As described in the report’s introduction: “This report draws on data from more than 70 nationally representative surveys over a 20-year period and presents the most comprehensive compilation to date of statistics and analyses on FGM/C… It reviews all available DHS and MICS data, along with other nationally representative datasets with information on FGM/C, and examines differentials in prevalence according to social, economic, demographic and other characteristics.”
The report covers all 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East where FGM/C is concentrated and includes, for the first time, statistics from countries where representative survey data were lacking. It is also the first
publication to include new data collected on girls under 15 years of age, providing insights on the most recent dynamics surrounding the practice.
Importantly, as noted in the report’s introduction: “An innovative aspect of the analysis is the addition of a social norms perspective.” [Blogger’s note: This “innovative aspect’ may be at least partially thanks to cultural anthropologist, Bettina Shell-Duncan, who played a key role in the analysis and writing of the report].
“Since 2009, anthropologist Jason De León has led groups of students from across the U.S. and Canada through the Sonoran Desert to study unauthorized migration using archaeological and anthropological methods. The project has collected and cataloged more than 10,000 artifacts left along the way by those trekking the desert,” reports the Arizona Daily Star‘s Perla Trevizo. “He can usually tell how old the site is or how far the migrants walked by the objects found. For instance, black shoe polish tells him it’s an older site from a time when migrants painted their water bottles to attract less attention. Now, they buy them already black.”
Jason De León examines a bottle of pond water left behind by migrants after a Border Patrol apprehension. Kelly Presnell/Arizona Daily Star
De León, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, started the Undocumented Migration Project to record history and get a fuller picture of what’s happening: “Undocumented migration is a complex phenomenon…I want to provide reliable information to help the public see behind the curtain.”
Half of the research is done by walking the same trails migrants use. The other half is spent talking to border crossers staying in the migrant shelters in Nogales, Sonora, or getting ready for their journey in the town of Altar, Sonora.
Medical anthropologist and UC Berkeley assistant professor of health and social behavior, Seth Holmes, has just published Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States. The book chronicles Homes’ in-depth study of the lives of indigenous Triqui farmworkers who travel from Oaxaca, Mexico to the western states of the United States and back, and how these farmworkers experience unfair treatment, inadequate healthcare and horrible living conditions.
Holmes lived and worked with a group of Triqui farmworkers for over one and a half years, traveling with them during an illegal cross of the Arizona-Mexico border, then on to picking berries in Washington state, pruning vineyards in California (along with a week of homelessness living in cars), and harvesting corn in Oaxaca, Mexico, the home state of the Triquis.
Discrimination against Triqui farmworkers, Holmes said, can be seen starting with the jobs they are given on farms: “The Triquis were given the hardest jobs, picking strawberries in Washington state for instance … This work involved putting their bodies into repetitive positions, crouched and picking, under stress and all weather, seven days a week, exposed to pesticides and insects that made them get sick more often.” Continue reading “Anthro in the news 7/22/13”→
The Los Angeles Times published an article by Rosemary Joyce, professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. She is quoted as saying: “One doesn’t have to go far afield to question the idea that marriage has always been defined the same way.”
The Huffington Post published an essay by Tom Boellstorff, professor of anthropology at the University of California at Irvine. He offers four points, the first of which echoes Joyce’s:
January 10, 2009 Chicago protest of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Flickr/Kevin Zolkiewicz
social scientists and historians have shown that many forms of marriage and kinship exist, and have existed, around the world, and heterosexual marriage itself takes many forms;
the victory is bittersweet given the Supreme Court’s finding of a key element of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional;
both the DOMA and Proposition 8 decisions were 5-4 rulings and this split represents divisions in society and suggests that heterosexism and homophobia will not disappear with these court rulings;
finally, it is important to anticipate questions about what is “normal.”
