As The New York Times reports, the U.S. government has presented a $78.5 million plan intended to block a hungry, huge, nonnative Asian population from invading the Great Lakes.
The Army Corps of Engineers is taking part in the operation against Asian carp, “known to take over entire ecosystems.” It includes “physical and sonar monitoring, faster testing, more nets, electric shocks and other measures.” But “Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm of Michigan, a Democrat who attended the meeting, said the measures were inadequate. (…) ‘They just need to shut the locks down, at least temporarily.’”
It always strikes me how similar the language of animal nativism is to that of human xenophobia. Okay, so maybe diversity is good (though it’s curious that this assumption is never discussed). But why are “natives” always privileged? And are immigrants really as dangerous as bioxenophobes portray them?
Seeing Culture Everywhere
Over at Savage Minds, CM contributors Joana Breidenbach and Pal Nyiri have been invited to post their thoughts on their anthropological writing over the years. So far they’ve posted on the experience of writing together and writing for non-academic audiences. These posts come on the heels of the publication of their book Seeing Culture Everywhere (pictured), which is an attempt to reach a general audience with a more more anthropologically nuanced sense of culture than the reified versions found in a lot of domains these days. You can get a foretaste of the book from an article they did for Espaces Temps here.
Their Savage Minds posts contain some interesting tidbits about the differences between working with academic and non-academic presses. Although they have written something of a how-to, they also admit that they may not yet have cracked the code for publishing successful popular works in anthropology. While it’s too early to say if their new book will be a commercial success, the German predecessor to Seeing Culture, Maxikulti, did not seem to grab the popular imagination. Naturally it’s very hard to say why this might be the case as everything from the title to the contingencies of book reviews play a role. If Seeing Culture is a broader success we might be able to get a better sense of what appeals and what doesn’t. I’ll be interested to read Seeing Culture when I get my hands on a copy, and I’m looking forward to more of their posts on SM.
Via Anthropology Matters, Science Studies is seeking papers on the topic of ‘cultural analysis as intervention’. Interestingly, this follows close on the heals of the AAS conference, which addressed a very similar theme. Here are the details of the CFP:
Call for Papers
‘Cultural Analysis as Intervention’
Science Studies Special Issue
Abstracts Deadline: 15th of February 2010
The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles (Latour 2004: 246)
To do cultural analysis – understood as a broad, qualitative mode of inquiry – is to intervene in the fields of study and application. How may we understand, conceptualize, study and handle these interventions? This is the pivotal question which this Science Studies Special Issue seeks to address by raising discussions concerning the performativity of the activities, materials, engagements and products making up cultural analysis. With this issue, we wish to interrogate the interventions performed and enabled by and through cultural analysis, whether as new modes of mattering (Law 2004), agential cuts (Barad 2003) or through the transformation of matters of fact into matters of concern (Latour 2004). We also ask how these interventions are enacted and discernable – and how perhaps they may be done differently. The aim is to investigate and challenge the status and roles of cultural analysis, perhaps seeing it as a form of activism or ontological politics (Mol 1999).
The editors of this special issue invite you to take part in and contribute to this inquiry into ‘intervention’ as an inevitable implication of doing cultural analytical research on and inspired by Science, Technology and Society (STS). Research papers may be empirical, theoretical, methods-oriented, or a mixture of these three categories.
We look forward to receiving abstracts of 150-200 words briefly sketching the purpose and outline of the paper by no later than February 15th 2010. Please send your abstract to ren@hist.sdu.dk. The authors of selected abstracts will subsequently be asked to contribute with full length research papers (max 10,000 words references and attachments included). This full paper must be submitted by August 1st 2010. All papers are subject to double peer review.
Read more about Science Studies and author guideline on http://www.sciencestudies.fi/
We look forward to hearing from you!
Special issue editors,
Morten K. Petersen, CopenhagenBusinessSchool
Astrid Jespersen & Marie Sandberg, Universityof Copenhagen
Carina Ren, Universityof Southern Denmark
I meant to blog this a while ago but as usual it got lost on my rather overpopulated back burner. Then I read Greg’s great recent post about the American export of mental illness and this popped back into my consciousness.
So, back in October, former Macquarie anthro Kirsten Bell, now resident of Vancouver, mentioned emailed me to say she’d published a “pop anthropology” article on cultural differences between Australian and Canadian dentistry. Kirsten was always well known, and well liked, as a lecturer who would delight in using embarrassing stories, often from her own experience (and of her own bodily functions) to bring home points about cross-cultural understandings of the body, disgust, smell, etc to first year students. She would delight in nothing more than using stories of shit and farts to unsettle and titillate students as part of the process of “unteaching” which, it has been suggested, anthropology training is all about. Kirsten has taken the same approach in her piece on dentistry, using her crooked and not-quite-pearly-white choppers as fodder for an entertaining anthropological tale of some impromptu fieldwork in the dentist’s chair.
