:: antropologi.info ::

Today was the fifth and last day of the 10th Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) in Ljubljana, Slovenia. There are no news stories yet, but anthropology students at the University of Ljubljana have already written an impressive number of reports on workshops, plenaries and poster sessions.

The students have done a real great job and I hope they will inspire other conference organizers. There are exciting things being told and discussed at conferences. But until now, these stories have stayed inside a small community of scholars. Things are changing: The Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) has started podcasting from their annual meetings.

EASA has started an ambitious project. Read this:

You have reached the online database of texts on the 10th Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). During this event, the site is hourly updated, bringing you fresh reports on the venues (workshops, plenaries and poster sessions) as well as several interviews with the lecturers, EASA officials and other guests. All texts will be published in English language.

The reports and interviews are written by students at the Department for Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. Since human resources are scarce, not all venues are covered and are therefore not reported or commented. We are trying, however, to present as much material as possible by covering as much events as possible.

The reports give a great overview over current anthropological research in Europe.

Tjaša Selič and Goran Karim for example write about Michael Carrithers who is interested in the question: How can so many differences between cultures, groups of people and individuals still inspire participation, cooperation, solidarity? (pdf) Tjaša Zidarič also mentions Panayiota Toulina Demeli who is interested in how being in prison effects the social meaning of motherhood (pdf).

Nikolas Kosmatopoulos seems to have given an interesting paper in the workshop “Imagining and Constructing “Terrorism” and “War on Terror". “Being an anthropologist in the Middle East feels almost like being a spy", he said according to Vasja Pavlin:

(I)t is possible to be objective in such an intense field as Lebanon. There is a grey zone between the attackers and the attacked into which an anthropologist enters in order to do his or her research. By entering into this zone one immediately becomes a suspicious person.

An anthropologist has to tell his or her informants some of the intimate stuff about what he or she is doing in order to be accepted by them. The situation forces you to take a position but you cannot please everyone; if you do so you are just like a clown. He concluded that being an anthropologist in the Middle East feels almost like being a spy.

(pdf)

“Crowd crystals and birdwatchers: charismatic leadership in volunteer organisations” was the title of Dan Podjed’s paper. In her summary, Tina Kranjec informs us that the meaning of charisma and charismatic leadership is “a black hole in anthropological research” (pdf).

She also writes that “his presentation was very good and in some parts funny".

I was surprised over the open and honest comments on the papers and the presentations. Maybe these reports may inspire some anthropologists to rethink their way of giving papers.

Tina Kranjec comments on a presentation by Elke Mader at the workshop Happiness: Anthropological Engagements:

I must say this was a very interesting paper. The author explores how fans experience, express, communicate and circulate happiness in relationship with Shah Rukh Khan. There was a lot of visual material, which was also very representative.

(pdf)

But the workshop On ‘Souvenir’: experiencing diversity, objectifying mutuality was less exciting, she writes:

After visiting two other workshops, I can say that this last one was more oriented on giving as much information as possible and not so much on trying to provoke us and making us participate by commenting and asking questions. Almost all of the lecturers were reading as fast as possible, which made the comprehension of the papers quite difficult.

(pdf)

Tina Mučič has also reviewed several presentations. An anthropologist “was reading her paper very quietly so it was difficult to understand everything", another one “was speaking and reading very fast, almost too fast to understand the meaning of the paper.”

She liked Gillian Evans‘ presentation best:

This introduction was the most likeable. Dr. Evans was speaking aloud and her tone was resolute. She was trying to explain some terms which we did not understand and was aware that there were not only experts on this topic in the room.

It seems that more and more paper givers have used PowerPoint presentations than for two years ago when I attended the conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth in Keele. Then, most presentations were so boring that I decided to stay at home. According to the students’ reports, the conference in Slovenia must have been very interesting. Their reports are very inspiring. Maybe I should have gone though?

>> overview over all reports

>> conference website

UPDATE (3.9.08): Martha Jiménez-Rosano has written a few notes about the conference of the Moving Anthropology Student Network (MASN) that took place before the EASA conference (in Slovenia as well) and has uploaded her paper “Projectionists of Reality. When researchers project images of their own boundaries.”

