Photo by grizzlybrice. Copyright Creative Commons, some rights reserved.

At a committee meeting a couple of months ago, a colleague from History declared that the men in the department were going to be wearing ties to try to boost student feedback, because “students really respond positively to that.” I laughed, thinking that he was joking. He looked at me and said earnestly, “No, I’m serious. Wearing a tie is a way of saying to students that we respect them.”

I gaped and said, “In my discipline, it’s a way of saying to students, ‘I’m not a real anthropologist.’”

Now I have to take that back and apologize to my fine colleague in the Anthropology Department, Greg Downey, who generally wears suits to teach his classes and is in fact a real anthropologist.  But Greg is definitely the exception rather than the rule; in all my history as a student and now teacher of anthropology, he’s the only person I know who regularly wears suits and ties when he doesn’t have a meeting with the dean.

The fashion aesthetic of anthropologists was part of my original attraction to the discipline. I first started out college at Parsons School of Design in New York, where my fellow fashion design students all wore ridiculously trendy clothes — designer, when they could afford it (or buy it cheap at a sample sale), and homemade when they couldn’t.  I still vividly remember the lederhosen that a classmate made out of fake fur one Christmas. (No kidding. Pre-Bruno.) It was all fabulous, and it intimidated me and exhausted me trying to keep up, and I started fantasizing about becoming an anthropologist so I could wear dumpy hemp clothing and ethnic jewelry.

I’m living the dream! (Minus the hemp, but I’ve got dumpy and ethnic jewelry down pat.)

Of course, now that I’m an anthropologist, I realize that we have our own sartorial code and fashion police, as Tom Strong wrote about so comically in his satirical analysis of AAA annual meetings on Savage Minds a couple years back.  When I meet another anthropologist who works in the Middle East, I instantly gauge her jewelry: antique silver from Morocco or Yemen?  If she’s wearing El-Ain Gallery then I know she works in Egypt, and if she’s a grad student, I wonder if she had to prostitute herself to be able to afford it.  (I would.)

That’s why I thought my historian colleague’s comment was so funny, because the notion that students only respond positively to a suit and tie seems to completely ignore the range of complex signals that we send to students with our clothes.  An anthropologist who is wearing three shirts and a cardigan on only one arm, which he keeps tugging up to cover the hole in the elbow of the outer shirt, and a pair of glasses that he continually pushes up with his knuckles just before they slide of the end of his nose (fellow Princeton graduates know EXACTLY who I’m talking about), is saying, “I am a THINKER. I do not waste precious synaptic pathways contemplating my fashion choices in the morning.” An anthropologist who works in Egypt and wears Azza Fahmy jewelry signals her connoisseurship of a reflexively self-conscious neo-Orientalist aesthetic, but she is also saying “I don’t buy that cheap shit from the Khan el-Khalili — I’m a local, I know where to get quality stuff in this town.”  An anthropologist who wears a suit and tie signals neither absent-minded professor-ness (which means your colleagues look at you that much harder when you “forget” to attend a committee meeting) nor exotic authenticity.

There aren’t many disciplines that aim to signal local authenticity with their dress, but there are plenty who are happy to signal their devotion to scholarly pursuits by distancing themselves from mainstream corporate fashion sense, so we anthropologists don’t look that much different than philosophers, except maybe for the ethnic jewelry and scarves.  But I notice that there are certain disciplines that are much more likely to wear ties than others: economists and political scientists, for one.  Is it because these disciplines are closer than most to centers of financial and political power so wearing suit and tie is actually how they signal their local exotic authenticity?

–L.L. Wynn

Recently, I read Tom Boellstroff’s book: “Coming of age in second life. An anthropologist explores the virtually human”. The book is an account of two years field work and an anthropological ethnography of avatar life in Second Life. Avatars are virtual personages created and Tom’s avatar was the anthropologist in 2^nd Life, interviewing, observing and, first and foremost, participating in social life.  This resulted in ‘thick description’, useful to understanding social life at Second Life. Tom explained that although it was difficult to tell whether the avatar you were talking to was a man or woman, different persons or human at all, social interaction between avatars in 2^nd Life was ‘real’. Dmitri Williams of the Annenberg school for Communication studied all server logs of 3-D game EverQuest and concluded that gamers are behaving online. Players who live 10 kilometres of each other play five times more intensively than people who live at larger distances (van Ammelrooy, Volkskrant 28 februari 2009).

