Europe’s hierarchy of aliens

A few days ago Jovan wrote about Gabriele Marranci’s blog. When I was in Singapore I had a chat with Gabriele about xenophobia in Italy, and to my surprise he told me that the main xenophobic party, Lega Nord, which is part of the current government,  has recently upgraded Chinese immigrants to being as dangerous as Muslims. I had thought that in the last few years Muslims have become the unchallenged embodiment of the dangerous Other. This does have its flip side, though. At a conference today in Amsterdam I heard a paper by Gargi Bhattacharya denouncing Britain’s criminalization of forced marriage as a step to stigmatize Muslims/South Asians further. But, commenting on her paper, anthropologist Jacob Rigi reminded us that “slavery” (combatting which was one of the rationales for the legislation) really does exist; just look at all those trafficked Chinese. In other words, even those in the academia who are sensitive towards “security talk” about Muslims may not be so critical when the same type of rhetoric crops up with regard to other migrants.

In my native Hungary, the situation is somewhat different. A few years ago, a social worker at Hungary’s single migrant-aid NGO told me how, when the organisation took a group of Afghan children on a trip to the countryside, an unfriendly villager asked: “Why did you bring all this gypsies here?” Told that the children were not Gypsy but Aghan, the man was visibly relieved and said that was okay then.

Today I came across a blog post on the Hungarian subsite of Stormfront a white-supremacist online forum.  The site seems to be populated by members from Hungary, other Eastern European countries, and ethnic Hungarians abroad (including North America).  Here is what the post, by Corvinus, said:

Here is a funny ad, posted at the most chinese-immigrant centers such as chinese food markets and such:

It says:

Dear Chinese!
For every 10 gypsies you kill , you get a greencard in exchange!

Corvinus’ signature says: “We are all Palestinians right now.” This did not seem to bother Norum, from Latvia, who posted the following response:

Chinese – “bad”
Gypsies – “worse”
Muslims – “worst”

 Most respondents from Eastern Europe seemed to agree that Chinese, though bad, were nonetheless better than Gypsies and Muslims. But a member who identified his location as “Europe – Catalonia – Spain” disagreed:

Chinese is a closed community but this reason doesn’t mean that they aren’t dangerous.  (…) Though they work silently they ruin our economy (I speak about my country) with their disloyal competence [competition] (because their prices are very low) and our local companies cannot do anything against them. In zone manufacturer near to my house there are dozens of stores that they dedicate to the manufacture of clothes and shoes while our merchants lose money or have to close the business. They were never mixing with us, but their economic activities are harmful to us. And if they come in mass, with the democratic system, they were finishing deciding for us. They are destroying our economy from the inside.

Every immigration is bad and the silent immigration is the worst.

Resentment of Chinese traders seems to be greater in Spain and Italy than elsewhere, as there they are successfully competing with the existing local garment and shoe industries. More broadly, I wonder if the recession, besides increasing xenophobia overall, will shift it towards migrants who are seen as economically successful, including Chinese as well as skilled white(-collar) migrants (witness the demonstrations against Italian workers today in England and Wales). Although I don’t think it will be easy to dislodge Muslims and Gypsies from the seat of the top threat, concerns about cultural norms may for a while be overshadowed by economic competition. It may also increase antisemitism, which has a difficult relationship with Islamophobia on the extreme right (especially in Eastern Europe).

If Corvinus is right and this sticker has really been put up around Chinese shops in Hungary, I wonder about reactions by Chinese. Anti-Gypsy prejudice is quite widespread among them, and some may feel vindicated.

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.

Best of Anthropology Blogging 2008

In my other identity as co-convenor of Neuroanthropology.net, I’m involved in trying to put together a year-end, ‘best of the anthro-blogoscape’ for 2008. For the announcement, just surf over to Best of Anthropology Blogging 2008: Call for Submissions. We’re looking for blog writers to submit their ‘most popular’ post — the one that caused the most traffic — and the post or posts that they like the best of their work for the year.

All submissions will be accepted; we’re more of an anthology than a contest. And feel free to nominate someone else’s work as well. The goal is to attract some people to check out what’s happening in anthropology who might not otherwise come our way in the virtual landscape.

Engaged skepticism about Minerva

American Anthropological Association president Setha Low recently held a conference call with media reps to discuss the AAA’s position on Minerva developments.  The major development is the recently announced partnership between the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to provide rigorous academic review of the grant applications submitted for Minerva funding (currently there’s $50 million to be allocated over 5 years). Causal relationships are hard to pinpoint, but it does look like the DoD-NSF partnership may be at least partly the result of Low’s and the AAA’s early critique of the Minerva announcement, to the effect that social science proposals should be peer reviewed by scholars outside of the military. (Other anthropologists, like Hugh Gusterson, have also voiced skepticism.)

I had promised to listen in on the 4am (Sydney time) conference call, but I missed it because of a sick kid, so I can’t report back here on the call itself, but I can say that it’s been picked up in a couple of places, and the reporting hasn’t been altogether accurate — for example, Wired reported that Low’s skepticism was directed towards the Human Terrain System, when she was actually talking about Minerva, and the AAA PR person Damon Dozier has responded with a letter of correction (pasted at the bottom of this post because I can’t find where it’s been published — thanks to Kerry Fosher for sending this).

The issue was also covered in the Washington Post which quotes American University anthropologist David Vine as being skeptical, like so many others, about U.S. military funding for social science research. The argument in favor of Minerva is that this is an opportunity to direct foreign policy thinking in completely new ways.  The argument against is that research selected for funding by the military will only answer and ask certain questions, and that this funding influence will skew the very questions that we social scientists think to ask.

