I spent this July in Papua New Guinea. The trip was mostly pleasure—to catch up with friends, talk with fellow academics and policy wonks, and of course to see my adopted family in Porgera. I did however, do a bit of research (mostly to satisfy the requirements of the grant that sent me there). What counts as ‘research’ as an anthropologist is difficult—as a recording instrument human beings never switch off while they are awake—and during my time in PNG I had no explicit research design or method. My goal was simply to interview a few people and take notes during my holiday in PNG. The human subjects people at my uni took a look at my research proposal and suggested that I file an exemption for a full IRB review since all the information I would be gathering was more or less public knowledge in PNG. However, they did still ask that provide a one page informed consent sheet to everyone I interviewed so that they could read it, sign it, and keep a copy of it.

In the past I’ve been quite skeptical of this sort of bureaucratization of the relations I have with informants. However, as I think more and more about the politics of doing fieldwork and writing about it over the course of a whole career, and the more I read Rena Lederman’s posts on IBRs the more strongly I felt that informed consent sheets, no matter how silly they seemed to some of my informants, were an important way of establishing some boundaries for myself and my ‘research subjects.’

So this is how it went down: (more…)

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I just flew back from Papua New Guinea, so after a long summer off I am now finally back and plan to be blogging regularly. Going back to my field site after years and years away was really really great—life affirming even. Over the next couple of days I’ll try to gather some of the things I learned this time around into a couple of blog posts. Hopefully they’ll be interesting to people who have yet to do fieldwork (who might learn something) and to people who have been doing fieldwork for years (who can have a good laugh and my slowly-evaporating naivete).

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I’ve just come off of a week long visit with Bruno Latour. He came to Rice as the “NEH Distinguished Visiting Scholar” and gave a public lecture, three seminars, screened a video about his recent art exhibit and participated in three classes (two in anthropology, one in architecture), in addition to dinners, lunches, talks with undergraduates and graduate students, trips to the mall, and a tour of Houston. In short, we got our money’s worth. It reconfirmed for me my sense that Latour is a gentleman and a fantastic teacher; his curiosity is boundless, as is his ability to converse, in depth, with an astonishing range of people—from scientists to lawyers to evangelicals to architects to philosophers to American historians to undergraduates to the wine buyers at Specs (The World’s Largest Liquor Store, about which Bruno said of its immense and varied selection from all over the world “Now I understand relativism. You know, you aren’t supposed to be that open-minded”). The only people he seemed unable to connect with were the French, which is not entirely ironic. He is a fantastic teacher—better at clarfying his ideas in person than in print—and incredibly patient with questions and the inevitable attacks that come based on his reputation (one colleague asked if he felt responsible for the Holocaust—I think this was meant to be “provocative” rather than puerile). (more…)

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Physicists hate it when Anthropologists misuse Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to give added weight to the commonplace observation that the ethnographic observer has an impact on the subjects and activities being observed. Not only is it unnecessary to evoke physics, it is bad physics:

Another common misconception is that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is equivalent to the statement, “You can’t measure a system without changing it.” In fact, it applies to unmeasured states and does not really take account of the effect of measurement.

Nonetheless, it has become anthropological shorthand to refer to our academic concerns that we (the observer) might be unduly influencing what we observe. The same concern affects documentary filmmakers, as it is not uncommon for the presence of the camera to have a strong influence on the events being recorded.

This fact struck home yesterday as we were interviewing a key subject. His kids came tearing across the frame: an older sister chasing her younger brother. As she ran, the sister yelled: “They should film our fight!” As shooting anything else had become impossible, we complied.

PS: I’m happy to say that DER has made our short film (which the current project is building upon), Acting Like a Thief, freely available from Google Video in its entirety. If your university library doesn’t yet have a copy of the film, please request that they purchase one. Doing so will help us demonstrate the wisdom of such an Open Access model, as well as supporting our current production!

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Ah, the AAAs: the only event I know of that combines endless reflexivity with overwhelming and alternating senses of total abandomnent and total communion. And yet if there was anything that struck me about the 2006 AAAS it was that we as a collevtivity had some trouble getting our effervescence on.

A lot people that I know blamed the venue. The San Jose convention center is huge. As a result, there was massive amounts of acreage at the front of the space where people could hang out, sit, check their email, and buy and drink coffee. There was even a large patio for the smokers! And there were three or four (or five or six) hotels where people could stay at, rather than one massive hotel and a couple of outliers.

