This is not news to cultural anthropologists. What is news is that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has adopted this “innovative” approach. That’s very good news. Gates Foundation
It is always been a major challenge to get those in power, with money, at the top, to adopt a more grassroots, local approach. Now let’s see if big money can actually lead to big changes in people’s well being by listening to the people (and the people who study people first hand).
It is essential for the Gates Foundation to also support adequate funding for long-term monitoring and evaluation of social impact, not just recording stats on micro-outputs. We need to be able to see what various innovations accomplish five, ten, twenty years out. We need baseline studies now and follow-up studies on into the future. Local people could be trained to collect basic social data and enter it into a computerized database each week, week after week. In this way, development monitoring and evaluation becomes participatory and sustainable. It’s development for local people, with local people, and monitored by local people.
Sounds like the Gates Foundation may be on an important learning and listening curve. Stay tuned.
Some years ago, when I was an undergraduate I took an annual holiday in Ireland. My friends and I made our pilgrimage to Fouhy’s bar in Glanworth, a village around 30 miles from the seaside town of Youghal, where we always stayed. The pub was situated halfway along the main street, and despite fierce competition always drew a good crowd, especially at the weekends.
Irish grave decoration. Wikimedia Commons/Ardfern
Unlike the other nine pubs in the village, however, not all customers were locals. I remember walking through the door on one occasion, and seeing the legendary British businessman and horse racing owner Robert Sangster and his wife, Susan, sitting at the bar drinking Jameson’s Irish whiskey.
Why was Sangster and his Australian socialite wife in Fouhy’s? His horses had won two Epsom Derbys, four Irish Derbys, two French Derbys, three Prix de l’Arc de Triomphes and a Melbourne Cup. The venue, a typical village bar with sawdust on the floor, was undoubtedly a far cry from the couple’s more usual, opulent haunts in the Isle of Man and Barbados, where they lived as tax exiles.
Part of the answer is: Sangster owns a major share at a nearby thoroughbred stud and was on one of his periodic visits to check on his investments.
The main reason was that the couple were there for the same reason my friends and I were: the conversation in Fouhy’s positively crackled.
The owner of the pub was Eileen Fouhy, a diminutive, unmarried woman in her early 60s. She stood behind the bar and poured the drinks until the last customer went home at a time of his or her choosing (normally his). She would not allow television. She thinks it ruins people’s ability to communicate with one another.
Eileen is right, of course. Go into any bar or pub anywhere in the world where a television set is switched on and observe the many people gazing at the screen rather than into the faces of their fellow human beings, even if they are not interested in the program being broadcast.
One lunchtime I was the only customer in Fouhy’s. I was an anthropology student, so this was an ideal opportunity to find out something about local folk beliefs. I asked Eileen, who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of local and national Irish history, whether belief in the existence of fairies had declined in Ireland in recent years.
"Fairy Glade" in County Cork, Ireland. Flickr/SageE
“It has,” she replied with a twinkle in her eye. “That’s because of the declining strength of Guinness. In the old days, I’d pour a pint and just like now there would always be some that would drip down the outside of the glass. But back then if you left it too long you’d have trouble picking it up — it would stick to the counter. That doesn’t happen nowadays.” She paused and added: “The stout is no longer what it was.” It was a fantastic reply. What else could I do but laugh?
But the story, with its quicksilver wit, summed up why locals, second generation Irish, U.K.-based undergraduates, and two members of the super-rich called in at Fouhy’s bar.
I was reminded of that conversation this week when I listened to “Away with the Fairies” on BBC Radio 4. The presenter, Dominic Arkwright, began by asking whether fairies are now mainly perceived as “innocent, little butterfly creatures you see in Disney films, all wings gossamer and glitter” or “spirits which can be dangerous and malicious, not at all the sort of things you would want cavorting around at the bottom of your garden.”
Cultural anthropology is not, overall, an events-driven field of study as are journalism and political science. But if, in recent times, there was to be an event that would inspire cultural anthropologists to apply their research skills and analytical insights, 9/11 is high on the list. Cultural anthropologists excel at looking at the local and seeing the global connections, or vice versa. Cultural anthropologists are about connections — between people, ideas, states, policies, contagion, and more.
Ground Zero ten years after 9/11/2001
What follows is a mini-bibliography, the result of a quick search in AnthropologyPlus through my university library’s electronic resources. It is not comprehensive. It is just a sample. But it offers tantalizing and important insights into what a cultural anthropology perspective has to offer in understanding the 9/11 event. Please note that AnthropologyPlus does not pull books or reports — only journal articles.
Of the over 30 articles listed below, several are focused on New York City. A few examine social responses and reactions elsewhere in North America and in some other countries around the world. Only one article, in this sample, looks at women. Some examine expressive culture (music, art).
