Tag Archives: Regions

Geographical Regions

Live 8: Naughty or Nice?

So I’d like to put a general theme of discussion here on SM to a concrete test: Live 8, naughty or nice?

I don’t work in Africa, but I do work in a HIPC (Highly Indebted Poor Country), Bolivia. And many Savage Minds readers and participants obviously work on and think about issues of global inequality & the forms of mutual, ahem, recognition made possible and impossible by global inequality.

Over the weekend I watched a bit of TV coverage from the show in London (a city that has had quite a week…), and wasn’t at all sure how to feel about it. Or, to be more transparently honest, it’s the kind of thing for which I am a complete sucker but know I oughtn’t be.

Given the indubitably necessary and yet insufferably snarky anthropological literature of the past two decades, I know how to take Live 8 apart in a critical spirit. The trope of hapless Africa rescued by salvific Euroamerica. The unwarranted catharsis provided to a privileged audience by the spectacle itself. The cover given to the nasty machinations of the Man, recently manifested by G-8 leaders pretending their association exists only to help poor people and to watch out for the environment. Etc. etc.

On the other hand… well, I don’t guess I have to outline the “pro” side of the equation for anyone. Everyone involved vociferously and repeatedly made the case for the worthiness of the undertaking.

There are, of course, multiple other possibilities. One that comes to mind is that the whole thing was the last hurrah of anglophone imperialism, soon to be displaced by some combo of China/India/Brazil, so that Live 8 was a spectacle of another kind, ironically headlined by an (ex-colonial) Irishman, showily insisting upon the mighty benevolent potential of (mostly) England-and-the-United States just as they begin to slide under the domestic burden of their foreign adventures and have only to look forward to days ahead when they’ll be wanting a little external debt forgiveness of their own.

Who is to say. But to return to the point, I’ll state my position on Live 8: naughty AND nice. Does this make me a fatuous booby? Don’t hold back.

William Fenton Dies at 96

In the “I didn’t know he was still alive” category, anthropologist William Nelson Fenton has passed away.

Here is a biographical sketch from the William N. Fenton Papers archive at the American Philosophical Society website:

Born in New Rochelle, N.Y., on December 15, 1908, William Nelson Fenton, became a leading scholar of the history and culture of Iroquois Indians. Raised in New Rochelle until the age of 16, he passed his summers on the family farm in western New York state, located midway between two Seneca Indian reservations. Exposed to anthropological work, Fenton’s interests were encouraged by his father and grandfather, friends to Indians there, who assembled a small collection of Indian memorabilia which was later acquired by the Museum of the American Indian.

After receiving his B.A. from Dartmouth in 1931, Fenton attended Yale for graduate study in anthropology. At the end of his first year in New Haven, the Laboratory of Anthropology at Santa Fe awarded him a scholarship for training in field archaeology on the Great Plains of Nebraska and South Dakota, where he took part in his first professional ethnological interviews. Returning to his old home in New York in 1933, Fenton embarked on what would become more than fifty years of field research on the Allegany, Cornplanter, Cattaraugus, and Tonawanda Seneca Reservations and on the Six Nations Reserve in Canada. From 1935 until he received his doctorate in 1937, Fenton also served as a community worker for the United States Indian Service, working principally on the Tonawanda Reservation.

In his first academic appointment in 1937, Fenton introduced anthropology to St. Lawrence University, though he remained for only three semesters before being called to replace J.N.B. Hewitt at the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) of the Smithsonian Institution, earning promotion to Senior Ethnologist in 1943. During the war years, he served as a Research Associate of the Ethnogeographic Board and as Secretary of the Smithsonian War Committee. While a member of the Committee on International Relations in Anthropology at the National Research Council (NRC) from 1952 to 1954, he served as the first Executive Secretary of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology. Meanwhile, he was employed as a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, and Catholic Universities, and at the University of Michigan.

In 1954, Fenton returned to New York State with his wife, Olive (1908-1986), and their three children to become Assistant Commissioner of the New York State Museum and Science Service in Albany, serving as director of the State Museum for thirteen years. In 1968, he abandoned administration and returned to teaching as Research Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Albany. In 1979, the trustees named him Distinguished Professor, and Anthony F.C. Wallace delivered the honorary lecture.

Throughout his career, Fenton’s research centered on the religious ceremonies and customs of the Iroquois, epitomised by his translation (with Elizabeth Moore) of The Customs of the American Indian Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times by Father Joseph François Lafitau, and hy his most influential work, his 1987 book, The False Faces of the Iroquois.

