Alfons van Marrewijk’s inaugural lecture on business anthropology

On 14 May, Alfons van Marrewijk, who has been guest blogger on CM during his recent stay in Sydney, gave his inaugural lecture at the Vrije Universiteit as the newly appointed Professor of Business Anthropology, Especially the Anthropology opf Cultural Interventions in Complex and Public/Private Networks. Such lectures are major public events with considerable pomp (I am already planning my own in November!), and the topic signifies a further step in the academic mainstreaming of business anthropology (although the VU has already been in a special situation, having both a social and cultural anthropology department and one that deals largely with organisational anthropology). The lecture broadly outlined the scope of business anthropology in Alfons’ own practice, in which I found particularly interesting the focus on material culture and spatial settings — from office spaces to project locations — which is close to the interests of one of our PhD students at Macquarie, Melanie Uy, who is doing her research in a small Chinese company.

Corporate anthropology as well as the anthropology of business is increasingly in the news in Europe as well, and the collapse of financial institutions may have given it a boost. The simple idea that managers do not always behave rationally suddenly does not need “selling.” Alfons mentioned that British anthropologist Gillian Tett’s book Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophy (a rather un-anthropological title, I must say) received the British Press Award. The book Gezocht: Antropoloog m/v (Required: Anthropologist [m/f]) and the organisation NAGA (Niet Academisch Gebonden Antropologen, Anthropologists Without Academic Affiliation) are testimony to the emergence of the trend in the Netherlands. Unlike in many other academic settings, at the VU, there is no animosity between academic and applied anthropologists, and the institutional conditions for a close interaction between them are at hand. Yet even here, the training of anthropology students (in either department) has not quite kept step with or been able to drive home the fact that anthropologists are in demand in the workplace — despite the fact that Alfons himself, together with another colleague in his department, runs an anthropology consultancy.

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

Virtual anthropology

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?

Latour in the French debate on university reform

I am not sure how many Culture Matters readers have followed the French debate that has surrounded the government’s announcement that university funding will be reformed in accordance with the audit model that French commentators mistakenly identify as “American,” but which all of us elsewhere in Western Europe, Australia and so on have meekly accepted. (I recall how surprised I was by the atmosphere in a faculty meeting at Macquarie, in which there was no attempt to discuss whether or not we should go with the new “research assessment” system; rahter, the debate was restricted to “harm reduction.”) French university staff, by contrast, has gone on strike in protest.

In Le Monde, Bruno Latour has published an article rejecting the reform principally in the name of defending university autonomy. The article unleashed another round of the debate, in which Claude Calame of the EHESS took issue with Latour. Calame points out that the current system is hopelessly in need of reform and that, in any case, universities’ liberties are now limited to the liberties of/in the market:

the Sarkozy administration is so reactionary, in the neoconservatie sense of the word, that it has succeeded in making a situation that no one wishes either to defend or to maintain appear progressive. To denigrate the state, and the dependence it will impose upon teachers and researchers, is to forget that it is also the state of law and the guarantor of fundamental liberties. It is this ensemble of institutions and services that not only maintains a certain equality of treatment … but also allows citizens to exercise political control over the institutions they finance, so that they are not short-circuited by an oligarchy of plutocrats or that its tasks are not farmed out to the private sector.

Not being familiar with the debate in is entirety, it appears that Calame sees the state-imposed audit system as a guarantee of taxpayers’ control over publicly financed institutions, which is exactly the freemarketist justification that audit systems use everywhere, in both state-financed and non-state-financed systems (and of course the argument of those in favour of e.g. bank nationalisation). Yet Calame attacks freemarketeers and “plutocrats” (a word that, I must say, sets off alarm bells for me, all the more that in Eastern Europe it has often been used in the combination “Judeo-plutocrats”).

In any case I would like to see more serious discussion of the combined effects of bureaucratization, democratization, and most recently recession and a turn back to state ownership, on knowledge production. I wonder in particular what effect the recession is having on the largely privately financed U.S. research and education system.

Students in Hungary reject rights for minorities

When some colleagues and I did research on Chinese and Afghan children in Hungarian secondary schools in 2003-04, we found that xenophobic views were consistently expressed by Hungarian students more or less regardless of social class (though of course there was individual variation). We hypothesized that this had to do to a large part with the absence of what is usually referred to as citizenship education — i.e. a coherently transmitted picture of what constitutes the Hungarian polity — which allows the ethnicist, descent-based views of nationhood held by many teachers and not refuted in mainstream media to spread unchallenged. In this, Hungarian schools were starkly different from those in Northwestern Europe, and this has not changed since Hungary joined the European Union.

This has just been confirmed once again by a survey carried out by a group  of sociologist, led by Mihaly Csako, on secondary school students’ views of democracy. Fewer than half of the students considered respect for the rights of minorities an important feature of democracy. Consistent with this, a majority said they would be bothered if they had to sit next to a Gypsy student. (60% of students at the more ‘elite’ type of secondary school, gimnazium, said so, in contrast to 40% at vocational secondary schools, where they are much more likely to actually have Gypsy classmates.)

