Epic teaching stuff-ups

This week I made the most massive error I have made to date as a teacher.  I run a large first year class called Drugs Across Cultures with about 400 students in it.  On Monday we had the mid-semester multiple choice exam scheduled that’s worth 20% of their grade.  The students had all come in, sat down, and I had given the last instructions for how to hand in the quiz when they were done.  Then I handed out the quiz.  I’d passed out about 100 of the question sheets when someone raised her hand and said, “Umm, why are some of the questions highlighted in bold?”

Yes, that’s right, I printed out 400 question sheets with the correct answers in bold.

I had to cancel the whole quiz, write another one, and have them all take it again (online this time).

I was reflecting on my colossal stupidity with a colleague who told me this great story about another teaching stuff-up.  A man he knew was teaching a large undergraduate class on biological anthropology.  The mother of one of his students was a primatologist and had sent him a film of someone’s field research on gorillas.  He decided to use it in class but hadn’t reviewed it before-hand — it was completely unscreened.  So he went to class and put on the film.  It started with two male gorillas approaching each other, and everyone expected to see a battle for dominance.  But instead, one of the gorillas lied down and the other started performing fellatio on it.  According to my colleague, the gorilla ejaculated spectacularly all over the other gorilla’s face.

Now that’s another good story about giving students a bit more than they are expecting!  I just did a google search for “gorilla film homosexual fellatio” and got to this result, a 2005 Guardian UK article asking “can animals be homosexual?” which says, “There’s a video some researchers made of male bachelor gorillas engaging in fellatio, but it still hasn’t been shown in the US.”  Oh yes it has!

Anyone else have any good stories of epic  blunders they’ve made in their teaching?  Or of mistakes that your teachers have made?

–L.L. Wynn

Making ethics training ethnography-friendly

I’ve been meaning to write about an ethics project I’ve been working on, and now someone else has beaten me to it! Serves me right for neglecting poor Culture Matters for three weeks. I’ll tell you about the project and then I’ll tell you who has scooped me with a critique of my own website.

It all started out because I teach a couple of methods classes and I ask my students to do their own independent research projects. This requires a bit of careful work to secure ethics clearance with our Human Research Ethics Committee. Another time I’ll write about that what that entails. Here I want to describe my solution for giving the students training in research ethics. It became apparent to me that our ethics committee would be more comfortable about the idea of undergraduate students launching into their own fieldwork if they were sure that they’d been trained in research ethics, so I had the idea that I could develop a set curricula to use with every class that I want to send “into the field.”

My inspiration, and nemesis, was the U.S. NIH ethics training module. I had to take it when I was a graduate student, and so I had only dim recollections of what it covered. My first thought was that I could use it as a starting point for my students, but when I went back to look at it, I was shocked at how inappropriate it was for training anthropologists in the ethical dilemmas of ethnographic fieldwork. Like most international ethics codes, its basic assumptions about research are grounded in a model of a clinical (mostly biomedical) encounter. Plus it was full of U.S. regulatory code. Ad nauseum.

A screen capture from the NIH training module covering the concept of “equipoise.” I gotta say, I never heard of this word before.

So at first I thought, OK, it’s a government document so they would probably give me permission to adapt it for my own non-profit, educational use. I’ll just change a few things around, drop every mention of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and replace it with a reference to the Australian National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research, mention “ethnography” a few times, and add some stuff about Australian research.

But the more I played around with the idea, the more I thought it needed something completely new.

April Fools… and overheard: things only an anthro would say

A couple of quick things.  First, did anybody else get pranked by the AAA’s April Fools Day joke?  Unfortunately, it seems like it wasn’t a deliberate joke.  The AAA website said clearly in several places that the call for papers would end April 1st, 5pm EST.  But when I went to put in my abstract at about 2am on April 1st, it got rejected saying that the call for papers had closed at midnight!  Even though the very same page that was telling me that the call for papers had closed also said that the deadline was 5pm. I called the number listed at the bottom of the page and a very annoyed-sounding call service guy (who basically just takes messages all night long for the AAA — I was rather surprised that they had something like this!) said, “No ma’am, this is not a joke.  I do not have time for jokes.”

So a U.S.-based colleague who was organizing our panel called the AAA first thing in the morning.  Some guy lectured to her about how the deadline was midnight.  After she patiently explained, he said he’d call her back.  I reckon they must have gotten a lot of pissed off calls because a few hours later, the deadline had been extended to 11:59 pm on April 1st.