Kelly (2002) published the earliest article, in this sample, about 9/11. Then, there is a bulge of papers in 2004. This gap between the event and anthropologists’ ability to collect and analyze data reflects both the positives and the negatives of traditional cultural anthropology. It takes so long (the negative) to produce high quality data (the plus). Continue reading “Cultural anthropology of 9/11”→
The Costs of War is a report written by several professors and policy experts from around the country and centered at Brown University’s Watson Institute. One of the authors and co-director is Catherine Lutz, cultural anthropologist and chair of the department of anthropology.
If you take a look at the report, you might wonder: what does a cultural anthropologist have to contribute to this report? It’s mainly about numbers. For example, see Table 1, The Wars’ Dead, Estimates by Category of Person. And Table 5, The Budget and Other Economic Costs of War. But read carefully and you will find the anthropological touch… attention to the “people” affected by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in every section but especially in the section about what is missing in the analysis: the next steps.
I have no doubt that, were a cultural anthropologist not a part of the team, the report would have been far less sensitive to social issues. The editor of this blog was fortunate to have a brief telephone conversation with Catherine Lutz on September 10, 2011.
Barbara: What were your main contributions, as a cultural anthropologist, to the Costs of War Report?
Catherine: I don’t feel that my role was especially that of an anthropologist. I was simply acting as a scholar, producing knowledge and trying to keep the level of the investigation’s rigor high. As an anthropologist, though, I could focus on the need for “ground truth,” something that far exceeds the policy rhetoric that usually disappears most of the people involved in these issues.
Catherine Lutz
At the Watson Institute, we began the project and created a report and a website so that people can get comprehensive information about the wars, for citizens and also for journalists so they can get source their stories more accurately and get beyond official narratives. We suffer from a lack of scholars in the war zone, first hand ethnographic material. One reason, unfortunately, is that many Iraqi scholars have been killed over the last 8 years. There is not enough on-the-ground data about what has happened to people in these war zones. We had to depend on secondary data, existing reports such as federal budget data about what the U.S. was spending on the wars, the Pentagon budget, the State Dept budget, information from veterans organizations about disability claims, and UN data on refugee populations.
Barbara: Are you going to continue this line of research?
Catherine: Yes, absolutely, we want it to continue to be an up to date source of information for journalists, policymakers, and activists. It would also be ideal if information like this — and improving on this information — could become the basis for a national commission on how these wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan), happened, how they have been waged, and what their human costs have been. Minimally, there at least need to be Congressional hearings, as there eventually were around the Vietnam War. Some serious journalism has also begun.
Barbara: As a cultural anthropologist, how did you learn how to get your head into things like Pentagon budgets?
Catherine: The economists on our team did that remarkable work, and I learned from them how to understand it and summarize it for the press.
Barbara: What advice can you offer to students who might want to follow in your footsteps and become involved in the anthropology of the military/peace/war?
Catherine: I would just say don’t worry about whether they are doing anthropology, but instead just focus on creating knowledge that can be used to make the public conversation about issues of security and war more productive, and to prevent the long past and future nightmare of these wars from being disappeared from view.
Note: an article in a special section of the New York Times, on 9/11/11 on the costs of the ongoing wars cites Brown University’s Costs of War project as one of its sources.
August 9 is the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, and Cultural Survival joins the world in recognizing and honoring of the strength, resilience, dignity, and pride of Indigenous Peoples around the world. Despite our long histories of struggle, we continue to weave our stories, our songs, our rituals and ceremonies into rich, colorful, textured, and beautiful tapestries that portray landscapes of our Indigenous experience and indigeneity.
We continue to pray and give thanks in sacred places for the knowledge and materials offered to us from this earth, and for all the relations that keep us connected to the heavens, earth, each other, and all beings.
We seek to speak our language to our children so that they speak to their children of this ancestral knowledge. We seek to be recognized as Indigenous Peoples with inherent rights, and we fight for those rights. As Indigenous Peoples we stand up and survive and weave our futures.
That spirit is honored each year on the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, and this year Cultural Survival is marking the day by launching a new campaign to support the Telengit people of Russia. Telengit man from Russia. Courtesy of Cultural Survival
The Telengit are resisting the building of a natural gas pipeline from Siberia to China that will cross their lands, undermine their way of life and spiritual traditions, and threaten the delicate ecosystem that has supported their lifeways. The pipeline would bisect the sacred Ukok Plateau and the Golden Mountains of Altai UNESCO World Heritage Site in Russia, and the Kanas National Park in China, all of which are home to endangered wildlife that includes the snow leopard, argali mountain sheep, the black stork. The construction will destroy the sacred lands where the Telengit People have journeyed for thousands of years to give offerings to the spirits of the heavens, the mountains, and the waters, and where they conduct ceremonies to bury their dead.
Your letters and financial support can help the Telengit people defend their lands, their traditions, and their rights. To learn more and support the Telengit click here.
