Vale Claude Levi-Strauss

I woke up this morning to read that Claude Levi-Strauss has passed away, aged 100.  As a testament to his stature as a world-shaping thinker, he has received prominent obituaries in newspapers around the world.  This New York Times piece by Edward Rothstein is especially worth a read.

As one wit wrote in the comments to that article, “He will be mythed!”

Inaugural distinguished lecture in anthropology

This year the Australian Anthropological Society has instituted a distinguished public lecture in anthropology to be given by a prominent member of the discipline. Clearly this is an attempt by the society to give anthropology more of a public face in Australia, which I think is definitely a Good Thing.

The inaugural lecture will be given by Ghassan Hage, entitled “The open mind and its enemies: Anthropology and the passion of the political”. Scheduled for 8 December, the lecture will open the events surrounding the AAS annual conference 9-11 December, proudly hosted by us at Macquarie.

Details: (AAS lecture flyer)

Ghassan Hage is an internationally acclaimed thinker, both as an academic and an arresting public intellectual. He is the author of many works on nationalism, racism, multiculturalism and migration from a comparative perspective. The most well-known is White Nation (2000) examining White experiences of Australian Multiculturalism, and his latest is Waiting (2009). Prof. Hage taught Anthropology at the University of Sydney for fifteen years until 2007. He 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. His provocative, insightful and sometimes moving press and radio discussions have been a valuable part of public life in Australia during the last decade.

Tuesday 8th December 2009
State Library of NSW
Macquarie Street, Sydney
Metcalfe Auditorium
FREE ADMISSION
Program:
6pm Refreshments will be served
6.30 – 7.15 Lecture
7.15 – 7.45 Questions from audience
8pm Finish

Please Visit www.aas.asn.au for further information

First Australian Arab Film Festival

I have just received some information about the first national tour of the Arab Film Festival in Australia.  The Festival opens with the Egyptian film, Eye of the Sun, at Dendy Opera Quays Sydney on 1 November.  The Festival contains a program of six films and will tour around Australian cities between 1-29 November.  For more details see the official website http://arabfilmfestival.com.au/

Polanski and the cultural defense

I was intrigued to find  out from today’s New York Times (Michael Cieply, “In Polanski case, a time warp”) that a report by two probation officers who, in 1977, made a recommendation against a longer gaol term (as compared to the 48 days  he got) in Polanski’s case of unlawful sex with a 13-year-old, they made the argument that while foreign filmmakers “enrich[ed] the community with their presence, they have brought with them the manners and mores of their native lands, which in rare instances have been at variance with those of their adoptive land.” Implicitly, they were making a cultural argument in favour of a lenient sentence.

These days, the cultural defense is often used in sex crime cases of non-European migrants (it is rarely successful in Europe, more often so in the U.S.), and it tends to be forgotten that thirty years ago it was applied to South and East Europeans. Overall, cultural arguments in such cases have become more explicitly articulated, both by defense and prosecution (and especially in public debates). At the same time, attitudes towards child-rearing, the agency of children and the adult-child relationship, and the biological versus moral determination of sexual behaviour have changed in complex ways. These days, children are seen as being endowed with more rights, yet, as the article points out, they are given less voice in legal deliberations because of the assumption that they must be protected. It seems that the biopolitics of childhood has become more strongly entrenched because it is harder to find an interpretive framework for the ambiguities of individual cases (that is, the difficult questions of free will and choice) when they involve individuals coming from different societies, as they increasingly do. It seems that the most successful weapon to deploy against the schematicism of this biopolitics is an equally schematic politics of culture. Thus, in a case reported by Alison Dundes Renteln in her book The Cultural Defense, an Afghan father in the U.S. was put on trial for kissing his infant son’s penis. He would have likely faced a harsher sentence than Polanski had the defense not mobilised an anthropologist to testify that such behaviour was a culturally appropriate expression of affection.

Teaching through the body (c.f. Mauss)

My little brother just started medical school (golly!  I still remember changing his diaper!) and he has been telling me about some of his most exciting lectures.  I asked him to tell me more about what he thought made for a great lecture, because I’m always trying to figure out how to improve my own lecturing skills, and here’s a little anecdote he told me:

[One teacher] gave us a great series of lectures on the pelvis.  He got a round of applause for his demonstration of the female perineum.  He had one student squat down on the ground, representing the bladder.  Another student stood just behind him in a ski-jumper position, representing the uterus with his bent over body body and the ovaries with his backwards-protruding and slightly drooping hands.  The teacher then stood behind both of them and thrust his hands up into the air exclaiming: “I am the rectum!”  I will never forget the relative position of the female pelvic organs.

A couple of things strike me about this.  First of all, it demonstrates the wisdom of some advice I once got from a great teaching mentor, Larry Rosen, which is that you direct your humor against yourself, not students.  This teacher didn’t make a student be the rectum; he took that role on himself.

