In anticipation of the 2012 London Olympics and Paralympics, the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Education Outreach Programme has launched an Anthropology of Sport Photo Contest.
The photo contest is open to anyone interested in anthropology, photography and sport.
Deadline for submissions is December 10, 2010.
For further information and submission guidelines please click here.
Guest post by Julia Friederich, Jessica Grebeldinger, Stephanie Harris, Jacqueline Hazen, and Casey McHugh
The following is an edited transcript of an interview with Philippe Bourgois, the Richard Perry University Professor of Anthropology and Family and Community Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Barbara Miller conducted the interview on October 26, 2010, as part of her introductory cultural anthropology class at the George Washington University. Her 280 students had just finished reading In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, and several of them submitted questions for the interview.
BDM: First, please tell us why you decided to do your dissertation fieldwork in the United States?
PB: I didn’t! I began my dissertation research with the Miskitu Indians in Nicaragua. But the Nicaraguan Revolution, a popular guerrilla movement that eventually overthrew the Somoza dictatorship, was trying to develop an independent socialist government at the time, and the US, through the CIA, destabilized the situation. The CIA distributed machine guns among the people and it turned into civil war. So I went to Costa Rica and Panama where I did research on the United Fruit Company’s banana plantations, and really that’s what eventually brought me to East Harlem. I thought if I can study ethnic conflict in Central America, I should study ethnic conflict and its political economy in my own country. I wanted to look at segregation and what I call “de facto inner city apartheid” in the US. So I went up to East Harlem in New York City and started my new research project there while I was writing my dissertation about the ethnic divide-and-conquer strategy of a US multinational corporation in Costa Rica and Panama. It became my first book: Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation.
Continue reading “In search of respect: an interview with Philippe Bourgois”
Fiji is going for the big three and it’s not lions, tigers and bears. It’s firewalking, water, and casinos.
The government of Fiji recently advertised for “expressions of interest” in the development and operation of its first casino (Economist Nov 13). According to the ad, the government seeks to engage “internationally successful full-casino developers/operators who would enhance Fiji’s brand.”
So now entire countries, perhaps especially small ones, must have a brand.
And the Fijian route to creating a brand is to look both inside at “traditional” cultural practices that are economically profitable and outside to the global marketplace. Cultural anthropologists have insights on the Fijian “big three.”
On firewalking and the branding of Fiji, read a journal article entitled “We Branded Ourselves Long Ago: Intangible Cultural Property and Commodification of Fijian Firewalking” by Guido Carlo Pigliasco of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Pigliasco writes about how Fijian firewalking has managed to indigenize the power of the foreign though a Maussian principle of the social gift: “The gift of firewalking has allowed its custodians to locally sustain their community, to gain a reach and respect across the nation and beyond, and to intensify the group’s social sentiment and social capital.” In other words, so far, firewalking is maintaining its value to Fijians as more than just a revenue earner.
On Fijian water, read a journal article entitled “Fijian Water in Fiji and New York: Local Politics and a Global Community” by Martha Kaplan of Vassar College. Kaplan discusses how Coca Cola first came to Fiji with American soldiers during World War II, and how Fijian water now flows out. Starting with a case study of local water bottling company in Fiji, she traces the changing commodity career of Fijian water.
On casinos: As Fiji invites the arrival of casinos, it should consider seriously what cultural anthropologists have learned from their studies of casinos elsewhere in terms of how to steer benefits to the local people and protect local people and their culture from possible negative effects. For one, Kate Spilde Contreras has written extensively on the economic and social impacts of American Indian casinos in California. There are lessons to be learned in the anthropological literature.
Ayahuasca, a beverage brewed from the roots of an Amazonian plant and consumed under the guidance of a shaman, reportedly provides mind-opening experiences and relief from symptoms of stress, depression and other afflictions. Ayahuasca has long been used in healing rituals in the Amazon region of Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil.
Recently the Guardian carried an article about the use of ayahuasca by members of several Indie groups such as the Klaxons. Then the Washington Post described a healing tour company that connects Westerners to ayahuasca sessions.
To learn more: Marlene Dobkin de Rios is the main cultural anthro expert on ayahuasca. In the 1970s, she published several scholarly articles and an ethnography about its ritual healing use, Visionary Vine: Hallucinogenic Healing in the Peruvian Amazon. More recently, with Roger Rumrill, she published A Hallucinogenic Tea, Laced with Controversy: Ayahuasca in the Amazon and the United States which provides important updates.
Here are other anthropological sources on ayahuasca, healing, and ritual (with apologies, as they are not open access):
Arévalo Valera, Guillermo. 1986. Ayahuasca y El Curandero Shipibo-Conibo Del Ucayali (Perú). América Indígena 46(1):p.147-161.