SEE ALSO:

What’s the point of anthropology conferences? - EASA conference 2006

How To Present A Paper - or Can Anthropologists Talk?

Academic presentations: “The cure is a strong chairman and a system of lights”

Norwegian anthropology conferences are different

Anthropology and the World: What has happened at the EASA conference?

Conference Podcasting: Anthropologists thrilled to have their speeches recorded

This is conference blogging!

AAA Annual Meeting: Are blogs a better news source than corporate media?

First news from the AAA-conference?

Military spies invade anthropology conferences?

The myth of the “untouched” Amazone is popular. But areas that look pristine today have been the home of large urban areas, anthropologist Michael Heckenberger has found out already five years ago.

In a new paper that was published today in Science he writes that these settlements might be a model for the future.

In a press release Heckenberger says:

If we look at your average medieval town or your average Greek polis, most are about the scale of those we find in this part of the Amazon. Only the ones we find are much more complicated in terms of their planning.
(…)
These are not cities, but this is urbanism, built around towns. The findings are important because they contradict long-held stereotypes about early Western versus early New World settlements that rest on the idea that “if you find it in Europe, it’s a city. If you find it somewhere else, it has to be something else.

They have quite remarkable planning and self-organization, more so than many classical examples of what people would call urbanism.

This new knowledge could change how conservationists approach preserving the remains of forest so heavily cleared it is the world’s largest soybean producing area. “This throws a wrench in all the models suggesting we are looking at primordial biodiversity,” Heckenberger says.

This early urban settlement can be a model for future solutions. Heckenberger and his colleagues conclude:

Long ago, Howard proposed a model for lower-density urban development, a “garden city,” designed to promote sustainable urban growth. The model proposed networks of small and well-planned towns, a “green belt” of agricultural and forest land, and a subtle gradient between urban and rural areas.

The pre-Columbian polities of the Upper Xingu developed such a system, uniquely adapted to the forested environments of the southern Amazon. The Upper Xingu is one of the largest contiguous tracts of transitional forest in the southern Amazon [the so-called “arc of deforestation"], our findings emphasize that understanding long-term change in human-natural systems has critical implications for questions of biodiversity, ecological resilience, and sustainability.

Local semi-intensive land use provides “home-grown” strategies of resource management that merit consideration in current models and applications of imported technologies, including restoration of tropical forest areas. This is particularly important in indigenous areas, which constitute over 20% of the Brazilian Amazon and “are currently the most important barrier to deforestation".

Finally, the recognition of complex social formations, such as those of the Upper Xingu, emphasizes the need to recognize the histories, cultural rights, and concerns of indigenous peoples—the original architects and contemporary stewards of these anthropogenic landscapes—in discussions of Amazonian futures.

>> press release: ‘Pristine’ Amazonian region hosted large, urban civilization, study finds (University of Florida News)

Heckenberger has put online several papers. On the frontpage of his homepage we read “Come visit our site after August 30, 2008 for latest research results”

SEE ALSO:

Tropical Stonehenge found in the rainforest? Why so surprised over the “finding” that the early inhabitants in the rainforest were “sophisticated” people?

The Double Standards of the “Uncontacted Tribes” Circus

Anthropologists condemn the use of terms of “stone age” and “primitive”

Dissertation: Survival in the Rainforest

As some of you might know, I work as a journalist at the interdisciplinary research programme Culcom - Cultural Complexity in the New Norway. I’ve just put online the English translation of my interview with Thomas Hylland Eriksen, research director of Culcom.

We talk about how hard it is to challenge conventional academic thinking and to establish a new analytical view of the world.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen says:

- What we are trying to do is shift the analytical gaze in a direction where the nation-state and the ethnic group are not viewed as the most important unit. It is here researchers like Knut Kjeldstadli have been vital in insisting on the significance of class, or Oddbjørn Leirvik, who points out that differences in value-based questions cuts across the majority and minority population.

- In this way, lines of distinction that are somewhat different than those common to immigrant research, in which an us-and-them way-of-thinking is common, get established. And in addition, the transnational perspective leads to a de-centering of the nation-state; it is almost like a small Copernican revolution.