Increasingly, 3-dimensional virtual platforms are being used by public and private corporations. The VU University, the one I’m working with, has (actually it was dr. Frans Feldberg) build a virtual University in which students can visit different information settings and view teaching examples. Large companies such as the ABN Amro Bank have built digital offices to attract young customers and to try out virtual services. Virtual platforms such as 2^nd Life are designed for social interaction and collaboration. Therefore, it was not strange that practitioners of private construction firms we worked with to reflect upon their practices of collaboration in with public partners suggested to use 2^nd Life. Not knowing much of the platform I started reading about the platform and made myself an avatar. Soon I found myself (my avatar) flying around, talking (typing) with an Italian girl (or someone saying so) about getting around. I tried to drive (sit in it) a parked car, but someone (never seen the avatar) threw me out telling me that I was stealing his car!

In order to facilitate learning of public and private partners we built a simulation game on 2^nd Life centred on a megaproject, the tunnelling of train, road and tram infrastructure in Amsterdam’s corporate suburb Zuid-As. One group played the public office, three others played private construction firms trying out a competitive alliancing tender model. In this model, partners have to collaborate in order to get the best solution for a complex problem, without knowing yet who will get the assignment. Employees (better: avatars) were first trained how to behave themselves at our research island. We had bought the island to have a selected group of people in the project. However, at one stage of the game we had thought of opening up the island for a broad audience to let them make a pubic choice of what the best design would be. This has not been applied yet.

We made a short documentary on the topic and I thought most of the young organisation anthropology students would love this stuff, but to my surprise the reactions were not very enthusiastic. They thought that studying people did not include studying avatars. There were not much anthropologists that would like to be virtual anthropologists, which is a pity. 2^nd Life will maybe disappear but, seeing my daughter using the Nintendo DS to play with her friends, 3-virtual platforms will be helpful in the near future for training and education. And Sony, the ‘owner’ of the earlier mentioned EverQuest was very interested to work with researchers/consultants that could help them understanding their gamers’ behaviour (van Ammelrooy, Volkskrant 28 februari 2009). Is here a new field for applied anthropology?

There is a nicely anthropological article in today’s NYT about the impact of the recession on the French luxury industry. It says that rescuing or killing the luxury goods industry has become the subject of a public debate; some call for its demise on moral grounds (“return to values”) while others defend it as heritage (in addition to economic reasons). But then the authors conclude that the industry itself is not spending less money than before, and not even necessarily being hit very hard; but it has embraced displays that communicate the “values” of intimacy, community and craftsmanship as opposed to large/scale glamour.

The US National Association of Practicing Anthropologists has just released a call for papers on the subject of the global food crisis.  Here are the details:

Global Food Crisis: Perspectives from Practicing and Applied Anthropologists
Sponsor: NAPA Bulletin, National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA)
Contact Information:

David A. Himmelgreen
Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida
4202 E. Fowler Ave, SOC 107
Tampa FL 33620
Email: dhimmelg [at] cas.usf.edu

Description

The NAPA Bulletin welcomes submissions for a thematic issue on “Global Food Crisis: Perspectives from Practicing and Applied Anthropologists,” to be tentatively published in Spring 2010. NAPA Bulletin is the official publication for the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA), a section of the American Anthropological Association. Recently, a convergence of events including environmental threats (e.g., floods, droughts, frosts) and cost of fuel in the United States and around the globe has resulted in skyrocketing food prices throughout the world, leading to a global food crisis not seen in decades. The ensuing threats of hunger and food insecurity have caused civil strife and political instability in dozens of developing countries. In the United States and other industrialized countries, rising food prices has further eroded the buying capacity of consumers and threatened the ability of families to access nutritious food in sufficient quantity. While the increase in food prices have been felt by most Americans regardless of socio-economic status, low income families have been the most drastically affected. The effect of this trend in rising prices on food security is clearly seen by increases in the use of soup kitchens in majority of the major U.S. cities. This proposed NAPA volume will bring contributions from both practicing and applied anthropologists to examine how rising food prices are affecting peoples’ food choices, to discuss the way international and domestic food and energy policies are exacerbating the problem of hunger and food insecurity in both developing and industrialized nations, and to provide recommendation for addressing the global food crisis in the coming years. This CFP invites practicing and applied anthropologists and other social scientists with expertise in aspects of agriculture and food, especially as they relate to global food policies, structural adjustment programs, and the development of food assistance initiatives either within or outside the United States to contribute full-length articles (approximately 7,500 wordsto this proposed volume.