Baer, G., and W. W. Snell. 1974. An Ayahuasca Ceremony among the Matsigenka (Eastern Peru). Zeitschrift Fur Ethnologie V 99(1/2):63-80.
Balzer, Carsten. 2005. Ayahuasca Rituals in Germany: The First Steps of the Brazilian Santo Daime Religion in Europe. Curare 28(1):53-66, 119.
Benjamin, Craig. 2000. Trademark on Traditional Knowledge: Slim Ayahuasca Win. Native Americas 17(1):30-33.
Callaway, J. C. 1995. Pharmahuasca and Contemporary Ethnopharmacology. Curare 18(2):395-398.
Desmarchelier, C., A. Gurni, G. Ciccia, and A. M. Giuletti. 1996. Ritual and Medicinal Plants of the Ese’Ejas of the Amazonian Rainforest (Madre De Dios, Perú). Journal of Ethnopharmacology 52(1):45-51.
Dobkin de Rios, Marlene. A Note on the use of Ayahuasca among Urban Mestizo Populations in the Peruvian Amazon. American Anthropologist 72(6):1419-1422.
Continue reading “Hallucinogenic healing”
A Blog on Current Events, Commentary, and Cultural Critique about Death/Dying/Policy/Representation from George Washington University anthropology and international affairs students
http://deathanddyingpolicy.wordpress.com/
We are a group of anthropology and international affairs students who are writing a blog for our course, Death, Modernity, and Public Policy for the Fall 2010 semester at George Washington University in Washington, DC.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced this past week the launch of a new international alliance to supply improved cooking stoves to 100 million poor households by 2020. An article in the Economist describes how many programs to promote cleaner stoves throughout the world have failed: “Too much emphasis has gone on technology and talking to people at the top, too little to consulting the women who actually do the cooking.”
That statement, all told, is probably true. Nonetheless, a quick search in Google Scholar and my university library’s electronic databases reveals many relevant studies including some by cultural/social anthropologists. They address and document both the health risks especially for women and children of traditional cookstoves and perceptions of improved cookstoves.
The most fine-grained anthropology study that I have found is Patrice Engle and co-authors with some Maya people of Guatemala. She and her co-authors used observation and recall methods to learn about time spent over cooking fires. The results indicate that young mothers and young children (who are with the mother while she is cooking) spend the most time in the kitchen and are most at risk for smoke-related health problems. Women with co-resident husbands spend more time in the kitchen than women without husbands or whose husbands are away.
In terms of how to provide improved cookstoves, the best publication I know is by Rob Bailis and co-authors. They assess subsidized versus market-based stove dissemination and compare several contexts in which clean cooking technologies were promoted.
Cultural anthropologists and others who take a grounded approach to learning about important issues: get cooking on cooking! This topic connects to social and gender disparities, environmental pollution and sustainability, and the future of all of us.
Related Reading:
Dherani, Mukesh et al. Indoor Air Pollution from Unprocessed Solid Fuel Use and Pneumonia Risk in Children Aged under Five Years: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 86(5):390-398, 2008.
Masera, Omar et al. Impact of Patsari Improved Cookstoves on Indoor Air Quality in Michiacán, Mexico. Energy for Sustainable Development 11(2):45-56, 2007.
Simon, Gregory. Mobilizing Cookstoves for Development: A Dual Adoption Framework Analysis of Collaborative Technology Innovations in Western India. Environment and Planning A42(8):2011-2030, 2010.
Troncoso, Karin et al. Social Perceptions about a Technological Innovation for Fuelwood Cooking: A Case Study in Rural Mexico. Energy Policy 35(5):2799-2810, 2007.
So-called honor killings take the wind out of a form of cultural relativism that I refer to as absolute cultural relativism. According to absolute cultural relativism, anything that goes on in a particular culture, and is justified within that culture, cannot be questioned or changed by insiders or outsiders. For insiders, such questioning is cultural heresy; for outsiders it is ethnocentrism.
An antidote to absolute cultural relativism is critical cultural relativism, which promotes the posing of questions about practices and beliefs by insiders and outsiders in terms of who accepts them and why, and who they might be harming or helping. In other words: Who benefits, who loses? [Note: I present these terms in my cultural anthropology texts as a way to get students to think more analytically about the very important concept of cultural relativism.]
Image: Flickr creative commons licensed content. If only India, and indeed the whole world, was a domestic violence free zone.
When death, torture and structural violence are involved, it’s time to relegate absolute cultural relativism to the sidelines and bring to the fore critical analysis and discussion among insiders and outsiders. As far as I know, murder is not legal in any country in the world, including murder of one’s own kin for purposes of protecting family honor.