We also talk about open access and dissemination via our website. He says:

- Working in a place where most of what is published is electronically available and can be downloaded as a PDF has been a dream of mine for many years, even in the transnational sense: Then people who are in Switzerland and India can get onto our webpages, download texts and use our research in their own work. There is no reason why this should cost money.

>> read the whole interview with Thomas Hylland Eriksen

There are two more new interviews online about related issues.

Hans Erik Næss criticizes in his thesis the methodologicial nationalism in sociology text books. Sociology does not focus enough on transnational aspects in society. His thesis contains not only suggestions for a better sociology, but also an alternative required reading list.

>> read the whole interview: “In favor of a more transnational sociology”

Gunn Camilla Stang has written one of the first studies on Polish labour migrants in Norway. She says that debates about migration should focus more on the possiblities of learning. In viewing Polish laborers primarily as (cheap) labor, companies miss out in a great deal of knowledge they could have used to improve routines and products.

>> read the whole interview “More than “social dumping””

And Arnfinn Haagensen Midtbøen explains us why Scandinavia should be illuminated as an interesting region in migration research.

>> Interview: Does migration strengthen the nation-state?

We have relaunched our website, and our English pages are “still under construction”

Gay marriage is banned in Oregon and the most states in the U.S. But if you are gay and Native Indian you are lucky: The Coquille Indian Tribe on the southern Oregon coast recently adopted a law that recognizes same-sex marriage.

The law extends to gay and lesbian partners all tribal benefits of marriage - even if a Coquille marries an Italian or Pakistani, ap and The Oregonian, report.

According to anthropologist Brian Gilley, The Coquilles are probably the first tribe to legalize same-sex marriage. Gilley is author of the book, “Becoming Two-Spirit: Gay Identity and Social Acceptance in Indian Country”.

The interesting thing is that many Native American tribes historically accepted same-sex relationships. But in the colonial era, Europeans tended to change that.

Native Americans not only accepted lesbian and gay people, they also respected them as prophets, hunters or healers, anthropologist Rae Trewartha writes in The New Internationaist.

English and French-Canadian fur trappers were surprised to find that there were significant numbers of men dressed as women among the Native Indians, Scott Bidstrup writes:

What intrigued them the most, however, was the esteem with which these men were held by their fellow tribesmen. These men were considered to be spiritually gifted, a special gift to the tribe by God, men with a particular insight into spiritual matters.

Native Americans with mixed gender identity are called “Two Spirit” (see also a New York Times story about a Two Spirit gathering)

The new law rises interesting legal questions, anthropologist Brian Gilley explains, Because the Coquilles have federal status, a marriage within the tribe would be federally recognized. But that would violate the Defense of Marriage Act, a law that says the federal government “may not treat same-sex relationships as marriages for any purpose.”

“The federal government could challenge the Coquille law as a way of testing the limits of tribal independence", he says.

>> Gay marriage in Oregon? Tribe says yes (The Oregonian, 20.8.08)

>> New tribal law allows couple to plan wedding (The Register Guard, 21.8.08)

SEE ALSO:

Law and multiculturalism: When law crosses borders

A subculture of hefty, hirsute gay men is attracting the attention of academics

(via media anthropology) What is the purpose of organisations like the American Anthropological Association? What is the point of publishing articles? The free software movement forces anthropologists to rethink these questions, Christopher Kelty says in a conversation about anthopology and open access to scholarship.

The discussion between seven anthropologists was published in the journal Cultural Anthropology. The article Anthropology of/in Circulation: The Future of Open Access and Scholarly Societies is of course available online.

They talk among other things about new divisions between scholary organisations like the AAA and anthropologists who want to engage with the wider world by making their research more accessible online. Now, the largest part of anthropological research is locked behind login forms that only members of subscribed institutions can pass through. The AAA has not taken side with the open access movement but with the commercial publishing industry.

“All anthropologists who want to be part of the revolution in scholarly communication must do so outside of the AAA", Alex Golub says. The AAA has “made exactly the wrong allies".

