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…)
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.”
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…
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?
These numbers should all be taken with a very large grain of salt, but with 400 people voting in our poll, it seems like there are a lot of anthropology graduate students, professors and undergrad majors out there:
The “other” category included librarians, editors, post-docs, medical professionals with anthropology training, and someone “living in sin with an anthropologist.”
And here is a map of our visitors over the past week. The top 10 cities were: Chicago, Helsinki, New York, London, Washington, Montreal, Bloomington, Portland, Arlington, and Sydney. The top 10 languages were: English, German, Traditional Chinese, French, Finnish, Italian, Norwegian, Dutch, Spanish and Japanese.
During that week we had 3,502 “unique visitors” the site, about half of whom were newcomers. Half of you are using Firefox, 35% are still using IE for some reason, and 12% are using Safari. About 70% of you connected via broadband (cable, T1, or DSL), with about 2% still using dial-up.
Military Investigation Installation:Feministing.com posted on Coco Fusco’s piece at the Whitney Biennial. Fusco piece was a faux CIA-style manual called, A Field Guide for Female Interrogators. It explores the role of female military personnel and prisoner torture in the War on Terror. For those unfamiliar with Fusco’s work, you may want to check out the Couple in a Cage documentary on her 1992 performance piece at the Chicago Field Museum.
Philosophy and the Social: This post at UnderstandingSociety explores a rubric for how philosophy can be successfully integrated into social science. Apparently, it’s more complicated than picking 5 sentences from one’s favorite theorist and slapping it over some ethnographic description. While the discussion tends to skew a little to far into law-based or generalizable social theory (at least for most mainstream anthropological taste), it’s still an interesting read.
It’s a small Google World: So, admittedly, I don’t know what GIS is, what it does, etc. All I know is that my archaeo-friends use it and need it. And from the emails I get on training sessions, it seems complicated. According to a post on anthropology.net, however, Google Earth may be as good for mapping terrain as specialized GIS applications. Now armed with our Kindle, Skype, and Google, fieldwork has never been easier. (And don’t forget all the cool new toys Kerim mentioned last week).
The Culture in Your Water: A current article on Slate examines the eco-argument against bottled water and traces the historical development of consumption of bottled water.
OK, people. I know there are readers of this little blog all over the world. Let’s find out what’s going on. Let’s hear some buzz, some chit chat, what the talk of the town is, what’s bubbling under… I know we have regular visitors in Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Finland (natch), Egypt, India, Senegal, the UK, Hawaii, and…. Vegas. So what are people talking about where you are? What’s on the news? What’s playing on the radio? What are people wearing? What sex scandal is rocking the upper echelons of government? How often do you see hacked iPhones? Where are the cool kids hanging out? I’ll start:
In Helsinki, they hang out at a giant mall/bus-station complex called Kamppi. This suits me very well, since this is in fact my main hang out too. I feel like I spend most of my life buying groceries and waiting for the bus in this place. This means that I spend a lot of time watching the children and their get ups. Helsinki kids are fiercely devoted to over-the-top looks, in particular goth (this pic is from my favorite local website; the goth stuff, as here, sometimes shades into Harajukuism; Finns seem to love Japanese design cues, and vice versa actually: I understand that Moomin trolls are huge in Japan) and metal. Anyway, in the last several months I have noticed a distinct, and now overwhelming, shift toward a particular kind of costume, synthesizing Helsinki’s hard rock (&/or black metal) ethos with transnational 80s mania: Hair metal is huge. The kids at the mall are now completely decked out in Mötley Crüe gear, with ratted hair, eyeliner, the whole bit. So the mall, especially on Friday nights, is basically utterly mobbed by 14-year-old Nikki Sixx’s, many of them drunk. It’s good times.
Meanwhile, for several weeks the country was gripped by a sex scandal involving dirty text messages the Foreign Minister was obsessively sending to various women who really didn’t want to receive them. He eventually was replaced, but the scandal apparently continues because there is a court case involving the right to publish said messages in newspapers. One friend reported that on a radio discussion she heard, two interpretations were offered of the scandal: (a) a new moralism is taking over Finland or (b) Finland is finally becoming civilized. And then there is the issue of the invasion of beggars. Panhandling is virtually unknown here, so last summer when there were just a few on the streets, they seemed to dominate headlines. The country is bracing for the arrival of folks with the temerity to ask for money in public.
Plus, Luis Vuitton just opened a store. OK! So that’s some Helsinki buzz. Tell us something about where you are…
Lately there has been some discussion here on Savage Minds about what an Anthropology magazine for a general audience might look like. There has also been some discussion about how the anthropological blogsphere seemingly perpetuates the hegemony of Euro-American academia. So I’m very happy to announce the first issue of AnthroVisions – a Chinese language magazine about contemporary Taiwanese anthropology, aimed at a broad audience.