Now, it is true that a lot complain about the terrible aquarium-like sensation of milling around in an over-packed hotel lobby amongst thousands of other anthropologists desperately looking for someone else to go out to lunch with between the morning and afternoon sessions. But was I the only one who missed the opressive, punishing meat-market atmosphere of the lobby? And that wasn’t all that was missing… (more…)

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Yesterday, William Hipwell gave a talk at my department about “Research Ethics and Aboriginal Peoples.” I won’t go into the details, but the emphasis was on the importance of informed consent. I was reminded of our recent discussion on SM about “anthropology and the IRB” and, indeed, some of those issues came up in discussion. The point I raised, however, was slightly different and came from my recent work in India. The issue there is that while we have the full consent of those we are working directly with in the film, the concept of “community” and who has the power to provide consent on behalf of the community (as opposed to individuals) is one of the things at stake.

The group we are working with are reformers who are challenging the old system of community governance. One of the processes we filmed was the establishment of a new form of self-government that aims to more democratically represent the needs of the community. However, there are still several competing traditional councils, or panchayats, that have significant power in the community. The group we worked with was reluctant to go to those groups for permission because their activities were challenging the authority of the panchayat and some panchayat members were actively seeking to hinder those activities.

At the same time, discussions within the group of reformers revealed that there was some concern that failure to secure community-wide consent could result in blow-back. Already two members of the group have been arrested for violent crimes on the basis of false testimony provided by their opponents within the community, and everyone was nervous. (more…)

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Wampum has been detailing the greater significance of the Abramoff scandal, tying it to the decade-old disgrace of the Cobell affair. Elouise Cobell is a Blackfoot banker who brought a class action suit against the Dept. of Interior for a century-plus of mismanagement of trust funds owed Indians for the use of tribal lands. By her reckoning, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) owes Indian peoples over $150 billion. The ruling in Cobell v. Norton held that because many of the documents needed to do a full accounting at the BIA had been destroyed (many at the order of Secretary of the Interior Gail Norton), it would be necessary to audit the companies that had profited from the use of tribal lands—mostly timber, mining, and oil companies. In the meantime, the BIA has been essentially mothballed, it’s already small budget going primarily to legal costs and accounting fees.

Which is how I indirectly ran into the Cobell affair. Soon after I arrived in Iowa to do research on the Meskwaki Settlement, the tribal council was overthrown following its refusal to recognize a recall election. Not much was different when I stopped in to the tribal offices to visit the tribal historian, John Buffalo—the only outward sign that anything was happening was a handful of men sitting around a campfire burning just outside the main entrance. Buffalo filled me in on what was going on, telling me that the supporters of the new council were occupying the building until they could get a ruling from the BIA recognizing the recall and authorizing a new election. According to the news, the occupiers were armed, with rifle-wielding Meskwaki prowling the rooftop, but in my visits, I never saw anyone with a gun, and I was never questioned or even given a second glance as I entered and left the building.

(more…)

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One of the most difficult issues we have had to confront in making a film about the Chharas is that of thievery. It is a fact that a sizable minority of the community still make their living from petty theft. Understandably, they are reluctant to talk about this on camera. It is important, however, in talking about the theater (the subject of our film), because the Chharas themselves see a link between their skill at acting and their skill at thieving. It is also historically important, since the Chharas (or, more precisely, the Sansis who speak the same language) were the first group to be labeled as “Criminal Tribes” after the passing of the Criminal Tribes Act in 1871.

It was in the course of searching for some more information about the topic that I came across Vinay Lal’s review of Rai Bahadur M. Pauparao Naidu’s 1915 book: The History of Railway Thieves, with Illustrations and Hints on Detection. Lal’s article discusses the role of colonial anthropology in creating the category of “criminal tribes”, but since I am already well aware of this story, my attention was caught by his tangential account of the origins of fingerprinting in colonial India:

Naidu’s matter-of-fact references to fingerprinting scarcely reveal the manner in which fingerprinting came to be developed and the extraordinary role of the Indian police in enabling its use as the most reliable method for the detection of criminals the world over. It is just shortly after the Rebellion of 1857-58 that William Herschel, Magistrate at Jungipoor on the upper reaches of the Hooghly, realized its uses as a method of identification. ... Herschel then left for England, but in India fingerprinting had another proponent, Edward Henry, who in 1891 was appointed Inspector-General of Police for the Lower Provinces, Bengal. Henry first experimented with the anthropometric system, but was not satisfied with the accuracy of the measurements. In a report submitted to the Government of Bengal in 1896, Henry detailed the experiments he had conducted with fingerprints, which he observed were not only inexpensive to obtain, but also a surer means of detecting and confirming the identity of any given person. Henry is then said, with the aid of a team of Indian assistants, to have developed a system of classification under which 1,024 primary positions were identified, which when considered along with secondary and tertiary subdivisions, made fingerprinting a fool-proof form of fixing identity.

