to begin my blogging here with a discussion of the “intervention” into Aboriginal communities that began in June of this year and has no clear end in sight (sound familiar?).

First, the “emergency.”

In June of this year the “Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle: Little Children are Sacred” report by Rex Wild and Patricia Anderson was released by the Northern Territory (NT) government. The report detailed child abuse (including sexual abuse) in Aboriginal communities and made dozens of recommendations for specific ways to address the problem including more community consultation, the use of interpreters, education, safe houses, etc. The report made it clear that this was not a new problem, and that solutions need to be long term and had to involve Aboriginal communities at every level (full report here, summary here). I’m not going to re-hash the debate that went on here at SM concerning the veracity of the report or who saw what where.

My purpose here is to examine and pose some questions about the relationship between settler governments and their indigenous populations in light of the events that followed the release of the Anderson/Wild report in Australia.

On June 21 2007 Prime Minister John Howard (who has been in office since 1996) and his current Minister for Indigenous Affairs Mal Brough called a special news conference to declare a national “state of emergency” in 73 Northern Territory Aboriginal communities and the town camps in Alice Springs, Tennant Creek and Katherine (see the map here). Using the Anderson/Wild report as their basis, they announced their intent to ignore “constitutional niceties” in order to adopt a plan that was “radical, comprehensive and interventionist.”

It didn’t take long for the crisis rhetoric to be undermined as some commentators noted that similar reports had been released consistently over the last ten years without so much as a peep from the Howard government. But these critiques were largely eclipsed by the emphasis on crisis—John Howard even likened the NT situation to the hurricane Katrina: “We have our Katrina here and now. That it has unfolded more slowly and absent the hand of God should make us humbler still.” This is one of the only mentions of the long history of problems predating the “emergency.” Most of the crisis rhetoric places the problem squarely in the present and thus The PM’s need to take “swift” action lest he be left looking like GWB post-Katrina.

What does the Commonwealth gain by defining Aboriginal communities as in crisis? How does this frame the way that Aboriginal issues are dealt with in the nation?

(more…)

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Savage Minds is pleased to announce our new guest blogger: Kimberly Christen.

Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Comparative Ethnic Studies Department at Washington State University. Kim received her Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2004. Her research focuses on contemporary indigenous alliances with governments, industries (such as mining and tourism) and technologies as part of the articulation of local self-determination politics. Specifically, she has worked with Warumungu people in Tennant Creek, a remote town in the Northern Territory of Australia since 1995. Recent projects include: a collaboratively produced community history text and DVD, website and community digital archive.

Many SM readers already know Kim from her blog Long Road, where she writes about Aboriginal issues, digital media, intellectual property and cultural heritage issues and other interesting tidbits.

This week on Savage Minds she will blogging about the Australian government’s “intervention” into Aboriginal communities in the wake of the Little Children are Sacred Report and about the possibilities of “virtual repatriation” of cultural objects to indigenous communities through the use of digital archives.

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Our good friends at Small Wars Journal have provided another forum for discussion of David Price’s article on plagiarism and Field Manual 3-24, aka the Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Lt. Col. John Nagl, one of the manual’s authors, has published a piece at SWJ directly responding to Price. Here is a quote (but inquiring Minds should read the whole thing):

The writing team had a lot of ground to cover. Counterinsurgency has been well described as “the graduate level of war”; success in counterinsurgency campaigns requires extraordinary political acumen, a real feel for the nature of the society in which the war is being waged, and an understanding of the political economy in the country and its neighbors, among dozens of other demanding requirements. Hence the need for a field manual writing team that could, and did, draw upon the best scholarship available. Remarkably, the team turned a draft of the manual in just two months—a process that often takes years. The draft manual was vetted at a conference Petraeus hosted at Fort Leavenworth in February 2006 that included journalists, human rights organizations, and military officers; at its conclusion, James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly commented that he had never seen a more open exchange of ideas in any institution, and that the nation would be the better for more such exchanges…

Critical to those successes has been a better understanding of the peoples of Iraq, an understanding that is a direct result of the influence of some of the people who contributed to the Field Manual. In particular, Dr. David Kilcullen, who recently served as General Petraeus’ counterinsurgency adviser, played a key role in building bridges with the Sunni tribes who have recently turned against Al Qaeda in Iraq. Dr. Montgomery McFate, who also contributed to the manual, is working to further the use of anthropological knowledge in our counterinsurgency campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan to save more lives and build better societies.

