Last Saturday, just days before this week’s final of the BBC’s amateur cooking competition, Masterchef, I was standing outside Hammersmith underground station in London, talking to a Mauritian Muslim friend. He was convinced that one of the competitors, Shelina Permalloo, born in Southampton of Mauritian Hindu Telugu parentage would win. He reckoned he had spotted how much the two judges, Australian-born restaurateur John Torode and his Cockney co-presenter, greengrocer Gregg Wallace, appreciate her Mauritian-inspired food as well as her personality.
Up until this point, I thought 29-year-old Shelina, a resident of Tooting in south London, had a very good chance of being crowned champion as she had made it through to the final three of more than 20 contestants. But my Mauritian friend convinced me that not only would it be good for Shelina, but it would also be good for the TV series as the former charity worker brought a point of differentiation to the food on display through her creative use of spices. And, as he pointed out, Wallace kept repeating that Shelina “brings sunshine to a plate.” Quite an endorsement.
And so it came to pass. Yesterday evening, Shelina Permalloo was duly crowned U.K. Masterchef 2012 champion. She very gracefully gave a great deal of credit to her widowed mother, claiming that she was really just her mother’s “sous chef.” Shelina added:
Anthroworks presents its favorite 2011 North American dissertations in cultural anthropology. In compiling this list, I searched the “Dissertations International” electronic database that is available through my university library. The database includes mainly U.S. dissertations with a light sprinkling from Canada. I used the same search terms as I did in previous years.
True confession: these are my picks, and they reflect my preferences for topics — health, inequality, migration, gender, and human rights. Somebody else’s picks would look quite different. But this is the anthroworks list!
The 40 dissertations are arranged in alphabetical order according to the last name of the dissertation author. Apologies to the authors for my reduction of their published abstracts to a maximum of nine lines.
I would like to convey my congratulations to all 2011 anthropology Ph.D. recipients. I hope they go on to a successful career in — or related to — anthropology.
An Analysis of Cultural Competence, Cultural Difference, and Communication Strategies in Medical Care, by Marisa Abbe. Case Western Reserve University. Advisor: Atwood Gaines.
This research expands the knowledge of the role of language, culture, and cultural difference in medical encounters. Minority populations suffer disproportionately from the burden of disease in American society. A common reason cited for health inequalities is that the U.S. health care system, in its “one-size-fits-all” approach, is inadequate to meet the needs of minority patients. A proposed solution in biomedicine is cultural competence. This dissertation investigates how Anglo-American clinicians and Mexican immigrant patients communicate in a medical setting. It is based on ethnographic research at the People’s Clinic, a free clinic in a metropolitan area in Texas. I examine how patients communicate information and whether their narratives cause barriers to treatment. I propose ways to redefine cultural competence of medical practitioners.
We Are Phantasms: Female Same-Sex Desires, Violence, and Ideology in Salvador, Brazil, by Andrea Allen. Harvard University. Advisor: Michael Herzfeld.
In this dissertation, I explore the paradox of lesbian intimate partner violence in Salvador, Brazil. My ethnographic fieldwork allows me to examine how lesbians and other women with female lovers act against “state interests” through their involvement in romantic and sexual relationships with other women, but nonetheless reproduce dominant Brazilian cultural norms through their involvement in intimate partner violence and sexual power relations. I focus on four themes: social violence perpetrated against lesbians in Brazilian society; women’s same-sex desires and sexual practices; infidelity, jealousy, and intimate partner violence in lesbian relationships; and the government’s response to intimate partner violence within Brazil.
An Ambivalent Embrace: The Cultural Politics of Arabization and the Knowledge Economy in the Moroccan Public School, by Charis Boutieri. Princeton University. Advisors: Abdellah Hammoudi, Lawrence Rosen.
This dissertation is based on fieldwork in urban Moroccan high schools. I explore the relationship between Arabization (post-Independence nationalizing agenda) and public education. I argue that tensions traversing the public school relate to Morocco’s ambivalent cultural politics in the postcolonial period and to the social fragmentation this cultural politics has encouraged. Through classroom observations, discussions with students, teachers and parents and curricula analysis, I trace the Arabized school’s ambiguous bilingualism between French and Arabic and narrate how school participants encounter their colonial heritage as re-articulated in the discourse of development. These dynamics reconfigure the school from a mechanism of social and symbolic engineering to a space where the cultural politics of Morocco is debated.
