The evidence? If you haven’t already, take a look at the Open Anthropology Cooperative. Back in May I wrote yet-another-post complaining about how the AAA relied upon poorly made user surveys instead of proper qualitative research, or genuine bottom-up democratic decision making. That sparked an interesting discussion on Twitter about what a more open, global, and democratic alternative to the AAA might look like. The discussion soon outgrew the 140 character limit, and so moved over to Kieth Hart’s forum. The discussion there progressed for a while until, at the end of May, Maximilian Forte suggested using Ning, and Kieth Hart set up the Open Anthropology Cooperative.

At present, OAC isn’t really an alternative to the AAA at all, its just another social networking site for anthropologists all around the world. But it seems to attract people interested in issues of openness and governance. In Shirky’s book he argues that the modern corporation was created to reduce the transaction costs involved in coordinating activity among large groups of people. It did that by imposing a large management hierarchy on top of the people actually doing the work. This model has worked for a long time, but it has limits. Such a management hierarchy is expensive to maintain, so it isn’t worth it for management to engage in activities which don’t generate enough revenue to support the hierarchy. Shirky argues that the social web solves this problem by reducing transaction costs to near zero. While the AAA may still be required to pull off something as monumental as the massive annual meetings, software like Open Conference Systems should make it easier to organize smaller conferences outside of the AAA. And, apart from their prestige, it is increasingly unclear that publishing in AAA journals offers any added value beyond what could be done with Open Journal Systems. Since much of the academic labor for these things is donated anyway, the cost really can be reduced to near zero.

But Shirky raises another point, which is that as the transaction costs get close to zero, it becomes trivially easy to do things which used to require either a strong ideological commitment or an oversized organizational hierarchy. As a result, it becomes much harder to gauge commitment. Signing an online petition is not the same thing as marching on Washington. So I was initially skeptical that what is essentially an Anthropologically branded version of Facebook would produce much in the way of “Open Anthropology.” It may still be too early to tell, but the site just seems to be growing and growing. There have been other attempts to create online forums for anthropologists but never have any of them succeeded like this. Time will only tell how well OAC survives its own success, but today gave me real hope saw the launch of yet another initiative: the OAC Wiki, thanks to the efforts of Paul Wren. I myself have tried to start a few wikis and given up because one needs a certain critical mass for a wiki to succeed. In general social media has a “user elite” who do most of the work editing and maintaining the site, even as content is added it bits and pieces by the entire membership. But with over a thousand people on OAC, maybe running a wiki has become boring enough that it can succeed.

Looking forward, one of the biggest hurdles will probably be in the realm of self-governance. Already this has been an issue on OAC, with Maximilian Forte leaving in a huff, citing “authoritarian and elitist tendencies” by which I think he means over-zealous moderation in the forums. Self-governance is difficult, especially since a small handful of people tend to do all the hard work of maintaining these communities. Two years ago I wrote a blog post about the bureaucratization of Wikipedia. It seems like these are issues already facing the fledgling OAC. But I’m encouraged that this time, Anthropology 2.0 might be taking off for real. I certainly hope so!

So, when you see this woman with red fingernails, she’s not just risking arrest for holding that sign, she’s risking it for the shade of her nail polish.

It relates to a Juan Cole piece, “Class v. Culture Wars in Iranian Elections” in which he pointed out that “the Iranian women who voted in droves for Khatami haven’t gone anywhere…”

I don’t know enough about class and gender politics in Iran to say much about this. The fact that the women in these pictures often conform to Western notions of glamor, including fair skin, had struck me in the media coverage about the elections, but I hadn’t thought about it beyond that until I read Jezebel and Juan Cole’s posts. What do you think?

UPDATE: Thanks to Gregory Starrett for mentioning Pardis Mahdavi’s new book, Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution. Here is an interview with her:

First off, the title is somewhat misleading. Ingold’s purpose is not to distinguish anthropology from ethnography, but to criticize the “the idea of a one-way progression from ethnography to anthropology” in which methodological rigor precedes theoretical generalization. The title really should read: “Anthropological reasoning is not inductive, but dialectical.” He wants to challenge the dichotomy which places ethnographic description on the one side and anthropological theorizing on the other.

