The Georgetown University Conflict Resolution Program is calling for student papers, art, and videography for their conference, “Managing Diversity in Divided Societies.” Submissions should address the following questions:
What tools and mechanisms best promote diversity? How is diversity best approached in conflict societies? How can the arts be used to engage diversity and enhance societal well being?
Cash prizes will be awared to the top three finalists in the categories of diversity, conflict, and peace-building. Submissions are open to third and fourth year undergraduate students and graduate students.
Abstracts will be accepted until October 15th. Submissions are due on December 1st. The conference will be held on January 30-31st.
May 2013 issue Issue 46 of the journal Forced Migration Review will focus on “faith-based organisations and responses to displacement,” and more specifically:
Individuals and organisations inspired by their faith or religion to assist people in need, whether in their own community or further afield, have long played important roles in humanitarian assistance. They are, from the point of view of the recipients of assistance, in most ways no different from others who provide assistance, and yet they are sometimes seen, and sometimes want to be seen, as different.
A supporter of deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi on Aug. 12, 2013. VOA/Reuters
Early this week, Voice of America reported that supporters of ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi were defiantly remaining at their protest camps in Cairo, despite days of warnings that the government would soon move on the sites. The article quoted Saba Mahmood, associate professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, who told VOA the interim government has not broken up the camps because the resulting bloodshed would be a “very serious political cost.”
But she says Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood is facing bigger stakes than getting him back in office: “So there is that issue that if indeed they back down, they’re going to not just simply lose Morsi, but they’re going to lose even the basis — the political, social basis — they have built over the last 40 years.”
[Blogger’s note: since then, much blood has been shed and are yet to see what the political costs for the military government will be].
• A probable first in history of anthro: U.S. President fist-bumps anthropologist
While on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, according to the Boston Globe, U.S. President Obama played golf with World Bank President Jim Kim.
[Blogger’s note: Jim Kim, as most aw readers know, is not only the president of the World Bank but also a medical anthropologist, doctor, health advocate, and former university president].
President Barack Obama and World Bank President Jim Kim playing golf on Aug. 14, 2013. Darlene Superville/Associated Press
Intense prayer among some Christians can become an addiction, as described by Tanya Luhrmann, professor of cultural anthropology at Stanford University, in an op-ed for The New York Times.
'Praying Hands' by Dürer/Wikipedia
She has learned that when people use prayer to enhance their real-world selves, they feel good. But when it disconnects them from the everyday, they feel bad. Luhrmann points to an anthropological study of the popular Internet game World of Warcraft for insights about when the supportive use of communicating with a different world veers into something less healthy.
The anthropologist Jeffrey G. Snodgrass and his colleagues found that some people were relaxed and soothed by their play: “Sometimes I just log on late at night and go out by myself and listen to the soothing music.” Others felt addicted: “Once I start playing it’s hard to tell whether or not I’ll have the willpower to stop.”
What made the difference was whether people found their primary sense of self inside the game or in the world. When play seemed more important than the real world did, they felt addicted; when it enhanced their experience of reality outside the game, they felt soothed. Prayer, Luhrmann suggests, works in similar ways. When people use prayer to enhance their real-word selves, they feel good. When it disconnects them from the everyday, as it did for the student, they feel bad.
He explores big pharma’s rebranding practices, suggesting that it constitutes deliberate deception. The piece mentions the work of Daniel Moerman, emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
Moerman has written about the placebo effect of medical practices and drugs, including how the very shape and color of a pill can change its effectiveness.
Journal cover “For many years, social sciences and development studies have adhered to a sociological view that holds that as societies modernise, religious institutions and beliefs will wane in their influence. Following the example of industrialised countries, it was assumed that societies in the developing world would follow the same path and that this would be a positive development. Until recently, development theories and practices were based upon the premise of rational, secular institutions and individuals; and the implications and contributions of religious actors were consequently either downplayed or completely ignored. In many developing countries, however, despite the secularisation of the state, religion remains to this day embedded in society; religious actors occupy an important place in civil society.