A central point of the article is that understandings of dental health are are permeated with ideas of morality, guilt and redemption. Her off-white teeth, once perfectly adequate, are suddenly found to be lacking in a society which she sees as more obsessed with (American style?) bright whites. She likens dental surgeries to churches, in which one is given a clear sense of the difference between the saved and the damned:
Like any church, pictures of the object of devotion adorn the office walls: the white, straight teeth of salvation and the horribly decayed teeth of the damned – a warning of the dangers of failing to abide by the ritual ablutions of regular brushing, flossing, mouth washing etc., prescribed by the dentist.
I have a theory that dentists are almost universally feared not because of the torture they inflict upon our mouths, but because of the guilt and shame they inflict upon our consciences. This is because good dentists, like priests, trade in guilt. However, there is no quick fix for the sins of poor dentition, no dental equivalent of a Hail Mary that might return one to a state of grace.
There is only the long, hard road to salvation: sonic toothbrushes, regular flossing, braces, teeth whitening, veneers, dental bonding, mouth guards, fluoride treatments and the like. For my dentist and her hygienist, not wanting to have the best teeth you can is akin to not wanting to be a better person. They are therefore evangelical in their desire to show me the error of my ways and embrace the dazzling toothed, unlined-skinned me I could be.
This is a light-hearted example of how the anthropological gaze can be used quite effectively to show up something of the invisible aura of the taken for granted, those aspects of social life that are both in plain sight and out of view. In this case it helps us to notice that notions of “health” is never simply the lack of illness. Ideas of good health intersect with notions of morality and beauty, and having good teeth could imply something about your character, even your worthiness as a human being. I’m reminded of discussions of obesity, where notions of health, aesthetics, class and morality are hard to disentangle from each other.
I was recently working on a multidisciplinary project that had been written by an academic working in marketing. The team was made up of academics with backgrounds in marketing, economics, sociology and myself with a background in anthropology. Among the objectives of this project was the development of a new methodological approach to reducing cross-cultural response bias in surveys. With a background in anthropology I felt dubious about the likelihood of realistically reducing cross-cultural response bias. The basic line of my thinking was that there must be so many factors that would create some sort of bias, such as age, class, gender, experience … that attempting to rule out one factor that may alter an individuals understanding of the question and choice of appropriate response in a survey may be quite futile. Despite my reservations I came up with the following methodological approach:
In order to reduce cross-cultural bias as far a possible four specific steps will be taken, first to identify where cross-cultural bias arises and then to address these differences in creating a larger scale quantitative survey.
- Focus groups will be used to identify relevant issues.
- Issues raised in the focus groups will be used to construct simple surveys.
- The participants will be given these simple surveys during in-depth interviews and asked to fill them out. Interviews will be used to discuss the issues raised in the focus groups and used in the surveys including some questions that exactly match the survey.
- Data produced from the surveys and the interviews will then be compared to identify where there are gaps between the response given in the interview, and that given in the survey.
This information will then be used to inform creation of the larger scale surveys to be used during the quantitative phase of the research, both in terms of how the questions are phrased, the issues addressed in the survey questions, and the type of response required.
I have to admit that I felt a bit of an anthropological twinge of ownership of the term “culture” when I first read the objective and initially felt a little offended at seeing the term used to bluntly and unquestioningly. Anthropologists tends to question how “culture” is used (see Adam Kuper’s work for a thorough explanation here), as well as their own supposed authority on the matter. And as a result of this mixture of guilty ownership, odd offence and my general feeling of the futility of attempting to reduce cross-cultural bias, I felt a little convinced that approach outlined above is quite useless. So I thought I would bring it to this excellent blog and ask the audience and participants out there for some feedback. Harsh criticism is welcome and I am interested to hear from any disciplinary background.
M.Stockey-Bridge
The Monthly’s online TV channel, SlowTV, is carrying the first annual Distinguished Lecture in Anthropology. Ghassan Hage presenting his talk, ‘Anthropology and the passion of the political.’ As SlowTV describes:
Ghassan Hage is an internationally acclaimed thinker, both as an academic and an arresting public intellectual. In this Inaugural Distinguished Lecture for the Australian Anthropological Society, he looks at the function of anthropology today. He asks, what is the discipline’s potential to help us understand, and be, ‘other than what we are’? Ghassan Hage has held many prestigious visiting professorships including at Harvard University, L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the University of Copenhagen and the American University of Beirut. He is now based at the University of Melbourne. State Library of NSW, December 2009.
Ghassan is charming, and the audio on the TV presentation is better than it was for those of us stuck outside the lecture hall at the State Library of New South Wales. Hage argues that anthropology cannot simply shed its history of studying small-scale, ‘primitive’ societies, that even contemporary anthropology must remain in dialogue with and in touch with these deep traditions in the field.
Prof. Hage’s homepage at the University of Melbourne is here.