Oil-related problems in the Niger Delta are not new. They are old, enduring and stain the future of Nigeria. They have to do with powerful corporate and state interests, corruption, global oil and petroleum demand, and the unrelentingly harsh cruelty of capitalist profiteering at the expense of local people and their environment and livelihoods. Nigeria is a major provider of petroleum to the United States.
The Niger Delta region has been exploited with impunity by outside powers for many years. During the British colonial era, Nigeria provided wealth for the Crown through the export of palm oil (Osha 2006). In the postcolonial era of globalization, a different kind of oil dominates the country’s economy: petroleum. Starting in the 1950s, with the discovery of vast petroleum reserves in Nigeria’s Delta region, several European and American companies have explored for, drilled for and exported crude oil to the extent that Nigeria occupies an important position in the world economy.
Most local people in the delta, however, have gained few economic benefits from the petroleum industry. Instead, most have reaped major losses in their agricultural and fishing livelihoods due to environmental pollution. They are poorer now than they were in the 1960s. In addition to economic suffering, they have lost personal security. Many have become victims of the violence that has increased in the region since the 1990s through state and corporate repression of a local resistance movement. Continue reading “Is there hope for the Niger Delta?”→
One day last January, around 7:00 in the evening, I was coming out of Sainsbury’s in St. Albans (near a car wash described in a previous post), laden with bags of shopping. I saw a white woman in her mid-30s, getting out of her smart sports car at the supermarket’s filling station.
Why did I notice her? Despite the winter cold and gloom, she was wearing bright pink pajamas and color-matching furry slippers.
fuzzy pink slippers. Flickr/Rachel D By coincidence, I recognized her as a receptionist at my local branch of HSBC, “the world’s local bank” as it says in the ads. But I had never seen her, or anyone wearing this sort of clothing in a public place before.
As a never-off-duty cultural anthropologist I was very keen to see how the cashiers in the filling station would react to the unusually attired customer. I decided that it was an opportune time to engage in some participant observation by driving my car to the forecourt and putting some fuel in the tank.
My timing was impeccable. I followed the pajama-clad HSBC employee into the filling station’s check out and stood behind her in the queue. When it was her turn to pay, the transaction went smoothly enough.
Despite their obvious curiosity, neither of the two cashiers seated behind the counter was bold enough to ask the woman why she was dressed the way she was. I did notice a twinkle of amusement, however, in the eyes of the female cashier when she caught the gaze of her male colleague. He smiled back at her. I found myself smiling as well.
At the time, I thought that going out in public while dressed in pink pajamas and furry slippers was idiosyncratic. I discovered a few weeks later that such attire is a fad in at least one other part of the U.K., where the country’s largest supermarket group, Tesco, decided that it would try and eliminate it before it became a long-term trend.
Despite the financial penalty to the company, Tesco refused to serve customers dressed in pajamas or walking barefoot in its store in St. Mellons in Cardiff, Wales. Signs placed at the entrance of the supermarket read:
To avoid causing offence or embarrassment to others we ask that our customers are appropriately dressed when visiting our store (footwear must be worn at all times and no nightwear is permitted).
“We’re not a nightclub with a strict dress code, and jeans and trainers are of course more than welcome,” a Tesco representative told reporters. “We do, however, request that customers do not shop in their PJs or nightgowns.”
Here is an anthropology connection, from more than half a century ago, to understanding pajamas-in-public.
“Ever since the middle of the 18th century, the scope and rigour of formality has been on the decline, modes of dress and of address have become increasingly casual, precedence and protocol increasingly irrelevant,” wrote British anthropologist Sir Edmund Leach in an essay for New Society in 1965. He was commenting on the deep social and cultural changes that had taken hold in most of Western Europe, the U.S., and “newly westernised” countries like Japan. Continue reading “When pink pajamas go public”→
It was only a matter of hours between the blast in central Oslo and my most extensive and exhausting engagement with international media since I started out as an anthropologist in the 1980s. Between Friday night and Wednesday, I spoke on radio, on television (via a mobile phone), to newspapers and magazines from China to Chile, and wrote articles for nearly a dozen publications in five countries.
My priorities shifted in a matter of hours. Our holiday house was turned into a makeshift media centre, and the computer was online almost 24/7.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen in Cuba, 2007. Courtesy of the author. My engagement with the terrorist attack on Norway is easy to explain. First, although rightwing extremism is not my field of research, cultural diversity in Europe and Norway is, as well as nationalism and ethnicity. Second, I have first-hand experience of the new, Islamophobic kind of nationalism, having been on the receiving end of relatively unpleasant attacks from these quarters for several years.
Actually, I am the only contemporary intellectual mentioned by the terrorist in his writings and YouTube video – a symbol of everything that went wrong with Norway. I have asked YouTube to remove the video.