One common argument against free access to scholarship has to do with economics: Journal subscriptions are an important part of the budget of organisations like the AAA.

But Jason Baird Jackson explains:

(I)f we want to think seriously about “sustainability” we must realize that sustaining anthropology means more than sustaining the AAA budget—it means sustaining the viability of research libraries and of our not-for- profit university press partners as well.

More and more research libraries today are responding by partnering directly with scholars to “publish” (…) research, and thus they are expanding the library’s role in new ways. They are trying to make scholarship more open and more sustainable by cutting out the middleman, the publishing companies. In doing so, they might make commercial publishing less profitable and scholarly societies built around toll access publication profits less sustainable.

So whose interests do you align with?

I’d like my efforts to help sustain the AAA, but the association’s interests are now more congruent with those of the publishing industry, not my library or the university presses. As a result the interests of my ethnographic consultants, my university library, my students, and my colleagues are increasingly in conflict with those of my professional society.

Alex Golub adds:

One of the key things about Free Software and Open Access (…) is that it allows things to get done extremely cheaply if you have the people who know how to work the technology. The AAA has failed to develop low-cost solutions using these methods, it has alienated much of a generation of younger scholars willing to devote their time to developing these solutions, and as a result it has thrown up its hands and outsourced this work to institutions like WB (Wiley-Blackwell).

WB then doubles the price of American Anthropologist, and makes money off of the AAA’s inability to manage its own publications program. We are all literally paying the price of the AAA’s inability to keep our house in order.

The AAA has developped AnthroSource where AAA members can browse through hundreds of journals. Jason Baird Jackson says we do not need AnthroSource anymore because of all the blogs, open access and other online initiatives that he calls the “Shadow AnthroSource":

(I)n a way what is happening now outside of the AAA is a “shadow AnthroSource” that fulfills the ambitions of the original AnthroSource. In its visionary phase, AnthroSource was going to have a subject repository in which we could have put our field notes, white papers, unpublished book manuscripts, etc. I saw this vision die during my first year as an editor.
(…)
However, we do not actually need AnthroSource anymore because we have already built it up out of various bits and pieces outside the AAA framework. We have a subject repository (Mana’o), we have a constellation of weblogs and key metablogs (such as antropologi.info), we have people like Mike Wesch and Chris showing us how to mix and match readily/freely available tools to build powerful research collaboratories (like Digital Ethnography and Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory / ARC
(…)
We have organizations like the EVIADA project (Ethnomusicological Video for Instruction and Analysis Digital Archive; ) and individual researchers like Kim building powerful, innovative database tools for use in our research and our collaborations with students and communities, there are people (like Rob Leopold at the National Anthropology Archives) in many archives and museums building great projects to make the archival database more accessible, we have folks like the team organized by the American Folklife Center and the American Folklore Society building metadata tools like the new ethnographic thesaurus, and as Chris noted recently in a SavageMinds blog post, we have more and more OA journals spanning the topical and international diversity of world anthropology.

Will all this stuff somehow function better if it is centralized and put under the control of the home office?

Chris Kelty has recently published a book that is also available online. He compares the internet with a bookstore:

The Open Access argument is simply that making the book available on line was in my interest, because it will mean that it will be easy to find, easy to cite, and easy to use in classes.

But it might also be in Duke’s interest; I made the argument that people are more likely to buy the paper book if they can get a look at the book in its entirety digitally (Harper Collins buys this argument, and has just begun a similar experiment)

I told Duke to think of the website as a bookstore with a huge number of potential visitors, and the on-line version as the browseable version of the book. If a million people download my book, but only 1 percent of them then go on to buy a copy, Duke will still be selling far more copies then they ever dreamed. And what if I sell 5 percent? I’ll be a superstar!

>> read the whole article

UPDATE See also Owen Wiltshire’s comments

SEE ALSO:

AAA: “Open access no realistic option”

American Anthropological Association opposes Open Access to Journal Articles

Open Access: “The American Anthropological Association reminds me of the recording industry”

For Open Access: “The pay-for-content model has never been successful”

Danah Boyd on Open Access: “Boycott locked-down journals”

Is it time to boycott SAGE?