Second, it’s amazing how memorable you can make something by teaching through embodied experiences.  I try to do this in my own classes by getting the students physically involved in lecture concepts — for a lecture on the placebo effect, for example, I do a blind wine tasting of red and white wines at room temperature to make the point that our sensory experiences are heavily influenced by our expectations.

However, I’m not sure whether the reason this bodily demonstration of the female pelvic organs was so memorable just because it entailed bodily movement or if it’s because it was so unexpected, unusual, and humorous.  I mean, if medical lecturers regularly demonstrated the positions of organs in the body by having students contort themselves, maybe it wouldn’t be quite so memorable.  Maybe it’s the novelty and the humorous unexpectedness of your lecturer shouting “I am the rectum!” that is the real trick to this effective demonstration.

It never occurred to me to use physical demonstrations like this to illustrate physiological processes, but I’m going to have to try this next year in Drugs Across Cultures after the lecture on brain neurology and addiction.  So many students get confused about how neurotransmitters work, and I don’t think it helps much that I find it confusing, too, despite the heroic efforts of our psychologist guest lecturer to explain this with pretty colored diagrams.  Next year I think I’ll get her to direct a bunch of students to play the roles of drug molecules and neurons and neurotransmitters and act it out.  “I am cocaine!”

–L.L. Wynn

Human Terrain Team member blog by Ben Wintersteen

Readers familiar with the ongoing discussions on the utilisation of anthropological knowledge and the employment of anthropologists within the Human Terrain System will be familiar with the views of the small band of its most vocal supporters: namely Montgomery McFate, Andrea Jackson and Steve Fondacaro. While these vocal supporters and a number of other program personnel (including, among others, Zenia (Helbig) Tompkins, Marcus Griffin, Brit Damon, and Major Robert Holbert) have expressed their opinions and experiences with the program publicly, the overwhelming tone of analyses of such opinions and  experiences has focused not on their stated experiences but on what their stated experiences belie about the program. Concerns expressed with the HTS largely revolve around the potential of the program to produce effects which are in conflict with anthropological values and ethics.

The views of the anthropologists involved with the HTS have often been censured, derided and ignored on the basis that they are representative of supreme ignorance, immorality and/or naivety. This is likely too simplistic a reading. It is important to acknowledge the diversity of experiences and thoughts of the HTS personnel or else we are subjecting ourselves to a narrow (and potentially flawed) conception of the program and the HTS personnel. In adopting such a narrow conception, we risk distancing ourselves from the actual issues of the program and fighting a war against a phantom of our own creation.

I would thus like to direct your attention to a blog by Ben Wintersteen, a current HTS member. The stated audience of his blog is his friends and family, but as his stated purpose in the program is (at least in part) to critically examine the workings of the HTS from the inside, his blog contains many reflections on his experiences with the program to date (he is currently in week 15 of training). He posts 2 extended blogs per week on his ethical, educational, social, emotional and physical experiences in the program, and often takes the time to compare them to the issues raised against the HTS in the broader disciplinary debate.

Without further ado, here’s the link:

http://www.thoughts.com/blog/browse/keywordSearch/ben%20wintersteen

–Nikki Kuper

Minerva awards announced – no anthropologists funded

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has just announced the winners of the first round of research funded under the Minerva Initiative.  This was a joint process whereby the National Science Foundation (NSF) and DoD determined funding for research on “Social and Behavioral Dimensions of National Security, Conflict and Cooperation” — i.e. social science research deemed of strategic importance to U.S. national security policy.  You can go to the DoD media release for more details, but in case you’re wondering if David Vine’s proposed Minerva research got funded, the answer is no.

There were four topic areas  for the NSF solicitation: authoritarian regimes, the strategic impact of religious and cultural change, terrorist organizations and ideologies, and new dimensions in national security.  17 men were funded, compared to 6 women (1 man and 1 woman were both funded for more than one project).  I did a quick search on the departmental affiliations of each grantee to try to determine disciplinary background, and as far as I can tell, no anthropologists were funded.  The disciplinary breakdown is: 14 political scientists, 6 economists, 3 sociologists, 2 psychologists, 1 linguist, 1 communications studies researcher, and 1 computer scientist were funded.

Of course, what we don’t know is what proposed research projects and disciplines were not funded.

The (national) culture of cultural heritage

Some time ago, MAA alumnus Jesse Dart sent in this article from by Phillip Rothstein on the concept of “cultural property” and the way it has changed in significance since it was introduced by UNESCO in 1954.  Although the article is mainly focused on the impact of the concept on archaeology, there is a lot of interest for anthropologists, too.

Rothstein reviews Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage by James Cuno.  He notes the key argument that while the idea of “cultural property” was introduced in order to protect, retain and make available certain objects, sites, buildings etc as the “cultural heritage of all mankind”, it has instead come to be used in an increasingly parochial sense, to restrict access to and control over objects of cultural significance.

