Tag Archives: Websites

The Rest of the World

vanishing point

Vanishing Point consists of a map of the world connected to a database fed by news coming from several international newspapers. The visibility of each country on the map results from the quantity of media coverage the country receives, so those countries that do not make the news disappear progressively.

Some countries, such as Taiwan, are completely invisible:

vp Taiwan

While others are (not surprisingly), well covered in the newspapers of the seven most industrialized nations.

vp USA

Fortunately, thanks to the internet, we are no longer so dependent on such limited news sources. Still, while we have access to thousands of newspapers from all over the world, language remains a barrier. That’s where sites like Global Voices can step in and fill the gap. Ethan Zuckerman calls the bloggers linked to in the Global Voices news aggregator, “bridge bloggers.” These are bloggers who are able to cross not only a linguistic divide, but also a cultural one. As he wrote in an article for Anthropology News [AAA members only]:

Bridge bloggers have one foot in each of two worlds: the world they live in and the one their readers inhabit. To convey events and ideas to a global audience, authors need to speak in a language—literally and figuratively—that a global audience can understand. It’s unsurprising that most bridge bloggers have lived and worked abroad, or are expatriates writing about their adopted country.

Zuckerman encourages anthropologists to blog precisely because they are often perfectly suited to exactly such a task. However, not all anthropologists are interested in explaining “their people” to the rest of the world. Some, like Alireza, have chosen to no longer blog in English, opting to blog only in Persian. While others, like this Norwegian anthropologist, have made a conscious decision to blog in English.

In the end, I’m not sure how much of a difference it will make. For highly motivated people, the information is out there and sites like Global Voices can be a useful tool. But most of the most popular blogs are still narrowly focused on information technology (with a concomitant obsession with the ever-exotic high-tech Japanese), or with American politics (and, justifiably, Iraq). Moreover, “bridge bloggers” often only cross national boundaries – not those boundaries of class, race and gender that often divide us within countries. True, there are some homeless bloggers (now in subsidized housing!), but I’m sure a map of the United States divided by class would show as much invisibility at the bottom as one sees in Africa on the Vanishing Point map.

(Thanks to Mike of Ishbaddidle for the link!)

UPDATE: Here is a link to an earlier post I wrote about various ways of mapping the news. And here is a new site that lets you see the front page of thousands of newspapers (also thanks to Mike).

UPDATE: World Changing points out that Ethan Zuckerman had himself tried doing something similar, drawing on the BBC, although he discontinued it last year.

Brain Boy

When writing my previous post about the National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives, I came across the web page of the director, Robert Leopold. On his page he has a link to a page from the 1960s comic book, Brain Boy:

BRAINBOY

Here is Robert’s description:

He’s a dashing young man with extraordinary powers, an under-cover agent for a clandestine branch of the Secret Service called the Organization of Active Anthropologists. If you read comic books in the early ’60s, you know him as Brain Boy, the studious superhero who appeared in six full-length color comics published by Dell between 1962 and 1963.

Brain Boy was versatile, battling Latin American dictators and extraterrestrials between the covers of a single issue — and always in a suit and tie.

Sounds like the comic book version of “Anthropologists as Counter-Insurgents.”

UPDATE: The B-Log has more.

National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives

The National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives collect and preserve historical and contemporary anthropological materials that document the world’s cultures and the history of the discipline. Their collections represent the four fields of anthropology – ethnology, linguistics, archaeology, and physical anthropology – and include manuscripts, fieldnotes, correspondence, photographs, maps, sound recordings, film and video created by Smithsonian anthropologists and other preeminent scholars.

They also have a blog (well, it has an RSS feed – but no permalinks…) telling you what’s new in the collection. Recently announced is an effort to “digitize 8,000 pages of Cherokee language manuscripts.” The site also has a few online exhibits, including this one of Lakota Winter Counts.

