Author: anthropologyworks12

Tourism, human rights, and who is in control

By Barbara Miller

Lead articles in the travel sections of the Sunday August 24 issues of The Washington Post and The New York Times raise some interesting questions about tourism in relation to indigenous peoples.

Both articles offer food for thought for anthropologists who work with indigenous peoples to protect, preserve, and “manage” their cultural heritage and for cultural tourists who want to avoid harming indigenous peoples and fragile environments. The articles also provide a useful source for classroom discussions around issues of heritage, rights, and responsibility.

The Washington Post article is about possible human rights abuses of Padaung women in northern Thailand. Their necks are elongated by wearing a stack of brass coils. They have long been an attraction to outsiders — photographers, journalists, tourists, and other voyeurs. Human rights activists and some eco-tourist company owners have expressed concern that unscrupulous businessmen are keeping Padaung women in “human zoos” across a wide area of northern Thailand.

The author of the article visited one village in which the women told him they are paid to live there and wear traditional clothing including their brass rings. It’s a village created for and sustained by tourists. The author asks: “So it is unethical to visit the long-necked women?” (p F4). The author notes that the women he talked with said that their life in the fake village where they earn money is preferable to poverty.

The New York Times article on the Navajo highlights the value, to indigenous people, of controlling tourism including the narrative conveyed to the tourists in terms of the complicated concept of “authenticity” and the profits generated from tourism. The contrasts with the situation of the Padaung women are clear. While the Navajo in this article are also putting parts of their culture on display for outsiders, they are in control of what to make publicly available and how, including an emphasis on respect for heritage and environmental concerns which responds to a new generation of tourists.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Padaung could be liberated from the “businessmen” and become in charge of their heritage and its consumption by outsiders?

Image: “Padaung Village,” licensed under Creative Commons from Flickr.

Anthro in the news 8/24

Cognitive anthropologist has a message for Obama about health care reform

Cognitive linguistic anthropologist George Lakoff lists nine things that the Obama administration should have done earlier on in the campaign to reform health care. He also offers specific advice for how to win the campaign through a more effective communications system, including a brilliant suggestion to rename the “public option” as the “American Plan,” which will remove any taint of “socialism” and instead invoke feelings of patriotism.

This blogger likes Lakoff’s idea very much but wonders about the chances of a label change in reminding Americans that patriotism and love of country can include compassion to fellow Americans who have less than they do.

Economic development can exacerbate gender inequality.

In many patriarchal situations (patriarchy is when men dominate most or all social domains including the economy, politics, family, and belief systems), sons are highly preferred to the extent that people opt to abort female fetuses or systematically neglect daughters in terms of food, health care, and affection.

Areas where such preferences are particularly include northern India’s richest states: Punjab and Haryana.

An article in a special issue of The New York Times Magazine (August 23, 2009, pp. 23- 25) devoted to women’s rights internationally highlights the field research of cultural anthropologist Monica Das Gupta in rural Punjab in the 1980s.

Her data revealed the double-edged sword of development: richer, more-educated people have fewer children than poorer, less-educated families, but they still want to have at least one son. So the pressure to avoid having a daughter is more extreme. Das Gupta is currently a senior social scientist in the World Bank’s Development Research Group.

The article offers no recommendations, just a faint note of hope that the “clash” between modernity and exacerbated masculine bias in infant and child sex ratios in highly patriarchal situations may be a problem of only “the short and medium terms” (p. 25). Whatever that means.

Note: For historical context on northern India’s extremely unbalanced sex ratios, see Chapter 2 of my book, The Endangered Sex: Neglect of Female Children in Rural North India, 2nd ed., Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997; originally published by Cornell University Press, 1981.

The cradle of agriculture in ruins?

By Barbara Miller

An article in The New York Times titled “Idle Iraqi Date Farms Show Decline of Economy “ (Aug. 14, 2009) describes the severe deterioration of agriculture in Iraq and highlights date farming as particularly hard hit. The article notes lack of water, fungi and pests as causal factors in the decline of the agricultural economy.

Any comments on more in-depth sources of information on the state of agriculture in Iraq? Is something more going on than drought and pests, though admittedly that’s a pretty serious combination of threats? Are anthropologists or other social scientists doing local-level studies on this topic?

These date palm trees are in Cairo, because there weren’t any Creative Commons-licensed photos of date palm trees in Iraq.

Painting by more than just numbers: the case for anthropology

Guest post by Nick Bluhm

Can numbers alone capture the essence of human behavior? This is a question that most anthropology professors would quickly rebuff; yet former General Counsel of General Electric Benjamin Heineman posed this question in a recent article in The Atlantic.

Heineman suggests that in certain situations, an understanding of a community, country, or region requires more than just mathematics or formulas. As an anthroplogist, I agree that these “numbers” are insufficient for understanding human behavior. However, I would go further, and argue that anthropology is a necessary component of any community analysis.

At the heart of all human activity, at the most basic level, is an interaction between two individuals, who have preferences, biases, desires and idiosyncrasies. Anthropology examines these aspects in the collective, carefully developing an understanding of the qualitative, integral components of what drives a culture and a people. By aggregating these individual observations, mostly without the aid of numbers or formulas, anthropologists create a holistic picture, one that I believe is necessary for formulating effective foreign policies.

