Tag Archives: Public Anthropology

Architecture, Rationalization, Codes, Power

architecture1.jpg

Continuing themes raised in my previous post, I’d like to present another riddle of rationalization and reflect on its meaning and impact.

As part of the planning process for the building project in which I’m involved, I joined my colleagues in various fieldtrips to other institutions. In the course of those travels I saw and heard about many odd cases in which codes of various sorts, complicated by their local interpretation, had a significant role in shaping architectural decisions. The example that I wish to consider could have happened anywhere, so its precise location doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that the buildings in question are located at an American institution of higher education.

The institution built an addition that links two late 19th-century buildings. At the time of construction, local authorities said that only two of the four entrances on one side of the complex had to meet the accessibility standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Since the average distance between the entries is only slightly more than 50 feet, this seemed sensible. Adding two more large ramps would raise costs significantly and, more important, deface the historic buildings. (Although they are historic, they aren’t on the state or federal historic register, an issue I’ll get to in a second.)

A couple of years after the building was opened, though, the local code official, apparently under pressure from higher-ups elsewhere, reversed the earlier decision. Now all four doors either had to be made ADA-compliant or the two non-compliant ones had to be decommissioned as public entries.

The institution, like virtually all American colleges and universities, is committed to the letter and spirit of the ADA. But absent a budget for the addition of two substantial concrete ramps and a willingness to compromise the look of handsome old buildings, the institution removed exterior handles from the doors in question. Continue reading →

Cultural Anthropology 2.0

The first issue of Cultural Anthropology under the editorship of Kim and Mike Fortun is out, and I am a willing participant in the media blitz. The first issue has a few articles that look great (although, as we already know, you need to be a AAA member to access them). One is an article on memory in Sierra Leone–articulating nicely with an article in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine on child soldiers–I’d love to see her reading of the use of memory in that autobiography. An article by Ilana Feldman on Human Rights in Palestine and an article by Michael M.J. Fischer revisiting culture.

As I am on the editorial board of CA, I’ve been privy to some of the discussions about what Kim and Mike want to do with CA. Continue reading →

Clans in the News (Again); Plus, When Informants Embrace Research

William Finnegan’s ‘Letter from Maine’ on ‘the Somalis of Lewiston’ (The New Yorker, December 11, 2006 — sorry I can’t find it online), revisits the issue of the contemporary relevance of both anthropology in general and of the anthropology of kinship (or perhaps I should say the anthropology of clans) in particular. He writes:

People [Somali immigrants] are loath to talk, at least to outsiders, about the clan system in Somalia, whose rivalries have helped fuel the civil war there. But it survives in the diaspora, and it continues to divide expatriate communities, where different groups scramble for access to resources. (A young Somali social worker told me that he’d stopped going to the Lewiston mosque, because it was dominated by members of the Ogaden clan. ‘I refuse to pray next to someone who sees me first as an Isaaq, nost as a Muslim,’ he said.)

The article pictures not a monolithic block of refugees composed of a phantom ‘nationality,’ but rather a set of people from diverse backgrounds, with different interests, histories of conflict and movement, experiences of oppression. The article focuses mainly on Somali Bantus, and their position vis-a-vis other Somalis both in Lewiston and back home. The article also features the work of Colby College anthropologist Catherine Besteman, work that has been important for Bantus in recovering and remembering their past(s). At a panel discussion on refugees in Lewiston, Besteman was amazed to meet some of her very own informants — they had been children when she first met them in the field. Besteman subsequently organized a slide show (with photos taken by her husband Jorge Acero). In the New Yorker, Besteman recalls the scene:

Most of those who made it over here [to the U.S.] were babies then. They never knew their parents. People in the audience were seeing their moms and dads for the first time. It was very, very moving. There were a lot of stories being shouted out about the people in the slides… Even the pictures of the fields, they were just incredibly excited to see. People went crazy over [a chart of census data]. They could account for everyone on the chart. This guy was shot in his field by a Somali. This guy was hacked with machetes and died of infected wounds. This woman was taken by militiamen from a fleeing group, right near the Kenyan border, never seen again.