(more…)

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While we are working on the film, we have been having our meals at Roxy Gagdekar’s house in Chharanagar, and we have had many long talks. He is a tremendous source of information about the Chhara community, denotified tribes, and the politics of Gujarat. A reporter at one of Gujarat’s leading newspapers, Roxy is also an excellent writer. So I am very happy that he has decided to start his own blog. He plans to use it to write about Chharangar, the activities of the Budhan Theatre, and even some short fiction he has written.

In one of my first posts on Savage Minds, I argued that there would be a resurgence of “armchair anthropology” as a result of the internet. Central to this argument are what Hossein Derakhshan calls “bridge bloggers.” Such bloggers are able to bridge the same linguistic and cultural barriers that anthropologists seek to overcome. In some cases they may even do it better. I believe that Roxy Gagdekar is one such person.

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Last night, sitting in Roxy Gagdekar’s house in Chharanagar, I asked him a question that I have been asked at nearly every screening of Acting Like a Thief: namely, how are people able to identify Chharas?

Beyond the historic injustices Denotified Tribes (DNTs) faced during the British Colonial period, Chharas (and other DNTs) continue to suffer from ethnic discrimination. Stigmatized as thieves, it is difficult for them to get legitimate jobs in mainstream society. As a last resort, they turn to criminal activity. It is a vicious circle from which only a few are able to escape.

But how do people know they are Chhara? They don’t look noticeably different from the rest of the population, and even if they did, they could easily be from a neighboring state. They speak their own language (Bhantu), but they can speak Gujarati as well as anyone else. (more…)

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Or, Anthropology for Old People.

So, with the AAAs in the air and most young anthropologists’ thoughts turning to interviews and how to sum up their thesis research in a boffo mini-paragraph, this might not be the most apropos time to discuss What Lies Beyond. But we here at SM shrink from no grim task.

A question likely to echo down the hotel hallways next week, and certain to rustle among the leaves of the groves of academe during next spring’s campus interviews, is what today’s tesista (this word should exist in English but unfortunately “thesist” sounds religious, “thesiser” sounds like a made-up title for a minor nobleman in a fantasy fiction novel, and “writer-upper” is plainly hopeless) plans to do as her Next Project.

One option that comes up often enough to perhaps warrant being considered a pattern is the young anthro—returned from a doctoral project carried out at a field site accessible only by ice ax, dugout canoe, or 20 mule team equipped with propeller hats—who suddenly evinces a serious interest in the same themes as those of the original research—say, exchange rituals—but in a rather more comfortable setting—say, upscale organic grocery stores located in periurban North America. Sometimes in a tone of mild moral umbrage about giving exoticism a poke in the eye.

I for one always felt certain I’d have none of that. No, I’d stay in the South American heartland, polishing my hard-won though still pretty pathetic Guarani language skills and ultimately dying, slowly, of Chagas’ disease as befits any Chaco dweller worth his salt. Neither bug bites nor saddle sores nor sulfurous ground water would stand in my way.

But that was me talking the talk. This fall, walking the Next Project walk (with a visit to my old field site along the way), I’ve discovered the Paraguayan Chaco (my previous work was in the Bolivian Chaco). A good portion of the Paraguayan Chaco has been settled by Mennonites and is, astonishingly, a Chaco with grocery stores, a Chaco with air conditioning, a Chaco with swimming pools (well, one anyway). My anti-colonialist spirit tells me it is wrong wrong wrong for me to want to take a swimsuit next time, while my sensualist flesh says it is oh so RIGHT.