Witchcraft in the Modern World

Via Sepia Mutiny, a Washington Post story about accusations of witchcraft in modern day India. The author, Rama Lakshmi, takes the view that such accusations are really about maintaining patriarchy, and should not be thought of as mere “superstition”:

In a tribal society steeped in superstition, the spells of witches often are blamed for stubborn illnesses, a stroke of bad luck, the drying up of wells, crop failure or the inability to give birth to a son. But social analysts and officials said that superstition and faith in witchcraft often are a ploy for carrying out violence against women.

“Superstition is only an excuse. Often a woman is branded a witch so that you can throw her out of the village and grab her land, or to settle scores, family rivalry, or because powerful men want to punish her for spurning their sexual advances. Sometimes it is used to punish women who question social norms,” said Pooja Singhal Purwar, an official at the Jharkhand social welfare department.

“Women from well-to-do homes in the village are never branded witches,” Purwar said. “It is always the socially and economically vulnerable women who are targeted and boycotted.”

Unfortunately, the online fulltext version of Mahasveta Devi’s excellent story Bayen has been removed from the web at the request of the publishers. It is an account of how such witchcraft accusations play out in rural India (and like Zora Neal Hurston’s work, it is ethnographically informed). You can find it in the collection: Five Plays.

A book about witchcraft in South Africa, Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy, sees contemporary witchcraft accusations in a very different light. According to this H-Net review by Gary Kynoch (via Anthropologi.info), the book sees witchcraft accusations as an attempt to explain continued suffering even after the demise of the Apartheid state:

Community solidarity has eroded when compared to the unity of the “struggle” years. At the same time, improved opportunities for black South Africans have enabled a significant minority of Sowetans to accumulate material wealth and enjoy a relatively privileged lifestyle. The less fortunate are often bitter at being left behind and rising inequalities have fuelled community and family conflict in the post-apartheid period. Without “the system” to blame, witchcraft is increasingly considered the source of many of these difficulties. The anxiety engendered by the AIDS crisis has further heightened witchcraft fears.

I personally haven’t read anything Anthropological on witchcraft more recent than Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, but I almost feel inspired to create a course syllabus on witchcraft in the contemporary world. Anyone similarly inspired would definitely want to take a look at this MIT Open Courseware syllabus for James Howe’s course: “Magic, Witchcraft, and the Spirit World.”

Finally, I wanted to add one other witchcraft link: to the excellent Museum of Witchcraft in Iceland. I visited this exhibit in 2000, and enjoyed it tremendously. The witchcraft accusations discussed there were mostly in the seventeenth century, where they seem to have been a European import. The most fun part of visiting the exhibit was watching the Icelandic visitors discussing whose ancestors were accusers and whose were the accused (Iceland is a small country and everyone is related).

Around 130 cases of witchcraft or sorcery are found in court records both from the high court at Þingvellir and in fragments of county court records. Of the approximately 170 persons accused around 10% were women, the rest were males, mostly of the lower classes though some sheriffs and clergymen were also accused. None of the latter suffered physical punishments. It must be remembered in this context that the total population of Iceland at the time was only around fifty thousand.

UPDATE: This story from the Telegraph UK just happened to appear today:

A Sicilian palazzo once used as a headquarters for the Spanish Inquisition has been discovered to contain dozens of pieces of graffiti by “witches” condemned to burn at the stake.

The anguished scribblings and drawings were found on the walls during renovation work on the Palazzo Steri in Palermo, reviving what had been a nightmare for the many women held there to await their fate centuries ago.

One of the damned wrote: “Hot and cold I am / as I be consumed by the fever of malaria / my guts do tremble / and mine heart and spirit grow weak.”

Autoethnographic Text

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s 1615 document, Primer nueva coronica y buen gobierno (The First New Chronicle and Good Government) is a fascinating document, written by “an ethnic Andean who addressed his 1,200-page work, of which nearly 400 were pen-and-ink drawings of Inca and colonial life, to King Philip II of Spain” with the hope of reforming colonial rule. It was discovered in 1908, sitting forgotten in a library in Copenhagen, and was first published in 1936. Now it is online, thanks to Rolena Adorno at Yale University.

