Applying Anthropology in the Future: the future is now

I’m sure many of you have heard about Masdar, the ‘green city’ being built in Abu Dhabi.  For those of you that haven’t the city is touted as:

a world model of energy conservation with zero carbon emissions and zero waste. Compared to average urban levels, fossil fuel consumption will be reduced by 75%, water demand by 300% and waste production by 400%. Cycling and walking will be the most common means of travel.

Accoring to the city’s master plan, no one will be more than 200 meters from essential facilities, including shops selling locally grown produce. A fully automated, electric Personal Rapid Transit System will provide a flexible and comfortable alternative to private cars. A Light Railway Transport system will link the Masdar development to adjacent developments, the airport and in the future with the center of Abu Dhabi.

Through a micro-chip-like network of connections, developers plan to coalesce the expertise and resources to enable global technological breakthroughs in advanced energy technologies. There will be a university education and research center - the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology (in partnership with MIT) - which will offer Masters and PhD programs in science and engineering disciplines focused on advanced energy and sustainability. Its research and educational institutions and partnerships will search for solutions to mankind’s most pressing problems: energy security, climate change and truly sustainable human development.

For the full story see –

http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/news.feature/id/1497

While I applaud the effort to build more sustainable cities I recently came across an article which asks a provocative question; what impact will cities like Masdar have on cultural diversity?

If successful, Masdar City could act as a model for environmentally friendly urban planning and sustainable development. “Green cities,” such as Masdar, could become a future trend around the world. But are there unforeseen consequences for such initiatives? While the environmental advantages of promoting and constructing green cities are clear, such planning may also accelerate the homogenization of, and even destruction of, cultures around the world. Cultural diversity is currently in decline. Globalization and the dominance of Western (especially U.S.) economic and cultural practices have influenced and altered almost all regions of the world. Languages and cultural traditions are becoming extinct at greater rates than ever before.

For the full story see - http://www.wesleyanargus.com/article/5989

 

While there is arguably potential in the development of ‘green cities’ to accelerate cultural homogenization historically people have found an almost infinite number of ways to diversify and differentiate and I’m relatively confident this will  continue to be the case.  However, as planed cities ‘green cities’ offer anthropologists a unique opportunity/burden in influencing the future of culture and cultural diversity. 

It seems probable that governments and city planners will hire anthropological consultants to advise them on the design an implementation of ‘cultural spaces’ (for example) within ‘green cities’. So while anthropology has typically been directed at documenting, analysing and comparing culture, if we take on a role in helping to plan the cities of the future will we become instead the creators of culture? If so on model will we rely?  Will the ‘cultures’ anthropologists instil in these ‘green cities’ be based on notions of tradition, authenticity and existing diversity or on notions of progress and sustainability?  Ultimately will anthropologists ask what kind of cultures have there been or what kinds of cultures should/could there be?  And what are the potential benefits and risks associated with our choices now?

how dictionaries mark the evolution of language

When I arrived in Australia 5 months ago, one of the first things that struck me was how different the English here is. When a student pronounced one of the class assignments “a bit naf,” I ran to Jovan to ask him what it meant. He soon delighted in feeding me baffling colloquialisms. (The result is that I have post it notes all over my office shelves with notations like “dinky-die,” “ocker,” “yobbo,” and “bogan,” but I’ve already forgot what all of those mean.) The only rule I’ve managed to glean is that Australians love to use diminutives (”brekkie” being my favorite). Once my undergraduate students cottoned on to how thick I was, they had lots of fun introducing me to new terms.

Yesterday, fellow American Anne Monchamp brought me a little news item about Macquarie Dictionary’s new additions for 2007. I went to the website to pore through the new additions and see if I could learn a little more Australish.

Is copying “part of Chinese culture”?

I have often encountered culturalist explanations of why Chinese don’t respect intellectual property rights. One version of this is that it “in Chinese culture,” it is okay to copy other people’s writing without acknowledgement. I remember a professor at Heidelberg, Germany’s most famous university, asking me whether this was true. This has always seemed to me a kind of well-intentioned “intercultural communication” orientalism, but also universities and professors looking for cultural excuses for not enforcing their standards on students who bring money and who they think will go back to China anyway. In China’s good universities, plagiarism is as unacceptable as anywhere else — though let’s remember that the institutionalised plagiarism scare is something new in the West, and often seems as a surrogate reaction to failing education standards.