So, I’m wondering (in a self-exculpatory sort of way)—am I just succumbing to the inevitable? Apart from all the condemnations of exoticist exploitation that are heaped upon old-fashioned, out-in-the-impoverished-Otherish-boonies fieldwork, how much of a role does the fact that anthropology is no longer a young upstart discipline, but one with lots of comfy established practitioners, play in the shift of what kind of ethnography “counts” for our collective purposes?

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I haven’t followed the case so I don’t know its outcome—perhaps some UK commentators can update us? —but an anthropological essay I find I have on the brain a lot these days is one written in 1999 by British anthropologist Alison Spedding. The full reference is at the end of this post; it was in Anthropology Today and I am not sure how to provide a universally accessible link.

At any rate, Spedding was writing from a Bolivian prison where she had been incarcerated (for 6 months at that point) on drug charges. Somehow under the conditions she managed to produce an amazingly thoughtful piece on the peculiarities of fieldwork. She writes of the “screen personality” we tend to adopt in the field—eating lamb flaps we don’t like, going to religious services we don’t believe in, nodding sympathetically to accounts of gender relations we’d condemn if they came from friends back home—and how impossible it was for her to maintain such a screen while in prison.

From there, she goes on to discuss the standard modality of ethnographic explanation: that “the apparent superstition is a reasonable way to understand the world, that what seems irrational is in fact entirely rational when one comprehends its context”. At the time of her writing, this mode wasn’t really working for her—when her fellow prisoners spent money on llama sacrifices and the like to influence the outcomes of their trials instead of using whatever funds they possessed to hire lawyers, she couldn’t help feeling it was basically counter-productive. And when women prisoners eagerly participated in the gender regimes of the prison routine she couldn’t help finding it, well, upsetting. The article ends on a rather despairing note (understandably). I can’t recreate its whole arc in this space but I highly recommend it.

So anyway—I thought about this article occasionally when I was writing my thesis, especially the bits on witchcraft. For all the structural rationales I could tease out about witchcraft discourse in the Bolivian community in which I carried out fieldwork, part of what motivated it seemed to be a kind of malicious glee. But mostly I ended up in the standard anthropological mode of explaining its relationship to social structure and so forth. Whatever, right? In the end I didn’t live in Isoso and neither I nor my loved ones would ever face witchcraft accusation.

However, living in the States the past few years I’ve started to get a bit of that ol’ Bolivian prison feeling. Of course my existence is quite cushy. But I mean in terms of hearing and being forced to live with rhetorics, discourses, regimes, practices—the lot—that I don’t want merely to understand/explain/analytically dissect. I don’t have a “screen personality” here—I’m me, and a lot of what is around me looks like flat-out meanness and stupidity. Are anthropologists allowed to say that? and having said it, then what?

article ref: Dreams of Leaving: Life in the Feminine Penitentiary Centre, Miraflores, La Paz, Bolivia, by A. L. Spedding
Anthropology Today (1999)

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It isn’t often you get to see anthrobloggers in their natural habitat. I just happened to meet Marc Joseph Francois Jacquin last week while visiting his fieldsite.

He is working towards his master’s degree, spending the summer as a research assistant for Scott Simon. Scott is an old Taiwan hand, having now written a couple of books on Taiwanese female entrepreneurs and the leather industry. Now he is researching the movement to create an Aborigine autonomous region.

Mark is documenting his research experiences on his blog. It is something of a letter home to his loved ones, but there are some genuine anthropological insights as he discovers, like this one about how Aborigine culture is genuinely different:

The point here is that one of the issues that exists between this indigenous community and the outside world is that the way of life here is seen as a ‘problem’ by outsiders. Working to have enough food to treat your family (extended family in Western terms) and then having nothing is perceived as irresponsible by us Westerners. In their culture, it’s the way things work: you work to have enough to survive from day to day with your family. If you suddenly come into a lot of money from the sale of livestock or land, it is understood that you will share that ‘success’ with those upon whom you have depended in the past or will depend in the future. The situation is thus that one culture’s lifestyle doesn’t jive with the majority’s concept of how to live..so we call them poor (though they would say they are not suffering) and lazy when they refuse to take a full time job – many who don’t could because they have a solid high school education, probably equal or better than in Canada.

In a followup comment he clarifies the difference between this way of living and “insurance”:

It is also different from insurance because money does not often come into the equation. Exchange labour refers to actually going to someone’s home and helping them do something (example: building an extension on their house for a day or two, or helping a kid in the family with school work). It’s as if time, energy and labour power were flowing from people to people within the group….a very interesting way of living.