An article in The New York Times describes an alleged honor killing of a young unmarried Hindu woman in her family home in Jharkhand state, eastern India.
The article links the possible murder to Hindu caste values, which forbid marriage of woman to a man of a lower caste category — in this instance, the woman was of a Brahmin family and was engaged to a man of the Kayastha category, which is lower. Not only that, she had apparently engaged in premarital sex, another serious problem from the point of view of family honor.
What the article doesn’t say is that honor killings of daughters and wives by family members occur among people of other religions as well, including Christianity, that are not driven by caste purity. More deeply than particular religious values is the widespread existence of lethal patriarchy: male dominance in all domains of life — economic, political, social, sexual — that it justifies, even actively supports, murder of women and girls.
There can be no way, in this world, that anyone can get away with murder by saying that “it’s part of our culture” to kill a daughter or wife who breaks cultural rules. As if it’s their right and duty to kill.
Unfortunately, local police and the judicial system are often on the side of the killers.
Amnesty International now keeps track of so-called honor killings, but it’s likely that cases are severely under-counted. Nevertheless, any and all efforts to keep shining a very bright light on the problem of honor killings and related forms of patriarchy are essential.
See also this post on the blog Women Against Shariah.
Journalist and filmmaker Sebastian Junger says that he wanted to make you feel like you are actually there in a remote combat outpost in Afghanistan in Restrepo. He and his partner Tim Hetherington, succeeded. After the documentary’s powerful 90 minutes, people in the packed AFI theater in Silver Spring, Md., on Friday June 28 were in shock and awe and tears.
Restrepo will remain embedded in my heart and mind for the rest of my life.
The film chronicles the daily lives, and sometimes deaths, of a small platoon of American soldiers tasked with pushing against Taliban control of the Korangal Valley. The soldiers, all men, are very young — 19 years old, many of them, pimply some of them, and proud to be serving their country in fighting “the enemy.” Also, over time, bored, thrilled, scared and sad.
Occasionally, the film provides footage of local villagers. They appear to be mostly scared by what is happening in their valley as they experience the counter-pressures of the Americans and the Taliban. But sometimes proud and dignified as male elders attempt to gain compensation for a cow who died as a result of entanglement with wire fencing surrounding the outpost.
The film brilliantly and effectively interweaves footage from the combat zone with tight-shot interviews with eight soldiers conducted in Italy four months after they had left Afghanistan. So one minute you are in the outpost Restrepo, named after a fallen comrade, with all the noise and smoke from artillery and helicopters. The next minute you are up close and personal listening as a young soldier quietly talks about what it was like to be in the combat zone and what it is like to be dealing with not being there. One says that he doesn’t want to go to sleep because of the nightmares. He has tried five different kinds of sleeping pills, but none works to allow him a peaceful night’s sleep.
Each of the eight men gets very close to tears.
An excellent panel discussion following the film was skillfully moderated by Lara Logan, chief foreign correspondent with CBS News, and included Sebastian Junger as well as one of the film participants, Major Dan Kearney, who made it possible for the film team to work with his combat team.
In the discussion, Sebastian Junger commented that the interviews really “make” the film. What you don’t see, he pointed out, is that the person interviewing the soldiers — Junger — is also fighting back the tears. Junger noted that soldiers cannot show emotion, especially in a combat zone. Instead, when death happens, especially the death of your buddy, you mourn for a minute or two and then get back out there and kill the enemy who took his life.
Once they leave combat, the men have to try to process all that they have been through in the previous 15 months. Many do not succeed in readjusting to civilian life. Junger hopes that the film will help with the re-integration process by promoting understanding of the challenges they face. He said that many of the men will end up going back into combat, leaving behind their wives who feel rejected. They go back, he thinks, because for many 19-year-old men in the United States civilian life does not offer a satisfying role, identity or sense of belonging. The combat zone does that in spades. Many soldiers, he says, become addicted to the male bonding, the brotherhood that is forged in the daily routine of a harsh life and possible death. It is an intoxicating form of solidarity, stronger than friendship, that trumps all differences and disagreements and provides an emotional security that overrides concerns about physical security.
Combat, says Junger, is a small, closed, male world. His film offers a peek through a keyhole into that world. Restrepo is an ethnographic film of the highest order. (Junger has a B.A. in cultural anthropology and it shows). Although Junger wasn’t with the troop for the entire 15 months — he visited five times — he and his camera were not obviously intrusive. But they must have created an extra layer of life and death?
In the question and answer period, no one asked Junger how he is dealing with re-entry to the civilian world. It can’t be easy for him, either. I believe I saw tears in his eyes at several points during the panel discussion.
Update: Tim Hetherington tragically was killed April 20th, 2011 while on assignment in Libia.