Tidbit #2: Overheard. An e-mail came around this week from an old friend to a group of former classmates. Rachel was wondering which digital tape recorder she should buy for an upcoming stint of fieldwork.  She wrote,

A while back, Sarah recommended the Edirol R-9, which I think she had just bought at the time but hadn’t yet used. I’m wondering if the rest of you have recommendations for recorders you have used, or if Sarah would report to the rest of us how she liked it.

Sarah responded,

I did like the Edirol.  A lot.  It is very very easy to use, I didn’t get confused and accidentally have the thing on standby when I thought it was recording, as happened when I used my ipod to record interviews, and the quality is good.  My only complaint is that the battery door thingie is very tricky and I would imagine it is very easy to accidentally snap off, which would make the machine unusable.  But I was just careful with it, and never had a problem, though if you record in the dark (evening music performances, exorcisms, that kind of thing) and have to change batteries quickly it could be tricky.

Don’t you love it?  “Evening music performances, exorcisms, that kind of thing” — something that only an anthropologist would say!  When we pointed that out to Sarah, she said,

I actually did encounter this situation, though for the most part those settings, the trance/exorcisms were relatively well lit, except when the electricity went out.

–L.L. Wynn

Indian dance / anthropology at the Art Gallery of NSW

For those of you who are in the vicinity of Sydney, the Head of Macquarie University’s Anthropology Department, Dr. Kalpana Ram, has been invited by the Art Gallery of NSW to interview artists whose collaboration ‘Rasa Unmasked’ is being presented at Sydney Opera House 13-15 March.  It’s exciting to see the work of an anthropologist being highlighted in this way in a public art space.  Details below:

- Artist discussion: Emotion and South Asian performing arts.
- Wednesday 11 March 5.30-6.30pm
- Centenary Auditorium, Art Gallery of New South Wales
- How has the expression of rasa adapted as Indian arts move across cultures? Join the creators and performers of Rasa Unmasked, a Casula Powerhouse and Sydney Opera House Studio Theatre production for a practitioners’ view on the expression of emotion. Anadavalli, artistic director Lingalayam Dance Company, Dr Alex Dea, composer and ethnomusicologist and Ramil Ibrahim, artistic director Sutra Dance Theatre , Malaysia are in conversation with Dr Kalpana Ram, Anthropology, Macquarie University.

Reviews of Pyramids and Nightclubs: gracefully written, academically constipated

I haven’t made much of an effort to talk up my own book, Pyramids and Nightclubs, which was published at the end of 2007.  I do mention it whenever I can, and my colleagues will all confirm that they are totally sick of me boasting about how I got the phrase “sex orgies” into the subtitle, but I haven’t written here in Culture Matters about the writing and publishing process, even though I keep meaning to get around to it.  I think maybe that’s because by the time you get a book published, you’re pretty sick of the whole thing — I must have written 30 versions of that book — and it’s hard to make the effort to do the PR legwork that you really should do to promote your book.

But I’ve been thinking about Pyramids and Nightclubs recently because I’m mentally working on my next book (thinking about it in the shower is work, right?) and trying to figure out what sort of audience I want to write for.

Pyramids and Nightclubs is a version of my 2003 dissertation.  Anyone who knows me knows that I have a casual style in both speech and writing — in my opinion, one of the great virtues of Michael Taussig’s writing is his liberal use of contractions — and my dissertation was no exception.  (You don’t want to know how many errors there were in the bibliography.) But for the book manuscript (aside from fixing all those errors), I tried to make my writing even more informal, with the goal of reaching a wide audience.  I wrote a chatty preface about my own experiences in the Arab world that led to my decision to work on that particular research project, and I pared down the literature review considerably and embedded it within a discussion of what I and my fellow grad students were reading at the time.  So, for example, instead of just citing Tsing’s In the Realm of the Diamond Queen, I wrote about how I thought that book was the bee’s knees, and how writing about mobility was the cutting edge of anthropology, only to return from the field to realize that everyone was writing about mobility and travel, and to have my dissertation advisor remind me that it was nothing new: Levi-Strauss had scooped the whole hybridity/mobility genre a half century ago with Tristes Tropiques.