Karmen Ramirez Boscan is a Wayuu indigenous woman from Colombia. She has worked as a consultant for the International Labor Organization (ILO) and Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva, Switzerland. She writes in Al Jazeera that violence against indigenous women is a the twofold challenge. One challenge is the militarization of indigenous territories that forces women to face unconscionable abuses based on gender discrimination. The second challenge is the presence of multinational companies (MNCs) in indigenous territories: “When established, MNCs were expected to greatly benefit indigenous peoples, but now they have become an endless source of frustration… Unfortunately, there are no official statistics to show the impact of these mega projects and MNCs on indigenous women. “
A November 2012 conference at Wilton Park, England, addressed “Preventing sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict situations.” Key points from the conference are provided in a report that concluded:
Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams speaks at a 9/25/12 event. Credit: UN Women Gallery “Preventing sexual violence in conflict and challenging the culture of impunity is a global responsibility and is vital to building sustainable peace. There is increased international momentum, appetite and ambition to address this issue and end the scourge. The Foreign Secretary, in his keynote address outlined the UK government’s approach; stating that the approach will be: ‘increasing our support to UN efforts, raising the profile of the need to confront sexual violence in conflict in every way we can, and proposing new action that we hope will be adopted by many nations in a new collective effort for our generation.’ The Foreign Secretary affirmed; the need for justice to be viewed in its fullest sense and for the sexual violence agenda to be part of a broader effort to empower women through women’s rights, participation and education. In conclusion, to advance the preventing sexual violence in conflict agenda requires; better coordination between the humanitarian, development and security sector; national ownership and a shift in the balance of shame from survivors to the perpetrators.”
The Elliott School’s Global Gender Program is committed to promoting research, teaching, and engagement to build sustainable peace and prevent sexual violence. Please join us for our celebration of International Women’s Day on Monday, March 4 when speakers from around the world will join Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Jody Williams in advancing peace and gender equality.
See also the best cultural anthropology dissertations of 2011, 2010, and 2009.
Again, this year, I did a key term search in Dissertation Abstracts International to find dissertations completed in 2012 that address topics related to the anthropologyworks mission and heart.
Trophies. Flickr/Snap®
I searched for anthropology dissertations related to human rights, justice, migration, gender, health, violence, conflict, environment, and energy. As someone commented last year, this post could be called “Best cultural anthropology dissertation abstracts” since I do not read every dissertation listed. It’s true — I choose my favorites on the basis of their abstracts, assuming that an abstract does have something to do with the body of the dissertation.
So, here are my 64 picks for 2012: cultural anthropology dissertations, mainly in the U.S., that address issues that I think are really important. I am sorry that I cannot provide a more global list, since so many excellent and important dissertations are written outside the U.S./Canada. Maybe others will address this gap?
All the best to my readers, and Happy New Year 2013!
Living in Limbo with Hope: The Case of Sudanese refugees in Cairo, by Gamal Adam. York University. Advisor Daniel A. Yon. This dissertation, about Sudanese refugees in Cairo, highlights the resilience and hope that distinguish refugees’ lives. The research has resulted in three key findings. First, the refugees have adopted a resource pooling strategy, which includes living in larger households, exempting the newcomers from rent and purchase of food for some time, and ensuring that the individuals who have more resources contribute more. Second, the traditional gender roles have changed and in some cases reversed, many spouses have separated, and children have lost the rights of play and education. Third, refugees are hopeful in celebrating events and setting plans for a better future despite the turbulent experiences they have gone through; most of them are resilient people who encourage each other and are rejuvenated by speeches delivered during various events which they celebrate.
Documenting and Contextualizing Pjiekakjoo (Tlahuica) Knowledges through a Collaborative Research Project, by Elda Miriam Aldasoro Maya. University of Washington. Advisors: Eugene Hunn and Stevan Harrell. People in Pjiekakjoo (Tlahuica), Mexico, have managed to adapt to the globalized world. They have developed a deep knowledge-practice-belief system, Contemporary Indigenous Knowledges (CIK), that is part of the biocultural diversity of the region in which they live. I describe the economic, social and political context of the Pjiekakjoo, to contextualize the Pjiekakjoo CIK, including information on their land tenure struggles, their fight against illegal logging and policies governing the Zempoala Lagoons National Park that is part of their territory. The collaborative research is influenced by the ideas of Paolo Freire and, as a translational work, it draws on the New Rationality proposed by Boaventura De Sousa Santos that appeals for cognitive justice.