But recently, Sina.com reported that 19 Chinese organizations in Christchurch, New Zealand, protested against a story in a local paper, identified as “Evening News,” that described Chinese students as “the biggest cheats,” showing a photo of Chinese students copying exam papers and asserting that “cheating is part of Chinese culture.” The paper apologized.

Cultural Diversity versus Cultural Difference; Examples from Australia

In one of my previous posts, I talked about the Norwegian anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s essay on cultural diversity versus cultural difference called Diversity versus difference: Neo-liberalism in the minority debate (http://folk.uio.no/geirthe/21st.html)

Eriksen describes cultural diversity as aesthetic aspects of a specific culture like arts, cuisine, folklore which are neutral and don’t require any moral judgement about that culture. Cultural diversity also means business and entertainment. Think of many ethnic food restaurants in Sydney like Malaysian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Italian, Turkish, Lebanese, Indian, Polish, Spanish etc. Think of many different dance courses offered in Sydney like Salsa, Tango, Belly dancing, Bollywood dancing. Cultural diversity has also influenced the language . For example people say ‘let’s eat Chinese (food) tonight’.

Example: Macquaire University Open Day Brochure, the section on Anthropology(according to the ad below, anthropology brings to mind culture, and culture brings to mind cultural diversity):Anthropology: Don’t miss the opportunity to dance up a storm at the Indian Dance Workshop led by renowned Indian classical dancer Kavitha Muthukrishnan. A brief introduction to Indian Classical Dance (Bharatha Natyam) will be given and an invocatory dance item will be performed in praise of the Hindu Lord Ganesha. There will be demonstrations of expression (abinaya) and rhythm (tala), so come along and join in the fun! 11am, 12pm, and 1pm in the tent outside the Library.

Example : An extract from Ghassan Hage, White Nation:Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society,1998:97; in Borderwork in Multicultural Australia by Bob Hodge & John O’Carroll, 2006:53:

Simonne: I really feel at home here…I like the multicultural feel.

Interviewer: Hmmm.

Simonne: You know, I originally came from around Manly. I mean, I love it there…I liked living there because of the ocean. But, ah, it’s too conservative…You miss out on what makes Australia such a nice place.

Interviewer: Is…?

Simonne: You see a mixture of people here, you see the, the, the Indian culture or, down the south end of Newtown, it’s the Fijian Indians and then you, you see the Asian people and ah, and ah, I like going to the deli and…ah visit George’s.

Example : An advertisement from 9 to 5 magazine (a free Sydney city magazine) (11.09.07): International array of the most gorgeous youthful women for your total sexual pleasure. Swedish beauty, Spanish model, Russian princess, Italian delight, Aussie sex kitten, China dolls, exotic Eurasians, French lingerie…..

Cultural diversity is something to be celebrated; and cultural diversity transforms the city turning it into a “cosmopolitan” place of endless celebrations, and this attracts many tourists. Cultural diversity is good for tourism, and probably it’s one of the factors which makes Sydney a popular tourist destination.

Example : From 9 to 5 (11.09.07) Magazine: Ritmo Brazilian Festival. Sunday, September 23, 11.30am-6.30pm, Tumbalong Park, Darling Harbour :The nation that gave us Carnivale, Brazilian waxes and Giselle Bundchen will bring Darling Harbour to life with the seventh annual Brazilian festival- a day filled with music, dancing and exotic cuisine. Visit www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au

Moon Festival, Saturday, September 22 Sunday, September 23, 5.45pm-7.30pm. Chinese Gardens, Darling Harbour For more than a thousand years the Chinese have celebrated the full moon during its brightest period with a festival. Join the celebrations and enjoy moon cakes, lanterns, dragon dancing, and more.www.chinesegarden.com.au

Examples of other celebrations of cultural diversity from www.darlingharbour.com:

Armenian Cultural Festival 2007, 16 September 2007

The Cedars of Lebanon Folkloric Group, 16 September 2007

Sparkling Korea Festival, 22-23 September, 2007

Darling Harbour Fiesta, 28Sept-1Oct:Feel the rhythm, discover the passion. Experience the sights, sounds, tastes, flamboyance and flair at Australia’s hottest dance and music festival - Darling Harbour Fiesta!Salsa, tango and rumba your way to Darling Harbour Fiesta this October long weekend. With more than 70 FREE performances across three stages, free salsa classes, DJs and Latin-inspired food, the spirit of Fiesta will dominate Darling Harbour for three sizzling days and nights. Now in its 16th year, Fiesta is Australia’s largest annual Latin American festival proving that when it comes to rhythm and passion, Sydney is right up there with Rio!Fiesta brings together traditional and contemporary talent from across South and Central America and Spain including legendary Columbian singer Wilson ‘Sabco’ Manyoma and, direct from the UK, Cuban musician Osvaldo Chacon whose timba-style salsa has been causing a stir on London’s dance floors.

Example: There is a ‘Cultural Diversity’ section for different suburbs in City of Sydney booklet called Preserving and Enhancing Sydney’s City of Villages: A Snapshot of Projects, Local Action Plan Strategy 2007-2010.

Redfern, Cultural Diversity: The Local government aims

-Celebrating indigenous Redfern

-Danks street festival

-Broaden retail mix for neighbourhood shopping

-Indigenous art projects

Inner East, Cultural Diversity:

-Creating an Oxford street cultural precint

-Harmony Park art and events program

-Public art to celebrate gay and lesbian community

Example: On Sydney city culture from the same City of Sydney local government planning booklet:

It’s a culture [Sydney city culture] that is rather funky, hip and urbane with respect to various ethnic, religious, non religious and sexual orientations.

Example: In Australia there’s a special day called Harmony Day, 21 March each year, to celebrate cultural diversity.Harmony Day provides an opportunity for us [Australians] to celebrate our successes as a culturally diverse society and re-commit ourselves to harmony and mutual respect. http://www.harmony.gov.au/

Cultural difference, on the other hand, might have moral and political connotations objectionable by the mainstream society.

Example: On the one hand encouraging aboriginal arts, painting, dance, music which is good for tourism and business, on the other hand turning a blind eye to the indigenous people who demand more rights.

Examples are endless…

‘Diversity is good; difference is bad’

“ ‘Diversity is good; difference is bad.’ This is the common view in European minority debates. As a result, the class component disappears, and an unacceptably vague catch-all concept of culture is allowed to predominate, even in much of the research literature”  Thomas Hylland Eriksen

The Norwegian anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen (the writer of ‘Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence’, a book every anthropologist and anthropology student must read; see my post on this book) has an interesting essay called Diversity versus Difference: Neo-liberalism in the Minority Debate on his personal website http://folk.uio.no/geirthe/. In the essay he argues that in Europe people do not take ‘class’ factor into consideration in intellectual and political debates about cultural diversity although class is an important factor in explaining cultural complexities. Eriksen also argues that the blanket term ‘cultural difference’ has many aesthetic, social and moral connotations.   

        He summarises the public view on ‘cultural diversity’ and ‘cultural difference’ as ‘diversity is good; difference is bad’. He says, on the one hand ‘cultural diversity’ refers to the aesthetic aspects of culture with no moral or political connotations like food, arts crafts etc.; and it is encouraged to be celebrated in the public sphere. On the other hand, ‘cultural difference’ involves some values and practices within various minority groups, which might be morally objectionable by the wider society; and in public view such cultural differences might:

i) create conflicts through direct contact with majorities who hold other notions, (ii) weaken social solidarity in the country and thereby the legitimacy of the political and welfare systems (Goodhart 2004), and (iii) lead to unacceptable violations of human rights within the minority groups          