The incredible trauma noted here and the lingering wounds of war notwithstanding, I find stories like these heartening. I think they demonstrate the continuing relevance and importance of anthropological research (in a way quite different, and in some sense, complementary to a relevance that would attach ‘local knowledge’ to the ‘security’ apparatuses of states that wage war but make the victims of their violence invisible). Who else but an anthropologist is going to spend two years recording lifeways, taking census data, learning stories of people in an out-of-the-way place? Sure, journalists will helicopter in for a few days, a few weeks, even months. But who is going to do the patient work of sitting on the flatbed truck and chatting with folks about their kin, about their hopes and fears?

Also, stories like these I think make a compelling case for a truly public anthropology. For the data that we anthropologists collect (whether we are from the U.S., Brazil, Finland, or Papua New Guiena) has value and meaning — above all for those people with whom we work.

Other Developments in the Modernity of Kinship

Apart from questions of prescription and description (or representation and practice) embedded in such questions as what counts as ‘cousin marriage’ here and there, and to what extent endogamous marriage strategies have property as the primary motivating interest, styles of reflexively-apprehended ‘kinship’ come to stand for whole sets of values and traditions, as noted below in Kerim’s post and responses.

As, for example, in places like the United States. The semiosphere (I really hate the term ‘blogosphere’) has lately been aflame with debates about gay parenting, prompted especially by Mary Cheney’s announcement that she and her partner are having a child. The symbolism is profound of course: here, at the very heart of one of the most consequentially anti-gay administrations in U.S. history (rivaled on anti-gay terms I think only by the Clinton administration), is a gay family. It’s rather uncanny how gays keep erupting on the putatively anti-gay Republican scene (Mark Foley, anyone?).

The properness of gay parenting was recently the subject of a controversial piece in Time magazine by James Dobson, who runs the conservative moralist group Focus on the Family (and who recently had his own uncanny encounter with the homo when his ‘friend’ Ted Haggard was forced out of the closet). The piece is controversial not only because it constitutes something of a personal attack on Mary Cheney and her decision to become a mother, but also because it misconstrues social research in order to argue that same-sex parental couples damage children. Carol Gilligan has released a letter calling on Dobson to cease citing her work in support of his argument that children can only properly be raised by their own biological father and mother. (To my mind, a rather odd gesture, since one of the hazards of publishing is that people are free to read and interpret your work as they like.) I actually think the best response to Dobson’s piece has been Saletan’s at Slate. (Saletan’s ‘Human Nature’ column is consistently fascinating.) Saletan points out that the real danger to children isn’t gay parents, it’s men.

Continue reading →

You Only Link Twice: Spying 2.0

My love/hate relationship with the NYT Magazine grows ever stronger with the publication of a totally fascinating story of the intelligence community’s attempt to take advantage of the “wisdom of crowds”–albeit crowds of the secretive, martini-swilling, karate-chopping and debonaire kind, viz. “open source spying.”[1] It’s a great article about the various US and defense intelligence agencies’ attempts to generate as much useful information as the blogosphere and wikipedia. Let me repeat that: an article about the US and defense intelligence agencies’ attempts to generate as much useful information as the blogosphere and wikipedia.

The fact that the blogosphere and wikipedia are the benchmark only confirms my suspicion of the US intelligence community as something akin to a keystone kops episode. On the one hand it seems obviously absurd that the intel community is not in possession of the most cuttingest edge stuff out there. Haven’t we been hearing since 9/11 about how the DHS is going to datamine everything from our consumer records to our cell-phone conversations to flight info in order to find–and torture into submission–those dastardly terrorists? And the FBI doesn’t even have a blog? WTF? On the other hand, the questions raised by the use of blogs and wikis in intel raise the stake on the stale debate around the reliability of wikipedia rather considerably. God forbid the blanket authorization to conduct water-boarding that we just granted our leaders rely on the intel community equivalent of Wonkette… or wait, maybe it should, I’m unsure.

