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Understanding Egypt

Political protests in Egypt are ongoing at the time of this writing, mainly in Cairo, Alexandria and some other cities. Who knows what will unfold in the near future? What do cultural anthropologists offer to inform our understanding of this new social movement?

Mubarak and Regime Out by Michael Soron/Flickr.
Mubarak and Regime Out by Michael Soron/Flickr.
In order to address these issues, I turned first to my favorite electronic database available through my university library, Anthropology Plus.

I used the single search term “Egypt,” and I chose the publication dates of 2000-2010. Nearly 400 articles popped up. In scanning through them, I found that only 10 percent were related to contemporary social life. The other 90 percent of the references are dominated by archaeology with a sprinkling of biological anthropology as well as some non-anthro sources.

Clearly, you will have a better chance of finding out about early cat domestication, prehistoric ships, vessel residue analysis and even infant weaning during Roman times than you will have of learning about the social dimensions of today’s street protests.

Nonetheless, the 10 percent does offer some excellent studies. I augmented the Anthropology Plus journal references with a quick search in my university library for relevant book titles. I widened the scope to allow in several non-anthro sources because they sounded important. So, here you have a very quickly prepared reading list of mainly anthro sources along with other relevant social science studies.

As with all such “bibliographic” posts on this blog, I offer my sincere apologies to readers who do not have a way to access to the sources on this list, because most are not “open access.”

I welcome additions and comments from readers.

Reading list on culture, society and contemporary change in Egypt:

  1. Agrama, Hussein Ali. 2010. “Ethics, Tradition, Authority: Toward an Anthropology of the Fatwa.” American Ethnologist 37(1):2-18.
  2. Aishima, Hatsuki, and Armando Salvatore. 2009. “Doubt, Faith, and Knowledge: The Reconfiguration of the Intellectual Field in Post-Nasserist Cairo.” Islam, Politics, Anthropology 2009:41-56.
  3. Armburst, Walter. 2002. “Islamists in Egyptian Cinema.” American Anthropologist 104(3):922-930.
  4. _____. 2004. “Egyptian Cinema on Stage and Off.” Off stage/on Display: Intimacy and Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture: 69-98.
  5. _____. 2006 “Synchronizing Watches: The State, the Consumer, and Sacred Time in Ramadan Television.” Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere: 207-226.

    6. Continue reading “Understanding Egypt” →

Top 40 North American dissertations in cultural anthropology 2010: AnthroWorks picks

Doctoral dissertations are an excellent indicator of the health of a discipline. They are a weather vane pointing toward where the discipline is heading. They represent a huge chunk of work by the researcher and his/her mentors as well as generous contributions from people in the field site(s). With luck, they are a crucial basis for a newly minted PhD to getting a job to which all the years of training and research will contribute. Dissertations are very important documents, and they deserve more visibility.

Last year, to mark the end of 2009, I created an annotated list of my favorite 25 North American cultural anthropology dissertations. It was based on a rapid scan of an electronic database of dissertations available through my university’s library. The list contained rich examples of what 2009 had produced, but it excluded many more excellent dissertations on important topics that (a) I didn’t include in the interest of keeping the list reasonably short and (b) that my search simply missed. I well know about (b) because I did a re-search, out of interest, a few days ago and was stunned to see so many exciting studies pop up that I hadn’t known about last year.

In any case, we must move on to 2010. This year, I did a similar search using terms such as health, inequality, gender, violence, environment, family, and population.

Instead of a list of 25, I have included 40 dissertations. In spite this substantial increase, I am nonetheless certain that the list omits many important theses. The list, thus, is just a tantalizing sample of a much wider universe of exciting work completed in 2010. Furthermore, by including only North American theses, the list excludes many dissertations submitted in the rest of the world. One can only imagine the entire spectrum of riches untapped.

On a brighter note: as the 40 dissertations demonstrate, cultural anthropologists are producing in-depth knowledge about important global issues.

My apologies to the authors for reducing their abstracts to around 100 words each and for the deep editorial cuts involved. Please forgive me for any misrepresentations this degree of editing can create.