I discovered the site via this post by Language Hat, which points to several excellent essays in English about the history and importance of the document. This one, by Rolena Adorno, offers a good overview:

Guaman Poma’s activities as an investigator and writer are those which hold greatest interest for us today. His reliance on Andean languages and the accounts of the elders who either had survived the Spanish conquest, or had known those who had, gives his accounts of pre-Columbian Andean society an authority found in few other places. His time spent working with colonial church inspectors and civil officers gave him the experience from which to construct an unusually complex view of colonial administration, including its goals at the highest levels and its practices and abuses at the level of the local community. His self-taught knowledge of the European historiographic, juridical and rhetorical traditions reveals the type of Spanish literary and intellectual culture that was available to the native elite.

Language Hat also highlights this article by Mary Louise Pratt which coins the term “autoethnographic text” to refer to “a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them.”

Autoethnographic texts are not, then, what are usually thought of as autochthonous forms of expression or self-representation (as the Andean quipus were). Rather they involve a selective collaboration with and appropriation of idioms of the metropolis or the conqueror. These are merged or infiltrated to varying degrees with indigenous idioms to create self-representations intended to intervene in metropolitan modes of understanding. Autoethnographic works are often addressed to both metropolitan audiences and the speakers own community. Their reception is thus highly indeterminate. Such texts often constitute a marginalized groups point of entry into the dominant circuits of print culture. It is interesting to think, for example, of American slave autobiography in its autoethnographic dimensions, which in some respects distinguish it from Euramerican autobiographical tradition. The concept might help explain why some of the earliest published writing by Chicanas took the form of folkloric manners and customs sketches written in English and published in English-language newspapers or folklore magazines (see Treviño). Autoethnographic representation often involves concrete collaborations between people, as between literate ex-slaves and abolitionist intellectuals, or between Guaman Poma and the Inca elders who were his informants. Often, as in Guaman Poma, it involves more than one language. In recent decades autoethnography, critique, and resistance have reconnected with writing in a contemporary creation of the contact zone, the testimonio.

Pratt’s essay analyses the ways in which Guaman Poma appropriates and adapts “pieces of the representational repertoire of the invaders” to form his critique of colonial practices.

Pratt’s discussion of the illustrations is also quite interesting:

The genre of the four hundred line drawings is European–there seems to have been no tradition of representational drawing among the Incas–but in their execution they deploy specifically Andean systems of spatial symbolism that express Andean values and aspirations.

The caption for this image reads: “The Inka asks what the Spaniard eats. The Spaniard replies: ‘Gold.'”

eatgold

An Anthropology Newspaper @ antropologi.info

Lorenz (welcome back from your summer break!) at antropologi.info has set up a test page for a newspaper for the anthropology blogosphere. If reading RSS feeds is not for you, this newspaper might be a good alternative.

By the way, I personally like the fact that Lorenz includes Global Voices Online, a fascinating project involving citizen writers, journalists, and activists all over the world. He allows it ten headlines, while for the others he gives only four.

Zora Neale Hurston’s Fieldwork Footage

zora_neale_hurston_fieldwork_1928_00000005

The wonderful Internet Archive has made public “Five excerpts from footage taken by author Zora Neale Hurston doing anthropological documentation of the South.”

We see people chopping wood, building a railway, sitting around the house, dancing in a school playground, and getting baptized. Not much to go on, especially without any sound or commentary, but still great to have it freely available online!

This silent, black and white footage runs about 6 minutes and is a 15MB Mpeg 4 download.

Get it here.

Here is a full list of Zora Neale Hurston materials at the Library of Congress.

(via Steve Rhodes’s del.icio.us feed)

UPDATE: Seems as if these materials were pulled from the web for copyright violation. Too bad.