Continue reading →

AAA Democracy

I was flying back to Taiwan by Saturday evening, so I missed some exciting activity in the general business meeting. Luckily David Price wrote it up for CounterPunch and Maureen posted it in the comments to an old post (we do have a “contact us” link, although I admit it is a little hard to find). In short, the AAA adopted some measures denouncing the War on Terror and torture; but what I find really interesting about Price’s article is the debate that followed over AAA democracy:

After adopting the anti-Iraq War and anti-torture measures, a spontaneous floor debate arose after Gerald Sider, CUNY Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, eloquently spoke of how the AAA’s bylaws had been changed during the Vietnam War as an anti-democratic measure to empower the association’s administrative structure, while disempowering the rank and file’s ability to enact political measures at these annual meetings. Sider knows of which he speaks. While doing archival research over the years at the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives, I have seen enough of the AAA’s records and the correspondence of key actors from this period to know that such claims are well founded, statements from the floor by Nina Glick Schiller and other veterans from these past struggles helped push Sider’s proposal to a vote that the association consider returning to its old structure.

The debate that transpired was interesting. Some argued that the business meeting’s normally low attendance was sufficient evidence that such poorly-attended meetings should not be allowed to direct Association policy, but the argument that carried the day maintained that it was the structural decision to limit the power of meeting attendees that had destroyed meeting attendance. After some discussion, a resolution was adopted instructing the Association to consider re-empowering the annual meeting as a forum where direct democratic action could occur.

Very interesting developments. Was anyone there who has more to comment on the debates?

Who’s down with OAA?

It got buried in the comments section of the last post on this topic, so I thought I should give it more prominent display:

We’ve set up a wiki to promote Open Access Anthropology.

I’ve already copied and pasted some stuff from what Alex and I have written, but a lot more needs to be done. Please help make this page the bestest wiki page ever!

Then we need to find ways to promote the wiki URL (http://openaccessanthropology.org) at the AAA. I was thinking stickers or rubber stamps that we could hand out and stick on everyone’s programs. I’d be willing to chip in on the cost if someone would be willing to organize designing and printing the stickers in time for San Jose.

UPDATE: Thanks to Kambiz for hosting our new URL!

UPDATE: http://openaccessanthropology.org is now live!

Open Access in San Jose

We’d love to do something at this year’s AAA to promote Open Access. The main goal would be to educate fellow anthropologists about the importance and feasibility of the Open Access publishing model and why the AAA should support it.

Here is what we have come up with so far: One idea would be to construct a web page with information and then make stickers with the URL which we could hand out. Another idea was to have an informal meeting (perhaps over lunch on Friday or Saturday) where we could talk about these issues. A third idea was to write a blog post about the topic and see if anyone had better suggestions … So please, help us brainstorm in the comments section! Or volunteer to help out with this effort.

Previous Savage Minds posts on the topic:

Mead the Positivist

Via a link left by Rex in my recent post on Margaret Mead, I discovered this article entitled “Margaret Mead vs. Tony Soprano” by Micaela di Leonardo, one of the few anthropologists who has taken trying to be a public intellectual seriously, writing regular articles for The Nation.

She argues that the early Mead of Coming of Age in Samoa was not the romantic antimodernist “Technician of the Sacred” she is portrayed as being, but instead was an empiricist whose Samoa is “‘human experiment’ under ‘controlled conditions.'” She argues that it was Mead’s later book, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, that established her place as a commentator on American sexual politics, but (contrary to how she is remembered) in a fundamentally conservative way:

Mead’s “gender malleability” statements are, in fact, lodged inside a larger argument against women’s equal rights as represented by the contemporary Soviet Union. Mead saw in the opening of all occupations to women there a “sacrifice in complexity” of culture: “The removal of all legal and economic barriers against women’s participating in the world on an equal footing with men may be in itself a standardizing move towards the wholesale stamping-out of the diversity of attitudes that is such a dearly bought product of civilization.”