Culture and Change: Towards a Dynamic Anthropology When: March 2-3 Deadline for submission: Jan 31
The Anthropology Department at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, is pleased to announce the 2012 graduate student conference.
Anthropologists recognize that cultures are dynamic and changing. Recent global events, such as the uprising in Egypt and the Occupy Movement, have pushed these notions of social dynamism to the forefront of public consciousness. How do global forces combine with local dynamics to shape the futures of communities around the world? Scholars from the traditional fields of anthropology, as well as geography, political science, law, and other disciplines are engaging with this question in new ways.
We cordially invite graduate and undergraduate scholars across disciplines including but not limited to sociocultural, linguistic, and museum anthropology, archaeology, sociology, geography, history, and political science, to join us for an exploration of these themes. Please submit paper and poster abstracts by January 31st, 2012, to anthconfubc@gmail.com. Abstracts are limited to 150 words. Please include 3 or 4 keywords below the body of the abstract.
The 2012 Anthropology Methods Mall is online. This site has info about five, NSF-supported opportunities for methods training in cultural anthropology:
Transgressive Culture – ‘Madness’ and Culture Deadline for submission: Feb 19
Transgressive Culture is a new electronic and print peer-reviewed journal and book series published with Gylphi, with an international editorial board that includes Ken Gelder (University of Melbourne) and James Kincaid (University of Southern California). Details of the ‘addiction edition’ can be found here: http://www.gylphi.co.uk/transgressive/index.php.
We invite submissions of critical and creative work within the broad area of ‘Madness’ and Culture. Submissions may wish to consider the following areas – though we are open to ideas from outside this list:
–How should and can madness in the 21st century be conceptualized, and who should be in charge of such conceptualization?
–How madness is represented in new media forms, such as blogs or advertisements?
–How can or does music, literature and the arts transgress traditional or clinical formulations of mad experiences?
–Are service users transgressing and transcending their own experiences through their documentation and reiteration in art and literature?
–How does psychiatry deal with those who transgress the boundaries of The Good Patient?
–To what extent can creativity and madness be delineated as interdependent in the 21st century?
–Does the media continue to play a role in creating and maintaining public perceptions of madness and how should this be addressed in terms of stigma and inequality?
–How are contemporary mental health movements, such as the Recovery movement, reconfigured or represented in literature and culture?
There is no Nobel prize in anthropology and certainly not in the field of cultural/social anthropology which is not known for exciting “discoveries.”
Cultural anthropologists cannot match findings such as: Neanderthals are smarter than we thought, chimpanzees are smarter than we thought, construction of temples is older than we thought, when did people first make hot chocolate, etc.
In relation to current events, cultural/social anthropologists rarely get called on by the mainstream media to comment. Sociologists do better. For example, Andrew Foster of the University of Pennsylvania regularly comments on changing U.S. demographics, especially family patterns. Cultural anthropology is not very event-driven. Cultural anthropology is more about looking at things slowly and carefully and slowly and carefully and…which is not a bad thing.
Having scanned the mainstream media for mention of anthropologists over the past few years for the weekly “anthropology in the news” post, I can say for sure that the most popular anthropology topics are Neanderthals and chimpanzees. Within cultural anthropology, Paul Farmer has taken the lead in terms of coverage (until 2011), though he is almost never identified as an anthropologist.
But 2011 was different, very different.
Because of sustained visibility in the media in 2011, for inspiring the OWS movement, and for the publication of a masterwork called Debt, the anthropologyworks “cultural anthropologist award of 2011” goes to David Graeber. David Graeber. Wikimedia Commons
Graeber published the largest stocking stuffer of a book with the unlikely title of Debt. It made it to many 2011 favorite book lists.
He was a leading non-leader of the Occupy Wall Street Movement.
He was quoted often in the mainstream media and on many blogs.
If you haven’t already, please read Graeber’s 2004 pamphlet, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. It will be your appetizer (105 pages, small pages) for Debt (391 pages not counting notes and references for a total of 534).
Or, just search him out on the Internet. He’s there. And he has important things to say about “advanced”/”extreme” (blogger’s terms) capitalism and where it’s headed.
I am driving along Mile End Road in east London around midnight with a Bangladeshi friend. I am giving him a lift home, after we had paid a brief visit to a “gentlemen’s club” located on the border between Tower Hamlets and the City, the so-called Square Mile, London’s preeminent financial district. “Well, I can now say that I am not very keen on lap-dancing clubs,” my friend informs me.