The 2010 list is presented here in alphabetical order, by last name of the author:

  1. Elite Landowners in Santarem: Ranchers, Gauchos and the Arrival of Soybeans in the Amazon, by Ryan T. Adams. Indiana University. Advisor: Richard Wilk.
    This dissertation is an ethnographic study of large-scale landowners in Santarém, Pará State, Brazil. I investigated immigrant large-scale farmers who were using industrial farming techniques, as well as the established local elite who were mainly engaged in large-scale ranching and business. The research asks whether or not the two groups of large-scale landowners would form a single landed elite class, as implied by a class analysis based in political economy. This research has implications for understanding of agricultural expansion in the Amazon.
  2. Belonging to the (S)Oil: Multinational Oil Corporations, NGOs and Community Conflict in Postcolonial Nigeria, by Omolade Adunbi. Yale University. Advisor: Kamari Clarke.
    This dissertation examines what oil and land represent in the Niger Delta. I investigate how contestations over oil and land resources are redefining and reproducing new forms of power, governance, and belonging. I examine how the physical presence of oil drilling platforms, flow stations, and pipelines represent a promise of widespread wealth, while the realities of resource control and legal institutions of the state have excluded local people from the benefits of oil modernity. This ethnography maps how these exclusions create conditions of possibilities for the establishment of competing governmentalities through the mobilization of political organizing against the state and multinational corporate control of land and oil in the Niger Delta.
  3. Stepping Outside the Ring: An Ethnography of Intimate Associations in Japanese Professional Sumo, by Nanao Akanuma. University of California, Irvine. Advisor: Mei Zhan.
    This dissertation is about the embodied professional lifecycles of sumo professionals, or rikishi in Japanese. I examine the ways in which they enter, train, socialize into, and retire from Japanese professional sumo. My ethnographic fieldwork reveals that sumo is neither a sport nor a tradition. Rather, it is the world of relations and different characters: sumo stars, unsuccessful lower-ranked sumo professionals, entrepreneurial-minded sumo masters, wives and daughters of the sumo heya (dormitory-cum-training facility of sumo apprenticeship), media reporters, fans, and spectators. I explore the lifecycles of sumo and how each stage of the professional lifecycle opens up a stage for particular sets of relations for them.

    4. Continue reading “Top 40 North American dissertations in cultural anthropology 2010: AnthroWorks picks” →

Cruise ships to heaven: Mauritius expands tourist sector

Guest post by Sean Carey

Mark Twain famously quoted a local person in his 1897 travelogue, Following the Equator: “You gather the idea that Mauritius was made first, and then heaven; and that heaven was copied after Mauritius.”

Anyone lucky enough to fly to the Indian Ocean island will understand something of why this sentiment was recorded. The view as the plane starts its descent to the airport is stunning — the central mountain range looks as if it has been cut from some dark grey and green material with some very sharp scissors. Towns and small villages dot the landscape. As the plane comes into land at Plaisance on the south-east coast you see a patchwork of green sugar fields, which contrasts with the azure water gently rippling within the coral lagoon.

Little wonder, then, that with these physical attributes the Mauritius tourist sector, which started in a small way in the early 1970s, has expanded greatly. Even with the current global economic downturn around 915,000 visitors are expected in 2010. In fact, the country’s tourist sector often referred to as one the “pillars of the economy” — the others are sugar, textiles, ICT, offshore banking and luxury property — contributed 7.4 percent of the $10 billion economy in 2009. Significantly, it remains the island’s main source of foreign exchange.

Screensaver worthy: a view of Mauritius. Credit: Tim Parkinson, creative commons licensed on Flickr.

It is nearly 40 years since Indo-Trinidadian writer, V.S. Naipaul, referred to Mauritius as an “overcrowded barracoon” and a “half-made society,” and predicted economic collapse and social mayhem. He was wrong and has since apologized. (In fact, a much better guide to the history and social make up of Mauritius is provided by Norwegian anthropologist, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, in Common Denominators, a brilliant analysis of the island’s polyethnicity, identity politics and nationalism.)

But there can be little doubt that contemporary travel writers love to visit Mauritius, because it produces such good copy. In the last few years I have yet to see a bad review in the mainstream press. Mauritius is often referred to as a “paradise island” which is easy enough to conclude if you are paid to stay in some of the big five-star hotels that punctuate the coastline — Trou aux Biches, Le Touessrok and the Royal Palm are good examples — and are waited on hand and foot. For example, a recent article by Erin O’Dwyer in the Sydney Morning Herald is fairly typical of its kind:

“If what people want most in a holiday is good food, great beaches and a glimpse of local culture, then Mauritius has it all… Golf and snorkelling are island mainstays, though most resorts have a hectic schedule of activities — from archery and bocce to yoga and tai chi — and the spa is never far away, either.”