In many ways it is the kind of magazine Rex imagines:
What we don’t have is a “it’s great to be an anthropologist! Here are the latest discoveries from anthropology! Learn more about how to do anthropology here!”
I’m a member of the editorial board, but the real work has mostly been done by Pei-yi Guo 郭佩宜 and Shao-hua Liu 劉紹華 at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, who deserve credit for all their hard work getting this thing off the ground. I also pleased that my Savage Minds post about the lack of ethnographies in Chinese was translated into Chinese and included [PDF] in this issue.
Entertainment Weekly (yes, I subscribe to Entertainment Weekly, not Atlantic Monthly. Sorry.) is featuring another story on the new Indiana Jones flick (unfortunately, only 1 picture of CB’s bangs tho) and—more mind-bendingly—Archaeology Magazine has its own cover feature on The Truth Behind The Crystal Skull. Archaeology is the official journal of the Archaeological Institute of America, which is sort of the applied wing of the Indiana Jones mythos. I have a soft spot in my heart for the AIA because of its willingness to admit that being an archaeologist is cool. What would happen if cultural anthropologists produced a glossy journal documenting the glamorous exploits of cultural anthros? Its exactly the sort of ‘public’ anthropology that would probably get us some attention…
For those of you looking for an intellectual antidote to the very serious conference oneman will be attending this weekend, I recommend that you join me at ROFLCon. ROFLCon is like the apocalypse, the last episode of M*A*S*H and the stupidest thing you can think of all rolled into one amazing package of Internet Memes. It is win. It can has cheezburger. Stuff White People Like Likes it. Since the Internet is Serious Business, this conference is likely to cause major waves in the morpho-memetic cultural field. I intend to make my forthcoming book into the next meme. I must be stopped. If I survive, and I intend to, I promise a report full of lies and distortions, dressed up as objective anthropological research. Leeeeeeeeeeerooooooooooy Jeeeeeeenkins!
Please indulge us by taking this informal reader poll. The poll will close in 7 days.
UPDATE: Sorry, I posted this when it was still supposed to be an internal draft. If you voted before the “undergrad” category was added, please vote again. And sorry about slighting independent scholars in the previous version!
Pure speculation. Does Montgomery McFate have the ear of Robert Gates, US Secretary of Defense? I was jumping around some sites related to the HTS discussion when I noticed the following quotes from a summary of a presentation that McFate gave {in May 2007} on ‘The Cultural Knowledge Gap and Its Consequences for National Security.’ Consider:
Why is Cultural Knowledge Not Available?
Despite the fact that a lack of cultural knowledge has hindered its operations across the globe, the U.S. military is still not filling that knowledge gap, according to McFate. She listed six impediments to the availability of this knowledge.
First, the military spends very little on the social sciences. From 2002 to 2004, the DOD spent less money on social sciences than any other agencies except the Smithsonian, whose budget is considerably smaller…
Conclusions and Recommendations
McFate recommended a four-step approach to closing the cultural knowledge gap. First, the federal government should develop a large-scale, systematic, social science research program. {Emphasis added} This program would sponsor highly directed research by social scientists to collect phase zero, open-source, baseline socio-cultural information.
Anthropologist, WWII French Resistance Fighter Dies at 100:Germaine Tillion, who did fieldwork in Algeria in the 1930’s, died at home yesterday at 100. According to the obituary:
Living in the eastern Aures region, she studied the semi-nomadic Ah-Abderrahmane tribe, according to her association. Tillion’s 700-page ethnography on the tribe disappeared during her internment at Ravensbruck [Nazi internment camp Tillion was sent to in 1943.]
Tillion reconstructed the study from memory decades later, and “Il etait une foi l’ethnographie” (Once Upon an Ethnography) was finally published in 2000.
Listen Up! diende at Neuroanthropology collected a lot of the recent anthropology podcasts into one post and gives tips on how to find new podcasts.
Mailbag (sort of): It’s often fun to mill through the blog posts who have linked to Savage Minds. This post on the sexworker activist blog Red Spine has a great take on the article advocating for decriminalization of prostitution featured last week on Around the Web.
He [Coates] says that he began to suspect that hormones, specifically testosterone, might be involved because the few female traders appeared to him to be “relatively unaffected”.
The article does not discuss whether Coates examined the possibility that women were just left out of the effervescent aether that is most often shown to accompany collective excitement.
Fun with Flashcards! I’ve found a great new way to procrastinate, and it’s this site.Dennis O’ Niel created a website with anthropology flash cards. They may not be the most radical pedagogy (flashcard question: “The number of societies still existing in total isolation from the outside world”; flashcard answer: “zero”), but they pass the time better than minesweeper.
