The California Series in Public Anthropology is continuing its International Competition in 2013. It seeks proposals for short books oriented toward undergraduates that focus on how social scientists are facilitating social change.We are looking for accessible, grounded accounts that present compelling stories, stories that inspire others.
The proposals should describe a book that will be relatively short – around 100 pages – with a personal touch that captures the lives of people. The core of the book should involve stories of one or more social scientists as change agents, as making a difference in the world.
The University of California Press in association with the Center for a Public Anthropology will award publishing contracts for up to three such book proposals independent of whether the manuscripts themselves have been completed. The proposals can describe work the author wishes to undertake in the near future.
Interested individuals should submit a 3-4,000 word overview of their proposed manuscript – detailing (a) the problem addressed as well as (b) a summary of what each chapter covers. The proposal should be written in a manner that non-academic readers find interesting and thought-provoking.
___________________________ A Symposium Organized by
The International Development Studies Program at the GWU Elliott School of International Affairs, the Institute for Gilgit-Baltistan Studies, and
The American Islamic Congress’ Project Nur
Thursday December 13, 2012, 9:00 A.M. – 4:00 P.M.
Lindner Commons, 1957 E St. NW, Room 602
Elliott School of International Affairs
This day-long symposium will examine the increasing influence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on development in Asia today in the context of its impact on indigenous peoples in China’s Asian borderlands. The symposium, therefore, explores the role of two increasingly important players in the new geopolitics of development: rising global powers (represented by the PRC) and non-state actors (represented by indigenous peoples’ groups). In doing so, it raises questions about the contested nature of international development today, both globally and more specifically in Asia. The symposium will consist of three panels, focusing on South Asia (9:00-11:00), Central Asia (11:15-1:15), and South-East Asia (2:15-3:15) respectively. Speakers, including both scholars and practitioners, will examine case studies of China’s interaction with indigenous peoples in the context of Asia’s development, highlighting both positive and negative ramifications, and provide recommendations for how Chinese-led development in Asia can better account for the particular needs of indigenous peoples, including their concerns about preserving cultural and religious traditions, the use of native lands, and their rights to self-determination.
An article in Nature highlights the negative aspects of dam building throughout the Himalayan region. The article draws on a new report, criticizing the current rush to build dams throughout the Himalayan region, as well as commentary from other scientists. The article concludes by pointing out that:
India is not alone in its rush to build dams in the Himalayas. Other countries, especially China, Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan, plan to add hundreds more dams along the rivers, prompting similar concerns about their EIAs. Damming rivers upstream could have significant impacts on downstream nations, but “every country behaves as if the river is 100% theirs”, says Edward Grumbine, an environment-policy researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Kunming Institute of Botany. “This is a recipe for disaster.”
Unfortunately, from the perspective of this blogger, the scientists’ worries are all about the negative effects on fish, forests, and other non-human categories.
Why are humans, who depend on the fish and the forest, so unworthy of mention?
• The poison in the palm oil
The Washington Post reported on the negative environmental effects in Borneo of the booming global demand for palm oil. Critics of the palm oil industry say that the rapid expansion of plantations into Borneo’s countryside benefits a handful of large companies. A joint study published by Stanford and Yale Universities found that land-clearing operations for plantations in Borneo emitted more than 140 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2010 alone, equal to annual emissions from about 28 million vehicles. Lisa M. Curran, project leader and professor of ecological anthropology at Stanford University is quoted as saying: “We may see tipping points in forest conversion where critical biophysical functions are disrupted, leaving the region increasingly vulnerable to droughts, fires and floods.”
• Genocide trauma transmission is culturally variable Science Daily carried an article about new findings showing that the experience of genocide as transmitted trauma is not universal. The source is ethnographic research published in the journal Current Anthropology. Carol Kidron, professor of anthropology in the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Haifa, examines two case studies: Jewish-Israeli trauma descendants and Cambodian-Canadian trauma descendants. While the Jewish-Israeli subjects felt that they bore some emotional scars that were passed on by their parents, they opposed the idea that they have been afflicted by these inherited traces of the Holocaust. In fact, in the Jewish-Israeli cultural context, these markers of emotional difference may serve instead as an empowering way to carry on their parents’ memory. In contrast, Cambodian-Canadians resist the stigma of trauma and also insist that the genocide has not left them psycho-socially impaired in any way. Instead of remembering tragedy, the Cambodian-Canadian subjects appealed to karma. Kidron’s article is forthcoming in 2013: Alterity and the Particular Limits of Universalism: Comparing Jewish-Israeli Holocaust and Canadian-Cambodian Genocide Legacies,” Current Anthropology 53 (6):723-754.