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A while back Nancy wrote that:

A bridge is a bridge in a very concrete way, [and] social and cultural elements are not necessarily as tangible. The anthropologist is not just learning about an unchanging and concrete thing when s/he is learning about a social phenomenon. S/he is interpreting it as s/he is observing it and learning about it so that the very entity that s/he presents as “fact” or “reality” is already affected by her assumptions… Two people trying to understand the same social structure will understand it differently because of their assumptions.

Just how different do two anthropologists interpret ‘the same social structure’? At the time I thought this maybe wasn’t quite right (not that Nancy was mistaken somehow, just that the issue was more complex than the comment indicated). On the one hand, I felt that it was obvious that your research interests shape your focus, so of course two people with different focuses will look at the same thing differently. On the other hand, I strongly feel that cultural systems are sufficiently stable and coherent that they can be studied without giving into some sort of wishy-washy postmodernism on the one hand or vulgar positivism on the other. Culture isn’t as tangible as a bridge, but I still think it’s tangible enough—it’s telling, for instance, that refering to two interpretations of ‘the same’ social structure implies there is one ‘thing’ there.

This is a real issue for me—I did fieldwork at the exact same time with (roughly) the same ethnic group as as another anthropologist, my good friend Jerry Jacka (who appears here with his permission). At first I think Jerry and I were a little nervous about this since this sharing a fieldsite can sometimes lead to trouble and strife so intense it is spoken of only in hushed tones over beer at hotel bars during AAAs. Lucky, Jerry and I got on famously and are good friends, and the only tales of fieldwork rivalry we talk about over beer are other people’s.

In fact, Jerry and I were often relieved to find out that we had discovered similar things about ‘our culture’ independently of one another. Although untangling the outlines of cultural structure in the field is hard (in our case only one other anthropologist had done fieldwork in our area) it was really gratifying to find the way we both came to recognize the prevailing themes in our area. “Did you ever hear about these spirit women?” I’d ask him. “Yu Angini Wanda? Oh yeah, people won’t stop talking about them. Have you run across these hired assasin/berserker types?” “Akali peyapeya? Sure.” This sort of thing.

So—just how different do two anthropologists (in roughly the same demongraphic, to be sure) interpret ‘the same social structure’? Well recently one of my ASAO homies asked members of our email list to describe their experiences in Papua New Guinea with lambflaps, cheap cuts of meat from a sheep’s belly that are sold throughout the country. Jerry and I both replied to her independently of each other, without knowing what the other had written. This makes an excellent example of how anthropological accounts of the same thing observed at the same time in the same place (more or less) differ.

Here’s what Jerry wrote:

I have a lot to say about lamb flaps as I initially found them revolting (not being used to eating mutton), particularly the boiled variety, but within months developed an insatiable craving for fried ones.

Lamb flaps (or sipsip as they are known in Tok Pisin) have taken on a huge significance in the Seventh Day Adventist community in eastern Porgera where I worked. As John Finch noted, they allow SDAs to engage in pig-like exchange functions and SDA celebrations/marriages use both sipsip and chickens to replace pork.

Ipili women have created a cottage industry out of selling raw and cooked lamb flaps. Early every morning Dyna trucks leave Mt. Hagen with boxes of frozen lamb flaps (at least women told me they came from Mt. Hagen, they may be coming from Wabag) and stop at places along the highlands highway where women buy the boxes and carry them back to their home communities, some as far as 10 km into the bush. I think the standard box is about 25(?) kilos and makes for a rather unwieldy trek through the forest as the boxes are shallow and wide and women carry them in netbags across their foreheads.

Around May or June of 1999, the boxes sold for K65 apiece (exchange rate then was about 33 cents for one kina), but in July of 1999 they shot up to K90 apiece. Women weren’t sure why the price went so high in one month, but most of the women I interviewed averaged K20 to K70 profit per box, so for some of them, they had a very restricted profit margin (if any at all) after this raise. Interestingly enough, prices didn’t change for the consumer.

Cooked sipsip, either boiled with watercress or fried, had a fairly standard size for price ratio. A 50 toea piece was about one and a half inches by one and a half inches, and one kina pieces were about twice as large. At the sipsip shacks alongside roads and in hamlets, these are the standard sizes/prices. At tradestores one can buy larger pieces that have been cooked for more money.

