I blogged earlier about the visibility of anthropologists in the Dutch public. Well, get this: a just-graduated masters student in my department at the VU made the front-page of the free (!) tabloid Spits (described by my colleagues as “right-wing”) today. The article, entitled “Chinese feels [sic] discriminated” describes “research by anthropologist Lilly Witte (23)” about Dutch-raised ethnic Chinese, which concludes that they feel that mainstream Dutch society does not quite accept them as Dutch, on account of their look.

Although some of my colleagues feel that there might be some trick here (this newspaper is seen as having a generally anti-immigrant slant, so this might be a way of compensating?), and the usual laments about simplification apply, it is fantastic to see anthropology masters students’ research influencing the widest possible arena of public debate. Congratulations, Lilly.

A while back I was talking with a couple of people in the department about theorists in anthropology.  The subject got onto Michael Taussig and the fact that he was teaching a new course to do with the apocalypse with some radical approaches to teaching.  Taussig had apparently done away with term papers and instead students had to keep “apocalypse diaries”.  Unconventional presentations were also encouraged.  We even heard a rumour that a student had burst into class naked, clutching nothing but a book by Taussig (I’m not sure which one) and proceeded to rip pages from the book and stuff them up his arse, a performance which earned him an “A”.  I have no way of confirming whether this is true or not but it is a good example of the sorts of stories which seem to spring up when the conversation turns to Taussig.  So it was an interesting coincidence to learn that almost at the same time we had that conversation an article in the New Yorker was published on Taussig and his apocalypse course, full title: “Preëmptive Apocalyptic Thought: The Angel of History Reconsidered in Light of Climate Change, the War on Terror, and Financial Meltdown”.  Talk about engaging anthropology!  Here’s an excerpt from the article giving a bit of a sense of the character of the class:

He decided to teach a class on the apocalypse, he said, because “now seemed like a good time.” He had to turn away more than a dozen students. Halfway through the semester, he abolished final papers, replacing them with “apo diaries,” in which students were to note omens of the apocalypse around them, using the scrapbooks of William S. Burroughs as a model. One student’s included an image of the wrestler Jake (The Snake) Roberts, snake in hand, juxtaposed with a glaring Jesus, also snake in hand, who is saying, “Don’t fuck with the Apocalypse.”

Topics during the semester have included Glenn Beck, an R.V. that can go two thousand miles without stopping for gas, Walter Benjamin, 9/11, Las Vegas, and apocalyptic Yiddish poetry, which reminded Taussig of a song by the Fugs called “Septuagenarian in Love” (“Every time we have some sex / it almost breaks my balls”). Some students confessed that after a while the material had started scaring them. One developed insomnia.

Hmmm, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t possible to teach a course like that at Macquarie.  Besides anything else, in the current regime of bureaucratic therapeutics scaring the bejeesus out of students might be deemed a breach of out duty of care.  Despite the unconventional teaching style though, it strikes me that imaginations of the end of the world is a very timely subject matter.  I certainly spend a decent amount of each day contemplating the End, although I might be unusually morose.  But it seems we’re never without one disaster scenario or another on the horizon, providing grist to the media’s mill.  There is also of course a whole sub-industry of films dealing with the end of the world, the most recent including the abominable Knowing and the soon to be released 2012.  Just this afternoon (after I began this post, I should add) my 8-year-old son gave me an uncanny chill when he matter-of-factly asked me if I thought the world would be destroyed one day, “when everything becomes completely scientific and people all melt (because of the sun)”.  He postulated that an “ozone machine” could be built to protect the whole earth from the sun, meteors and other threats.  So there we have it: ozone depletion, meteor strikes, climate change and technological armageddon/salvation, and the image of a small, limited and fragile Earth, all rolled into one child’s imagination.

Apocalyptic thoughts aside, the article also got me wondering if there are any other unusual or experimental anthropology courses being taught out there, either in terms of the subject matter or teaching methods.  Maybe readers can chime in with some examples of teachers pushing the boundaries of anthropology?

– Jovan Maud

On June 20, marking two years of the Northern Territory Intervention, demonstrations will be held across the country in defense of Aboriginal Rights .

See the Youtube promo at

http://www.youtube.com/user/solidtv7#uploads/7/9rHbpKEZVco

Darwin: 11am Raintree Park contact Dave 0407209520

Sydney: 10:30 Belmore Park contact Monique on 0415410558

Brisbane: 11.00am Queen’s park contact Rob 0424265730 or Sam 0401227443

Melbourne: 12pm outside the State Library Cnr Swanston/La Trobe sts.

Perth: 12 noon Wesley Church.