The relegation of minority rights to a marginalised liberal discourse has been a gradual process. Tolerance of all minorities — ethnic, religious, sexual or social, e.g. the homeless — has been rising. Whereas homophobia was not discernible in Hungary’s political landscape in the 1990s, it has today become a regular feature of nationalist discourse. It must be said that in the ’90s, gay rights were not part of the liberal human-rights discourse or the politicized identity that they have become now, with politicians’ “comings-out” and Western-style gay pride parades (very small and heavily protected from physical attacks by hecklers though they are). But in Hungary, homophobia has little to do with religious concerns; rather, the thematization of any minority rights provokes angry attacks by nationalists who see this as part of a liberal discourse that betrays national interests. Anti-semitism, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-Communism and anti-liberalism are related and almost interchangeable sentiments in Hungarian nationalism, and indeed frequently feature in the same speeches. The kike, the Chinaman, the faggot and the Commie have become signifiers for the same conspiracy that threatens Magyardom. In this respect the nature of xenophobia in Hungary is different from Western Europe (where it is conceptually difficult to be both Islamophobic and antisemitic) or Australia.

Advice for anthropologists who want to work for government

Charity Goodman, an anthropologist who is a public health analyst for the U.S. federal government, wrote the below with some information about anthropologists working in U.S. federal agencies and she includes some excellent advice about what student anthropologists who aspire to working for the government should study.  Though some of it is specific to working for the U.S. government, other things (like “get methodological and statistical training”) are relevant to aspiring applied anthropologists anywhere.  I repost it with her permission.

–L.L. Wynn

Shirley J. Fiske has written a highly informative article on the federal government as an employer of anthropologists. (See Careers in Applied Anthropology in the 21st Century: Perspectives from Academics and Practitioners, napa Bulletin 29, 2008, pp 110-130. ) She provided statistics on the number of anthropologists in various federal agencies, interviewed practicing anthropologists in a number of agencies, summarized their recommendations for those searching for jobs, and included a list of websites to assist job seekers. According to Fiske, the federal government is largest employer of anthropologists outside of the academy with OPM estimating of 7,500 social scientists (job series GS-101) in 2006. This series includes anthropologists, behavioral scientists, geographers, sociologists and planners. She focuses on the U.S. Census Bureau, The National Park Service, National Marine Fisheries, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and USAID.

From her interviews, Shirley found the following recommendations and lessons learned that are helpful for those planning to work as a federal employee, contractor or for those who already work for the government and want more insight into how another agency works.

1. “Have a secondary specialty,” especially if planning to work in international development. “It might be methodological, such as evaluation research, or qualitative methods; or it might be substantive specialty such as public health, agriculture, public lands and resource management, housing policy, or any number of mission-related fields or analytic approaches.”

“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.” 

‘White flight’ in Australian schools

The term ‘white flight’ is one I associate with the USA. I have never heard it used in an Australian context before. However, the Herald has just published a report about this phenomenon, which it says is producing an ever more ‘racially’ and religiously segregated education system. In both city and country contexts, they report, white students are increasingly moving into Catholic and independent schools and away from public schools with large populations of Aborigines, Muslims or Asians. An excerpt:

The NSW Secondary Principals Council conducted a confidential survey which raises serious concerns about “white flight” undermining the public education system and threatening social cohesion. Some teachers and principals have described it as “de facto apartheid”.

The findings are backed by research from the University of Western Sydney, which has identified evidence of racial conflict in schools in the wake of the Cronulla riots. It also suggests students of Anglo-European descent are avoiding some schools with students of mainly Asian background.

Not only have some public schools lost enrolments; they have become racially segregated. In pockets of rural and remote NSW, Aboriginal students fill public schools and white students attend Catholic and other private schools in the same town.

Around Sydney, the parents of some Anglo-European students are avoiding what they perceive as predominantly Lebanese, Muslim and Asian schools.

In New England, in towns such as Armidale, white middle-class students are flocking to Catholic and independent schools.

In their report, principals say this is so the students can “get away from their local school”.

“This is almost certainly white flight from towns in which the public school’s enrolment consists increasingly of indigenous students,” the report says. “The pattern is repeated in the Sydney region. Based on comments from principals, this most likely consists of flight to avoid Islamic students and communities.”

The term ‘white flight’ is not completely appropriate here because it’s not just whites who are making choices that leader to greater levels of segregation. On section of the article suggests, for example, that Asian families may be avoiding schools perceived to be ‘Muslim’. There is also the suggestion that in Southwestern Sydney, Aboriginal and white kids are ‘lining up against’ kids of Lebanese background rather than against each other, as was previously the case.

See also this article on the same theme, which includes details of students crossing from NSW to Queensland to avoid the local public school, perceived as ‘indigenous’ and (therefore) ’scary’ by students.