The unacknowledged convergence of open source, open access, and open science

Why were they doing this work just to give it away for free? Thesis on Ubuntu Linux hackers

Plans to study anthropological online communities and Open Access movement

2006 - The Year of Open Access Anthropology?

Better times for the Ainu in Japan? There is an “revival of ethnic pride” going on in Japan according to ap.

At the forefront are the Ainu Rebels (image). They use music and dance to rebel against a history of institutionalized discrimination. They celebrate being an Ainu by mixing traditional dress, dance and language with hip-hop and rap.

And they’re getting an enthusiastic response from young Japanese. T-shirts, vests and handbags adorned with Ainu motifs are selling well, and Ainu rock musician Oki Kano is making it big with a band featuring the tonkori, a sort of Ainu guitar, ap journalist Malcolm Foster writes. Ethnicity is hip in Japan according to linguist John Maher.

When I visited the indigenous music festival Riddu Riddu in Northern Norway a few years ago, I noticed the strong ties between the Saami and other indigenous people around the world. Riddu Riddu started as a Saami festival but developped into an international festival with guests from Papua New Guinea, Botswana, New Zealand, Nunavut and Greenland.

Contact with other indigenous people was also critical to the Ainu revival. Mina Sakai from the Ainu Rebels tells that her awareness came at age 16 when, on a cultural exchange trip to Canada, she was struck by the passionate way Canadian indigenous people danced and sang:

“I was shocked. They were so cool and so proud of being native Canadians. I realized that I have a beautiful culture and strong roots. I decided that I should be a proud Ainu and express that in my life.”

In June, Japan’s parliament recognized the Ainu as an indigenous people - a major shift from the mid-1980s when Yasuhiro Nakasone, the then prime minister, declared that Japan was a homogenous nation with no minorities.

>> read the whole story in the Guardian

The article also mentions Ann-Elise Lewallen, an American cultural anthropologist at Hokkaido University who has worked closely with the Ainu community for 10 years. But I could not find info about her online.

UPDATE: See also the coverage of this issue at Open Anthropology: Decolonizing Japan?

SEE ALSO:

Inuit language thrives in Greenland

“Pop culture is a powerful tool to promote national integration”

The cultural nationalism of citizenship in Japan and other places

How Media and Digital Technology Empower Indigenous Survival

“But We Are Still Native People” - Tad McIlwraith’s dissertation is online

Indigenous people no victims of globalisation: Alex Golubs dissertation on mining and indigenous people

Open Access to Indigenous Research in Norway

How filmmaking is reviving shamanism

Thomas Hylland Eriksen on Cosmoculture: Preferably more art than books!

With mobile banking taking off around much of the developing world, how long will it be before international aid is delivered electronically, asks anthropologist Ken Banks in PC World.

Banks is the founder of kiwanja, an organisation, that helps non-profit organisations to make better use of information and communications technology in their work - of course with an anthropological perspective. “Anthropology is interestingly the area which raises the most eyebrows among delegates at conferences", he writes on his website.

He writes:

As our ever-expanding digital world slowly reaches some of the poorest and marginalized members of society, opportunities to deliver financial aid to them electronically becomes less myth and more reality.

Mobile phone users in a growing number of developing countries can already pay for goods and services wirelessly through their mobile phones, and there are few technical challenges in allowing someone in the U.K., for example, to make a direct donation to a user in Kenya by way of airtime credit to their phone.

Just as the Internet redefined the way we shop, the mobile phone will likely end up doing the same for international aid.

>> read the whole article in PC World.

There’s a lot to explore on Kiwanja’s website and elsewhere on the web . Some weeks ago he wrote the article Anthropology’s Technology-driven Renaissance (PC World), Africa’s grassroots mobile revolution – a traveller’s perspective (Vodafone Retriever). And his projects were presented by the BBC (Mobile development rings true), Global Voices (Zimbabwe: Using New Technologies to Fight for Democracy) and Mongabay.com (Cell phones, text-messaging revolutionalize conservation approaches - An interview with IT conservation expert Ken Banks)

Some of you might remember an related article in the New York Times by ethnographer Jan Chipchase Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?.