Easter Island and Its Mysteries

While Easter Island and Its Mysteries might not be as great a book as it was deemed to be by Dr. Étienne Loppé, Chief Curator of the Lafaille Museum in La Rochelle (France), who wrote a gushing preface, it certainly provides interesting insights into ethnography in the mid 1930s.

A translation of this 1930s French ethnography is freely available online, as “a gift from [Dr. Ann Altman] to the academic community and to everyone else who is interested in Easter Island.” It includes copious footnotes by the translator.

Guns, Germs and Steel Links

The posts that Ozma and I wrote about Guns, Germs and Steel seem to have struck a nerve, and already there is a fair amount of discussion in the blogsphere. In addition to Brad DeLong’s dismissive pot-shots, there is a very good discussion developing in the comments section of this Crooked Timber post. From there I learned that the Science article mentioned by Ozma (and also by Majikthise and Louis Proyect) has been posted online by Louis. I recommend everyone take the time to read it in full. Also, Nomadic Thoughts is collecting links about the debate, and I will try to mirror some of those here, as well as whatever else I come across as I discover them. And stay tuned – our resident New Guinea expert, Rex, is on vacation, but I’m sure he’ll have something to say when he gets back!

UPDATE: For those who want a quick overview of the debate so-far, go take a look at an excellent write-up by Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed.

UPDATE: This is getting very long, so I’m moving everything below the fold.
Continue reading →

The Genealogy of Neoliberal Capitalism and the Atlantic Slave Trade

A few days ago I came across Long Sunday, a group blog whose contributors write, for the most part, on continental theory writ large. Reading the posts there have taken a while because the comments are often magisterial in length (not unlike some of the posts here at SM!)

Quite frankly I am jaw-drop amazed at the high level of discussion there and I am glad I came across this wonderful site. I have been on-and-off following the individual blogs of some of the contributors (such as Fort Kant, Charlotte Street), but having one place to go to get my RSS feed fix will be convenient.

One particular post, begun by Jodi Dean, caught my attention. She has launched a learned discussion about the ways in which neoliberal capitalism produces a fantasy of Capital as the Real. Taking cue from Slavoj Zizek‘s concept of the imaginary real, she suggests that this neoliberalist fantasy is so sublime (and subliminal) that when disguised in the language of the Symbolic (economic laws, for example) it tends to obfuscate the institutional violence of state power at both the national and international levels.

Here’s a long quote from this post, which neatly summarizes a paper she has made available online titled “Enjoying Neoliberalism“:

Zizek argues that Capital is Real in several senses: it is the ‘positive condition of hegemonic struggle’ (Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 319), it ‘sets a limit to resignification,’ and it determines “the structure of the material social processes themselves’ (Ticklish Subject, 276). But, to assert that Capital is Real is to embrace neoliberal ideology, to accept its premises without a struggle, without inquiry into how neoliberal faith in the market has come to produce a sense of its own inevitability. What is necessary, then, is an account of the neoliberal imaginary allied with the Real.

One might want to claim that Zizek’s elaboration of the Real in terms of an imaginary Real, a symbolic Real, and a real Real and his specification of capital as a symbolic Real (one that operates in terms of basic formulae or persists as an underlying structure) contributes to thinking about capitalism insofar as it points to a logic determining and distorting, that is, forming, the basic matrix of contemporary socio-political life. I disagree. The specification of capital as formulae invests economics with a scientific status, with the ability to formulate laws or truths about the world that tell us how the world functions. Such an investment occludes and naturalizes the roles of governments, both as national states and as international organizations, in creating property rights, establishing corporations, producing a functioning tax system, and sustaining and militarily defending the very infrastructure necessary for business.

As I understand her argument, neoliberal capitalism produces a fantasy around the very notions that guarantee it, such as free trade, private property rights, the right for governments to tax and enforce regulation, etc. These elements of neoliberal capitalism, however, are backed by the state’s fundamental power to mete out punishment. In her short essay she explores this idea through a sharp analysis of the shopaholic and the criminal as two prominent subject positions in neoliberal capitalism.