His obituary suggests that his activities were not always appreciated:

He frustrated some tribes by not returning artifacts, insisting museums were necessary safeguards for the items. Some Indian leaders were upset with Fenton for writing about rituals considered to be sacred.

The only book of his which still seems to be in print (at least as far as Amazon.com is concerned) is The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy.

I’m not very familiar with Fenton’s work so if you have some insights into his legacy, please contribute in the comments!

No Shamans Here

When you tell someone you study anthropology, the chances are that you will hear one of the following responses:

  • I have a friend/relative who studies insects.
  • Like Indiana Jones? Do you have one of those hats?
  • I think shamanism is so fascinating, don’t you?

The shamanism one is the one that gets me the most upset. The other two are understandable confusions caused by ignorance of the field, but the last one is the result of a type of anthropological hucksterism – the deliberate use of pseudo-anthrpological discourse to sell spirituality to New Age believers.

So I was happy to see this page devoted to proving that North American natives do not practice shamanism. The argument is made that shamanism is a very specialized term, originally referring to specific practices associated with the natives of Siberia. From an article by Tori McElroy:

The word “shaman” actually originates among the natives of Siberia, where it describes a specialized type of holy person. The shamans of Siberia interact with deities and spirits not only with prayer, ritual and offerings, but through direct contact with the spirits themselves. With the aid of rhythmic drumming and chanting, the shaman enters a very deep or “ecstatic” trance.

UC Davis anthropologist, Jack Forbes looks at Western traditions of shamanism:

But if we back off and take a look at so-called shamanism from a multi-cultural perspective, instead of a Eurocentric one, we find that the most famous “shamans” of the 20th century have been people like Amy Semple McPherson (founder of the Foursquare Church), Oral Roberts, Billy Joe Hargis, and the legendary Billy Sunday. Moreover, the day-to-day work of “shamanism” in North America is carried mostly by Roman Catholic and other priests who daily enact “shamanistic” rituals (such as Mass, a “magic” ritual where wine becomes blood and wafers become flesh) or by charismatic Protestant preachers (healers) who attempt to cure by the laying on of the hands and other techniques of “faith-healing,” or by religious figures (preachers or priests) who attempt to “control” events, obtain wealth, drive away death, or determine who gets into “Heaven” by means of prayers, incantations or ritual. Millions of Catholics recite a ritual incantation on their rosary beads every day while the church actively sells (or has sold) “relics,” medals, and other items which are thought to possess “magic” powers. The Bible has apparently been used as a “talisman” by fervent Protestants, and the cross is viewed as a potent object by many Christians of different denominations. Being “born again,” spirit possession and other acts of “ecstasy” are regular features of some Protestant sects.

The fact of the matter is that there is no such religion as “shamanism,” since all of the religions of the world make use — perhaps equally — of the tools of the “shaman” including liturgy (ritual), songs, incantations (recited prayers or formulas) and direct contact with the spiritual world (visions, ecstasy) in order to bring about changes on the physical plane.

And since I’ve been writing about etymology-as-argument lately on my own blog, I think it is worth mentioning the way in which etymology is used here. Unlike arguments which seek to persuade showing that two words were linked in the language of some ancient culture, the anti-shamanism argument uses etymology as counterfactual. By showing that the term has its roots in Central Asia, they seek to disprove its applicability to the the American context. Now, I’m not sure I necessarily buy the Sanskrit (via Chinese) origins of the term, but there is no doubt that the word is not North American in origin, as the Oxford Dictionary shows:

from German Schamane and Russian shaman, from Tungus šaman.

Which isn’t too say that we can’t apply words from one culture to another. We do it all the time. But we should be careful about how we do it. As Forbes puts it:

Quite obviously the above definitions present a culturally hostile picture since the use of terms such as “magic,” “demons,” “gods” and “ancestral spirits” will likely be interpreted as backward, evil or even “devilish” by many European readers.

Of course, it is exactly the exotic otherness of shamanism which attracts:

more than 5,000 people each year who take [a] rigorous training in core shamanism, the near universal methods of shamanism without a specific cultural perspective

A have to admit that while it may not seem to be as immediately harmful, the marketing of such cultural exoticism by anthropologists upsets me even more than when they work for the CIA. But then again, orientalism and colonialism have always been connected …

To end on a personal note: The only time I’ve found myself the object of such orientalist mysticism (my South Asian wife gets it all the time) was when I travelled in Germany. I can’t tell you how many people told me: “You’re Jewish? I think Kabbalah is so fascinating.” I have to say, I was pretty tempted to drop out and become a shaman in Berlin…

A field guide to anthrobloggers

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.