Women will also sell larger hunks of raw meat for people to take home to cook. A K5 piece was about 8 inches by 8 inches (around 5 or 6 rib pieces). People tended to buy these rather furtively so that others wouldn’t know they were intending to have meat at home as you’re obligated to feed people that drop by during dinner time. As you can guess, I was pretty unsuccessful at being unobtrusive while buying sipsip and inevitably had someone come by to “story” with me shortly after buying meat.

Children, from what I could tell, would spend every last toea they could wheedle from anyone on lamb flaps. SDAs don’t have a lot of chances to eat meat (chickens sold for K20 per chicken) so the ability to get at least a little bit of meat for 50 toea was very significant. I can attest, as others have, that lamb flaps don’t have much meat, but people didn’t care as the fat seemed to be relished just as well. In fact, the fat comes off in a nice strip, crispy on one side, juicy on the other, which you can eat and then gnaw on the bone to get what little meat there is.

Women that had successful sipsip shacks on two occassions were targets of accusations of menstrual blood poisoning. In both cases, younger, unmarried women were alleged to have cooked sipsip while menstruating thus making men ill. One of the women had to pay K20 to the person who accused her and I don’t know the amount the other one paid. Far worse than the fine was the public shaming they received and neither one of them cooked sipsip for some time afterward.

And here’s what I wrote:

In Porgera—at least the bit where I lived—lambflaps were ubiquitous. As mentioned elsewhere, they were used by SDAs and tref-avoidant anthropologists like myself in group mumus they wanted to participate in, but without eating pork. They were more popular than slaughtering a goat. Most people found goats scary.

Whole cases were available for purchase at large stores at the government station, after having been shipped in via truck from Lae. Typically they were still more or less frozen when they got there. Individual tradestores with refrigerators would also sell ‘racks’ of unsliced lamb flaps to women. They then cooked individuals slices slowly in large low sided pans around the edge of the village square (ama). They thus fell into the same category as ‘palawa’ (flour—fried dough pancakes right out of Grapes of Wrath), betelnut, single cigarettes, and home made popsicles—pre-cooked food that women (often from migrant families) sold when they felt like it. It wasn’t something you’d get in a tradestore (which were more or less run by men, although there were exceptions). People would occasionally buy lamb flaps to eat at home when they had more money than a can of tinpis cost, but not enough for a whole chicken. Occasionally after very long and cold walks or trips (very common in Enga) we would buy lamb flaps to eat to get some energy into us ‘or else we’ll die’. Of course, at that point, the last thing I wanted were lamb flaps. There are ways to make virtue a necessity, but it is a very poor cut of meat for straight frying. Nevertheless, I ate them frequently since they were the only readily available meat I could eat, and it was common for people walking with friends to buy small things such as this for each other.

I suppose if your kink is liquified or semi-liquified pig fat, then lambflaps would seem a natural substitute for pork and quite tasty. If your idea of fun is a hanger steak with béarnaise sauce and a nice robust Bordeaux, they’re not really for you

What does this show? Well first, thre is probably a lot of stuff in there (Wabag, K50, etc.) that only make sense if you already know a lot about Papua New Guinea. But overall it seems to me that our accounts are remarkably similar. On the other hand, there are differences of style and approach. I was going to comment on what they were, but as I read through our responses I see that I don’t have the distance necessary to pull back and compare them – I’m too close to my data. So let me post it as a question instead—what are the differences in style, interpretation, and emphasis that you see in these two responses?

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Smoki Musaraj is a graduate student doing research in Albania. I have been fascinated by Albania ever since I read a news story about how, at the end of the cold war, there were signs that Albania was “opening up” because they didn’t execute victims of a shipwreck who washed ashore (as they had done previously).

In a recent post Smoki explains why there are no anthropology departments in Albania.

I asked [the director of the National Albanian State Archive] why there is no Anthropology Department in the Academy given that there are so many ethnographers whom I am starting to discover through various institutes. He explained that while ethnography and ethnology were always part of the History Department, Anthropology as a discipline, according to the Communist academic doctrine was considered as an “American invention. Given that America, he said, was considered as a country without a history, Anthropology [always according to this official interpretation] was invented and fetishized to make up for the lack of culture and ethnos”.

Although there is no clear “about” page or individual author bios, it seems that blog.newanthro.net is another anthropology group blog of some kind, so add it to your bookmarks!

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