This rally will have a focus on Aboriginal death’s in custody, demanding justice for Mr Ward.

www.rollbacktheintervention.wordpress.com

www.stoptheintervention.org

A couple of news items about the Human Terrain System have crossed my desk in the past week and I’m finally getting around to writing about them.  First, there’s an extended article in the Boston Globe about Paula Loyd, the HTS anthropologist who was killed in Afghanistan by a man who set her on fire (she died after 2 months in the hospital).  It gives more details than had previously been available about the man who killed her, suggesting that it wasn’t a spontaneous act of rage but something a bit more premeditated:

As part of a new military program that uses social scientists to improve the troops’ understanding of the local population, Loyd began interviewing a gregarious stranger who approached her with a jug of cooking fuel in his hands. He talked for 15 minutes, thanking her profusely in English. But just as her guards motioned it was time to leave, he lit his jug on fire and engulfed the 36-year-old Loyd in flames.

The other news item from this week’s Wired.com and Pravda is that HTS employees are about to become government employees instead of private contractors, with a substantial decrease in pay. From Wired.com’s Danger Room:

Imagine you’re on a mission for the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. The job is dangerous. The hours are long. And suddenly, you find out that your pay is about to be cut by sixty percent or more.

That’s the situation facing interpreters, researchers and  managers, deployed overseas as part of the Army’s social science program, the Human Terrain System. Since the inception of the project in 2006, these specialists have been generously-paid contractors, serving as cultural counselors to combat units. Earlier this week, however, program manager Steve Fondacaro told workers that they’re all becoming government employees — effective almost immediately. Which means that Human Terrain pay is suddenly not all that generous. One linguist, previously pulling in an annual salary $270,000, will now make about $91,000 — if that person continues his warzone work for the Human Terrain project, that is.

It abruptly changes the incentives calculus for anthropologists working for the military, which is something that has been widely reported on and critiqued — though even a ‘measly’ $91,000 a year is still about double the average starting salary of most anthropologists who teach at U.S. universities.

–L.L. Wynn

I am looking forward to reading Alfons’s posts; meanwhile, a PhD student at VU’s anthropology department, Erella Grassiani, has made it to the cover of the student newspaper, Advalvas.  I am not clear yet whether this paper is really edited by students, but at least it does discuss political controversies. In this instance, it is about Erella’s activism in opposing Israel’s intervention in Gaza. Erella, herself an  Israeli, recently completed her dissertation about Israeli soldiers who serve in the occupied territories, and recently was instrumental in setting up a group of Israelis in the Netherlands critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza. The cover story, entitled ”"Erella Grassiani may not criticize”, is about the reaction of Dutch Jewish groups, which have rejected her initiative, even as they support “dialogues” with Arab intellectuals who are similarly critical of Israel’s policies. Erella’s position is quite mainstream within Dutch academia (or dare I say it, “among Dutch intellectuals”), and her conflict with Dutch Jewish organisations may well be due in part to the challenge this poses to the latter in their role as spokespeople for the Jews vis-a-vis the Dutch government. Yet what makes it a more complex issue is that (as I speculated in an earlier post) anti-semitism may be rising in Europe, and though the synergies between the current popularity of anti-Israeli political positions and antisemitic conspiracy theories should not be overstated, they cannot be ignored either.

In Hungary, the front lines are drawn in a strikingly different way. Leftish/liberal Hungarian press has been full of condemnations of a prominent leftist intellectual, Tamás Gáspár Miklós, who had condemned fellow intellectuals for their cowardice in not protesting against Israel’s invasion, and stated that this had nothing to do with one’s opinion of Hamas. Although among my colleagues here and probably in Australia this position would probably be quite mainstream, the responses, ranging from conservative-liberal philosopher Agnes Heller to committedly left-wing sociologist Vásárhelyi Mária, were furious. They insisted that it was not possible to ignore the context of Hamas, and indeed some of them bid TGM farewell, saying he had parted ways with them. By contrast, the Hungarian nationalist press, which often publishes antisemitic articles, cheered TGM, although he is one of its most implacable and vitriolic opponents.

Today’s New York Times reports that “Arts Leaders Urge Role for Culture in Economic Recovery”. “Culture” here means the arts, and what the “leaders” urge is state funding for public art projects, ranging from more fine art commissions built into public construction and transportation projects to a European-style government-level secretary of culture.