 For example, politicians and public figures may generally praise migrants for enriching the national culture (I suppose generally in terms of food, cuisine; they might like kebabs) but at the same time they may worry about some Muslim values. The acceptance and rejection of different cultural aspects may actually disguise some political and class conflicts. He analyses some examples from Norway. One of his example is the racial motivated murder of a 15 year old Norwegian boy of African origin, Benjamin Hermansen-who had a white Norwegian mother-   in Oslo in 2001. Media and public in general denounced the murder, and many white Norwegians attended demonstrations, and many public figures spoke to condemn the racial violence. Eriksen says:

The virtually unanimous expression of disgust and outrage in the aftermath of Benjamin’s death may suggest that blackness is not, in contemporary Norway, a marker of undesirable difference. In a strict sense, it may not even be a marker of diversity, since many black Norwegians are culturally one hundred per cent Norwegian, meaning that they do not deviate from mainstream culture concerning language, religion, food habits and other everyday practices.

But he adds that if the dark skin colour has some cultural and religious connotations like in the case of migrants from Southeast Asia and the Middle East, it might become undesirable. For example the police might stop and question a Pakistani migrant with a flashy car whether he is completely integrated into Norwegian culture or not; whether he is a Muslim believer or not; ‘to use Gellner’s (1983) term, like black Americans under Jefferson’. He says:

The question is: Which kinds of difference, that go beyond mere diversity, are subconsciously drawn on by the police in treating non-whites differently? In all likelihood, class is the main strand of association here. Since non-white immigrants largely belong to the working class, the policemen may reason, if one of them has a flashy car it cannot have been acquired by honest means. In other words, although the police’s behaviour cannot be put down to ‘old racism’, it has an inescapable racial dimension in that it results in a systematic discrimination of non-white citizens with nice cars.

There is a website devoted to the memory of young Benjamin. Viewers are invited to post their messages, and nearly five years after his death, people (judging from the style, most are teenagers) still send their condolences and expressions of concern to the site. His death has come to signify the evil of racist violence. At the same time, it has been well documented that non-white residents in Norway with exotic names have difficulties in getting high-level jobs. Documented examples include a man with a higher degree in engineering, who had not been shortlisted for a job once in several years – he had applied for around two hundred – and who eventually changed his name to a Norwegian-sounding one. He was immediately hired by a large company.In other words, racist violence is generally frowned upon. Skin colour as such, with no further cultural or religious connotations, does not seem to function as an important marker of difference, in spite of the fact that the term neger, negro, is still in common usage in the country (Gullestad 2002 dissects the debate over the term). Yet at the same time, having the wrong skin colour, or a kind of name which suggests the wrong skin colour, does mean that one must be prepared for systematic discrimination. Although it is not related to skin colour as such, this does little to help those who become victims of a cultural semantics which connects colour to other traits deemed undesirable, that is to say difference as opposed to diversity.

He analyses other examples like hijabs, female circumcision and arranged marriages. His essay is very rich and very engaging. In conclusion; he says, after Sept 11 there has been a shift  from the sociological focus on racism and discrimination to repression and human rights violations within migrant minorities. And in public debates the emphasis on cultural rights is replaced with individual rights and choice.

The Norwegian public sphere thus tends to see only shortcomings and evil intentions when confronted with cultural differences. Diversity is fine; it is morally harmless and potentially economically profitable, but ‘the others’, bearers of difference, have again become inferior, as they were in the past. This time, however, they are not inferior as a race or a cultural group, but exclusively as individuals, who oppress each other, who tacitly allow themselves to be oppressed, and who cannot blame majority society if they are insufficiently integrated.

The new way of talking about minorities and rights in Norway is not, in other words, a result of nationalism. The latter was a kind of collectivism which could occasionally propose compromise and peaceful co-existence with other groups. It nevertheless had its obvious weaknesses, which could only be addressed properly via a strong antidote of no-nonsense individualism. However, the pendulum has now swung so far in the opposite direction that concepts such as ‘ethnic group’ or ‘cultural minority’ are immediately associated with enforced marriages and authoritarian religion. In this kind of situation, entire life-worlds are opened to general suspicion and censored.