• Local ecological knowledge for cultural survival
According to Kathryn Demps, sustainable villages and their livelihoods are needed to preserve ecological knowledge in upcoming generations. Demps, a visiting assistant professor in anthropology at Boise State University, studies behavioral and evolutionary ecology in small-scale societies. Her latest project looks at the Jenu Kuruba, a foraging group in South India and how their cultural knowledge is being preserved or lost. As quoted in Science Daily, she says, “What we learn from others — our culture, skills, values, beliefs and knowledge — is passed through the generations…How it is passed down can change the body of knowledge.” She further noted that in today’s race toward homogenous societies, indigenous knowledge is being lost even faster than languages. Continue reading “Anthro in the news 12/3/12”→
• Beware of the 4°: Climate change is real and dangerous
Several media sources, including U.S. News and World Report, mentioned Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank and a physician and cultural anthropologist, in discussing a new report from the World Bank pointing to the need to take climate change/global warming seriously.
• Stop wildlife trafficking
Wildlife “There is a movement afoot to humanize environmental issues, to address them from an anthropological, or human, perspective.” writes Tara Waters Lumpkin, an environmental and medical anthropologist. Her article is published in The Huffington Post and argues for the need address wildlife trafficking. As one example of increasing attention to wildlife protection, Lumpkin notes that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke out against wildlife trafficking at the U.S. Department of State in early November. Secretary Clinton stated that wildlife trafficking is a global security issue, emphasizing the need to enlist the support of the public to stem wildlife trafficking. She also declared the launch on Dec. 4 of Wildlife Conservation Day. Lumpkin has been employed in international aid work and as an environmental anthropologist in both the U.S. and overseas and is President of the non-profit Perception International, which promotes perceptual, cultural and biological diversity through its global projects. She is the founder and executive director of Izilwane, which means “animals” in Zulu. Izilwane explores a new ecological paradigm based on enhancing the relationship of human beings with other species and the natural world.
• Missing women primatologists at conferences
A study by researchers at UC Davis has marked gender inequality in who is chosen to speak at primatology conferences. The study was published in the open access journal PLOS ONE. Lead author Lynne Isbell, a professor of anthropology at UCD, initiated the study after being struck by the scarcity of female speakers at the annual meeting in April of the American Association of Physical Anthropology. “I started wondering if this was a fluke, or something we hadn’t noticed before,” Isbell said. She and two UCD colleagues, fellow anthropology professor Alexander Harcourt and Truman Young, a professor of plant sciences, went through programs from 21 annual meetings of the association, focusing on primatology sessions. They tallied the genders of speakers at symposia; those giving shorter oral presentations; and those presenting posters. (Symposium talks are generally seen as being more prestigious than short oral presentations, with posters — often given by junior researchers and graduate students — being seen as the least prestigious.) They found that symposia organized by men had half the number of female speakers, 29 percent, as those organized by women, 64 percent, or by men and women, 58 percent. Women were far more likely to make poster presentations than give talks, while men presented more talks than posters.
Until I found a copy online, it had been some years since I had read Marcel Mauss’s seminal 1934 essay, Les Techniques du Corps. He focused on how membership of a particular society obliges people to use their bodies appropriately in activities like walking, running, sitting, eating, climbing, jumping, swimming, and marching.
Marcel Mauss
I had forgotten a lot of the basic argument. But I did remember a few things. Firstly, Mauss’s observations and analysis of the body – “man’s first and most natural instrument” – reinforced something that I had already learned from cultural anthropology: what is deemed as acceptable and unacceptable customary behavior often varies according to differences in gender, social class, geographical area, and social occasion.
Secondly, I could recall that Mauss’s powerful concept of “prestigious imitation” was literally an eye-opener for a field worker in terms of observing customary use of the body and how it can change. It highlights, for example, the way in which people of a lower status (belonging to subordinate social groups) l tend to imitate the body techniques of those of higher status (belonging to dominant social groups) in order to acquire improve their relative position in the social order.