We can still recognise today the figure of the ‘social theorist’, sunk in his armchair or more likely peering from behind his computer screen, who presumes to be qualified, by virtue of his standing as an intellectual, to pronounce upon the ways of a world with which he involves himself as little as possible, preferring to interrogate the works of others of his kind. At the other extreme is the lowly ‘ethnographic researcher’, tasked with undertaking structured and semi-structured interviews with a selected sample of informants and analysing their contents with an appropriate software package, who is convinced that the data he collects are ethnographic simply because they are qualitative. These figures are the fossils of an outmoded distinction between empirical data collection and abstract theoretical speculation, and I hope we can all agree that there is no room for either in anthropology.

Against this he juxtaposes a view of anthropology as a craft (a view which Rex has elaborated in a series of posts on this blog).

For it is characteristic of craft that both the practitioner’s knowledge of things, and what he does to them, are grounded in intensive, respectful and intimate relations with the tools and materials of his trade. Indeed, anthropologists have long liked to see themselves as craftsmen among social scientists, priding themselves on the quality of their handiwork by contrast to the mass-produced goods of industrial data-processing turned out by sociologists and others.

The endeavour is essentially comparative, but what it compares are not bounded objects or entities but ways of being. It is the constant awareness of alternative ways of being, and of the ever-present possibility of ‘flipping’ from one to another, that defines the anthropological attitude. It lies in what I would call the ‘sideways glance’.

But I have started this discussion at the conclusion, and Ingold’s own process of getting there is as important as where he ends up. Much of the essay is, in fact, a dialog with Radcliffe-Brown, and the kind of anthropology he proposed. It both seeks to defend R-B from his critics, as well as to correct some of his contradictions and excesses. I am not particularly concerned about defending or attacking R-B’s place in the anthropological cannon, but I do find the shifting framework of Ingold’s discussion to be quite fascinating. He starts with Kroeber’s critique of R-B’s approach as a form of ahistorical classification, to which Kroeber opposed a form of “descriptive integration.” Just as the artist does not see a landscape as a “multitude of particulars” so too does Kroeber’s anthropologist seek to render the particulars into a coherent whole rather than viewing them as an incoherent jigsaw puzzle of unconnected parts.

This integrative approach leads to an interesting question: “the anthropologist describes the social world as the artist paints a landscape, then what becomes of time?”

Kroeber came to the conclusion that time, in the chronological sense, is inessential to history. Presented as a kind of ‘descriptive cross-section’ or as the characterisation of a moment,a historical account can just as well be synchronic as diachronic.

It was left to Edmund Leach to defend R-B, although his defense was at best a backhanded one. Leach complained that his colleagues had “given up in the attempt to make comparative generalizations” for “butterfly collecting” (by which he meant “impeccably detailed historical ethnographies of particular peoples”). However, he felt that R-B’s approach to comparative generalization overemphasized the “generalization” part rather than the “comparison” part which Leach felt was more important.

A generalisation, then, would take the form not of a typological specification that would enable us to distinguish societies of one kind from those of another, but of a statement of the relationships between variables that may operate in societies of any kind.

It follows that any endeavour of so-called descriptive integration, if it is to do justice to the implicate order of social life, can be neither descriptive nor theoretical in the specific senses constituted by their opposition. It must rather do away with the opposition itself.

Having concluded my summary of Ingold’s argument, I have some questions:

• Does our epistemology necessarily need to reflect our ontology? I’m not convinced it does… In any case, it seems that the case for this needs to be made rather than simply assumed.


• How much of this is boundary maintenance? Real anthropologists are those who have an undefinable savoir faire, as opposed to those pesky applied folks, or ethnographers in other disciplines, who have only learned our methodological tools.