Because in the past there has been much less of this in the US, discussions of “culture” have centred less on the arts and more on education and the media, which — along with museums — is where the “culture wars” largely played out (of course, they did in the National Endowment for the Arts as well, but that wasn’t so significant and visible to a broad public). If the wishes reported in the article materialise, then the American state will be confronted with the question of how to shape public representations of culture in the arts more strongly than before, and similarly to the way that, say, Britain’s Arts Council has. Considering the dominance of the “heritage format” (in Andrew Shryock’s term) in the (self-)representations of American society, there is a risk that ethnically labelled “cultures” will proliferate in this imagery.  This was, for a while, the case in Britain, where, say, certain artists tended to be selected qua British-Chinese or British-Caribbean artists, and expected to represent their “constituencies.” On the other hand, the fact that Obama’s own person, to an extent, defies the “heritage format” raises hope that this will not be the case.

There appears to be a lull on the blog, as my colleagues at Macquarie are (I guess) off to do fieldwork. So, as I have been silent here for a while, I’ll take the opportunity to share my first impressions of anthropology in the public in the Netherlands, as I experience it having just arrived at the Free University (VU) in Amsterdam.

While this is not Norway, where anthropologists are constantly in the news (though Thomas Eriksen did have a guest appointment at this department for a while!) it does seem that the media are more interested than, say, in Australia in what anthropologists have to say. In December alone, my departmental colleagues (including PhD students, who are considered staff) have been interviewed in the media on religion, Gaza, environmentalism, and Suriname. There is also a feature article in the popular Volkskrant of the type that we are by now used to, about corporations hiring anthropologists. This is true also for Philips, one of the Netherlands’ best-known multinationals, which has a Futures, People and Trends team. (The article notes, though, that anthropology students are often unaware of how trendy they are, as are their teachers who sometimes advise them to write in their CV that they studied “social sciences.”)

I guess one reason for this higher profile is that the Dutch press simply has more in-depth debates on social issues than the Australian one. Another may be that PhD students are often treated as authorities on their own right. A third, and perhaps more specific to the VU, is that within this department there is a strong research stream to do with religion, which is clearly a hot topic for journos (even though research here is mostly on neoprotestant conversion rather than Islam; but the VU also is a hub for Muslim students. Apparently, the fact that it is a university that has religion in its charter is considered a plus by many Muslim students, even though that religion is Protestant Christianity). And finally, there is a separate department of organisational research within the faculty of social sciences, whose members define themselves largely as organisational anthropologists. This is interesting, as such departments tend to be within business schools and thus fairly isolated from mainstream anthropology.

The Life and Style section of the Sydney Morning Herald has a fascinating article by Sydney-based writer Emily Maguire about the way culture trains men and women to respond in particular ways to their “biological responses to beauty.” Here’s an excerpt:

…boys are not taught, as girls are, that their bodies could have a disruptive effect on people around them, that they should wear looser clothing so as not to distract their classmates. They’re not told that how they look could incite nasty rumours or prevent them advancing at work or cause them to get raped. They aren’t told that the sight of their flesh may cause grown women to turn into mindless brutes.

But the fact is male bodies can have the same effect on women as female bodies can have on men. That far fewer men than women are harassed or attacked by people claiming sexual provocation is not because women aren’t visually aroused, but because women have learnt that their biological responses to beauty are not an excuse to commit acts of violence or discrimination.

The context is a recent attempt by conservative MP Fred Nile (Parliamentary Leader of the Christian Democratic Party in New South Wales) to ban women’s topless bathing on Sydney beaches.  Here’s what Maguire has to say about that:

Women’s learnt ability to deal with inappropriate lust brings us back to those topless sunbathers. In supporting Nile’s proposal, the NSW Labor MP Paul Gibson revealed his deep discomfort with both women’s bodies and the language used to describe bits of them when he asked, “Do you want somebody with big knockers next to you when you’re [at the beach] with the kids?”

Plenty of beach-loving mums can relate: there you are, rubbing sunscreen into your toddler’s back when a delicious slab of man meat lays his towel down right beside you. What to do?

How about this – remember that the person lying there is a human being whose hotness does not negate their right to bake unmolested. If the kids ask awkward questions like, oh, “What are those?” You say, “Nipples, we’ve all got them. Cool, huh?” Then you stop being a creepy perve and concentrate on the sandcastles and surf.

In a culture which is fascinated by biological arguments about the differences between men and women, it is awfully refreshing to hear a wittily argued rejoinder that lust and reactions to naked bodies are shaped by culture.

–L.L. Wynn

It’s a pity that the month that Culture Matters won the Savage Minds blog award, we’ve been really slow. It’s the end of the semester right before everyone disappears for the summer, and I assume that everyone is either swamped with marking or making exciting travel plans. I have a huge backlog of work and e-mails to answer so I probably shouldn’t be taking the time to post something, but I couldn’t resist because I keep getting distracted from grading by a couple of Wired articles on the Human Terrain System.