She points out that “Betty Friedan in 1961 spent almost an entire chapter of her celebrated book attacking Mead’s pernicious ‘super saleswomanship’ of the Feminine Mystique” and that much of her political activity was in support of “progressive social engineering, and thus her profound commitment to the notion of disinterested science and the rule of experts”

Similarly, Mead’s war work for the American government extended into both her very successful postwar advocacy of federal funding for anthropological research and her cold warrior stance against, among other actions, antinuclear and anti-Vietnam War protests. (The latter issue led to a huge fight at the 1971 American Anthropological Association meetings, during which Mead was hissed by an antiwar audience of 700.) These political actions were overwhelmed, in popular culture, by Mead’s highly public approbation of “questing youth” from the mid-1960s forward, and the liberal feminist alliances of her last years. She even had her own character in the first stage version of Hair, who celebrated male “long hair and other flamboyant affectations,” and whose song ended in the recitative, “Kids, be whatever you are, do whatever you do, just so long as you don’t hurt anybody.”

She goes on to discuss Mead’s legacy in establishing certain kinds of stereotypes for (feminist) anthropologists in the public sphere, and the difficulties those pose for constructing a truly progressive public anthropology.

While reading this article I was tempted to do an entirely separate post on the various “Halloween costumes” di Leonardo describes: popular culture stereotypes of anthropologists. Maybe at the end of this month …

Knowledge that Matters

We’ve had a lot of discussion here about the relationship between anthropology and the war-on-terror (mostly by Oneman: see here, here, here, and here). I think a lot of the discussion misses the mark. Aside from important issues about how such work would affect the ability of anthropologists to do their work in the first place, the issue that really concerns me is whether or not the context exists in which anthropological knowledge could matter to government agencies?

The Washington Post recently ran an article in which they quoted FBI officials to the effect that they didn’t need to have top level operatives with knowledge of Arabic in order to effectively do their job:

In a recent deposition filed in an employee lawsuit, a senior FBI official testified that the bureau’s two International Terrorism Operations Sections (ITOS) do not require any agents to know Arabic, even though the sections coordinate all foreign terrorism investigations. Only four agents in ITOS have any familiarity with Arabic, and none of them are ranked above elementary proficiency, documents show.

And just this week the New York Times ran an editorial about how few leading officials in the war-on-terror are unable to articulate the most basic differences between Sunnis and Shiites:

But so far, most American officials I’ve interviewed don’t have a clue. That includes not just intelligence and law enforcement officials, but also members of Congress who have important roles overseeing our spy agencies. How can they do their jobs without knowing the basics?

If it could be done without hurting the trust necessary between anthropologists and their informants/collaborators (an admittedly big “if”), I don’t really have anything against anthropologists working for the government; however, I’m very skeptical about the ability of government to make use of anthropological knowledge. I don’t think this is because these officials are stupid, many are quite sharp, but because they work in an administrative culture in which knowledge about the rest of the world simply doesn’t matter.

To Cherish the Life of the World

I have to admit not having read much by or about Margaret Mead, with the exception of the Bali work she did with Bateson, but Bookslut has a nice review of To Cherish the Life of the World: Selected Letters of Margaret Mead:

To Cherish skates on the surface of academic anthropology but goes to the heart of human intimacy. Because readers can learn about other aspects of Mead’s life through Blackberry Winter, her autobiography, or through an earlier collection of correspondence, Letters from the Field: 1925-1975, editors Margaret Caffrey and Patricia Francis sensibly decided to focus this volume on Mead’s relationships. Combing through the Margaret Mead collection at the US library of Congress — the single largest collection that the Congress holds — they made fine choices. As anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson (Mead’s daughter) writes in the preface,“The discipline of reading these letters is to avoid worrying too much about the references to events and about the order in which they unfolded, and rather to attend to the way Margaret frames her words to communicate with a particular person.”