In sum, diversity is economically profitable and morally harmless (see Hutnyk 1997 on the WOMAD festival), while difference threatens the individualism underpinning and justifying neo-liberalism. In this perspective, it is no wonder that immigrants were praised in the 1970s, when the collectivist ideology of social democracy still held sway in Scandinavia, for their strong family solidarity; while in the new century, they are criticised for it since it impedes personal freedom. Finally, through a narrow focus on moral issues, the hierarchical and structural dimensions of minority/majority relations is made invisible.

You can read the article on http://folk.uio.no/geirthe/Diversity.html

Playing with Children and other cultural oddities…

The article’s a month old now, but I find myself still thinking about it, so I thought I’d share. The Boston Globe ran a piece entitled, ‘Leave Those Kids Alone,’ about the adult practice of playing with children. You can find the original article here.

The article commits its own grievous errors of cross-cultural universalizing, but it makes some worthwhile points about the peculiarity of certain Western conventions of childrearing. For example:

“Adults think it is silly to play with children” in most cultures, says Lancy, who teaches at Utah State University. Play is a cultural universal, he concedes, “but adults aren’t part of the picture.” Yet middle-class and upper-middle-class Americans — abetted, he says, by psychologists — are increasingly proclaiming the parents-on-all-fours style the One True Way to raise a smart, well-adjusted child.

There is now a concerted effort to spread adult-child play beyond its stronghold in the upper- and middle-classes of wealthy countries. To this end, many cities and states support programs of some sort. Massachusetts will give the Parent-Child Home Program, which has 33 sites in the state, $3 million this year (up from $2 million last year). Through the program, staff members visit the homes of low-income residents and offer tips not just on good books for toddlers but also on “play activities” for parents and kids. Likewise, the eminent Yale psychologist Jerome Singer has partnered with a media company to devise imaginative parent-child games (examples: “My Magic Story Car” and “Puppets: Counting”) that librarians and social workers can teach to low-income parents.

‘Caravanserai: Journey Among Australian Muslims’ by Hanifa Deen

In her book ‘Caravanserai: Journey Among Australian Muslims’, Australian writer Hanifa Deen says:

I grew up in the forties and fifties of the last century, almost a lifetime ago, when Muslims were invisible. We were called ‘Mohammedans’ and nobody knew much about us, or really bothered with us; we were too small to be a threat, there was no Middle East problem and while the British Empire was running out of steam it still flew the flag; the media hadn’t ‘adopted’ and ‘distorted’ us- we were pariah- like without being real pariahs.’

and she points out:

‘Stereotypes now define people as less than human and what a litany there is to choose from: veiled women, fierce bearded men, barbaric parents, rapists and suicide bombers- these are the images taken to represent Islam. But where is the human face that I know? Where are my parents, my brother and sister? Where are my friends?’

Hanifa Deen’s book is based on her two separate journeys among Australian Muslims: she began her first journey in 1993 two years after the Gulf War ; and the second one after the September 11 and also the Bali bombings of 2002. After these significant events, the media locked the images of Muslims into unchangeable terrible and negative stereotypes. In order to challenge these misleading stereotypes, Hanifa Deen wanted to give Muslims a human face as ordinary people who have their own little problems like everybody else, who have a mortgage to pay; who like doing sports and watching rugby matches; who worry about gaining weight; who send their children to school; who pay tax; who vote.

Deen says, she wrote the book out of pride as a Muslim who grew up in Australia. She listened to the stories of Muslims, her people, from different ages, genders, classes, ethnicities, all from different walks of life. In her book she tells the story of these diverse people, whose common point is being Muslim. She has a beautiful style; she is not only in conversation with the people whose stories she listened to but also with the reader. She never tries to draw a rosy picture of Muslim communities, and she does not avoid to also talk about the petty power struggles, jealousies, and social control among Muslim circles.

In her book, Hanifa Deen brings up many different issues relating to Muslims in Australia. I think what she says on ‘veil’ (with her own words ‘a small piece of cloth’), an issue which has not been exhausted in the European-Christian West yet, is very interesting.  

On veil ‘A small piece of cloth’:

And so the fuss continues over a plain piece of cloth. Nuns wear habits, Christians wear crosses and the Jews the Star of David. What does it matter if other people, for religious reasons, want to wear distinctive clothes as a religious sign- a reminder of God and a show of solidarity?