Of particular interest to me was the argument that modern states are increasingly defining themselves as the rightful owners of “cultural property”, even when these claims involve an anachronistic projection of the contemporary state into the past.  From the article:

The idea of cultural property has become a political trump card. At a conference in Athens in March, organized in part by a Unesco intergovernmental committee, the concept expanded even further: “Certain categories of cultural property are irrevocably identified by reference to the cultural context in which they were created (unique and exceptional artworks and monuments, ritual objects, national symbols, ancestral remains, dismembered pieces of outstanding works of art). It is their original context that gives them their authenticity and unique value.”

Those artworks, objects, symbols and relics do not just merit protection; they should be “returned” to their “countries of origin,” the only places, supposedly, where they can be fully appreciated. This has nothing to do with whether they were obtained illicitly or inappropriately.

The countries of origin, of course, are modern states, which are increasingly asserting control, a point emphasized by Mr. Cuno. In 1970 another Unesco agreement said it was “incumbent upon every state” to protect its cultural property. Cultural property — almost by definition beyond the control or disposition of individuals — is linked to the powers of the modern state and its political demands.

These are interesting points to make and it is always worth being reminded of the extent to which we take for granted the claims of nations to be the only legitimate inheritors of cultural property.  Indigenous groups have of course made ground claiming back elements of their heritage, including the remains of ancestors, from distant museums.  But nation states tend to claim heritage based on their territorialising strategies, i.e. where claims to heritage are connected with a defined territory over which exclusive sovereign rights are asserted.

In southern Thailand, where I did my fieldwork, premodern Buddhist sites are used to create a sense of the Thai nation state projected backwards in time.  In an area in which there are different and strongly contested historical sensibilities, between Thai Buddhist and Malay Muslim, this use of cultural heritage is highly political.  Similarly, the current stoush betweeen Thailand and Cambodia over the ownership of a Hindu/Khmer temple, Preah Vihear ( see here for a decent archive of stories about the conflict), illustrates the way claims to cultural heritage and claims to territory are intrinsically linked.  This case also provides an example of the way in which the “universal” UNESCO model of cultural heritage, which admonishes states to protect their heritage “for the benefit of mankind”, may contribute to the parochial claims of states against their rivals.  Indeed, the catalyst for the current crisis was precisely a UNESCO statement which reaffirmed a 1962 ruling of the International Court of Justice  granting Cambodia possession of the site.  (As a side note, a fascinating detail of this case occurred in 1963 when Thailand finally backed down after initially disputing the 1962 ruling. Rather than lowering the Thai flag that had been flying over the temple soldiers dug up the flag pole with the flag still flying, removed it from the site, and reinstalled it at another location in Thailand).

As Benedict Anderson noted, the imagined community of the nation state is imagined to be both sovereign and limited.  Correspondingly, in the national imaginary cultural heritage must also be limited, and sovereignty over it must be exclusive.   According to this zero sum mentality, a gain for one nation must necessarily entail a loss for another.

Revealed! Chinese stores in Hungary are collection points for organ harvesting

In the past few weeks, stories have been circulating on the Hungarian Internet about women disappearing in Chinese shops  and being discovered dead or drugged by relatives in a secret room, either with organs already taken out or in preparation for the harvesting. The women (always women, rescued by a male relative who is a friend of a friend of the author) invariably have their heads shaved (even if it is a kidney that is missing). I have been getting these emails from a friend who gets them from her university classmates, with comments like “Well, if this is true!…” ”I don’t know if it’s true but I’ll forward it”.

The people waking up in a bathtub full of ice with a kidney missing are one of the most popular recent urban myths — so much so that they have figured in well-known anthropological writing, for example by Nancy Scheper-Hughes. But these stories tend to come from exotic foreign lands. Here, however, we have a cross-breed of the story with domestic xenophobia, so that the exotic locale is transported to our midst.

Chinese shops are a ubiquitous phenomenon in Hungary and some other Eastern European countries. They sell cheap clothes and shoes, and in some villages are the only provider of such goods — to some extent heirs of the pre-war Jewish shopkeeper. It is perhaps not far-fetched to see in the organ-harvesting Chinese the updated embodiment of the Jewish blood libel (the use of Gentile children’s blood  in preparing matzoh for passover).

Hungary consistently gets the highest scores in European surveys of xenophobia.

In three days, I will be part of a festive roundtable  in Budapest celebrating “Diversity in the united city.”

American Anthropologist Launches “Public Anthropology Reviews”

American Anthropologist has launched “Public Anthropology Reviews,” a new review section in
 that

will highlight anthropological work principally aimed at non-academic audiences, including websites,
 blogs, white papers, journalistic articles, briefing reports, online videos, and multimedia presentations. The editors will also consider other traditional and innovative mechanisms for communicating anthropological research and concepts outside of academic realms and welcome suggestions.

Submissions for materials to be reviewed in the June 2010 issue of AA are now being accepted. Materials for review, ideas for review essays and inquiries should be sent to the review editors, Melissa Checker (CUNY Queens C), Alaka Wali (Field Museum), and David Vine (American U), at publicanthreviews [at] gmail.com.