Oh, and following Larry Rosen’s advice, I gave my chapters snappy titles.  Whereas chapters of the dissertation were titled “Arab tourism part I” and “Arab tourism part II” (catchy!), the equivalent chapters in the book were “Transnational dating” and “Sex orgies, a marauding prince, and other rumors about Gulf tourism.”

The result was maybe a more accessible book, but possibly also a schizophrenic one. Now I’m seeing the results, as reviews start to trickle in.  So far, academics have mostly been generous.  James Jankowski reviewed the book for the Middle East Journal, and he wrote that

The sprawling title of this work is appropriate; it is a sprawling book.  Yet it is not unstructured.  Its main focus, a comparison of the differing nature of Western and Arab tourism in Egypt and how contact with each group contributes to the Egyptian sense of national identity is original in conception and by and large well executed in practice.  It is also an enjoyable book: the work’s personal tone, its reliance on the vivid narration of Egyptian experiences and of popular opinion as gathered in interviews, and its lavish use of photographs, all contribute to making the work an evocative portrait of contemporary Egypt.

So far, anthropologists have also been kind; the book was named the Leeds Honor Book by SUNTA (Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology), and Robert Rotenberg described it in with superlatives that even *I* wouldn’t use if I were writing an anonymous review of my own book on Amazon:

Gracefully written and theoretically astute, Pyramids and Nightclubs is an extraordinary ethnography… Multi-layered and fabulously textured, the book weaves meticulous ethnographic accounts of cross-cultural encounters with history, images and the anthropologist’s own experiences.

Sounds good, right?  So, speaking of Amazon, how has the general reader taken my attempts to write accessibly?  They’re somewhat less impressed.  Here’s a take from an Amazon.co.uk reviewer:

Unfortunately Wynn’s frequently entertaining text makes for frequent heavy reading because although it is presented as a ‘book’, in reality it is rather obviously still only a slightly retouched innocent and endearing university doctoral thesis by a serious young Texan (?) lady…. In fact the book sometimes suffers from a rather academically constipated style, formally repeating the same things ad nauseam, acceptable perhaps in a doctoral thesis but not in a book with the catchy title and the “bestseller” subtitle she or her editor has chosen.

He ends by judging it a “worthwhile read.”  Four stars!

So what I’m trying to decide is: just how academically constipated will my next book be?

–L.L. Wynn

A new anthropology ethics scandal (?)

The Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca (UNOSJO), an Indigenous umbrella group, has issued a press release condemning the American Geographical Society’s Bowman Expedition, “México Indígena.”  (Below I’ve pasted this press release, and following that, the text of the AGS description of the Bowman Expedition’s “México Indígena” project, which refutes many of the UNOSJO charges.)

The first charge is that one of the AGS researchers, University of Kansas’s  Peter Herlihy,  failed to disclose the fact that his research was partially funded by the U.S. military, specifically the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) of the United States Army. It also claims that Herlihy failed to disclose the participation of Radiance Technologies, “a company that specializes in arms development and military intelligence.”

Another ethics charge is a novel variation on accusations that international researchers exploit Indigenous cultural and intellectual property: they accuse the project of “geopiracy.”

They also claim that the mapping data collected by the project is fed into “a global database that forms an integral part of the Human Terrain System (HTS), a United States Army counterinsurgency strategy designed by FMSO and applied within indigenous communities, among others.”

AGS refutes  the association with HTS, but one thing that seems clear from this project is that one of the 5 main concerns expressed by the American Anthropological Association about the HTS, namely its prediction that HTS would taint anthropologists and their informants worldwide, seems to be coming true.

–L.L. Wynn (pasted press releases below)

Top 100 anthropology blogs

Catching up on some messages that have been gathering dust in my drafts list.  It’s really shocking how many posts I begin but the let languish!

Anyway, a while ago Kelly Sonara was kind enough to let us know that Online Universities.com have put together a list of the “top 100 anthropology blogs“. My first reaction was, “Wow, there are more than 100 anthropology blogs out there?”  Impressive.  The list is testament to the vibrancy of anthropology blogging.

The blogs are divided up into a number of categories, with Culture Matters appearing in the “social and cultural” section.  Greg’s other effort, Neuroanthropology appears in the “biological and evolutionary” category, though I’m sure he would challenge such an easy separation of the “biological” from the “cultural”.