Nagl argues that plagiarism is an inappropriate accusation because the genre conventions of the manual are different than those of an academic treatise, echoing discussion in CKelty’s post here at SM. Both Harper’s and Danger Room have picked up on Nagl’s response. Additionally, SWJ has published a response by US Army spokesman Tom McCuin. The Harper’s article looks at the comments at SWJ, and highlights one by Lt. Col. Gian Gentile:

Agree that the Price piece is strident and very angry in tone . . . [However] I am looking for an explanation for the reason so many passages from the manual were pulled directly from other sources (as the Price piece demonstrates) but were not set off in quotations in the manual. I mean heck on page 1–4 of the manual the publishers did find it in their means to use quotation marks to quote directly from TE Lawrence; So why not these other passages?

While we could think of the charge of plagiarism as simply a ‘gotcha’ tactic, we might also think of it in terms of a larger attempt to assess the quality of the social science being offered to, conducted for, and used by the US Army in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nagl suggests that Kilcullen, McFate, and other military social scientists offer “broader and deeper understanding of other societies.” Listening to McFate on the radio and reading her comments in newspapers, looking at the writing and production of the FM 3-24, and reading the blog of Marcus Griffin, we are offered only bits and pieces of what comprises this ‘broader and deeper understanding.’ I personally was thinking of Shweder’s comment about Emily Post, as well as McFate’s comments about ‘man-boy love,’ after reading Nagl’s evocation of deeper understanding.

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Brad DeLong (a huge fan of Savage Minds) has posted a review of James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, in which he castigates Scott for not more openly acknowledging his intellectual debt to the Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Crooked Timber’s Henry Farrell has replied by pointing out that markets require real trade-offs and “we should acknowledge the costs of markets” even as we tout their benefits. While I applaud Henry for cautiously pointing out the costs of markets, I think that both he and Brad both underestimate the extent to which Scott is correct when he states:

the conclusions that can be drawn from the failures of modern projects of social engineering are as applicable to market-driven standardization as they are to bureaucratic homogeneity

A good example is the recent failed attempt by aid organizations to employ markets to distribute much-needed mosquito nets:

In doing so, Dr. Kochi turned his back on an alternative long favored by the Clinton and Bush administrations — distribution by so-called social marketing, in which mosquito nets are sold through local shops at low, subsidized prices — $1 or so for an insecticide-impregnated net that costs $5 to $7 from the maker — with donors underwriting the losses and paying consultants to come up with brand names and advertise the nets.

When Kenya started giving nets away for free instead of charging for them coverage increased dramatically and the “deaths of children dropped 44 percent.”

Both David Harvey’s book, A Brief History of Neoliberism, and Naomi Klein’s new book The Shock Doctrine discuss numerous cases where the (often forced) imposition of markets have had disastrous consequences. Perhaps not as disastrous as some of the famines discussed in Scott, but still pretty bad. Like the examples in Scott’s book, these free-market ideologues like to make use of political instability in order to conduct their social experiments. Case in point, Iraq, where the first order of business by Paul Bremer was to privatize Iraqi business and lift trade barriers. (As well as dismantling the trade unions, one of the more important pillars of Iraqi civil society.)

Below is a video for Naomi Klein’s book made by Children of Men director, Alfonso Cuarón. While I haven’t read her book yet, it seems as if it popularizes many of the arguments found in similar books by Harvey, Stiglitz and others. For a more thorough filmic treatment of these themes, I highly recommend Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt.

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From the Columbia Spectator:

Controversial Barnard professor Nadia Abu El-Haj will receive tenure, according to an e-mail sent to the anthropology department list-serv by academic departmental administrator Xiomara Perez-Betances.

“Here is the good news: Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj is now a tenured member of the Barnard and Columbia Anthropology Departments,” the e-mail said, providing no further information.

Abu El-Haj has come under fire for her 2002 book, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, in which she allegedly denies the existence of the ancient Jewish state of Israel.

Though her bid for tenure drew wide criticism from alumni and organizations like Campus Watch, Abu El-Haj also received strong support…

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