Tedious? Possibly. Essential? Certainly. Heineman provides an apt case study that highlights the need for qualitative data and field research: Vietnam. Heineman takes aim at former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who clearly failed at forecasting the failure of American troops to surmount the determined North Vietnamese.

McNamara, in his memoir, acknowledges that the failure of Vietnam can be attributed to the “profound ignorance in the history, culture, and politics of the people.” Although the mea culpa came 30 years too late, as an anthroplogist, I find it validating to hear a former U.S. senior official admit to the importance of this knowledge, something that anthropology is ideally suited to provide.

Michael Dove shares Heineman’s sentiment, championing the importance of anthroplogy for a deeper understanding of foreign affairs. In his New York Times article, Dove describes the work of Dr. Ann Soetoro, renowned development anthropologist and mother of current President Barack Obama.

Dove explains that, much like the Pentagon in conducting the Vietnam War, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) lacked the essential perspective gained by Dr. Soetoro during her studies in Indonesia. Dr. Soetoro, who consulted with USAID, attempted to dispel its misguided assumption that the proper village delegate for channeling aid was the village official. Instead, she pioneered the notion of micro-credit, eschewing the USAID approach that she found exacerbated social stratification in the Indonesian villages.

And this is where the two articles agree. In any policymaking or decision-making capacity, there is an urgent need for a dissenting perspective, especially one that captures the spirit, social structure and culture of a community. Anthropologists must continue to challenge the numbers and rigid, formulaic policies heralded as the explanation and objective solution. Anthropology, though often unacknowledged for its contributions, provides an essential toolset for anyone who seeks to thoroughly comprehend the world.

Nick Bluhm is a public policy analyst at the law firm Cooley Godward Kronish, in downtown D.C. He holds an M.A. in anthropology from the George Washington University.

Image: “Lego People.” Source: Joe Shlabotnik.

Male-biased sex ratios of pet dogs in New Delhi

By Barbara Miller

The wealthy of New Delhi have taken to buying pedigreed dogs as status markers, and the vast majority buys male dogs. Owners are resorting to advertising to find female mates (in the sexual sense, it seems) for their dogs, but the search is often fruitless due to the scarcity of females.

The skewed set ratio among pet dogs appears to be even more severe than in the human population, though perhaps it may be driven by a general societal preference for males that has long been documented by anthropologists, sociologists, demographers and others. In the human population, the larger number of males occurs mainly through sex-selective abortion and neglect of female children putting them at greater risk of death through malnutrition and untreated illnesses.

As with the pet sex ratio problem, highly unbalanced sex ratios among children is not most characteristic of the poor, but is more prominent among middle and upper groups.

Are dog breeders systematically culling female puppies, or are they keeping them as future breeders rather than selling them? Perhaps a combination thereof? Either way, male dogs seem to come out on top, as do men more often than women in India.

Readers with access to JSTOR may be interested in my related article “Female-Selective Abortion in Asia: Patterns, Policies, and Debates” in American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 103, No. 4 (Dec., 2001), pp. 1083-1095, accessible here.

Image: Young mother and her son in a village in North India. By Barbara Miller.

Anthro in the news 8/19

The politics of women’s clothing

By Barbara Miller

The Economist reports that Sudan’s criminal law forbids “indecent clothing in public” with little in the way of further details. Sudanese journalist Lubna al-Hussein was recently arrested in Sudan along with 12 women for being improperly dressed. Ten of the 12 accepted the charge, and each was punished with 10 lashes and was forced to pay a fine equal to U.S. $100. Ms. Hussein is contesting the charges. The problem seems to be that she was wearing trousers.

In Sudan women are flogged for wearing pants. In France, women appearing in public fully covered with a head-to-toe veil has become a volatile policy question for the government and an important cultural rights issue for Muslims along with the 2004 ban against girls wearing headscarves in schools. France has the largest Muslim population of any country in Europe. Muslims constitute about 10 percent of the national population.

How does all this square with liberté, egalité, and fraternité? Are such hard-fought-for values to be lost in the wake of contemporary concerns for “national integration” and “national security”? And how important a role, behind the veil of national policy, is being played by xenophobia and anti-immigrationist fears?

Image: Female students in Alexandria, Egypt. By Barbara Miller.

Welcome!

Hello,

Welcome to the anthropologyworks blog, where I invite anthropologists and non-anthropologists to engage in a lively discussion of any and all topics, as long as comments and queries link, in some way, to anthropology. Please click here for more details.

I am a cultural anthropologist, and I teach cultural anthropology at The George Washington University. My primary appointment is in the Elliott School of International Affairs, where I am the associate dean for faculty affairs and the director of CIGA, the Cultural in Global Affairs research and policy program. I also direct the international development concentration in the Anthropology Department‘s M.A. program. Click here to learn more about me.

I believe that anthropology is relevant to just about everything since it’s about people, our past and present, and our future on this earth.

Please join me in making this blog relevant to you and others by responding to posts and adding new topics for our readers to learn from, share, and discuss.

All the best,

Barbara

Barbara Miller
Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs
Professor of Anthropology & International Affairs
The George Washington University