I was quite surprised at the little factoid she slips in there: “the single largest collection that the Congress holds.” Not sure if that is 100% accurate, but it doesn’t seem far off the mark. Here is what the library says:

Totaling more than 500,000 items, the Margaret Mead Papers and South Pacific Ethnographic Archives is one of the largest collections for a single individual in the Library.

In 2001, for the the 100th anniversary of Margaret Mead’s birth the library put a some of this material up on the web.

One thing I’ve always liked about Mead is that she was very much a “public intellectual.” As Bookslut says:

Deeply committed to furthering anthropology’s method and theory, she was committed to activism in a troubled world. Mead brought her skills and insight to bear in various war efforts during the ’40s, when she testified before Congress and other governmental bodies on social issues, in helping Democrat presidential candidates (Humphrey, Carter) campaign effectively on television, and in inviting the average reader into social science through a column in Redbook magazine.

Maybe its time to go back and take a closer look at Mead’s legacy?

Should we outsource anthropology?

I just got back from the latest Allen Chun production at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica: “Culture in Context: Pragmatics, Industries, Technologies, Geopolitics.” Allen regularly hosts thought provoking interdisciplinary conferences. One cool Savage Minds connection was made this year, as frequent SM commentator John McCreery was the chair on one panel and I was the discussant on another.

My panel was entitled, “Flows and Boundaries, Real or Imagined,” and I had the honor of discussing papers by George Ritzer and George Marcus. Allen instructed us to discuss all the panel papers together, rather than taking them each separately. With one paper a survey on outsourcing, and the other a meditation on anthropological methodology, it at first seemed like an impossible task; however, I decided to have some fun with it and people seemed to enjoy the result. Since the papers are available online, and all my references are online as well, I thought it would be appropriate to post the full text of my discussion here on Savage Minds.

I urge everyone to please take the time to read through Ritzer and Marcus’ original papers before reading my commentary since it was written with a certain contextual setting in mind.
Continue reading →

Boas and the Popular Museum

I discovered a neat, fairly new blog dedicated to museums today, S.J. Redman’s Museum Madness. Redman’s most recent post addresses an interesting and (for me, anyway) new aspect of Boas’ museum work, his populism.

Most of us are familiar with the relationship between Boas and museums — the ethnographic exhibits at the Columbian Expo in 1893, his early curating work at the Field Museum, his move to the American Museum of Natural History and his involvement with the Jessup Expedition to the Pacific Northwest and Arctic coast that stocked much of the AMNH’s collection. Along with his 1889 article On Alternating Sounds (AnthroSource link), Boas’ critique of exhibition schemas that reflected the prevalent evolutionary beliefs of the time were a crucial early step towards his later cultural relativism, as was his insistence on supplementing material artifacts (shields, pots, spearheads, matates, etc.) with folklore, songs, and other non-material “artificats” (recipes, instructions, game rules, etc.) in order to create a fuller understanding of a culture “from the native’s point of view” (rather than as a pitstop on the march towards us-ness).

Redman focuses here on Boas’ role as a museum professional, though — not as an anthropologist. Continue reading →

Female Genital Cutting, Sexuality, and Anti-FGC Advocacy

I don’t normally cross-post here from my research blog, but I thought my recent post on female genital cutting (FGC) might interest some of Savage Minds’ readers. Drawing on anthropological research and first-hand testimony reported across the literature, I’ve tried to counter a lot of the ethnocentrism, racism, and sexism that characterizes anti-FGC arguments, especially in the mainstream. This is not an argument for FGC, by any means, but rather, in the spirit of Geertz, “anti-anti-FGC”.