Please submit a 250 word abstract and 150 word biographical sketch to David Himmelgreen , no later than November 1, 2008.

Several articles have appeared in today’s The Australian regarding the Northern Territory intervention, and on indigenous health and welfare more generally.  Of most interest to me was a report on calls to soften some aspects of the new government regime.  The article notes that while there have been some reported positive outcomes of the new paternalism in the NT, such as an increase in the amount of fresh food being eaten.  I’ve heard anecdotal evidence from an anthro working in Arnhem Land that the quarantining of welfare payments and the introduction of stamps for certain products has certainly had an effect on consumption patterns.  For example, kids are claiming “not to like” lollies anymore but to prefer fruit-based snacks like Roll-ups because the latter can be bought with stamps.  This allows them to continue to spend their free cash on cigarettes and other products not covered by the stamps.  It would seem that the new system has introduced new hierarchies of need where people have to make choices about which pleasures to keep and which to modify.  This is all interesting stuff and it would be great to see more reporting by anthropologists about what they’re seeing in the communities that they work with. All contributions are welcome and we are happy to reproduce them on this blog.

One area on which the Intervention doesn’t seem to be having an impact, and might even be making matters worse in some ways, is child welfare and the prevention of abuse.  This was of course the issue that prompted the Intervention in the first place.  According to a report by the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care,

“A major unintended consequence of the NT intervention has been to stall and delay the necessary reform of the child protection systems (and) care needed to support children at risk of abuse and neglect,” the secretariat says in its submission.

“It has not uncovered the abuse of children or resulted in any significant change in child abuse notifications.

“Ironically, the intervention seems to have swept to one side the very issues that precipitated it in the first place.”

Other related articles in today’s Oz are as follows:

Call to lock in indigenous health gains
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24422991-5013172,00.html

Action, not words, needed to close gap on indigenous health
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24422990-5013172,00.html

The New York Times has run a story about Val Curtis, an anthropologist who directs the Hygiene Center at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine: Warning: Habits May Be Good for You by Charles Duhigg. The story discusses how Curtis turned to consumer goods manufacturers like Procter and Gamble and Unilever in her attempts to persuade people in the developing world to wash their hands habitually with soap. Although seemingly innocuous, illnesses carried on the hands that might be prevented by simply washing them often lead to diarrhea, one of the leading killers of children in the developing world.

The marketing divisions of these corporate behemoths had abundant experience insinuating themselves into the everyday habits of consumers, helping us to feel ‘dirty’ if we don’t brush our teeth multiple times each day or that we are inadequate if sweat shows in the armpits of our t-shirts. As Curtis explained:

There are fundamental public health problems, like hand washing with soap, that remain killers only because we can’t figure out how to change people’s habits…. We wanted to learn from private industry how to create new behaviors that happen automatically.

Curtis looked at the ways in which advertisers try to establish cuing behaviour for habits, such as associating being with friends with having a beer or having a Snickers bar when one is a bit spacey in the middle of the afternoon. If the advertising works, the relatively common cue starts to provoke people to think about the product (even if the product is a dubious ‘cure’ for a manufactured ‘problem’).

Dr. Curtis’ problem was that people were not cued to wash their hands with soap after going to the bathroom. As the article explains:

To teach hand washing, about seven years ago Dr. Curtis persuaded Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever to join an initiative called the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing With Soap. The group’s goal was to double the hand-washing rate in Ghana, a West African nation where almost every home contains a soap bar but only 4 percent of adults regularly lather up after using the toilet.

Studies showed that Ghanaians used soap when they felt there hands were dirty, such as after traveling about in the city or cooking with oil, but they didn’t have those associations with going to the bathroom (oh, don’t get all shocked and incredulous — studies of Westerners show that less than half wash their hands before leaving public restrooms). Because modern commodes were such an improvement upon previous facilities, many Ghanaians actually considered them to be quite clean and sanitary, which they are relative to other sorts of solutions to human waste problems.

The campaign resulted in commercials aimed at creating a sense of ‘disgust’ or ‘unseemliness’ about leaving a bathroom without washing one’s hands with soap; they used ‘ads showing mothers and children walking out of bathrooms with a glowing purple pigment on their hands that contaminated everything they touched.’ The article discusses how other public health campaigns, such as HIV infection prevention and anti-smoking campaigns, are adopting a focus on habit formation and using methods that focus less on health concerns than on creating habitual associations.