Symbols change and often the very symbol of oppression from the past is reinterpreted and becomes adopted as a rallying point-redefined all over by subsequent generations.

Today many young Muslim women in Australia choose to wear ‘the veil’ or hijab-their symbol from the past. Yet not so long ago, their grandmothers and great-aunts marched in the streets demanding the right not to wear the veil for what it symbolised to them-exclusion from education, public life and employment. Seventy years ago Egyptian feminist leader Huda Sha’rawi symbolically threw her veil into the Mediterranean at Alexandria. Her husband divorced her for refusing to wear it. Overseas the struggle still continues. But for migrant women, in Australia at least, wearing the hijab is a way of asserting their religious and cultural identities.    

New ban on female circumcision in Egypt

Jovan brought to my attention a Yahoo! news item reporting that Egypt has just banned all female circumcision (aka female genital mutilation or FGM). There is a decade’s history of the practice being banned in Egypt, yet it has persisted. In 1996, the Ministry of Health banned any state-affiliated medical personnel from involvement in female circumcision, according to the BMJ. Then, according to ReligiousTolerance.org, the ruling was challenged by a Muslim cleric, Sheikh Youssef Badri, who claimed it was permitted by Islam and that the state was overstepping its bounds in banning it. In 1997 a court overturned the ban, but then the government took the case to the Egyptian Supreme Administrative Court which ruled that it was not an Islamic procedure and that citizens therefore did not have a right to practice it. The state banned the procedure, but allowed gynecologists to perform the surgery if they deemed it necessary for health reasons.

The extent to which this health exception is invoked is revealed by recent surveys that have shown that upwards of 90% of Egyptian women continue to be circumcised. Circumcision crosses religious boundaries, with both Egyptian Muslims and Christians circumcising their daughters at or before puberty. The minority of women who aren’t circumcised are typically members of the urban upper class.

The new ban removes the earlier ban’s exception and prohibits all members of the medical profession, both in public clinics and private practice, from performing circumcisions. It also criminalizes physicians who circumcise. The government ban was supported by the highest ranking clerics in the country, both Muslim and Christian: the Grand Mufti, the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, and the Coptic Pope Shenouda.

There is substantial debate over the topic — even the name used to speak of the practice is hotly disputed (”female circumcision” vs. “female genital mutilation” or FGM). Some argue that the government’s provision allowing circumcision to be performed by physicians for ‘health reasons’ was an attempt to ensure that it be done by medical professionals under hygienic circumstances, avoiding the high rates of infection often associated with circumcision by traditional medical practitioners. Others say that it only gave the veneer of a ban for the benefit of a critical international community but allowed the practice to continue. The procedure was taught in some of Egypt’s most prestigious teaching universities such as Qasr el-Aini medical school in Cairo.

The latest ban comes in the wake of the widely publicized death of a young girl (sources peg her age at 11 or 12) who died during the procedure (the news wire source all say she died from an incorrect dose of anasthesia). Some reports claim that the doctor who performed the procedure as well as the girl’s mother were arrested. This points to the complicated costs and benefits of bans. On the one hand, bans delegitimize the procedure in a way that allowing ‘health exceptions’ does not. On the other hand, families who are determined to have their daughters circumcised but cannot have it done by a clinician may turn to more dangerous sources (in Egypt, typically barbers and midwives). They may also be less likely to seek medical care in the wake of a botched circumcision or infection if they fear that family members will be arrested.

For more anthropological reading on female circumcision, see Ellen Gruenbaum (who points out that Western opposition to the procedure typically leads to local backlash) and Janice Boddy, whose Wombs and Alien Spirits is a classic symbolic anthropology reading of circumcision in Sudan and how it linked up with cultural aesthetics (of not only the body but also things like home decor — if you ever wanted to know why Sudanese villagers blow out ostrich eggs and hang them in their houses, read on!) Boddy also covered debate over the practice in a 1991 article in Medical Anthropology Quarterly.