Continue reading “Cruise ships to heaven: Mauritius expands tourist sector” →

Anthro in the news 8/16/10

• Put out the fire
Experts are debating how to stop the fires in Russia which are now spreading under the surface and how to deal with the smoke and fumes. Lisa Curran, professor of environment and anthropology at Stanford University, studies peat fires. The Wall Street Journal quotes her on their health effects: “There are a lot of really nasty things that are given off when peat is burned–carbon monoxide, sulfates, nitrous oxide…They cause respiratory problems and burning eyes when smoke is in the air.”

• Many meanings of the Muslim headscarf
An article in the New York Times about multiple and shifting meanings of Muslim women’s headscarves quoted Hanan Sabea, an anthropology professor at the American University of Cairo. She explained that in Egypt, no clear consensus exists about the headscarf’s meaning in a time when the majority of women have adopted the practice–whether it’s about religiosity or simple conformity to public rules: “it’s an incredible moment..still very mushy and uncertain.” A small percentage of young Egyptian women are now starting to wear the niqab.

• Salvage anthropology in the Arctic
Linguistic anthropologist Stephen Pax Leonard of Cambridge University will spend a year living with the Inughuit people of north-west Greenland to document their unwritten language. He told the Guardian that “Climate change means they have around 10 or 15 years left” to live where they are. Once they move, their entire culture and language will be lost. The Inughuit are the world’s most northern people.

• Ancient meat eaters
The hottest news item of the week, by far, was the pushing back by 800,000 years of the date of earliest tool-using, animal butchering and likely meat-eating to 3.4 million years ago, the era of Lucy and our small-brained early human ancestors. The evidence is cut-marks on an animal bone from Dikika, Ethiopia. Leader of the research, Ethiopian paleoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged who is with the California Academy of Sciences, is quoted in the New York Times as saying: “Our future work will be to find those stone tools that have shifted the framework for such an important transition in the behavior of our ancestors.” The findings are published in Nature.

• Ancient people eaters
Not just as an occasional snack, feast item or famine food, Homo antecessor inhabitants of the Atapuerca cave complex in Spain practiced “continuous cannibalism” as indicated by thousands of bones with cut marks. USA Today covered the story, and the findings are published in Current Anthropology.

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 8/16/10” →

Anthro in the news 8/9/10

• Life in the camps is a daily struggle
The latest information from Haiti is that 1.7 million displaced people are living in 1370 registered camps. Mark Schuller is there with eight student assistants doing research on a sample of the 861 officially registered camps for displaced people in the Port au Prince area. His article in the Huffington Post offers a preliminary look at the findings, and they are not pretty. One of the major roadblocks to providing safe housing for the displaced people is the government’s lack of commitment to providing land for new housing. Schuller comments that it comes down to a question of “…whose rights matter more, the 1.7 million homeless or the hundreds of private landowners?” Schuller is professor of African American studies and cultural anthropology at York College of the City University of New York.

• Stop stop stop
Several anthropologists are among the 57 signers of a letter to the Guardian supporting an end to US coca fumigations in Colombia. They cite environmental pollution affecting thousands of people as a result of the fumigations.

• Returning U.S. troops are strangers in a strange land
Zoe Wool, an anthropology doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, is writing her dissertation on how U.S. soldiers injured in the Iraq war adjust to civilian life when they come home. She says that returning soldiers face the huge divide between “warriors” and civilians who are not involved in the process of war and have little understanding of its effects on soldiers. She says that the soldiers “…are a small group of people carrying a huge burden on behalf of everyone else.” Blogger’s note: Sebastian Junger’s book War, and his film with Tim Hetherington, Restrepo, also highlight the difficult situation of soldiers coming home and rejoining civilian life. We could benefit from studies of soldiers who do manage, against tough odds, to readjust and become civilians whose lives are free of violence. If our society must have soldiers then it must have ways to bring them back to a life that is safe for them and their loved ones. If our society fails to do this, and so far the record is not looking too good, then we don’t compare all that well to the Romans who watched gladiators fight and die.