It would seem that there are several things going on here.  First, there has been a general move to private education among middle class families, which was exacerbated during the Howard years as more public funds were directed to private schools and policies encouraged school choice and student mobility.  Second, ‘racial tensions’ in schools seem to be on the rise — with the Cronulla Riots featuring, as a cause or result?  Again, one could argue that Howard government policies and rhetoric, which promoted a normative white model of Australian identity and encouraged xenophobic nationalism, have exacerbated this trend.  Third,  class is a factor, and much of this segregation could be understood as a product of increasing class segregation in Australian society.

I suppose another point to be taken from this is that this ‘white flight’ phenomenon, according to the reports, differs from the US in that families are not relocating away from neighbourhoods perceived to be undesirable and therefore creating monocultural ghettos.  Children are increasingly travelling long distances to schools, or boarding, but families are staying put.  It therefore doesn’t seem to be the case that ethnically homogeneous neighbourhoods are necessarily being produced.

Generally speaking, I see this kind of development as an example of the sort of thing that happens when governments move away from being producers and guardians of public institutions and collective ‘goods’, to becoming the facilitators of privatised choice.  Faith in public institutions, in this case schools, diminishes at the same time as people are encouraged to be more entrepreneurial in their choices.  In short, a sort of market force is at work, and what might appear to be good at the level of the individual — more choice — can produce a systemic racism.

Gerard Noonan, The Herald’s Social Issues Editor, makes similar points when he argues that there are two main factors underpinning the trend towards de-facto segregation:

The first is the ideological obsession with “choice”, which a decade ago in NSW changed the way students in NSW were able to enrol in schools.

Previously students attended their “local” school, based on where they lived. With few exceptions, it was a century-old tradition which ensured a genuine mix in schools – the smart, the scholastic pedestrians, the talented musicians and the sports-obsessed, the immigrants, the local Aboriginal kids, the funny, the socially inept, the goofy – all mixed together.

This widespread and predominantly secular approach allowed Australia to claim, with some justification, that its supposed egalitarianism and lack of class pretension was nurtured and cemented in the nation’s schools.

Now students can effectively enrol anywhere. They do, and one of the results is the abandonment of schools such as the ones identified in the principals’ survey, often for no other reason than distaste by parents in their thousands at having their kids rubbing shoulders with others from a different ethnic, class or religious background.

The second institutional factor is the deliberate effort by federal and state governments to pour billions and billions of dollars into supporting private schools and making them more and more attractive options for the well-off.

These schools, with a few exceptions, generally enjoy far better facilities, lower student-teacher ratios and more “choice” and they make their pitch for a “specialness”: the antithesis of the secular equality of opportunity which underpins Australia’s boastful egalitarianism.

It’s difficult not to see this officially sanctioned abandonment – so starkly revealed by school principals in a report that was kept under wraps for two years – as evidence of plain, old-fashioned racism at work. (See his full article here).

I think the claim of “plain, old-fashioned racism” is a little simplistic.  What this case shows is that a lot of individual choices which are not necessarily racist per se — just wanting the ‘best’ education for one’s kids — can add up to a sort of racism at a much broader level.  This is not to say that racism is not an issue, but just addressing individual attitudes to race will not fully ‘explain’ the situation.

Open access, online journals, peer review

Inside Higher Ed has an article on a debate at Indiana University over the relationship between free, online journals and peer review.  A couple of weeks ago they covered a decision at Harvard University to make an open access repository of faculty publications the default option.  And Savage Minds is talking about similar debates at Berkeley.  It’s clear that this issue is gaining momentum and that a few universities are positioning themselves at the vanguard of the open access movement.

–L.L. Wynn

‘On not winning the Nobel Prize’

Recently I came across the Nobel lecture by Doris Lessing, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2007, on the internet; I enjoyed reading it and would like to share it with you.

Doris Lessing was born in Persia in 1919; her parents were English, and she grew up in Zimbabwe, which was a British colony and then called Southern Rhodesia; and later on she moved to England.

In her Nobel lecture ‘On not winning the Nobel Prize’ Lessing talks about the meaning of ‘reading’, people’s craving for books and frustration over not having plenty of books in some poor African villages; and compares it to the ‘reading’ habits in affluent countries. This is a long article, but it’s worth reading and reflecting on:    

I am standing in a doorway looking through clouds of blowing dust to where I am told there is still uncut forest. Yesterday I drove through miles of stumps, and charred remains of fires where in ‘56 was the most wonderful forest I have ever seen, all destroyed. People have to eat. They have to get fuel for fires.

This is north west Zimbabwe early in the eighties, and I am visiting a friend who was a teacher in a school in London. He is here “to help Africa” as we put it. He is a gently idealistic soul and what he found here in this school shocked him into a depression, from which it was hard to recover. This school is like all the schools built after Independence. It consists of four large brick rooms side by side, put straight into the dust, one two three four, with a half room at one end, which is the library. In these classrooms are blackboards, but my friend keeps the chalks in his pocket, as otherwise they would be stolen. There is no atlas, or globe in the school, no textbooks, no exercise books, or biros, in the library are no books of the kind the pupils would like to read: they are tomes from American universities, hard even to lift, rejects from white libraries, detective stories, or with titles like ‘Weekend in Paris’ or ‘Felicity Finds Love’.