But according to the Washington Post article, Vine proposes doing something to test which of these perspectives will more accurately characterize which direction the influence will run between Minerva and academia:

Video contest: intercultural dialogue

Well, after something of a hiatus I intend to get more active with the posting from now on.

First of all, here is an announcement I just noticed on the Intersections blog about an online video competition with the theme “Intercultural Dialogue”.  Perhaps there are some young visual anthropologists who would like to put in an entry.

Xenoclipse, the group hosting the competition, can be accessed here.

Jovan Maud

“I luv a man in a uniform” blog disappears

This morning I was trying to explain to an engineer-physicist all about the Human Terrain System.  That got me to explaining about the blog, “iluvamaninauniform.blogspot.com.”   The nom de plume of the blog is “Pentagon Diva” but the author was recently named as Montgomery McFate, as Open Anthropology, Savage Minds, and In Harmonium reported last week.

But when I went there to show him, the blog was gone!  It’s been taken down.  I wish I’d made some copies of the text (fortunately there are a few choice excerpts on Open Anthropology and In Harmonium).

“Never fear!” I proclaimed to the engineer-physicist (let’s call him Dave).  “I know a site that archives web pages.” 

AAA annual meeting online submissions (and where are those blogs?)

The American Anthropological Association just sent me an e-mail announcing that online submissions and registration for the 2008 annual meeting is now available on their website. It also says:

Notice something new? The AAA has recently launched a redesigned website. The website links to three new blogs: Anthropology News, AAA Public Affairs and AAA Human Rights. Let us know what you think about the site by completing our three-minute web survey.

I like to think of myself as not completely Internet illiterate, since I’ve put up a few websites in my day*, but I swear it took me about 20 minutes to find the blogs by navigating through their website. How do they expect anyone to find the blogs when the only links to them are embedded several layers deep within the website? Aside from that clue, I won’t tell you how to find it — any sleuths amongst you who can go searching and report back here on how long it took you to find the blogs?

corporate anthropology = anthropologists working for the military?

Over at Savage Minds there is a small but fierce exchange of comments about the merits of corporate anthropology (two commentators divide over whether the appropriate analogy is corporate=military or corporate=academia).  Since we here at Macquarie like to think about applied anthropology, maybe some of our students and readers of Culture Matters would like to go over there and weigh in.  Preferably with something a little more thoughtful than name-calling (e.g. “reductive dumbass”).

Open access tools

Over at Savage Minds, Rex has just posted an incredibly useful piece on the process he went through to negotiate open access rights to an article that he published with the journal Games and Culture. He describes all of the tools that are available for finding out the policy of each journal regarding open access and links to sites that provide tools for authors to write addenda to the copyright contracts they sign with journals. He also reminds us all to get off our butts and send our pre-print publications, theses, dissertations, etc. to the Mana’o open access repository.
L.L. Wynn

American Anthropology Association issues Human Terrain System resolution

The American Anthropology Association has released a statement of resolution by the Executive Board on the Human Terrain System (HTS) Project. The statement, posted online, is dated October 31, 2007 (though I just received the e-mail from the AAA announcing the resolution today, and as as far as I can tell from the metadata on the website, it was only posted online November 7, 2007).

The resolution is brief and it concerns itself almost exclusively with ethics, not with the methodological trouble of working for the military in a war zone (which Greg has discussed here on Culture Matters). The resolution identifies three key areas of ethical trouble that potentially puts anthropologists involved with the HTS at odds with the AAA code of ethics:

(1) the difficulty of distinguishing between anthropologists and the military “places a significant constraint on [anthropologists'] ability to fulfill their ethical responsibility…to disclose who they are and what they are doing”;

(2) the imperative of doing no harm to the people being studied cannot be assured when anthropologists are reporting on these people to the dominant military power; and

(3) the ethical imperative of voluntary informed consent is compromised when anthropologists are working for the military in a war zone.

It also notes that (4) involvement of anthropologists with the HTS project puts at risk other non-HTS anthropologists — and the people they study — all over the world.

It concludes,

“Thus the Executive Board expresses its disapproval of the HTS program.

“In the context of a war that is widely recognized as a denial of human rights and based on faulty intelligence and undemocratic principles, the Executive Board sees the HTS project as a problematic application of anthropological expertise, most specifically on ethical grounds.”

The full text of the resolution can be read here.

The AAA has also created a blog where members can comment on the Executive Board Statement and related issues at http://aaanewsinfo.blogspot.com/. However, as far as I can tell, one need not identify as a dues-paid member of the AAA to comment.

While the AAA statement is primarily about ethics, many of the comments posted on the blog grapple with the complicated entanglement of ethics and methodology. Some, for example, doubt whether an ‘applied anthropology’ can call itself anthropology when it is in the employ of an interested institution. For example, Hugh Jarvis from the University at Buffalo argues that, “Surely to achieve any credibility or scientific objectivity, anthropologists need to be independent observers.” Others profess deep disappointment with the resolution’s seeming rejection of any anthropological cooperation with imperial power on the grounds that, as long as harm is being done somewhere, anthropologists have a duty to try to minimize that harm, if necessary by working for the powers that be. Some criticize the AAA for not going far enough in expressing only “disapproval” and not “condemnation”; others criticize the AAA for taking a position on the war itself.

As of this writing, there are only 14 comments, but I expect we’ll see that explode in the coming weeks, and the matter of anthropology at war is bound to dominate the annual meeting of the AAA later this month. I’ll be attending and I’ll write about it on this blog, so stay tuned.

L.L. Wynn