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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.

African Exceptionalism

Christopher Davis, of the Anthropology Department at SOAS, is doing what Savage Minds aspires to do: injecting anthropology into public discourse. In an article in the Guardian (found courtesy of the ever alert antropologi.info), Dr. Davis attacks what she calls “African exceptionalism,” the tendency to see religion as the solution to the failings of the African state:

We are told that religion succeeds where the state fails, that faith leaders have a significant role to play in shaping social attitudes, that religion can be a model for the state and that it commands the kind of loyalty and energy that was given to nationalist causes during and just after Africa’s struggles for independence.

To regard religion in Africa in these terms is to put their religion where our politics should be. Our error begins with the place in our imaginations that we force Africa to occupy. We are subject to “African exceptionalism”: a sense that Africa is so different, so impossible to organise, that any undertaking is practically pointless. It is the sense that African people are unruly as citizens and irresponsible as politicians and bureaucrats. Africa’s state is always behind. We never perceive it as leading the way. Economically and politically, Africa is held back, not yet caught up. Exceptionalism heightens the temptation to look at the continent as a problem or an illness.

After criticizing the ethnocentrism and colonial mentality of such views, she makes what I think is her key point: that religion is appealing to policy makers, not because African states have failed, but because religion offers an alternative to market forces; and that these forces are challenging the state not just in Africa, but at home as well.

What happens in Africa happens violently, more vividly and rapidly than here, but where that change leads is also where we are headed. The logic of the marketplace seems unassailable in its entry into the politics of public services. In Britain, recent decades have seen the persistent advance of privatisation in areas formerly held in the public interest. Religion has the benefit of not being about profit or profitability. In the context of religion’s redistributive logic, cost and benefit are perhaps more equitably balanced. When we see things in this way we are in a better position to compare like with like, and the results can be enlightening.

We see the same thing with the rise of religion in the United States. No party wants to do anything that would challenge the forces breaking apart the fabric of society, so religious institutions are propped up in the name of “family values.” But in the long run these will be insufficient to stem the tide – and the failings will be felt dearly both at home and abroad.

Albanian Anthropology

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!

Image Ethics

Anthropologist Karen Nakamura, who writes the Photoethnography Blog, has posted a photo essay about a disability protest in Japan to her web site gallery. While I loved the essay, as a good pro-sharing netzen I naturally questioned her decision to use a restrictive license on her photos. Here is her license:

All of the photographs on this site are copyright 2005 Karen Nakamura and cannot be used without prior written permission.

In response, I wrote:

Karen, Why did you choose to use such a restrictive license for your work? There are many other options, which allow people to use your work without getting written permission as long as they give you proper aknowledgement, don’t use it for commercial purposes, and use the same license that you have chosen. Otherwise you are treating anyone who e-mails one of your pictures to a friend, or downloads one to their desktop, or posts a copy to their blog, as a criminal unless they go to the extraordinary step of contacting you first. Since you would presumably give permission for anything which fell within “fair use” you could easily provide a creative commons lincese which stated all this explicitly and has the full force of US copyright law behind it, but avoids the problems associated with restricting all use outright.

To which Karen then replied:

Good question. I want to protect my informants right to control how their image is used. The Creative Commons license protects against commercial re-use but not against non-commercial but still malicious re-use.

For example, there is nothing in the Creative Commons license that would prevent one of the photographs in my blog being used in another blog with a derogatory caption; or re-used in other non-commercial ways that would upset the people who I work with.

I prefer to err on the side of requiring re-use consent be given so that I can control how the images are used. If this blog were just photos of Minnesota mosquitoes (our state bird), it would be licensed differently.

This is something I have not seen Free Culture types discuss. It isn’t an attempt to limit copyright for commercial profit, but in order to protect her informants images from being misused. While I wonder if it is truly possible to limit such “malicious re-use” in the sense that Karen discusses, I understand her motivations in seeking to do so. I would very much like to see more discussion about how anthropologists might put work into the public domain, or Creative Commons, without reneging on our responsibility to protect our informants and ethnographic collaborators.

Global Assemblages

I just heard Aihwa Ong talk at a conference here in Taiwan on transnationalism. She was drawing on her MacArthur funded research into “how neoliberal forms are taken up in the transformation of East Asian cities.” These ideas are presumably also discussed in her contribution to a new edited volume: Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems.