On a personal note, I spent 3-1/2 years living in Egypt, studying Arabic and doing fieldwork, and I knew Cairene women from all different classes, and the only one who ever brought up the topic of circumcision with me was an upper-class young woman who was taking a sociology course at the American University in Cairo and who commented to me that in a class discussion on the subject, students were mortified to have to discuss it in a mixed (male and female) group, and most could not even bring themselves to say the word out loud in class. At least amongst my little cohort of female informants, it was a non-issue.

L.L. Wynn

Web 2.0 - Marx v. Socrates (what would Sapir say?)

In early 2006, Andrew Keen published a polemic in the Weekly Standard in which he argued that Web 2.0 was taking us down a dangerous cultural path. He was troubled about the development of new Internet-based technologies that allowed just about anyone with a computer to be able to “to publish weblogs, digital movies, and music….to become an author, a film director, or a musician.” He warned of the dire consequences in which a world of millions of blogs would crowd out the informed expertise of the “elite mainstream media.”

According to Keen, the new opportunities for writing and creating that the Internet opens up eerily recall “Marx’s seductive promise about individual self-realization in his German Ideology” [sic]:*

“Whereas in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” †

This — the cultural division of labor in capitalist society — is a matter that has long been of interest to anthropologists, at least since Edward Sapir published his riff on Marx and Engels in “Culture, Genuine and Spurious” in 1924 with a comparison of the empty existence of the “telephone girl” versus the more fulfilling life of the salmon-fishing “American Indian.”

First: what is Web 2.0? According to Wikipedia the term was coined by the O’Reilly Media Group in 2003 (and for a hearty guffaw of irony, read this post and the first comment about O’Reilly’s proprietary claim to the term for a technology that is meant to embody open access and an era of new intellectual property law). The NY Times defines Web 2.0 as an era of Internet technology “distinguished by a new generation of participatory sites like MySpace.com and YouTube.com, which emphasize user-generated content, social networking and interactive sharing” and which its proponents argue “ushers in the democratization of the world: more information, more perspectives, more opinions, more everything, and most of it without filters or fees.” (Check out anthropologist Michael Wesch’s brilliant anthropology-inflected explanation of Web 2.0 on YouTube.)

But, according to Keen, this “fantasy” is really leading to narcissism and is “inherently dangerous for the vitality of culture and the arts.” Rather than a utopia of democracy and self-expression, Web 2.0 is leading to nothing but “the flat noise of opinion–Socrates’s nightmare.”

This past week the New York Times reviewed Keen’s new book, The Cult of the Amateur, which extends the argument of his original essay, with reviewer Michiko Kakutani seeming to side with Keen on the problems with “a world in which the lines between fact and opinion, informed expertise and amateurish speculation are willfully blurred.” It’s hard to not feel a little cynical about somber nodding over the threat posed to “informed expertise” when this is coming from that most elite of journalistic institutions, and hard not to laugh when you’re an anthropologist who during fieldwork in Cairo met plenty of wire agency journalists who didn’t speak Arabic. Informed expertise? It seems at least as likely to thrive on the free-for-all web as in the elite print media.

For example, Kakutani decries the possibilites of “postings that are inaccurate, unverified, even downright fraudulent” on Wikipedia, which gets “way more traffic than the Web site run by Encyclopedia Britannica” [sic]. But it’s a glaring omission when any journalist compares Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica without mentioning the Nature research project that famously compared the accuracy of entries in both encyclopedias. Was the finding of the Nature investigation an excess of “inaccurate, unverified, even downright fraudulent” entries on Wikipedia? No. As Jim Giles summarized it, “The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.” (And Nature, by the way, knows how to spell Encyclopaedia Britannica.)‡

Then there’s the fact that bloggers have been responsible for bringing news to the attention of the world that might otherwise have been ignored or supressed by the traditional media. Let’s take, for example, the case of the Egyptian blogosphere. In October 2006, bloggers were the first to report a mass assault on women in the streets of Cairo during the post-Ramadan feast holiday that Egypt’s state-run media failed to report. As Rania Al Malky reports at length in Arab Media and Society,

“The incidents were initially met with zero coverage in the press and on satellite channels. Some bloggers alleged that Al Jazeera had footage of the episode but was given strict orders by the authorities not to air it. And so it remained for three days until Nawara Negm, daughter of leftist poet Ahmed Fouad Negm and outspoken Islamist thinker and journalist Safinaz Kazem, appeared on Dream TV’s magazine show Al Aashera Masa’an (The 10 O’clock Show) hosted by Mona El Shazly. Nawara was originally invited to critique Ramadan TV shows, but suddenly diverted the issue to talk about the Downtown assaults that were being discussed all over the Internet.”