I get a bit of ethical vertigo in the article as we jump back and forth from discussions of public health campaigns and the marketing of ever-increasing amounts of self consciousness in order to flog new ‘necessities’ like mouth wash and hand sanitizer. A ‘consumer psychologist’ for Procter & Gamble rather glibly announces that her firms’ attempts to create ‘positive habits’ are ‘a huge part of improving our consumers’ lives,’ nevermind that the Cincinnati-based Fortune 500 company markets a few products that likely only improve consumers’ lives after they have developed phobias about the way they smell, the colour of their teeth, or the presence of hair on their bodies in particular places. Christina Aguielera fragrance and ‘Born Blonde’ hair colour, anti-wrinkle creams and teeth-whitening strips seem to be a bit of a stretch in the ‘life improvement’ department.

The companies’ representatives are pretty clear about the need to produce new ‘needs’: one of the P&G psychologists says, ‘For most of our history, we’ve sold newer and better products for habits that already existed…. But about a decade ago, we realized we needed to create new products. So we began thinking about how to create habits for products that had never existed before.’ They turned to emerging research on habit formation in order to learn how to manufacture new ‘needs’ in people’s lives.

One of the better examples that the New York Times article uses as illustration is Febreze, a P&G product first advertised as being useful for getting the smell of smoke out of your clothes after a late night at the local watering hole or for making a stinky room smell passable. Febreze was a big hit in my college dorm immediately prior to parents’ weekend as it was also useful for removing the smells of certain burning substances from the curtains and linens.

Because consumers didn’t need to remove terrible smells often enough (how much of the stuff can you flog to college students in need of hiding incriminating odors?), P&G couldn’t sell enough Febreze. So they repositioned the product, convincing homemakers that a spritz with artificial aromas was the perfect end to a housecleaning activity. As the company psychologist says, ‘It’s the icing that shows you did a good job’ — as meaningless an empty signifier of ‘job done’ as folding the end of toilet paper into a triangle.

North American consumers alone engaged in this habit to the tune of $650 million last year alone. No, I’m not kidding — $650 million on Febreze. I’m just reminded of a girl in my freshman dorm using it on her long hair to try to remove the malodorous aftermath of a serious bender.

The article is fascinating; first, there’s the reincorporation of ideas originally taken from social science research (or psychology) and developed in marketing back into the applied social sciences. Second, there’s the marketers pretty much laying out how they seek to manipulate and produce human needs through a kind of symbolic association, linking their products to sometimes only loosely related recurring events. Third, there’s a fascinating discussion of the habitual basis of much of human behaviour, especially consumption. Worth checking out on many levels.

Credit: Graphic from http://www.1st-in-handwashing.com/hand_procedure_washing.html

I’ve been silent on Culture Matters for way too long: first I was on a research trip to Egypt, and then I was recovering from a bug caught during said research trip to Egypt (Flagyl is my friend!). And speaking of pharmaceutical products, ever since coming back I’ve had a stack of drug boxes on the desk in my office that has elicited a lot of curiosity from visitors:

These are all the local brands of sildenafil that I found in a single pharmacy. There’s the Pfizer-licensed Viagra, but we also have Virecta, Erec, Kemagra, Vigorama, Vigoran, Phragra, and Vigorex. The Kemagra box features a tiger: Rrawr!

Why the stack of drugs? That’s between me and my doctor. No, seriously, I picked them up as part of a research project on several new reproductive health technologies in Egypt, including erectile dysfunction drugs. I’m looking at religious debates about the moral implications of new technologies, representations in popular culture, and the way RHTs are taught in Egyptian medical schools. Also interesting to consider is elisions between biomedical technologies and indigenous health beliefs. Take, for example, this restaurant’s “Viagra Sandwich” (would you like your Viagra grilled or fried?):

This takes traditional notions of the virility-enhancing power of seafood and rebrands it with the notoriety of a global pharmaceutical product. By the way, it seemed that every other restaurant in Cairo has some “Viagra” dish. At the annual date market, one variety of dates usually gets called “Viagra” for the same reason.