• Witness to extinction with a dash of hope
The Australian weekend edition carried a review of Singing Saltwater Country, a book by cultural anthropologist John Bradley with Yanyuwa Families. The book documents the songline traditions of the coastal Yanyuwa people of the Northern Territory of Australia. As Bradley compiled and studied their songs, he learned of their importance for the older generation as a way of transferring their heritage to the younger generation. Right now there are only 11 fully competent speakers of the language. The elders lament that the “children…are standing in ignorance, they know nothing. We are talking to them, but they do not listen.” So where’s the hope? The elders feel that if the youth gain even some understanding of their heritage, then they will want to know more, and eventually they will express their heritage in creative, new ways.

• Toward pharmacovigilance
Drug Week picked up on a publication by medical anthropologist Sylvie Fainzang and her colleagues on prescription drug use in France, doctor-patient communication, and pharmaceutical industry discourse. The authors juxtapose an ethics of care with an ethics of information. Fainzang works in the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) in France.

• Nneka in NYC
Hip-hop musical phenomenon Nneka performed in New York City on August 2. Born in Nigeria, she moved to Germany at the age of nineteen and since then has become a star. In the meantime, she also earned a degree in anthropology in Germany.

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Upcoming public anthro conference at American University

From our friends at American University, via the Washington Association of Professional Anthropologists (WAPA):

Revolutions! Building Emancipatory Politics & Action

The 7th Annual AU Public Anthropology Conference

Registration deadline: September 12

Join us for a revolutionizing conference as we work towards building coalitions across diverse social justice movements. We invite community activists, practicing and academic anthropologists and other social scientists, students, filmmakers and interested individuals to join us for two days of collaborative discussions and strategizing about how to better organize and collaborate across various sectors and disciplines to create new social justice alliances. Participants are encouraged to share experiences and insights from environmental, labor, liberation, LGBTQI, peace, anti-racism, anti-displacement, feminist, indigenous rights, health, disability rights, fair trade, and other social justice movements.

Unlike many academic events built around formal papers, this conference will focus on bringing panelists and audience members together to discuss concrete ways social scientists can support, strengthen, and contribute to activist movements striving toward progressive political action. The conference will include panel sessions (structured discussion of ideas), skills workshops (presenters teaching concrete skills to audience members), and a film festival.

Please submit abstracts (one-paragraph descriptions) of what you are interested in presenting or a film you made and would like to show at the conference. Panelists and Skills Workshop presenters will be selected by a group of students and faculty to ensure the conference reflects a diverse array of social movements, backgrounds, and experiences. The submission deadline is September 12; participants will be notified of acceptance on a rolling admissions basis.

PLEASE SUBMIT: one-paragraph abstracts to AUPublicAnthro@gmail.com
for panel sessions, skills workshops, or films.

DOWNLOAD: Call for Participants

Anthro in the news 7/19/10

• Toward an anthropology of the anti-burqa
Sean Carey asks: is there an anthropological explanation for the high-level of disapproval for a garment worn by so few? In France, approximately 2000 women out of a total Muslim population of 5 million wear a burqa, or full-body covering. He turns to examining the opposition within the context of advanced capitalist culture values such as individuality and the importance of face-to-face encounters. Carey studied both sociology and cultural anthropology and is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Multiculturalism (CRONEM) at Roehampton University.

• In the Navy now
Since 1993, cultural anthropologist Clementine Fujimura has been the sole anthropologist on that faculty of the US Naval Academy, which is largely an engineering school. Hired to teach about the psychology of foreign cultures, she finally introduced her first course with the word anthropology in the title in 2000. Recently, the Naval Academy’s Department of Language Studies changed its name to the Department of Language and Cultures. Fujimura sees a sign of hope in this change, that the Navy recognizes the need for teaching about culture

• Fifty  years on
July 14, 2010 marked fifty years from the day in 1960 that primatologist Jane Goodall began her field research with the chimpanzees of the Gombe Stream Reserve, Tanzania. Since then, she has gone on to support primate conservation as well as community development. The Washington Post carried an interview with her in which she comments: “”It seems hard to believe it’s been half a century. And yet it doesn’t seem like yesterday, either.”

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 7/19/10” →

Hey there. Nice jaws.