(See also Sharon Otterman for an extensive discussion of Egyptian female bloggers.) So without the bloggers, the event might never have made it into the mainstream media. The Egyptian blogosphere has also consistently been an early source of eyewitness accounts, in both Arabic and English, of government supression of the democracy protest movement Kefaya, not to mention the means by which the movement propagates itself.

With Web 2.0 (and eBay and Amazon.com§) we may be seeing a new era of the ‘Long Tail‘ (or, as Keen pessimistically puts it, “everyone is an author, while there is no longer any audience”), but that doesn’t mean that we don’t still see talent rising to the top with new media technologies. It’s not only the traditional media and culture industry that are able to “discover, nurture, and reward elite talent,” as Keen puts it. While everyone may be able to create music and dance and post these online for an intimate audience (see, for example, my 3-year old niece perform the hula), not everyone will author an Aunt Jackie and get signed by producer Jermaine Dupri.

OK, so what happens when we try to apply Keen’s argument¤ to Anthropology 2.0?

Early fetal gender detection (gender contagion?)

A U.K.-based company markets an early fetal gender detection test; they claim remarkable accuracy (”99%”) at only 6 weeks gestation. DNA Worldwide’s website describes the test as involving a “blood spot” obtained by doing a finger prick that the woman then mails in to their laboratory, and claims that results published in a Science article in 2005 proved the technique. (They don ‘t provide a link, but a search of the Science archives reveals this article as the one they seem to be refering to; the article does not “prove” their company’s technique and doubts their claims of accuracy.)

Another company, Urobiologics, claims to be able to detect fetal gender using a sample of the pregnant woman’s urine as early as one day after her first missed period. (See this Obstetrics and Gynecology article for an assessment of the science possibly behind the blood test; a search of the PubMed database revealed this review article that is very skeptical of the possibilities of finding extracellular fetal DNA in sufficient quantities to detect in maternal urine, and my cursory PubMed search suggests that no publishing scientists are currently experimenting with fetal gender detection based on testosterone levels in maternal urine.)

Let us set aside entertaining thoughts of a lucrative business scheme in which a private, proprietary (therefore unverified and not monitored by national regulatory bodies) lab test does not have to have any scientific merit whatsoever in order to produce 50% satisfied customers who will receive an apparently correct diagnosis. There remain a couple of interesting things to note here, from an anthropological perspective.

First, the ability of consumers to discover gender at such an early stage in pregnancy has provoked hand-wringing from anxious pundits who seek weighty opinions from certified bioethicists. DNA Worldwide, which manufactures the “Pink or Blue® Gender Test,” attempts to alleviate concerns about sex-selective abortion with reassurances that they are not selling the test “into China and India and some other areas” and that they are a company that “operates in the UK, a liberal society that does not prize babies of one sex over another.” Note the easy deferral of ethics problems to a vague, far away, Oriental Other. Anthropologist Sarah Pinto, in a personal e-mail exchange, articulated the matter well when she questioned

“this idea that gender detection, among other repro technologies, is rationally mediated and managed and used in the west - that there would be no dubious uses of it here because The Problem is in son preference (or whatever gloss is used to apply to a whole complex of issues…) which lives Elsewhere in The East (kind of like female genital cutting, which only lives in Africa and the Middle East, while things like routine episiotomies, re-virgining surgery (or whatever it’s called), genital cosmetic surgery etc etc are completely different things).”

The second interesting point arises from a little line in the homepage of the test website, which states that “It is important…that No Males are in the room during collection” (punctuation as in original document). Sarah brought this to my attention and I was fascinated. What trouble could arise from the mere physical presence of a man in the same room where the blood is drawn? Was it a contamination theory?