The office interactions I have with colleagues about the stack of drugs on my desk have given me new insight into the different cultural meanings attributed to erectile dysfunction drugs. You see, every male colleague that comes in has a laugh at the boxes, and then typically I say, “You’re welcome to a box after I finish photographing them.” This usually leads to louder laughter and a protest, as he backs away from my desk: “No thanks, I don’t need it!” The implication seems to be that by accepting the drug, one is admitting to some sort of sexual failure. Perhaps this seems natural — it certainly reminds me of all the ribbing former presidential candidate Bob Dole endured when he agreed to be the first spokesman for the product in the U.S.

But in Egypt, this logic just doesn’t work. There, men often give the pills to each other as gifts. According to my Egyptian colleague who is researching the phenomenon, they are sometimes given by an employer to his employees as a kind of reward or incentive. Instead of connoting a lack, it seems to imply the cheerful anticipation of an excess of virility. It may also speak to the history of the drug’s availability in Egypt: before the market was opened up to all the cheap generic brands, Viagra was expensive and in limited supply. Thus the enthusiasm for trading it around was part of the wider intersection between gift economies and the black market economy.

Perhaps my Australian colleagues simply disapproved of the idea that I should be offering them drugs for which they didn’t have a prescription. Of course I should clarify that my offers were all in jest: I know that it is illegal for someone who is not a medical professional to give someone else a prescription drug. No, boys, these drugs are MINE, ALL MINE!!

–L.L. Wynn

Following on from Nursel’s recent post, I’d like to draw readers to a recent New York Times article about the “global food crisis”. According to the article, rising commodities prices, especially fuel and food prices, are producing unprecedented stress and anger across the globe, resulting in unrest and even riots. The article includes disturbing descriptions of people in Haiti eating concoctions made in part from mud in order to still their hunger pains. It is worth being reminded that what is experienced as a bit of additional pain at the checkout for the world’s wealthy can be an issue of survival for the world’s poor.

The article states:

“It’s the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and special adviser to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. “It’s a big deal and it’s obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there’s more political fallout to come.”

Significantly, the article also acknowledges the interconnectedness of the global economy in that rising prices have “pitted the globe’s poorer south against the relatively wealthy north, adding to demands for reform of rich nations’ farm and environmental policies”. The production of biofuels putting upward pressure in prices is mentioned, though the competition between animals and humans for grains is not.

Given the likely future impact of rising fuel prices, climate change, the expansion of economies such as China and India on food production and prices, the fact that the situation appears already to be so bad is worrying indeed.

See also the NYT’s index of articles on food prices.

George Monbiot’s latest article ‘The Pleasures of the Flesh’ on 15 April 2008  is about the causes of the current global food crisis. Currently there are food crises in 37 countries. Monbiot says “the price of rice has risen by three-quarters in the past year, that of wheat by 130%(1).” and according to the World Bank one hundred million people could become poorer by the high prices. Actually there is no scarcity of food; for example “at 2.1 bn tonnes, last year’s global grain harvest broke all records” and “it beat the previous year’s by almost 5%”.

A significant amount of food produced are used as biofuels; for instance according to the World Bank “the grain required to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle with ethanol … could feed one person for a year”. And according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), this year 2.13 bn tonnes is likely to be consumed, and only 1.01bn will feed people. Monbiot complains that now in the UK, all sellers of transport fuel have to mix fuel with ethanol or biodiesel made from crops. He says: “In the midst of a global humanitarian crisis, we have just become legally obliged to use food as fuel. It is a crime against humanity in which every driver in this country has been forced to participate. “

Monbiot also discusses the other cause of the food crisis, which “is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer”. This year 100 m tonnes food will be used as biofuels, and a bigger amount, 760 m tonnes, will be used to feed animals. Since meat consumption in Asia and Latin America has been booming, and the UN estimates that the population will rise to 9bn by 2050, Monbiot tries to answer the question “What level of meat-eating would be sustainable?” and he says “ If you care about hunger, eat less meat”.

At the end of his article, George Monbiot says:

Re-reading this article, I see that there is something surreal about it. While half the world wonders whether it will eat at all, I am pondering which of our endless choices we should take. Here the price of food barely registers. Our shops are better stocked than ever before. We perceive the global food crisis dimly, if at all. It is hard to understand how two such different food economies could occupy the same planet, until you realise that they feed off each other.

More Yum Cha, an exhibition featuring several Chinese artists, is currently showing at the Ray Hughes Gallery in Sydney. As this image shows, at least some of the exhibition involves an engagement with China’s relationship to globalisation.

The exhibition is running till 16 February.