Her talk started off in a rather funny manner. Her microphone didn’t work and nobody could hear her, but the Taiwanese audience was too politely reverential to tell her. They tried rigging up a microphone stand, which didn’t work. Then they decided to send a woman on stage with a chair to sit next to Dr. Ong and hold a microphone for her. It was at this point that she began to realize that nobody could hear her, and she took up the microphone in her own hand, clearly freaked out by the idea of having someone sitting there holding it for her.

Even with the microphone, however, Aihwa Ong is still difficult to understand. I don’t believe that academic discourse need always be understandable to the non-initiated, but I do believe scholars should make an effort in that direction. Academic jargon and neologisms can be useful short-cuts for complex ideas, but they can also short-circuit the analytical process by allowing one to avoid critically reexamining certain key assumptions. Fortunately, once she moved from theory to the specifics of her research, her main argument became much more comprehensible.

At its core, Ong is applying the analytical techniques of governmentality to the discourse of management “gurus” in Shanghai and Singapore. That is to say, she is looking at how American management companies and experts attempt to reengineer the behavior of white collar workers in order to better align them with the needs of global capital. Central to this is the ideology of neoliberalism, which Ong defines as the promotion of self-governing rationality and entrepreneurial risk-taking.

What particularly interested me was the comparison between Shanghai and Singapore. In China the state remains officially critical of neoliberal ideology, even as it encourages the forces of neoliberalism, while Singapore openly embraces neoliberalism. In particular, the Chinese state counters neoliberalism with nationalism, while Singapore, Ong argues, is moving away from the ethnic state. Ong discussed how Singapore is actively encouraging expatriates and global talent, throwing out the “Asian values” rhetoric of the 90s.

In discussing the rhetoric of foreign management gurus in Shanghai, Ong said that any behavior which deviated from the standards of American corporate culture was treated as irrational, and blamed on “Chinese culture.” Workers were seen as lacking motivation, not identifying with the company, and lacking the communication and self-presentation skills necessary to function in a global economy. At the same time, Ong also made it clear that the workers resented the different pay scales awarded to foreign and local workers, and explained that many workers saw corporate work as a way of gaining the necessary knowledge to go into business for themselves, with no long term plans to remain within the corporation.

Ong seemed to take the ideological rhetoric of neoliberalism at face value. As her own account seems to make clear, these management gurus are not actually interested in producing rational self-motivated individuals. They want a disciplined white-collar work force. These workers “irrationality” is in fact rational and entrepreneurial. They would rather go into business for themselves than be treated as second class workers in the corporate hierarchy. Just as the Bush administration selectively invokes neoliberal ideology to promote its own agenda, quietly abandoning neoliberal principles whenever it suites them, so too do Shanghai’s management gurus seem to invoke neoliberal values in order to produce team-players willing to subordinate individual gain to corporate interests. It is when they act rationally in their own self-interest that they are somehow being “Chinese.”

Despite my reservations, it was a thought provoking talk, and I will definitely be checking out Aihwa Ong’s new book. Hopefully I might have a chance to meet her before she leaves the country, and maybe even discuss this further.

Missing Women Found

In two recent posts I referenced the use of life expectancy statistics by economist Amartya Sen to highlight social inequality. So I feel compelled to report on a new paper which is critical of another set of data used by Sen: the gender gap in birth rates.

Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, the authors of Freakonomics, have an article in Slate on Emily Oster’s work (PDF) which establishes a link between hepatitis B and birth gender.

This is an important link because it goes a long way towards explaining the 100 million “missing women” Amartya Sen had noticed when examining statistics on childbirth in Asia. In fact, it seems to account for about half of them; although primarily in China, not India. Basically, pregnant women with hepatitis B are much less likely to give birth to boys than the general population. Hepatitis B can account for “roughly 75 percent of the missing women in China,” but “less than 20 percent of the boy-girl gap” in India.

The article is also worth reading for a nice coda regarding Emily Oster’s contribution to the study of child language acquisition.

Funding Scholarship

About 5 years ago there was a story in the Taiwanese papers about how gangsters were giving “scholarships” to students. Gangs needed students with advanced legal and business skills. By paying for the students to go to school, the gangsters ensured that the students would come and work for them after graduation.

Today, in a comment elsewhere on Savage Minds, I discovered a new article by David Price, of Threatening Anthropology fame, about intelligence agency recruitment in the universities. In the new Intelligence Community Scholars Program (ICSP), “unnamed intelligence agencies” will ”’enter into contractual agreements with individual’ students.” Price suggests that the funding could amount to as much as $160,000 over a four year period.