We already reported on news coverage of the attack on a Human Terrain Team member, Paula Lloyd, who was set on fire in Afghanistan by a man she was interviewing. Another Human Terrain Team member, Dan Ayala, then reportedly shot her attacker in the head after the attacker was disarmed and fully restrained. Ayala has since been charged with second degree murder and subsequently released on bail and is back in the U.S. (Open Anthropology has a list of links covering the story.)

Of course the attack and the revenge killing raise to a whole new level the debate about the ethics of putting social scientists in the middle of a war, and though I didn’t attend the AAA meetings this year in San Francisco, my sources tell me that this was hotly debated (see Inside Higher Ed for coverage). But all of this has been amply reported on elsewhere, so I didn’t think we needed to write more about it, until a friend and colleague based at SOAS in London sent me to have a look at the comments that have been posted to the Wired articles.

The first is an article by Noah Shachtman reporting on the charges against Ayala. What’s been distracting me from work is the comments that readers posted following the article. If you don’t get sick reading them, it’s actually fascinating to observe how misogyny and homophobia blend seamlessly with the ostensibly “anthropological” statements about local culture.

Misogyny:

“You invade and occupy a country, you better not send girlies with a psych degree to chat with locals”

and

“Afgan is an Islam [sic] country. The dumb-asses let a woman walk around like she owns the f***ing place and interrogate locals. There is no wonder the locals got so pissed off and set her on fire. She shouldn’t have been there in the 1st place. Stupid anthropologist [sic] got what is deserved.”

Homophobia: Shachtman and John Stanton, who has been writing a series of articles critical of HTS, are described as “blow buddies” by one commenter.

Cultural awareness: Many commentators express the view that Ayala’s reaction was culturally appropriate because

“Violence is the only thing people in that region understand.”

My favorite “cultural awareness” genre of comment, though (because I’m writing about stereotypes about Middle Easterners and camels), are the ones that suggest that this isn’t a matter of Geneva Conventions at all — it can just be reconciled by paying the dead man’s family some camels:

“But seriously, local customs would dictate he [Ayala] give the guy’s family some camels or cows and it’s done. So if the point of his team was to work within the local cultural framework, that is the appropriate response. Not an arrest and trial for murder. So lets embrace the local customs, raise some money, and buy some livestock.”

There are actually several comments that more thoughtfully reflect on legal codes that authorize or forbid different kinds of killing during war, but the overwhelming tenor of the articles is one of celebration that the Afghani who set Lloyd on fire was killed. It makes me wonder about the blood-thirstiness of Americans. It’s one thing to understand how a distraught man might kill after seeing his colleague set on fire, and it’s quite another to heroize that.

In other HTS news (they haven’t been getting much good press lately), Wired is also reporting that a Human Terrain contractor has been indicted as a Saddam-era spy.  There’s another series of comments ranging from the thoughtful to the bizarre, and one of the choicest in the “bizarre” category is this one:

“I blame the American Anthropology Association for all the dead and wounded HTS employees, for Ayala’s Human Terrain Murder, and for Montgomery McFate’s hiring of a one of Saddam Husein’s spies. Damn these anthropologists, if they would rise to the call of their patriotic duty and join this program like McFate wanted them to, there wouldn’t be a need to hire people like Issam Hamama or that woman who got set on fire after not realizing the problems with a woman approaching a man on the street (with a gas can) for an interview; anthropologists also wouldn’t have gotten into situations with the IEDs that killed those other HTS members because they’d have a clue about what’s what. Instead, now that the AAA has forbid its members to join McFate’s HTS, they have to hire people with no real experience in the area or whose experience includes spying for Saddam.”

I suppose it’s flattering that “Dr Darpa” (as s/he signs off) thinks that we anthropologists know everything, but it also seems rather cruel to suggest that intelligent social scientists and military personnel are getting killed because they’re not anthropologists so they don’t “have a clue about what’s what”!!

–L.L. Wynn

Some sad news: Paula Lloyd, a social scientist on a Human Terrain Team in Afghanistan, was reportedly doused in gasoline and set on fire by a Taliban supporter.  According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lloyd was interviewing a man about gasoline prices when the man, who was carrying a container of gasoline,  doused her and lit her on fire.  Via Open Anthropology, a Reuters news report says that the Taliban claim that children were responsible for setting on fire and killing a “female soldier” when she was searching homes in Maiwand in the province of Kandahar.  Lloyd, however, is not dead; she was evacuated to a hospital with burns over 60% of her body.  Reuters also reports that another “U.S. civilian” shot dead the Afghani who set her on fire.