“All of the authors who have contributed to this special issue of the CJDS agree that different development theories have largely ignored the role played by faith-based NGOs in donor countries within international cooperation. This oversight is clearly represented by the gap in International Development Studies (IDS), both in Canada and elsewhere. In the past 10 years, however, several research teams and development organisations, based primarily in Europe, have recognised and documented the presence and importance of religious actors within development policy and practice in both donor and beneficiary countries.
“Several of these organisations have published research showing the importance of religion and faith in development and contributing to increased understanding of how they influence development policies and practice. However … until very recently, there have been few forums for Canadian scholars who are interested in issues related to religion in Development Studies.
“The articles in this special issue build upon existing research in order to simultaneously tackle unaddressed issues and raise the debate to another level with regard to identifying religious actors, assessing their importance and understanding how they influence development studies, practices and processes in both donor and beneficiary countries.”
Victoria Sanford, professor of cultural anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, published an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that it is too soon to declare victory in Guatemala given the evidence that the current president, the former military commander Otto Pérez Molina, may have been involved in the same mass killings for which General Ríos Montt has now been convicted.
Otto Pérez Molina. Flickr/World Economic Forum
Nonetheless, she states that the conviction of former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity is of monumental significance:
“It was the first time in history that a former head of state was indicted by a national tribunal on charges of genocide. It offers hopes to those similarly seeking justice in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.”
• Culture and technology
CBS published a video interview with Intel’s cultural anthropologist, Genevieve Bell. Bell discusses the role of cultural anthropology in understanding people’s needs and preferences related to technology, people’s time patterns, social relationships, and more.
The Washington Post carried an article describing the influence of Sir Michael Barber‘s philosophy of public management on Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank (as well as medical doctor, medical anthropologist, and former university president). Apparently Kim keeps a copy of Barber’s book, Deliverology 101, close at hand, calls him for advice, and has asked Barber to meet with senior World Bank staff. Continue reading “Anthro in the news 5/20/13”→
Andrew Irving, New York Stories: The Lives of Other Citizens/Village Voice The videos, published by Scientific American, were created by Andrew Irving, professor and director of the Granada Centre of Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester, England. He spent part of 2011 documenting 100 randomly selected New Yorkers’ inner monologues. Irving stood on street corners and asked pedestrians to put on headsets and narrate their streams of consciousness out loud.
While each narrative is distinct, Irving picked up on a recurrent theme of economic instability and concerns in “the age of terror.” Irving told the Voice that this particular project arose out of work he had done in Uganda, trying to understand the thoughts of people diagnosed with HIV.
• Hello, God
Tanya Marie Luhrmann/Stanford In a guest column for The New York Times, cultural anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, a professor at Stanford University, discusses findings from her ethnographic field work in a charismatic evangelical church in Chicago. It was not at all uncommon for people to talk about hearing God. She asks, what do we make of this?
“I don’t think that anthropologists can pronounce on whether God exists or not, but I am averse to the idea that God is the full explanation here. For one thing, many of these voices are mundane. A woman told me that she heard God tell her to get off the bus when she was immersed in a book and about to miss her stop… Schizophrenia, or the radical break with reality we identify as serious mental illness, is also not an explanation.” She provides more detail in her book, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God.
Press TV interviewed William Beeman, a professor of cultural and linguistic anthropology at the University of Minnesota, about U.S.-Russia relations especially in terms of Washington and NATO’s new plans to build an anti-missile system around Western Europe.
U.S. and NATO Patriot missile deployment to Turkey. Flickr/Staff Sgt. Daniel Owen
In response to a question about American plans to strengthen military bases in Alaska, Beeman replied, “This is an old, old story. The United States tried to establish missiles in Eastern Europe, supposedly in the Czech Republic, I believe, in order to defend against the attacks, as they said, from Iran. Now we are talking about North Korea.