Career Women in Contemporary Japan: Pursuing Identities, Fashioning Lives, by Anne Stefanie Aronsson. Yale University. Advisor William Wright Kelly. This dissertation explores what motivates Japanese women to pursue professional careers in today’s neoliberal economy and how they reconfigure notions of selfhood while doing so. I ask why and how it is that one-fourth of women stay on a career track, often against considerable odds, while the other three-fourths drop out of the workforce. I draw from interviews gathered during fieldwork in Tokyo between 2007 and 2010 with 120 professional women ranging in age from early twenties to mid-nineties. I organize these interviews along two main axes: the generation when each woman entered the workforce, and the work sector she entered. I look at five work sectors – finance, industry, entrepreneurship, government, and academia – that attract women because of the new career prospects that emerge as the sectors’ institutional policies change.
“If ih noh beat mi, ih noh lov mi” [If he doesn’t beat me, he doesn’t love me]: An ethnographic investigation of intimate partner violence in western Belize, by Melissa A. Beske. Tulane University, advisor Shansan Du. I examine the cultural underpinnings which normalize gender-based intimate partner violence (IPV) in western Belize and efforts of local activists to diminish the problem. I use multiple methods to investigate why women in heterosexual dyads have come to begrudgingly accept or even justify abuse by their male partners with discourses that conflate “love” and “violence.” Joining forces with former NGO colleagues, I initiated a sustainable survivor assistance program. Continuing to incorporate new members since my time in the field, the group now offers occupational and educational assistance to survivors leaving abusive relationships, and the shelter has expanded as well and thus remains a vital resource for women across Belize and surrounding countries.
Infected Kin: AIDS, Orphan Care and the Family in Lesotho, by Mary Ellen Block. University of Michigan, Advisor: Elisha Renne. This interdisciplinary dissertation in anthropology and social work examines the intersections of HIV/AIDS and kinship and its impact on orphan care and the family in rural Lesotho. It is based on fieldwork in the rural district of Mokhotlong, Lesotho. I find that HIV is a fundamentally a kinship disease and therefore: interventions for AIDS orphans need to include caregiver support; the household should be considered as a salient unit of analysis, evaluation and intervention; and biomedical or biocultural interventions for HIV/AIDS that need to incorporate the underlying theoretical framework of HIV as a kinship disease in order to be effective.
The explanation of the riot that happened on Tottenham High Road in north London last night after a march to protest the killing of a local 29-year-old black man, Mark Duggan, who was shot by police marksmen on Thursday evening, has followed a predictable pattern.
Burnt out cars lie in the road after riots on Tottenham High Road on August 7, 2011 in London. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) The local MP, David Lammy, was quick to point the finger at unnamed people from outside the area who hijacked the otherwise legitimate, peaceful protest from the Broadwater Farm estate, scene of a 1985 riot, to the Tottenham Police Station.
The Daily Mail, the paper of Middle England, also gave details in its story of events about “unconfirmed reports [that] suggest a group of around 150 youths arrived in the north London suburb from 4 p.m.”
This evening (Sunday), trouble is reported in the neighbouring area of Enfield, where a police car has reportedly been vandalised and windows smashed on the high street. The local MP, Nick de Bois, has also blamed “outsiders.”
But how true is the “outsider” hypothesis in accounting for riots? In the UK in the early 1980s, people often thought that “outsiders” were responsible for disorders simply because a large crowd would gather when there was an incident which then developed into a riot. Commentators put two and two together and reasoned that the rioters could not all have been local. But research I was involved in strongly suggested that the people who were present on the streets at the time rarely came from outside the area, especially on the first night of disorder. Continue reading “UK riot blamed on outsiders”→
It’s August and a time when professors try to clear out accumulated reprints, notes and other collected items. Tonight, I spent a while attacking some stacks in my home office. In a cluster of materials relating to social conflict and violence, I found a clipping that I had saved from the Washington Post, dated March 8, 2008.
It’s not really an article, so much as a series of graphic displays that caught my attention three years ago and now, again. A bar graph shows the rise in number of hate groups in the U.S. since the year 2000. A series of maps show the numbers of particular hate groups by states.
Good news: membership in the Ku Klux Klan declined dramatically since its founding in 1865. Bad news: the size of other hate groups has surged “especially along the border in Arizona, California and Texas.”
These figures are the result of dedicated work by the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. I urge you to visit the website. Explore a map of the United States and the links to currently active hate groups by state. Beware: you may not be able to sleep well after this excursion into the darkness of hate.
On a brighter note, another page offers you an opportunity to take a stand against hate and create a non-hate space on the U.S. map.
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”→
• 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 