Gentlemen's club in the City fringe
We had just spent around 45 minutes in the club. The venue opened two years ago. It is one of 11 currently licensed lap-dancing clubs in Tower Hamlets. Only those 18 or over can cross the threshold. The club opens in the late afternoon and closes at 3AM, Monday to Friday. Young, predominantly white men –- “City boys”, as they are known — with high levels of disposable income sit either at the bar, tables or in armchairs –- and can either talk amongst themselves or engage in conversation with around a dozen “girls” who are looking for clients. For a fee of £20, a striptease can be performed in an alcove at the back of the club. A “private” room is also available. The club takes a proportion of the women’s earnings and, along with the sale of alcohol, is a key revenue stream. “Do you ever have any trouble,” I ask the owner. “Never,” he replies. “Everyone is as good as gold. In any case, we have really good security.” He then indicates two very large men, one black one white, at the club’s entrance. He pauses and adds: “The only trouble we have is with the local authority.” More on this later.
My friend is nominally Muslim –- he visits the mosque only occasionally and is largely secular in outlook. He likes the U.K. and London in particular. Apart from his early years, he has spent most of his life in Tower Hamlets. He very much admires open and tolerant multicultural societies. “Each to his own,” could sum up his personal outlook in terms of how people organise their personal lives. But perhaps he has reached the limit of tolerance after a visit to the lap-dancing club. And even a relatively weak religious identity clearly plays a part in how he evaluates such cultural forms. “Everyone likes to have a good time, have a drink and meet people, but perhaps it would be better to meet somewhere else.” He paused for a moment to reflect. Because we had also visited a Bangladeshi-owned “Indian” restaurant earlier in the evening he then added: “On the other hand, running a restaurant which serves alcohol is also prohibited in the Koran.” He was obviously wrestling with the metaphysical problem of adjudicating between making a living from two types of businesses that according to Islamic law are forbidden (haram).
I asked: “From a Koranic point of view which is worse: running a restaurant which serves alcohol, or running a lap dancing club?”
“Difficult to say,” he answered. “Both are bad.”
I felt the issue could be explored further. “All right, but leaving aside for the moment how you view it, tell me how most Bangladeshis, either in the U.K. or in Bangladesh, would see the situation? Would they see owning a lap-dancing club as worse, the same or somewhat better than owning a restaurant which serves alcohol?”
Put this way, my friend was able to answer very quickly: “Oh, in both countries they would see the lap-dancing club as worse.”
How did my friend and I end up making our first visit to a lap-dancing club? We had been visiting a Bangladeshi-owned “Indian” restaurant in the Aldgate area to talk about my friend’s recent move to Sylhet, Bangladesh, to set up a business in the part of the country from which he originates. He wanted to run some ideas about marketing and branding past me.
Ethnographica Journal on Culture and Disability (EJCD) is a new peer-reviewed journal that is grounded in ethnographic research and writing as the principal means of understanding the significations of Dis/Ability. The journal invites scholarly contributions that engage in conceptual dialogues across disciplines in the social sciences and humanities in general, but also in bioethics, and science and technology studies in relation to social and cultural anthropology.
Moreover, the Journal has to be situated in a line of critical thinking, often reflected in terms of ‘models’. The so-called ‘social and cultural models’ are engaged in critical thinking of disability as limited to Western contexts. Therefore EJCD wishes to engage in a spectrum of cross-cultural views, and to document ‘disability’ in both local and global contexts. Last, EJCD is also engaging with the transformation of the self, communities, living spaces and technology resulting from experiences with disability.
The slim, elegantly dressed blonde-haired woman in her early forties emerges from the side entrance of the House of Fraser into the pedestrianized part of Old Cavendish Street at the junction with Oxford Street, purposefully heading to her next destination. A smile slowly appears on her face as she hears the melodious sound coming from the 8-strong steelband, which is playing the Christmas classic Ding Dong Merrily on High. Her pace slows. She stops. She then transfers her three shopping bags to her left hand and with her right hand retrieves some change from her handbag. Then, bending down carefully, she puts her contribution in the NSPCC children’s charity collection box placed on the pavement. Unlike other people, who have gathered around, she does not linger but disappears into the crowd. This is the last Sunday before Christmas Day. Undoubtedly, she has more presents to buy. But because of the Sunday Trading laws, the shops will close in two hours at 6 PM. So she needs to get a move on.Ebony Steelband, Notting Hill Carnival 2010. Flickr/Ibrahim_D
The members of the Ebony Steelband, who are wearing the instantly recognizable NSPCC t-shirts on top of their normal clothes as well as Santa Claus hats, are wrapped up in the musical moment and barely register what is taking place a few yards in front of their pitch.