In her discussion she takes Zizek to task for downplaying the role of disciplinary power in neoliberal capitalism while overemphasizing the truimph of unfettered exchange-value. She asks:

How is that we have been taken in by capital? That we find ourselves so entrenched in it that escape seems impossible, a step into oblivion?

To answer this question, Alphonse van Worden, another blogger at the site, delves into the history of the Atlantic slave trade. If Dean argues that neoliberal capitalism produces a sublime fantasy around the institutions of state power, for Alphonse this resonates specifically with the genealogy of emancipatory politics (she brings up the transatlantic slave trade) as integral to understanding the legacy of private property rights.

She makes sure to explain the process of inversion whereby the initial calls for liberating slaves, which were initially a response to the traumatic encounter with the horrors of industrial capitalism, had been usurped by Capital itself in the form of liberal economic thought. For this inversion to be convincing, however, required not only “the revival of antique narratives and the fanstastic and the fabulous” but also the twisting of the political mythology from an image of freedom to that of bondage. This is why she says:

Its a head-exploding irony that the modern concept of ‘freedom’ upon which the idea of ‘free trade’ is built and which is the fairy in its shell was first embodied in sugar industry slaves, who were physically the ‘freedom’ of their proprietors.

Reading this exchange I immediately thought of a parallel discussion about the theory of labor power in Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, which was mentioned in the commentary (Alphonse also mentions Robert Brenner’s Merchants and Revolution, which I did not know of but sounds fascinating from a comparativist perspective.)

I am quite enthralled by this bringing together of Zizekian musings on neoliberal capitalism and what seems to me as a more “British Cultural Marxist” look at the history of industrial capitalism. Although I am not fully convinced of Dean’s critique of Zizek (but then she’s read much more Zizek than I have, so who am I to say this), this move to ground a critique of neoliberalism in a nuanced historical materialist sort of analysis is promising. If anything, it blasts through the comforting mythology of neoliberal capitalism that we (or I should really say “I” to be less presumptuous) often wrap ourselves in by tuning into the emancipatory potential of one’s encouters with the acute economic and political inequalities that exist today. This engagement with the Real is for me at the heart of the ethnographic encounter — and perhaps is part of my answer to oneman’s discussion about the disciplinary “moral core” of anthropology.

This discussion also brings back some of the key theoretical issues in the anthropology of political economy (the work of Sidney Mintz immediately comes to mind). It also touches on the anthropology of law, which in rent years has been energized through a double-whammy of Giorgio Agamben‘s reappraisal of Foucault’s theory of biopolitics and the critique of neoliberalism from what I see as a more Anglo-American take on the politics of recognition.

How to read the web like a blogger.

Most people who read Savage Minds do so through our RSS feed, so it seems silly to have a tutorial about how to read RSS feeds. (Currently over 200 people are subscribed to our feed.) However, I figure that some people still haven’t figured it all out, so I thought I’d make it easier.

This will be short:

That’s it.

In time you may wish to set up your own Bloglines account. Then you can read this tutorial, which will guide you through the process.

Over time we will add more feeds to the Bloglines aggregator. And when it goes public I might even switch us over to Feedlounge which looks like it will be very cool!

Personally, I don’t use Bloglines, preferring NetNewsWire on my Mac. (Which can actually sync with Bloglines, although I haven’t tried that.)

For more information on RSS feeds, see all the posts in the “feeds” category on my blog.

Mead to Boas: “Will You Be Directly Disappointed in Me?”

During my exploration of del.icio.us bookmarks tagged “anthropology,” I came upon a site with the correspondence between student Margaret Mead and teacher Franz Boas during Mead’s research in Samoa (1925-6). This site, which was created to showcase more exchanges between the two anthropologists and complements the letters already published in the appendix of Derek Freeman’s book The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead.

Because I am unfamiliar with the details of the Mead-Freeman controversy (started by Freeman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth), I was unable to truly appreciate the letters in terms of proving or disproving the validity of Mead’s findings. (For more on the Mead-Freeman controversy, see here and here, among others.)