“So the difficulty of course for Russia is that Russia wants to make sure that these missiles would not ever be deployed against Russia, and I can tell you that Russia borders both on Iran and on North Korea. So it is very hard for the United States to guarantee the Russians in any satisfactory way that these missiles would never be used against Russian territories, and I can really understand the Russians’ trepidation about this.”
• Christian belief, practice, and mental health
Credit: Random House
The Deseret News of Salt Lake City carried an opinion piece in response to a recent New York Times column by Stanford anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann, where she says that the reason is not entirely clear why church attendance “boosts the immune system and decreases blood pressure. It may add as much as two to three years to your life.”
She speculates that it is the social support of a congregation and the healthy habits of churchgoers. In clinical terms, she explains how someone can experience a God they can’t see and she observes, “those who were able to experience a loving God vividly were healthier — at least, as judged by a standardized psychiatric scale.”
Photo courtesy of the Elliott School of International Affairs
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
12:30 pm – 1:45pm
The Elliott School of International Affairs Linder Commons, 1957 E Street, NW; Room 602
Sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies
The worldwide resurgence of Islamic piety has raised important methodological and theoretical questions about subjectivity: what do these expressions of devotion mean to the people who engage in them? Mahmood (2006) argues that understanding Muslim women’s piety requires appreciation of an alternative subjectivity, one that challenges standard models of Western liberal feminism. Deeb (2010) has argued that pious discourse is not as coherent as all that, and that Muslim subjects entertain alternative models depending on the context. Professor of Anthropology, International Affairs and Human Sciences, Joel Kuipers calls for an ethnographic approach to piety, urging scholars to avoid prematurely attributing inner states and interior conditions to the people they describe. His research investigates piety in Islamic Java by examining ethnographically the role of Arabic as medium of expression in its context of use.
Joel Kuipers received his B.A. in English and sociology with Honors from Calvin College in 1976, and his M.Phil. (1978) and Ph.D. from Yale in 1982. Before he came to the Anthropology Department at The George Washington University in the fall of 1989, he served on the faculties of Brown, Wesleyan, and Seton Hall Universities. He has been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (1994-95), and a visiting scholar at Harvard, Stanford, and Brown Universities. His main publications relate to the language and culture of Indonesia, and include: Power and Performance: the Creation of Textual Authority in Weyewa Ritual Speech (University of Pennsylvania, 1990); and Language, Identity and Marginality in Indonesia: the changing nature of ritual speech on the island of Sumba (Cambridge, 1998).
The on-going legal battle between the International Society of Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) and McDonald’s over the right to sell hamburgers at the Jumbo Phoenix shopping mall in Vacoas, Mauritius, a site opposite the organization’s temple, highlighted in a previous post has taken a new turn.
The interim injunction in force since 26 February 2013 prohibiting the sale of beef products by McDonald’s was lifted on 27 March. Judge Prithviraj Fecknah was persuaded by members of McDonald’s legal team that the beliefs of religiously observant Hindus on the Indian Ocean island, the descendants of indentured labourers, about the protected status of the cow cannot trump the interests of an international fast food business.
Nevertheless, last Friday lawyers representing ISCKON, including Rama Valayden, a former Mauritian Attorney General, submitted new legal arguments to the Supreme Court, which will be heard on 18 April.
Meanwhile, last Wednesday the festival of Holi was celebrated by Hindus in residential areas (see video below), including at the Holyrood football stadium in Vacoas. Somduth Dulthumun, President of the Mauritian Sanatan Dharma Temples Federation, who has backed ISCKON in its dispute with McDonald’s, told the crowd: “We must live as one family forgetting and differences. Every Hindu has obligations to his religion. Nothing is free in life, and you have to make sacrifices to promote your religion.”
The Georgetown University Conflict Resolution Program is calling for student papers, art, and videography for their conference, “Managing Diversity in Divided Societies.” Submissions should address the following questions:
anthropologyworks 