The website provides a good starting point for those who are interested in exploring the (very healthy) world of anthropology blogging.

Polyglot Perspectives: giving prominence to non-English anthropology

In light of Third Tone Devil’s post about anthropology in The Netherlands, I wanted to draw attention to an initiative by Anthropological Quarterly to expose the English speaking world to more anthropology from the non-English speaking world. Despite anthropology’s enduring engagement with cultural difference and goal of studying the full breadth of human experience, it is remarkable how separate national and language-based traditions remain within the discipline. One of the consequences of this is for English-speaking anthropologists to assume that the history, debates and anxieties of English-language anthropology are those of the discipline of anthropology more generally.  Any attempt to create more linkages between different national and language-based boundaries should help to give a better sense of the true breadth of anthropological enquiry and should help to show the English-language traditions as one group among many.

Here is the message that has been circulated by Prof. Michael Herzfeld, “Editor at Large” for Polyglot Perspectives:

In Polyglot Perspectives, scholars will present essays on books written in languages other than English. Such languages may include those in which there is a long tradition of anthropological scholarship, but we hope to give particular emphasis to less widely used languages in which a nascent anthropology is already making important contributions that may be invisible to the larger international community.

In launching this new section, we acknowledge that, in many ways, the English language has been allowed to define the anthropological mainstream.  We also acknowledge that in many disciplines, English has become the language of scholarship in countries where English is not the locally dominant language.  Anthropology, however, is both a cosmopolitan discipline and one that seeks to recognize and study politically less powerful cultures and languages.

AQ wishes to apply to our collegial relations the same ethic that we bring to our fieldwork.  With Polyglot Perspectives, Anthropological Quarterly seeks a more just balance while also expanding the scope of the journal’s content.  We encourage scholars familiar with a recent work in a language other than English to submit a brief proposal (1-2 single-spaced pages), outlining the work’s significance for an international audience. If the potential contributor has already been involved in the production of the work (for example, as a consultant or commentator), we see no conflict of interest: we are looking less for reviews than for informed presentations that are original, substantive, provocative, and analytically powerful.  All proposals should be sent to Michael Herzfeld at herzfeld [at] wjh.harvard.edu or +1-801-457-0717 (fax).  Please do not send a completed manuscript in the first instance.

Call for papers: “Beauty and Health”

Call for papers – Medische Antropologie, Dutch journal of medical anthropology – “Beauty and Health”
Please submit papers to Alex Edmonds at a.b.edmonds@uva.nl by January 30

Beauty and health. In most societies beauty can be seen as a sign of health, presenting the body as the materialization of wealth and power. But as anthropologists we are also familiar with an astonishing range of aesthetic ideals and body modification procedures that are violent and harmful to the body. The Western beauty ideal of a slim and youthful body leads to practices that carry their own health risks, ranging from severe dieting to cosmetic surgery. And then there is the growing importance of the ‘aesthetic of health’, the idea that the continuous improvement of the body is possible and desirable. Beauty can be both a sign of health and an invitation to endanger it. ‘Beauty and health’ in its many varieties, is a theme that prompts reflection from several focus points, not only anthropological, but also psychological, medical, sociobiological and historical.

Authentic Dubai

Last week I was invited to Dubai to participate at a German-Arab Dialogue, organised by the German Foreign Ministry. As my life for the past year has fully belonged to betterplace.org, a not-for-profit marketplace for social initiative, I feel lucky to be still asked to contribute my anthropological perspective to such official gatherings were anthropologists (at least in the German speaking world) are rarely present.

The topic of the gathering was cultural globalisation, especially how it is affecting the Arab region and whether Dubai’s „higher, bigger, better“ brand, including signature architecture and the promise of a five-star lifestyle seeking to eliminate real world condition, is a valid model for the region to aspire to. (One of the Dialogue participants, Prof. Ali A. Alraouf has called this process Dubanization and described how other Arab cities – in the UAE (such as the new museum buildings in Abu Dhabi), in Bahrain (Durrat Al Bahrain), Saudia Arabia (King Abdullah Economic City) or Egypt (Serrenia) – are emulating the Dubai model.) Yet, with the economic crisis hitting the region, this process will probably drastically slow down or even come to a stopp – indicating the volatility of a development model utterly based on growth (Dubai has the worst ecological footprint of all cities worldwide).