The hands of the two young pannists, one male and one female, playing the small, “lead” or “tenor” pans, move at blistering speed in perfect synchronicity as the piece comes to its climax. The crowd of several hundred people applaud. Many of them, including young children whose parents have provided some coins, place money in the charity box. Then the band starts the next number, We Wish You a Merry Christmas. And so it goes on.
Apart from knowing that this tradition originated in Trinidad and Tobago, I claim no expertise on steelbands. But even to my untrained ear this is high quality stuff. I want to find out more.
So I talk to Michelle Francis, aged 44, who is standing behind the band swaying rhythmically to the music. “I don’t play myself, but I’m the manager,” says Michelle, who is wearing a heavy-padded, black jacket and woollen hat as protection from the cold night air. “My father, who comes from Trinidad, started Ebony in 1968 in Ladbroke Grove and it’s all grown from there. We’re still based in the same area, but we now go into schools to teach the kids about the tradition. We’ve now got steelbands in Leeds, Leicester and Huddersfield.”
Michelle tells me that the Ebony Steelband Trust, a registered charity, was the first black organization in the UK to receive the Queen’s Award for voluntary work in 2005. “That was quite something – it made us all very proud,” she says. She goes on to explain that, while the size of the band varies over the year, the core group has around 35 members. But before the Notting Hill Carnival, which is held over the bank holiday weekend at the end of August and is the second largest street festival in the world, the number will grow to around 110 as other pannists fly over from Trinidad and Tobago to join in.
Although everyone playing today is of African-Caribbean heritage – Trinidadian, Jamaican and from some smaller islands — the Ebony Steelband is both culturally and socially “open.” “We don’t have any restrictions — we have English, Irish and even Japanese people playing the pans,” says Michelle.
The Ebony Steelband has been playing for charity in different parts of the Oxford Street area for the last four years. “You have to have a license, you can’t just turn up,” explains Michelle. But the band has clearly put time and effort into their Christmas repertoire – as well as Ding Dong Merrily on High, members also play classics like We Wish You a Merry Christmas, Winter Wonderland, Sleigh Ride, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and Walking in the Air.
Having just learned that today the Ebony Steelband has been playing in temperatures hovering around freezing since 11 AM and will finish at 6 PM, “it must be hard work,” I say. “If you are a beginner then it’s hard work,” Michelle replies. “But if you are experienced like all the people here today it’s easy enough. You just get used to it. We’ve been here every day since 8 December and we’ll finish next Saturday on the 24th, Christmas Eve.”
Earlier in the day, I talked to some managers and shop assistants in a number of shops along Oxford Street, once, along with Regent Street and Bond Street, London’s foremost shopping area. I wanted to find out how sales were going. I was told that the number of people buying products seemed to be down from last year, and many were reluctant to buy without the incentive of some sort of discount. Some of this behavior can undoubtedly be explained by the economic downturn – consumers are justifiably careful about spending their hard-earned cash, especially at a time of rising unemployment – but the area now has significant competition from two new, large shopping centers, Westfield London in west London, and Westfield Stratford near the Olympic Village in east London developed by the Australian-owned, Westfield Group. Tony Travers, Director of LSE London, a research center at the London School of Economics, has argued recently that “although the pound’s weakness has spared central London the worst effects of the long economic downturn” because it has brought in visitors from Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere who have taken advantage of favorable exchange rates, “it is inevitable Stratford Westfield will take trade from West End stores.”
Later, it occured to me that, while the noise level produced by musical groups like the Ebony Steelband can easily be accommodated in open areas like Oxford Street and its surrounding areas, this is not the case with conventional, enclosed shopping malls where the sound would be deafening. Given that charity donations have held up well in the U.K. despite consumers cutting back in other areas of expenditure, maybe the New West End Company, which represents 600 traders in the area, who employ a considerable number of people, has found a secret formula in their competition with the two Westfield shopping malls as well as with the comparative ease of Internet shopping.