You can also find an ‘Up Close’ podcast by Prof. Hage available for download here, and earlier lectures on SlowTV by Prof. Hage, Key Thinkers: Ghassan Hage on Pierre Bourdieu and On Gaza and narcissistic victimhood.
There have been a couple of interesting posts I’ve run across in my attempts to find out what happened at the 2009 AAA conference (see especially Lorenz’s run-down at antropologi.info). These discussions of conferences in general have encouraged me to write something about my own experiences organizing and attending conferences over the past year (see also, Lorenz’s What’s the point of anthropology conferences?, Kerim’s What’s Your Favorite Anthropology Conference? and Strong’s How to attend a conference in a couple hours). I thought I’d add a different perspective; that of the amateur, I’ll-never-do-it-again (dis-)organizer.
I will cross-post this at both Neuroanthropology.net and Culture Matters, something I do not usually do, because I think that it’s worth putting up at both places, and both sites are intimately tied to the content of the post. Apologies if you run across this twice; I won’t make it a habit.
Although I’ve probably been to a few score academic conferences since my first in 1992 (the Society for Ethnomusicology), I’ve never really organized anything substantial until this year, when Daniel and I organized our first Neuroanthropology conference, ‘The Encultured Brain,’ and I agreed to chair the annual meeting of the Australian Anthropological Society (the AAS). I also was on the ‘program committee’ for the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science annual meeting, but they realized I was up to my neck in other planning so didn’t ask too much of me. It was probably a monumental act of stupidity to agree to do this, but at least I get this blog post out of it! (Yes, that’s bitter irony you read…)
Before I get into the good bits though, I have to admit that I do enjoy conferences, although less and less, primarily because traveling always seems to leave me worn out, and my travel distances have gotten egregious now that I’ve moved to Australia. I had a hoot changing into my presentation suit in a cab on the way to the AAAs in DC about a decade ago, arriving half-way through my panel but in time to give my paper after United stranded me overnight in Pittsburgh or somewhere like that (it was snowing around the Great Lakes so, of course, United was taken completely off-guard by this freakish, never-before-seen weather). I once did a single panel at the Guadalajara meeting of LASA, spending the rest of the time sight-seeing, eating really well, and searching unsuccessfully for a second-hand accordion. And I met my wife at a Council on International Educational Exchange conference in Santa Fe, our ice breaker consisting of a slightly off-colour joke during the panel set-up that ONLY an Australian woman would find endearing.
So don’t get me wrong; I’m a big fan of the good conference, but I’ve also been traumatized at academic conferences, especially during the FOUR YEARS when I tried to nail down a permanent position. They can be very lonely, especially for the jobless, and I’ve wandered around the AAAs trying to find someone, anyone, to talk to when everyone else looked like they were having stimulating (or at least drunken) conversations. One of the low points was in the cattle pens for an interview with an institution in NY that had a 5-4 teaching load:
UCL’s anthropology department (that’s Daniel Miller’s department) has announced an MSc in Digital Anthropology — they say the first worldwide. Here is the link and the text of the advertisement:
http://www.ucl. ac.uk/anthropology/digital-anthropology/
The new MSc in Digital Anthropology- -begun in the Autumn of 2009–is well positioned for becoming a world leader in the training of researchers in the social and cultural dimensions of information technologies and digital media.
Digital technologies have become ubiquitous. From Facebook, Youtube and Flickr to PowerPoint, Google Earth and Second Life. Museum displays migrate to the internet, family communication in the Diaspora is dominated by new media, artists work with digital films and images.
Anthropology and ethnographic research is fundamental to understanding the local consequences of these innovations, and to create theories that help us acknowledge, understand and engage with them. Today’s students need to become proficient with digital technologies as research and communication tools. Through combining technical skills with appreciation of social effects, students will be trained for further research and involvement in this emergent world.
This MSc (…) brings together three key components in the study of digital culture:
1. Skills training in digital technologies, including our own Digital Lab, from internet and digital film editing to e-curation and digital ethnography.
2. Anthropological theories of virtualism, materiality/ immateriality and digitisation.
3. Understanding the consequences of digital culture through the ethnographic study of its social and regional impact and issues of the digital divide.
The AAA Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC) has published its final report on the Human Terrain System (HTS). Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary:
When ethnographic investigation is determined by military missions, not subject to external review, where data collection occurs in the context of war, integrated into the goals of counterinsurgency, and in a potentially coercive environment – all characteristic factors of the HTS concept and its application – it can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology.
In summary, while we stress that constructive engagement between anthropology and the military is possible, CEAUSSIC suggests that the AAA emphasize the incompatibility of HTS with disciplinary ethics and practice for job seekers and that it further recognize the problem of allowing HTS to define the meaning of “anthropology” within DoD.
The entire report can be read online at http://www.aaanet.org/cmtes/commissions/CEAUSSIC/upload/CEAUSSIC_HTS_Final_Report.pdf.
–L.L. Wynn