A number of things struck me during our four day stay. Firstly, the immense diversity of voices. Set up as a German-Arab dialogue, there was no unity of voices, neither within the Arab nor the German delegation. The scholars, journalists and politicans from the UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Palestine, Egypt or Syria came not only from vastly different national perspectives, but many were obviously fully feldged cosmopolitans, having studied in the U.K. (as one of the highly articulate young Emerati representatives), or living abroad (such as my co-Berliner, the Palestinian author Hassan Khader, who explicitly refused to be identified in broad categories such as “Arab“ or „Western“ intellectual). They all confirmed once more, that categories constantly used  in the media, such as „Arabs“ or „Muslims“, are by themselves rather meaningless. And dangerous, as they promote the idea that seperate civilizations exist. (There is a good recent article by Olivier Roy in the NYT, urging Obama to be a „post-civilizational president“ and not following through with his idea of convening a conference of Muslim leaders around the world within his first year in office).

The voices of the German participants were also highly heterogenous. Some of them displayed an only thinly disguised disdain for the host city, bemoaning its artificiality and consumption-orientedness, while others showed a great curiousity about the future of the „Dubai experiment“.

In many of these discussions, I felt that anthropology really had something to offer: first of all, we can ground highly abstract and vague statements, for example about „the loss of cultural identity“ (a big topic in the Dubai-media, as only approx. 15% of the population is of „local“ Emirati origin and has citizenship, leading to an “I love the Emirates” campaign) or cultural homogenization and Americanization by introducing concrete examples and case-studies. For someone who knows the ethnographic literature about globalisation, it is surprising, how old insights such as the one, that global goods and ideas are appropriated and acquire diverse meanings locally, are still seen as provocative. (I received highly emotional responses after bringing up James Watsons book on McDonalds in East Asia. And, many thanks to you, Lisa, for supplying me with additional material on the use of “tradition” in the region).

In a similar vain, the anthropological research which shows migrant workers (in Dubai alone there are about 500.000 low-paid workers, mainly from South Asia) to be not only victims, but strategic, transnational actors, challenged the notion of some of my conference collegues, who thought the fate of 1960s turkish „guest workers“ in Germany paralleled those of contemporary construction workers in Dubai. (That the latters situation is far from good can be seen in Hadi Ghaemi’s report Building Towers, Cheating Workers. Still, stereotypical ideas about poor and passive workers, who are little better than slaves don’t do justice to them either.)

What especially provoked me were the statements critizising Dubais lack of „authenticity“ and its superficial preoccupation with consumption. The disdain for commodification among many conference participants (regardless of origin) was so great, that many refused to visit one of the many shopping malls, while at the same time bemoaning that they didn’t see any public places for people to get together. My suggestion, that shopping malls might be just those places (and that people did many things there besides shopping), was met with scepticism.

Looking at Dubai, I was reminded of my research with Pál in China. Here we had encountered, again and again, the idea that commodification was good and new was better than old. In the city of Songpan (in northern Sichuan), we witnessed how the organically grown town was being demolished to be replaced by a new „old city“, with a large parking lot for tour buses, illuminated, blue plastic palm trees etc. in order to appeal to Chinese mass tourists, according to whom only places which have been „developed“ are worth a visit.

Thus in my talk I argued for a fresh look at Dubais attitude to commodification and authenticity. Regarding the latter, we need to question the relevance of this concept which originated in 19. Century Western Europe, at a time when the status of elites was threatened by industrialisation, i.e. the fact that suddenly many goods previously limited to the upper classes, were now mass-produced and available to a wide range of social classes. „Authenticity“ was introduced to establish new distinctions between the elite and the rest. Why should a concept, so particular to a time and social scene, be used unreflexively amongst contemporary intellectuals to judge a place like Dubai? For me it makes much more sense to use an alternative definition of authenticity, one firstly coined (I believe) by Danny Miller: let’s think of authenticity not as something to do with origin, but with results! Thus, an authentic practice would be one, which is successfully appropriated by the population in question. But what does „successfully appropriated“ mean? How about: something is successfully appropriated when it offers an answer to relevant questions a society asks itself? Or even loftier: when it increases the range of options for people, to lead the kind of life which they themselves deem good, just and beautiful. According to this new definition the experiment that is Dubai – from the perspective of city planning, life-style and citizenship – may well turn out to be authentic.