I wonder if much of what we as anthropologists engaged in blogging are in fact engaging in is public anthropology, or simply anthropology in public. I will not be naming names, and take the charge that I am criticizing a “straw man”, to avoid any unnecessary skirmishes (I have enough battles on my hands already)–from what I have seen, most anthropology bloggers are in fact writing for an audience of anthropologists online, and the discussions, even when vibrant, retain a private quality. Sometimes the posts that are published fit in with narrow professional concerns that they could only be of very limited interest to a wider audience, apart from members of that audience who are curious to gain insights into academic professionalisms. We are not generally communicating anthropology to non-anthropologists, or drawing on non-anthropological blogs in our own conversations, or producing an anthropology that is less self-consciously anthropological because it is too immersed in the give and take of a public debate to pause and ask aloud: “I wonder what Ralph Linton would have said about this?” Some of us seem to be too busy trying to impress professional, even senior colleagues, as if blogging were a shortcut to professional prestige previously gained through print publications, knowing the “right people” and having the “right pedigree”, and lots of hand shaking at conferences. The tone of assessments can resemble that found in the comments of anonymous peer reviewers in print journals, that is, sometimes rather elitist and haughty: “overly simplistic”, “spurious argument”, “specious”, “outmoded dichotomy”, not a good way to invite dialogue. In other words, it’s as if “work” has followed me “home” when I read some of the blogs, when in my case I often seek a break, a refuge, and a space for doing something different, or something that goes against the norms of the workplace. Otherwise, the question I would be directing to myself is: what’s the point of blogging when there’s beer and television?
Well, as noted here, there may be no divide between beer and blogging. And blogs are the new TV: on demand, interactive! Yet, I wonder if any of us here at SM recognize ourselves in Maximillian’s description? Two responses. Yes!: This online world is so open, dynamic, multi-media-ed, polyvocal, synthetic, syncretic, hybrid, assembled, contemporary – in short, so very 2.0 – it seems like anything is possible, and anthropological discourse could work in this environment in inventive new ways and draw in whole new audiences. On the other hand, readers of Anna Tsing are people too, we are a public. Do we not count? Does all writing on the web have to be snappy and quick, tilted toward a general audience? Maximillian has captured something here, to be sure, but what I notice often elsewhere on many anthroblogs is simply collation of interesting articles about, say, hormones and risk taking, from the New York Times. Newsflash: we are all reading the New York Times online. We all saw that article. One thing I like about SM’s sometimes arcane discourse is precisely that it remains rooted in literatures that I find fascinating and that I frankly don’t really see discussed elsewhere on the web (could be my own fault though).
Announcing the Minerva Consortium initiative, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says:
The Human Terrain program… is still in its infancy and has attendant growing pains. But early results indicate that it is leading to alternative thinking – coming up with job-training programs for widows, or inviting local powerbrokers to bless a mosque restored with coalition funds. These kinds of actions are the key to long-term success, but they are not always intuitive in a military establishment that has long put a premium on firepower and technology.
This week, Newsweek reports on some of those growing pains:
{HTS} Recruitment appears to have been mishandled from the start, with administrators offering positions to even marginally qualified applicants. The pool of academics across the country who speak Arabic and focus on Iraq, or even more broadly on the Middle East, is not large to begin with. Some of the best potential candidates probably grew leery of the program when the American Anthropological Association declared participants would most likely be violating the ethics tenets of their profession if they signed up (because they would be contributing data that could be used in military operations). Several team members say they were accepted after brief phone interviews and that their language skills were never tested. As a result, instead of top regional experts, the anthropologists sent to Iraq include a Latin America specialist and an authority on Native Americans. One is writing his Ph.D. dissertation on America’s goth, punk and rave subcultures.
Following Oneman’s post on Minerva, this story sketches scenarios that call into question the freedom of inquiry that anthropologists working with HTS might be able to attain. Note in particular the story of Zenia Helbig. (See also.) Irony might be too soft a term for a situation in which the very expertise that is needed by the military (e.g., in local languages) is thought to reveal one’s suspect loyalties. I noticed several themes in the Newsweek story that were prefigured in our discussions of HTS at SM, notably the high salaries offered to the HTS anthropologists, the basic lack of local knowledge on the part of those hired, and so on. Steve Fondacaro is quoted:
But Fondacaro, whose program recently received an additional $120 million in funding {!!}, does not necessarily believe it was wrong to send over anthropologists with no background in the region. “Research methodologies are universal,” he says. Interpreters help fill in the gaps. That he clings to this concept raises concern among people who want the program to succeed, including Thomas Johnson, an Afghan expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. Johnson served in Afghanistan on a pilot Human Terrain team last year. A Pashto speaker, he spent much of his time there interviewing Afghans in their homes. “If you don’t have a good knowledge of the actual country and language, all the methodology can go for naught,” he says. Johnson was shocked to hear Human Terrain had received a huge funding increase while other military programs face cuts. He says it shows just how much faith Pentagon planners have in the idea that real experts can help America win the war in Iraq. If only someone would make the effort to find them.
AAA responds to Newsweek in rather convoluted and unclear fashion here.
UPDATE: Good links at Antropologi.info. And Wired’s Danger Room publishes a response to Newsweek from Montgomery McFate.