Instead I read these letters as an exchange between a student and an advisor. In some of her missives Mead is quite honest in expressing her doubts about her fieldwork situation. The way she asks Boas for advice, I thought, was revealing of their close bond. In reading this exchange between a student and her teacher, I sensed some transference between the two, which might be a familiar feeling for those who has undergone the rigors of ethnographic fieldwork as a graduate student.

When I read this following passage in a letter Mead wrote to Boas (January 16, 1926), I thought to myself, “Hey, I’ve been there too!”:

But through it all, I have no idea whether I’m doing the right thing or not, or how valuable my results will be. It all weighs rather heavily on my mind. Is it worth the expenditure of so much money? Will you be directly disappointed in me?

Anthropological Theory, Siglo XXI

Folks over at the Valve have been discussing a new collection of essays, Theory’s Empire : An Anthology of Dissent edited by Daphne Patai and Wilfrido Corral.

It’s prompted me to reflect — not for the first time — on how glad I am I went through grad school just after the high water mark of high theory. Some necessary battles were fought without my help, which suited me just fine, and I could approach the work of controversial scholars from the safe angle of necessity. That is to say, I never had to shout at my scholarly seniors “I’m going to my room to read Derrida and Foucault and there’s NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT!!!!!” Instead, I read them because it was a given that one had to, and one could like or dislike them as one pleased without anybody getting very worked up about it.

A downside, however, was that the available paradigms felt a bit hoary. While writing my dissertation I got detoured in one chapter by my own critique of Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, which consisted in part in chiding him for using the format of a self-help manual. Then it occurred to me he probably meant it as a sort of joke; that anyway, who was I to be so cranky when I’d found it so useful; and that somehow, the darn thing had become a decade old since I’d “discovered” it two or three years after its publication.

In the end… I just couldn’t get that worked up about it. What excited me toward the end of my graduate career was perfectly straightforward work in political ecology and ecological economics. I still find that work very useful, and I am truly glad I’m not a battle-scarred veteran of the 80s. Still I wonder… why hasn’t a new generation of exhilirating theorists come along for my generation of scholars to fight about? Or have they, and I’ve just missed the boat?

Ethnoblogs

I have spent the last few days preparing course syllabi for the fall semester and I was thought-experimenting about ways I can possibly incorporate blogs and other online technologies into the classroom.

Then I remembered that a few weeks ago over at Fieldnotes, Tad McIlwraith had wonderful things to say about Aaron Fox’s new ethnography Real Country: Music and Language in Working Class Culture (and also reported by Lorenz over at anthropologi). So I went over there to take a quick look.

Fox’s ethnography, which is a study of how country music expresses Texan working-class identity in a particular local community, is of interest to me because it is related to my dissertation topic: his treatment of class culture has made me think about a chapter of mine that deals with mineworkers in 1950s & 60s Japan who were into writing haiku poetry.

Yet besides his rich ethnography, I was also struck by Fox’s decision to “extend” his book into cyberspace. At his website for Real Country, he has all kinds of materials — interview transcripts, some real stellar photographs, audio files, and even a video clip — pretty much everything short of reproducing the book itself. I had so much fun going through his multimedia files, and I can see how students would too. It looks like he has not uploaded all the materials he has, but the site is very organized and easy to use.

What’s even more impressive is that Fox has begun a blog devoted to discussing the book with his readers. He wants the site to be a place “where students can interact with [him] and ask questions about the book.” Sure enough, there have already been a few students reading the book for class who have logged on and chatted with the author. Some of the discussions have been really enlightening. For example, when he was asked about his photographs, he talked about his passion for “working class documentary photography.”

So I am wondering if any of you august readers and bloggers of Savage Minds know of other online presentations of ethnographic materials? Or a list of ethnographic blogs already out there? Or better yet, your experience with such blogs in the classroom?

Thanks! I promise I’ll return the favor by compiling them into a list and posting it here.