What struck me is how much the incentive structure of these ICSP resembled that of Taiwan’s gangsters:

if ICSP recipients decline to work for their sponsoring intelligence agency upon completing of their education, then the student “shall be liable to the United States for an amount equal to the total amount of the scholarships received[and] the interest on the amounts of such awards which would be payable if at the time the awards were received they were loans bearing interest at the maximum legal prevailing rate, as determined by the Treasurer of the United States, multiplied by three.” In other words, spy or have a lousy credit rating for the rest of your life.

In an earlier article David Price had suggested that CIA funded students could end up spying on their fellow students and faculty. Pat Roberts, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, responded to these concerns by claiming that

legal safeguards against domestic spying are in place that weren’t in the 1950s and 1960s, when the anti-Communist fervor of former Sen. Joe McCarthy and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover created a climate that contributed to agency abuses. Specifically, a 1981 presidential executive order clearly prohibits physical surveillance of American citizens by agencies other than the FBI.

However, as David Price points out, such legal obstacles were obviated by the U.S. Patriot Act.

Between Sex and Power

Tak brings our attention to a Perry Anderson review of a new book on the history of the family: Between Sex and Power: Family in the World 1900-2000. Here is how Anderson characterizes the central focus of the book:

All traditional family systems, Therborn argues, have comprised three regimes: of patriarchy, marriage and fertility (crudely summarized–who calls the shots in the family, how people hitch up, how many kids result). Between Sex and Power sets out to trace the modern history of each.

Patriarchy is defined as male power within the family, not necessarily broader discrimination against women – although that might be part of it.

What particularly caught my eye (perhaps because of the discussion over my use of life expectancy statistics to discuss inequality) was this line:

Harshest of all was the Hindu system of North India, in a league of its own for repression. As Therborn notes, this is one of the very few parts of the world where men live longer than women, even today.

It is interesting to note that Sen makes much of the high life expectancy (and literacy) of women in Kerala, in southern India. Last winter break I was traveling in India and was struck by the tremendous regional variation in the degree to which women were free to walk the streets. Taking a trip from Delhi to Gujarat we drove through Rajasthan. When we were in Jaipur I was surprised at how few women were out on the street, or driving scooters. (I wrote about the trip here.) It was like taking a trip from New York to Washington DC and suddenly realizing that there are no women walking the streets in Philadelphia.

Calling the Hindu system in North India one of the harshest against women ignores the complexity of regional variation. And yet, the same data – life expectancy – can give us a rough account of some of that regional variation. It isn’t a substitute for detailed local analysis, but it can point the way, telling us where to look. If women generally outlive men, then it is something to notice if women in a particular region have unusually high, or unusually low life expectancies.

Finally, one last thing struck me about the review. From Anderson’s account (glowing as it is) it sounds as if it reproduces many of the myths about the liberated Western woman vs. the oppressed women of the East. It is one thing to talk about women getting more sexual pleasure in Norther Europe in the 1960s, but one should remember that much of the Kama Sutra is about a woman’s pleasure:

It may be said that, if the ways of working in men and women are different, why should not there be a difference, even in the pleasure they feel, and which is the result of those ways.

But this objection is groundless, for, the person acting and the person acted upon being of different kinds, there is a reason for the difference in their ways of working; but there is no reason for any difference in the pleasure they feel, because they both naturally derive pleasure from the act they perform.

One thing that struck me about being in India was how many women hold positions of real power. I’m not just talking about political dynasties, but at all levels of society.

There is also tremendous variation by class, and it isn’t necessarily the poor women who are the most powerless. Far from it. As I wrote elsewhere:

it is arguable that much of the most visible violence against women in India (such as “kitchen fires”) occurs in lower-middle-class homes, in families struggling to live a lifestyle beyond that which their limited means can afford them.

It seems like this is a book that is worth reading, but I am always worried when such far reaching studies adopt a teleological narrative in which the whole world is seen as moving inextricably towards a society that looks very much like that of Sweden. In his classic study of the family Engels drew on the work of anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan who proposed exactly such a teleological schema of the family. From the review, it isn’t clear to me that this book is much different.

NOTE: Since I mentioned sexual pleasure, I should also link to this recent article in the New York Times, which says:

that female orgasms are simply artifacts – a byproduct of the parallel development of male and female embryos in the first eight or nine weeks of life.