A study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior discusses the fact that, among humans, men have thicker jaws than women (noted in this week’s Anthro in the News). Professor David Puts of Penn State University suggests that men have thicker jaws than women as a result of an evolutionary process of selection, over many generations, in which men with thick jaws survived and outbred men with thin jaws. The survival advantage of having a thick jaw for men, he postulates, has to do with, he postulates, a male culture of brawling throughout human evolution.

If you are comfortable with that explanation, what do you make of this website about women with pronounced jaws ?

UPDATE: The author of the article under discussion, Professor David Puts of the Anthropology Department of Pennsylvania State University, emailed me and gently informed me that I had followed the lead of a tabloid-style media source and replicated its distorted view of his scholarly article.

Dr. Puts is right, and I apologize. I usually do consult the original source rather than bouncing off a media report. I got so carried away with the jaws intrigue that, in this case, I failed to do so.

I have since read his 20-page review article which discusses findings from nearly 300 sources. On one page (p. 162), he discusses “robust mandibles,” suggesting that they, along with many other features of male anatomy and behavior (such as men’s greater muscle mass, strength, and levels of same-sex aggression, deeper voices, and beards), appear better adapted to excluding sexual competitors by force or threat than to attracting a mate. On another page (p. 168), he summarizes his argument that robust mandibles may have evolved to lessen the risk of jaw fractures during fights.

The comments about men’s jaws constitute a small fraction of the total content of the article. It is intriguing that the media source picked up on that material. Apparently, in the contestations of the B-grade media world, jaw size, linked with violence, might be a winning combination. I fell for it.

His article is the subject of a piece in this week’s Economist.

Image: “The truth is always up there” from flickr user dhammza, licensed with Creative Commons.

Thinking outside the pill box

The latest issue of the Journal of Women’s Health includes three articles describing health risks of women in the United States related to social exclusion and cultural factors. They all demonstrate that good health is about a lot more than medical care.

The first article looks at three factors associated with cardiovascular disease–hypertension, elevated cholesterol, and diabetes–among 733 uninsured, low-income rural women in West Virginia aged 40-64 years.  The women were participants in the Well-Integrated Screening and Evaluation for Women Across the Nation (WISEWOMAN) program.  West Virginia has a high percentage of people 50 years and older, the highest rate of angina and coronary heart disease in the United States, and is tied with Kentucky for first place in prevalence of heart attacks.  Prevalence of hypertension, elevated cholesterol, diabetes, and obesity, are also among the highest in the nation. The study found that large proportions of the women are at risk for cardiovascular disease because of untreated hypertension and high cholesterol. They lack access to regular health care due to the limited availability of health services in rural areas. Women who are less educated, a likely proxy for poverty, are particularly likely to have these untreated chronic conditions.

The second article is about emergency care for women who have been sexually assaulted. According to the National Violence against Women Survey, 18 percent of white women, 19 percent of Black women, 24 percent of mixed race women, and 34 percent of American Indian/Alaskan Native women report a rape or sexual assault at some time in their lifetime. This article reports on findings about the “incident history” of sexual assault from 173 women who sought care in an Emergency Department in an unidentified city (possibly in Mississippi since the lead author is assistant professor in the School of Nursing at the University of Southern Mississippi).  Of the total, 58 percent of the women were black and  42 percent white.  Weapons were much more likely to be involved in assaults on black women, and black women were more likely to be assaulted in the city rather than the suburbs. Substance abuse occurred in about half of the assaults; black women were more likely to report use of illicit drugs while white women were more likely to report alcohol use before the assault.

The third study reports on an evaluation of a community-based pilot intervention in New York City that combined cervical cancer education with “patient navigation” to improve rates of cervical cancer screening among Chinese American women.  In the United States, Chinese American women have higher rates of cervical cancer than white women.  The study compared an intervention group and a control group.  Eighty women received the intervention: two education, sessions,  open discussion with a Chinese physician, educational videos,  and navigation assistance in identifying and accessing low-cost services. The control group of 54 women received two education sessions delivered by Chinese community health educators and written materials on general health and cancer screening. Twelve months later, screening rates in the intervention group were 70 percent compared to 11 percent among the control group. An important factor in the intervention group was greater perception of the severity of the disease.

Continue reading “Thinking outside the pill box” →