A few words about the articles: The earliest piece, for OpenDemocracy, was an initial attempt to make sense of the catastrophe and to begin reflecting on the consequences for Norwegian society. It overlaps substantially with articles in Sydsvenska Dagbladet and Information, which, respectively, cover southern Sweden including Lund and Malmö, and a smallish, but select left-leaning audience in Denmark. The title of these Scandinavian-published articles, “Men who hate social democrats,” plays on the Scandinavian title of the first novel in Stieg Larsson’s trilogy (Men Who Hate Women). Continue reading “22 July, 2011. Oslo”→
• Whose lies are better?
Two weeks ago, cultural anthropologist Mike McGovern of Yale University published an op-ed in the New York Times about the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case in which he argued for understanding of why the immigrant hotel maid would have lied on her asylum application. His position is that life in Guinea can be so difficult and dangerous that lying to get out can make sense, given the context. Now, Robert Fulford, professor of journalism at Massey College of the University of Toronto, claims that McGovern abuses the concept of cultural relativism and is building a culture of excuse-making. Blogger’s note: there appears to be the likelihood of lying on both sides of the case. Questions are: whose lies will be more damaging to the person’s credibility, and whose lies will be left to lie?
• Gillian Tett on the European financial situation
Cultural anthropologist Gillian Tett, an award-winning journalist at the Financial Times, where she is an assistant editor overseeing global financial markets coverage, appeared on the U.S. news television show, Morning Joe. She discussed the European financial situation and, particularly, Irish banking. And she actually managed to work in the word ‘anthropology’!
• Morocco’s Arab Spring
Paul Silverstein, cultural anthropology professor at Reed College, gave a radio interview about Morocco’s response to the Arab Spring movement. He also comments on Morocco’s new constitution that was overwhelmingly approved on July 1.
• Anthro of chess
Robert Desjarlais, a cultural anthropology professor at Sarah Lawrence College, has published a new book on chess, Counterplay: An Anthropologist at the Chess Board. The Boston Globe online included a piece on the book in its section on (guess what?) chess. Continue reading “Anthro in the news 7/18/11”→
• The trauma of war and rape
In the first of a two-part story, CNN highlights the work of cultural anthropologist Victoria Sanford, whose research has involved listening to victim narratives of Maya women in Guatemala since her doctoral studies at Stanford University in the early 1990s. A Spanish speaker who had worked with Central American refugees, she befriended the few Maya in the area. “I was moved by their stories, but even more so because they were intent on someone hearing them,” she said, “And no one was listening.” She joined the nonprofit Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology investigative team and went to Guatemala. Sanford talked to the women, who told other women about her, and soon she was recording their stories. Over time, and after hearing many stories, Sanford suffered from a kind of “secondary trauma” including paralysis.
• Conflict in Uganda and a possible love complication
The New York Times quoted Mahmood Mamdani, professor anthropology and government at Columbia university, in an article about an ongoing bitter personal rivalry in Uganda that involves President Musaveni and his rival and former friend, Kizza Besigye. Things may be complicated, the article suggests, by a woman, Winnie Byanyima, who is married to the president’s rival but who may have had a romantic involvement earlier with the president. Other matters are likely part of the story as well. Mamdani comments that the government is “clueless” about how to deal with Besigye’s opposition movement. He didn’t comment on the love factor.
• Culture and asthma
Cultural context and behavior shape the diagnosis and treatment of asthma according to David Van Sickle, medical anthropologist and asthma epidemiologist of Reciprocal Labs in Madison, Wisc. Van Sickle’s fieldwork in India revealed that physicians were hesitant to diagnose patients with asthma because of social stigma.
• Treating autism: two cases in Croatia Drug Week covered findings from a study conducted in Osijek, Croatia, which discusses the treatment of autism in a boy and a girl with risperidone. K. Dodigcurkovic and colleagues published their study in Collegium Antropologicum.
• Profile of a forensic anthropologist
The Gainesville Sun carried a profile of Michael Warren, an associate professor of anthropology and director of the C.A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida. He has conducted hundreds of forensic skeletal examinations for the state’s medical examiners and has participated in the identification of victims of mass disasters and ethnic cleansing, including the attacks on the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina and the recovery and identification of the victims found within the mass graves of the Balkans. He recently testified in the Casey Anthony murder trial.
• Medieval persecution
The remains of 17 bodies found at the bottom of a medieval well in England could have been victims of persecution, new evidence suggests. DNA analysis indicates that the victims were Jewish. They were likely murdered or forced to commit suicide. The skeletons date to the 12th-13th centuries, a time of persecution of Jewish people in Europe. Professor Sue Black leads the research team. She is a forensic anthropologist in the University of Dundee’s Centre for Anthropology and Human Identification. Continue reading “Anthro in the news 6/27/2011”→
anthropologyworks 