In the mid-1980s, I was carrying out fieldwork in London’s East End, an area of the U.K. which has served as a reception area for many migrant groups fleeing persecution or famine including Huguenots, Irish, Ashkenazi Jews, and Somalis, as well as those seeking economic betterment. I became aware of the difference between first generation, 1.5 generation, and second and third-generation male Bangladeshis, in terms of how they moved, especially how they walked. (Young Bangladeshi females took a different trajectory in terms of the control and use of their bodies, but I will not that address that topic here.) Continue reading “Walking the cockney walk”→
A 1957 photo shows Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff (center) with his wife, Alicia, and Clifford Evans of the Smithsonian Institution. Credit: Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo.
The recent revelation of the secret Nazi past of Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, one of Colombia’s best-known anthropologists and a visiting professor at UCLA in the 1970s, has shaken academic circles. According to an article in The LA Times, the native Austrian immigrated to Colombia in 1939 and was famed for his influential studies of indigenous communities and for his books on the unusual stone statues of Colombia’s most important archaeological zone, San Agustin. Reichel-Dolmatoff, who died in 1994, was apparently a member of the Austrian Nazi party and, according to a diary fragment that has been identified as Reichel-Dolmatoff’s, he was also stationed at the Dachau concentration camp. “What this whole affair has shown us is that there were many things in his life we thought we knew but which now are not so clear,” said Carlos Uribe, head of the anthropology department at Bogota’s University of the Andes, a department that Reichel-Dolmatoff and his anthropologist wife, Alicia, founded in 1964. “He was an expert at covering his steps, a chameleon,” Uribe said, adding that Reichel-Dolmatoff, as an academic, was a champion of cultural diversity and indigenous philosophies.”
The current issue of the Indian Journal of Traditional Knowledge contains 31 articles on food sources and livelihood. For example, Singh, Singh and Bhardwaj write about a particular plant food and its relationship to the livelihood security of Adi women in Arunachal Pradesh, in eastern India.
The Indian Journal of Traditional Knowledge is open access.
The seven-acre site for public art in Atlantic City. Photo: Ryan Collerd for the NYT.
In Atlantic City, New Jersey, Hurricane Sandy spared the first phase of a five-year, $13 million public art project that organizers hope will enhance the city’s image. An article in The New York Times quotes Joseph Rubenstein, an anthropology professor at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey who is active in community groups and has worked to enhance Atlantic City with gardens and murals: ”I do think it has healing potential poststorm.” He added that the city’s growth has been centered on the boardwalks, or nearby, and public art “…has to be in combination with work on the rest of the city.”
• Big mining vs. local people in Alaska
Two Kenai Peninsula College anthropology professors concluded that a degradation of the water in Bristol Bay from a major mining project could have devastating nutritional, cultural and religious impacts on the villages in the region. Their study, part of a larger impact assessment carried out by the Environmental Protection Agency, was in response to a request by nine Dena’ina and Yup’ikvillages in the region. Bristol Bay is home to one of the world’s largest sockeye salmon fisheries.
• AAA revised ethics code
The American Anthropological Association announced that its members approved a new ethics code after a five-year review. The revised code was favored by 93 percent of those who voted. In a news release, the association said that the new document is organized according to seven principles, including “do no harm” and “be open and honest regarding your work.” The new document says it is intended to “foster discussion, guide anthropologists in making responsible decisions, and educate.” Continue reading “Anthro in the news 11/12/12”→
A report describing results from a systematic review of programs seeking to reduce female genital mutilation/cutting in several African countries offers this conclusion:
[Our] systematic review shows that there is a paucity of high quality evaluations of the effectiveness of interventions to reduce the prevalence of FGM/C. We included eight controlled studies assessing the effectiveness of five broad categories of interventions, set in seven different countries in Africa. We identified no controlled interventions that had taken place in other parts of the world. All of the evaluation studies were characterized by low methodological quality. Thus, while our calculated effect sizes for prevalence of FGM/C, knowledge, beliefs, and intentions about FGM/C suggested that there appear to be positive developments as a result of interventions, the low quality of the body of evidence affects the interpretation of results and draws the validity of the findings into doubt.
In other words, if one is seeking rigorous, control-trial tested findings about intervention effectives for FGM/C intervention programs, we don’t have it.
In spite of these dismal conclusions, the 156 page report provides a more positive overall contribution by describing several important programs. And even though they lack formal, statistically dependable evaluations, they do seem to be headed in the direction of reducing the practice of FGM/C.
anthropologyworks 