Surely, the combination of a highly accomplished steelband and a nationally recognised charity should be deployed more often.
The big romance is over and the mass media thinks it knows why. Pippa Middleton rose to national and international fame when she was maid of honor earlier this year as her older sister married Prince William, second in line to the British throne. She is reported to have been “dumped” by her long-standing boyfriend. A few days ago, press reports suggested that it was Pippa who had called time on the relationship with Alex Loudon, the 31-year-old former captain of England’s Under-19 cricket team turned corporate financier.
Pippa Middleton, June 2011. Flickr/erangi2
Now, it appears that it was the Old Etonian who tired of the pandemonium that attended the couple’s public appearances. “The plain truth is Alex adored Pippa but he couldn’t stand the circus that now surrounds her,” an unnamed friend of Loudon’s told a Mail on Sunday reporter. “Nothing is straightforward anymore.” But there is a further twist. One of Pippa’s friends disclosed that Loudon’s parents did not see the 27-year-old party planner as “wife material.”
The split has set up a feeding frenzy of speculation in the U.K. and international media. “Pippa Middleton lovers of the world, rejoice! The Duchess of Cambridge’s younger sis is reportedly back on the market,” shouts the headline in msnbc.com. “The Duchess of Cambridge’s foxy little sister was the world’s most sought after woman even when she had a boyfriend,” declares an article in the Daily Mailbefore revealing that Justin Timberlake, is among Pippa’s legion of admirers. “We American males love Pippa,” gushed the U.S. pop and movie star.
“Could flirty Prince Harry be in with a shot at the other Middleton girl?” asks Newsweek. We shall soon find out.
For what it’s worth, my guess is that the chances of happy, freewheeling bachelor, Harry, third in line of succession to the throne, dating his older brother’s sister-in-law are close to zero. Even if attracted to one another, surefooted Buckingham Palace officials will have already warned off the pair from doing anything that might jeopardize the British monarchy which, after a rocky period, when its popularity seemed to be on a permanent downward trajectory, has been reinvigorated by the global appeal of the newlywed Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.
We have been here before. In 2007, Prince William “dumped” Kate Middleton before they got back together and decided to tie the knot at Westminster Abbey. But with Pippa and Alex, chances of reconciliation before a fairytale wedding seem to this anthropological observer to be very slim indeed.
Why? The reason lies not, as the many headlines suggest, in Alex Loudon’s personality or psychological profile. He is variously described as “quiet” and “reserved.” But rather because of his membership in the British upper, upper class who tend to live on relatively isolated estates in the Home Counties. True to the stereotype, Alex’s parents live at Olantigh Towers near the Kent village of Wye.
A key cultural characteristic of the British aristocracy is understatement. Although members of this group nearly always maintain reciprocal links with a local population through charitable works and “open days,” they also strongly adhere to a value which is the antithesis of a global celebrity culture in which middle class Pippa is now deeply immersed.
British aristocrats have a degree of social visibility and interaction with subordinate social groups, but it is highly ritualised. In this way, their reputation is controlled and protected.
The British aristocracy is not unique in its rejection of ostentatious social display. While some social and political elites feel confident enough to flaunt their wealth because it is perceived to enhance status, others deliberately under-communicate it for fear of the trouble it might cause.
In Mauritius the Franco-Mauritians known locally as “les grands blancs,” make up less than 2 per cent of the 1.3 million population. As a legacy of colonialism, they remain in control of most of the important sectors of the Indian Ocean island’s $10 billion economy such as sugar and associated agro-businesses, tourism, the export processing zone (EPZ), and commercial services.
Members of this group typically avoid attracting attention. They do not run for political office, which would raise their public profile and flag up their commercial interests, or drive big, expensive cars, which would increase their visibility on the streets.
The reason is not hard to fathom. The best strategy for any minority group, which maintains a considerable economic surplus and which is keen to retain its high position relative to other groups in socially complex societies is for its members and associates to operate as anonymously as possible. Other options of course include direct intimidation or violence.
Back to Pippa. The real reason why global celebrity Pippa Middleton is back on the market is because she is a global celebrity.
True confession: these are my picks, and they reflect my preferences for topics — health, inequality, migration, gender, and human rights. Somebody else’s picks would look quite different. But this is the anthroworks list!
anthropologyworks 