(Image courtesy of www.kiwanja.net)

SEE ALSO:

Why the head of IT should be an anthropologist

How Media and Digital Technology Empower Indigenous Survival

Ethnographic reports about the uses of ICT in low-income communities

“The science of ethnography is an ideal tool to designing mobile phones”

Mobile phone company Vodafone gets inspired by traditional Kula exchange system

In 2005 his movie Metal - A Headbanger’s journey took the world with storm. Now anthropologist and metal musician Sam Dunn has released “Global Metal” - a film about the global expansion of heavy metal music.

Together with his co-director Scot McFayden, Dunn visited metal fans in Brazil, Japan, China, Indonesia, Israel and Iranian metal fans in Dubai.

The film seems to be especially relevant for theories on globalisation, cosmopolitanism, and social movements. As we read on the film’s homepage:

GLOBAL METAL reveals a worldwide community of metalheads who aren’t just absorbing metal from the West – they’re transforming it. Creating a new form of cultural expression in societies dominated by conflict, corruption and mass-consumerism.

Reviewer Liz Braun notes in the Winnipeg Sun:

In every country, metal has been bent and remade to reflect the culture. In India, metal fans talk about Bollywood music. In China, kids learn metal licks at a music school devoted to rock. Kaiser Kuo of the band Tang Dynasty talks about the underground metal scene in Beijing. In the Middle East, a Muslim says, “I got caught by the religious police for wearing a Slayer T-shirt and having long hair.”

(…)

Global Metal confirms that music is an international language. Particularly in countries where war and oppression are the norm, metal seems to represent a crucial outlet for emotional expression.

Unlike many facets of so-called “Western culture", metal has not been spread by mass media, but rather by word of mouth and the internet. After the success of their first film, Dunn began receiving emails from places he didn’t even know had a metal culture, he tells to The Age:

There were a lot of countries that didn’t get proper distribution of the film, and we started to get emails from India and Iran, from people saying, “We’ve heard about the film or downloaded it, but come and check out metal in our country.”

We knew about metal in places like Brazil and Japan; we didn’t know the full extent of how metal is spread around the world.

In an interview with twitchfilm.net, Scot McFayden says that they even hired researchers for their movie.

Sam Dunn tells that he was especially surprised about heavy metal in Israel:

I was really struck by our experience in Israel actually and the degree to which the Metal that the Israeli kids listen to and perform has such a strong personal relevance for them.

When I was growing up as a Metalhead, the lyrics were never necessarily reflecting something I was going through as a person. (…) But to go to Israel and talk with people that are living through a day to day reality of conflict and war. It was quite eye-opening for me and I realized that Metal can mean something very different to people depending on where you come from.

In an interview with Victoria Times Colonist he says learning about metal communities in other countries changed his views on Heavy Metal:

Being a fan of metal in Iran means you’re putting, at some extent, your personal safety at risk. Kids have had their hair cut [off], their T-shirts taken away, rehearsal rooms raided and gear confiscated, so we realized being a metal-head is a far greater statement [there] than being a snotty-nosed teenager with a Slayer shirt who wants to piss off your parents.

According to the SeeMagazine, “Dunn is a major reason the film is so charming":

He’s tall and lanky, forever wearing the same Mastodon t-shirt and awkwardly tucking his shoulder-length blond hair behind his ears. That earnest, unassuming quality makes him a likable character, but it also makes him an extremely effective interviewer: everyone seems to want to talk to the guy—not just Chinese record store owners and struggling metal bands from Iran, but ex-Megadeth guitarist Marty Friedman (who now makes his career appearing on Japanese variety television) and even Lars Ulrich, the notoriously prickly drummer for Metallica.

SEE ALSO:

The Rediff Interview/Nandini Chattopadhyay: Music and Protest

Socially conscious hip-hop is worldwide phenomenon

Cultures of Music Piracy: An Ethnographic Comparison of the US and Japan

How does music create community? Interview with Jan Sverre Knudsen and Stan Hawkins