Guest post by Eben Kirksey
President Obama turned his back on Indonesia recently — canceling his visit there for the second time this year. His mother, Ann Soetoro, was a cultural anthropologist who spent much of her adult life helping economically-marginalized people of Indonesia. If she were still alive, she might well be disappointed in her son.
As President Obama turns his attention to the oil spill in the Gulf, the U.S. Congress is reminding him of other important issues in a seemingly remote corner of Indonesia. A resolution introduced by Rep. Patrick Kennedy (H.Res. 1355) calls attention to the human rights problems in West Papua [Google map], the half of New Guinea that was invaded by Indonesia in 1962.
Image: West Papua has idyllic scenes like this one, but also significant human rights problems. “Asmat boat.” Creative commons licensed content on Flickr.
In the President’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father, he recalls a conversation with Lolo Soetoro, his step-father who had just returned home after a tour of duty with the Indonesian military in West Papua. Obama asked his step-father: “Have you ever seen a man killed?” Lolo responded affirmatively, recounting the bloody death of “weak” men.
Ann Soetoro never spoke out publicly about Indonesian atrocities in West Papua, but she divorced her husband shortly after he came back from the frontlines of this war.
Papuan intellectuals and political activists, kin of the “weak” men killed by Lolo Soetoro, have read Obama’s autobiography with keen interest. They still embrace the message of hope from the Presidential campaign and the slogan, “Yes We Can.”
At a moment when many Americans are questioning whether Obama will be able to fulfill his campaign promises, when everyone is wondering if he can reign in the hubris of the corporate executives who produced the disaster in the Gulf, it is worth considering these enduring hopes in West Papua.
Perhaps it is time for those of us who were drawn in by the slogan “Yes We Can” to remind the President that grassroots political movements still have power.
Many people, including some anthropologists, do not know the difference between West Papua* and Papua New Guinea. The subject of several classic anthropology books — from Margaret Mead’s Growing Up in New Guinea to Marilyn Strathern’s Gender of the Gift — the independent nation of Papua New Guinea is familiar to almost anyone who has taken an introductory anthropology class. Indonesia is also well known among academics who study culture or politics. Cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz told us tales of Balinese cockfights and Javanese religious systems, and political scientist Benedict Anderson famously wrote about imagined communities and power in Indonesia.
At the edge of national and scholarly boundaries, West Papua, in contrast, falls through the cracks.
Anthropologists and scholars in allied disciplines should join human rights advocates and others in noticing West Papua. Amnesty International is currently working with Representative Kennedy’s office to pass his Resolution which calls attention to many pressing problems:
“Whereas a Human Rights Watch report on June 5, 2009, noted ‘‘torture and abuse of prisoners in jails in Papua is rampant’’;
“and Whereas prominent Indonesian leaders have called for a national dialogue and Papuan leaders have called for an internationally-mediated dialogue to address long-standing grievances in Papua and West Papua.”
If passed, this Resolution would give President Obama some issues of substance to talk about with Indonesian leaders once he does make a return trip to Southeast Asia. Resolutions are non-binding acts that convey the sentiments of Congress.
Amnesty International, and the other human rights groups advocating for this resolution, are up against powerful forces. Transnational companies have been lobbying for stronger military ties with Indonesia. The same company that brought us the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, BP, has a huge natural gas field in West Papua called Tangguh. Starting this year, BP is scheduled to start shipping super-cooled gas from this site (liquid natural gas or LNG) to North America where it will be piped into the homes of millions in California, Oregon and other westerns states.
BP has been a major donor to the U.S.-Indonesia Society, an organization committed to educating congressional staff and administration officials about the “importance of the United States-Indonesia relationship.” The U.S.-Indonesia Society is also supported by Freeport McMoRan, a company that operates one of the world’s largest gold and copper mines in West Papua.
The American public is starting to reign in the irresponsible behavior of companies like BP that have created domestic disasters. American must also reckon with the foreign entanglements of the companies supplying the U.S. natural resources and should question the politicians who have led the United States into a series of environmental catastrophes and debacles on foreign soil.
Continue reading “President Obama: What would your mother say?”
Jeffrey Cohen, associate professor of cultural anthropology at Ohio State University, is an expert on Mexican-U.S. migration. In an interview published in his university’s faculty and staff newspaper, he critiques Arizona’s new immigration law, SB1070.
U.S.-Mexican border, by Flick user Nathan Gibbs, creative commons licensed.
Cohen argues that such a law is unjust, inefficient and actually irrational given the demand for labor in the United States.
On this side of the fence, Cohen says that U.S. citizens who support SB1070 have to walk away from thinking that immigrants are all bad news.
anthropologyworks 