• What is left, after this discussion, of generalizing theory? I’m not really clear. My sense is that Ingold ends up collapsing theory into ethnography, undermining his own argument. But I’m not sure about that. I have the feeling I need to read Ingold’s other work to get a better grip on where he is coming from.


• I think one of the things I like most here is the critique of the postmodern “assemblage” view which revels in complexity. It seems that Ingold is staking out a middle ground, but again, I’m left a little uncertain where this might be?

Is there some other professional organization I can join instead?

Their most recent film (see clip),   Before Tomorrow (2008, Arnait women’s collective), is gathering prizes on its festival run. The group formed in 1990, turning televisual technologies into vehicles for cultural expression of Inuit lives and histories,  a counterpoint to the introduction of mainstream satellite-based television into the Canadian Arctic.  Headed by director Zacharias Kunuk, Isuma engages  Igloolik  community members while filmmaker and Isuma partner Norman Cohn leads a support team in Montreal. Frustrated by the difficulty of  showing work to other Inuit communities, in 2008,  they launched a groundbreaking alternative for indigenous distribution, Isuma TV, a free internet video portal for global indigenous media, available to local audiences and worldwide viewers.

The increase in opportunities for distribution of native-produced media, either on Isuma TV and other websites or on nationwide television cable channels in Canada (APTN: www.aptn.ca),  New Zealand (Maori TV: www.maoritelevision.com), Taiwan (Taiwan Indigenous TV: www.titv.org.tw/about_e1.htm) or Australia (National Indigenous Television: http://nitv.org.au) has kick-started and sparked a political, social, and artistic renaissance of visual media production of new proportions.

UPDATE: Video in the Villages has a YouTube Channel!

On a related note, while they don’t have any other anthropology interviews, this episode of the UC Press Podcast contains an interview with Savage Minds occasional blogger Jonathan Marks about his new book Why I am Not a Scientist: Anthropology and Modern Knowledge.

Anyone know of any other anthropology related podcasts, radio shows, or audiobooks?

It’s the perfect Jeffersonian fantasy. The colonials (aptly named) get to be purified by the landscape and the simple primitive noble savages, and they get to uplift and improve them at the same time.

The most chilling moment in the finale is when five white men, hiding behind a hillock, look at a group of black “natives” and express surprise and delight at their shared humanity. “Hard to believe it,” Papa Adama tells us.

Once again Frederick Jameson rears his ugly head. Throughout the series we got to flirt with these unprescribed, complicated, unscripted forms of relationship, but once the story ends we’re right back to mom and dad and the half-cylon child.

(Thanks to my brother for the link!)

The Secret in the Cellar is a forensic anthropology webcomic.

During his stint as a guest blogging on Savage Minds Loomnie will be discussing commodities, things, and anthropology in present-day Africa.

Welcome Loomnie!

Wendy Doniger, Paul Courtright and David White have also been among those academics who have been targeted by the Hindu right because of their intellectual work on the religion. Doniger, a senior scholar of the Hindu tradition, regularly receives death threats; a letter-writing campaign tried to prevent another young scholar’s tenure at Rice University.

• Why Open Access?


• Self-Archiving Made Easy


• Open Access Anthropology Journals

The interviews were started by Jack Goody in 1982. He arranged for the filming of seminars by Audrey Richards, Meyer Fortes and M.N.Srinivas. Since then, with the help of others, and particularly Sarah Harrison, I have filmed and edited over ninety archival interviews. Having started with leading anthropologists, my subjects have broadened to include other social scientists and, recently, biological and physical scientists.

The full list of interviews can be found here.

Rebecca Bird and I recently wrote a brief essay in which we bemoaned this perspective, noting particularly in the case of indigenous peoples, the diagnosis of irrationality is the ticket to paternalism, allowing “marginalized people to be further marginalized and fail to reap the benefits of even well-intentioned [development] projects.”  In many traditional social contexts, pecuniary rewards may trade-off with social prestige.  People could be hyper-rational in their optimization of social capital and fail utterly to meet the bar for narrow-sense economic rationality.