ANTH 20 Final
To Veil or Not to Veil Overview
"Culture" is the key concept in Cultural Anthropology. Simply put, culture is expressed by human beings as learned, symbolic, and ever-changing patterns of behavior and meanings, at least partially shared by members of a group or society. A group of people is not "a culture". Rather, it is the patterns of behaviors and meanings that are the culture. Enculturation is the learning process by which a person learns the culture of their society. Social institutions such as the family, the schools, the churches/mosques, and the mass media teach and impress upon people the meanings for words and other symbols and behaviors. A symbol is something that stands for something else, such as a flag that is flown to proclaim a nation-state. It is through these symbols that people organize their worlds and express their social identities. People also express with symbolism their values and what they see as the norms for good behavior. No group or society of people are ever completely unified and agree on their values. Diversity is endemic to the human condition. Social diversity exists in many ways: by gender, sexuality, class or caste, political views, religion, ethnicity, and regionalism. Think of American society and how diverse we are, even within the same religion or ethnic group. All societies have social diversity. The movements of people across the world have intensified with globalization. Most places have transnational migrants adding more layers to their social diversity. To capture the importance of social diversity to human cultures, the term "multicultural" is used. Usually the culture of one segment of the society dominates, the culture of the majority or most powerful people, while a variety of subcultures co-exist. The people of the dominant culture control the social institutions. They are able to impose their values and meanings upon the people of the less dominant subcultures. We see this happening today in France over the issue of Muslim women wearing full-face veils. In 2010, the government of France passed a law banning the full face veil in public places. The French people who support the law claim the face veil is discriminatory to women and violates French norms regarding secularism. The result has been an ongoing clash of cultural values. Muslim women have launched demonstrations and protests, asserting their right to veil is a human right. The Muslim population in France steadily grew over the past few decades due to transnational migration, and now is estimated to be about 5% to 10% of the total population. Not all Muslim women in France would want to wear a face veil. But there are at least a couple thousand women who have insisted that veiling and the freedom to express their religion is their right. Quite a few Muslim women resist the law by continuing to wear the face veil. This resistance is called by anthropologists "cultural resistance." The women are resisting the imposition of French cultural norms on themselves. No culture is ever static. France a century ago was very much a Roman Catholic country, while nowadays the majority population proclaims its secularism. Recently, the European Court of Human Rights upheld the French law banning the face veil (July 2014). An unidentified French Muslim woman had brought the case before the European Court, and she lost. Meanwhile, Belgium enacted a similar law in 2011 and many cities in Spain and Italy have also banned the wearing of the face veil in public places. The much vaunted open-ness and freedom of western European countries has become more restrictive and less free for Muslims in Europe. The face veil is a heavily contested symbol, differing in its meanings for majority versus minority segments of the population. Human languages are the greatest systems of symbols by which people understand and order their world. Styles of speech as well as commonly used phrases and expressions provide ways by which people articulate their identities. Patterns of nonverbal communication, including the use of "artifacts" such as face veils, also convey social identities. Meanwhile, religion or any type of ideologically shared beliefs present particularly evocative symbols for establishing social identities that make people's worlds more meaningful yet often more conflictual. Religions share common characteristics such as sacred narratives, symbols and symbolism, and rituals. The sacred narratives include cosmologies for explaining and ordering the world. For Muslims, the significant religious narratives are found in the Quran and the Hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet Mohammad). Built into the cosmologies are powerful, evocative symbols such as Muslim clothing that articulates the modesty expected from men and women. The donning of clothing like a face veil can also be viewed as a ritual, as it is done with some regularity and usually for the purpose of showing religious piety and to please the will of Allah (God). At times people resist what they view as threatening social changes with fundamentalisms that reaffirm their religious symbols. Some Muslims in Europe resist the sexual liberty and licentiousness around them by adhering to a more fundamentalist practice aligned to the norms of modesty found in their religion. At the same time, a secular French majority resist what they perceive as Islamization of their society by enforcing secularism in public places with the ban on the face veil.
What causes Migration?
"Pushes and pulls" Pushes - Poverty - Famine - Natural disasters - War - Ethnic conflict - Genocide - Climate Change - Disease - Political/religious oppression Pulls - Job opportunities - Educational opportunities - Access to health care - Investment opportunities
Refugee:
A person who has been forced to move beyond his or her national borders because of persecution, armed conflict, or natural disasters
Ethical Fieldwork
Anthropologists must - Obtain consent of the people to be studied - Protect people from risk - Respect their privacy and dignity = Research cant do harm
SECOND GENERATION:
Child of immigrants who is born and raised in the new country
TRANSNATIONALISM:
The practice of maintaining an active participation in social, economic, religious, and political spheres across national borders
Why do Muslim women wear veils?
The veil is general term Have multiple names for this outfit like HIJAB, roopoosh, chador, NIQAB, BURQA
Theory
Way to take set of data/observations about world around us & organize in way to create patterns - Go beyond observation & make predictions Powerful tool to understand world in meaningful & useful way
SALVAGE ETHNOGRAPHY
defined U.S. anthropology a century ago namely the attempt to learn as much as possible about native cultures and customs as they'd been before conquest's devastation
XENOPHOBIA
dislike of or prejudice against people from other countries
DISCRIMINATION
is the act of making an unfavourable distinction for a being based on the group, class, or category to which they are perceived to belong can be justified or prejudicial
People Like Us
A Nation of Tribes: How Social Class Divides Us - People Like Us episode 1 · Show two photos o one people say lower class § black and white, man with white tank top, and high waisted shorts o other people say CEO § couple smiling, white, wearing polos · Americans supposed to not belong to class, but we do, why we struggle to talk about it o Many things measure class in America § House size, material possessions, if born with money, · Fallen gentry o Guy passed down big house, have painting of rich general who built house, and his wife, statue of great grandfather · Social Climber o Volvo is middle class family with children, ford is stolen · Working stiff o Guy showing up to job in suit is pretentious, take suit off when talk to him · Social critic o Teenage judging personality based on how kids dress (ghetto, quirky, grumpy, preppy) · Americans part of at least 1 tribe, are multiple in US o Groups we are a part of, we unconsciously separate ourselves from people who don't fit in our social class o Ex. Proud to be redneck, business/fashion high class, firefighters o America divided by class (neighborhood, how far got in school, what food eat, how ear hair) § But hard to see · If lived on hill = powerful, rich respected, educated, etc. o But lived on bottom = nothing · If went to private school b/c didn't like black people, now it's so don't be around poor people o If stupid can at least get into nice catholic university, hope for Harvard · Dining room shows taste, painting of grandfathers · English farmhouse or French farmhouse kitchen, huge TV, How to Marry the Rich - People Like Us episode 3 · Go to country club, charge dads' card o Women felt ignorant there, didn't know how to use right fork o High class people stand across from each other a certain number of inches, changes based on relationship (Business vs personal) · Idea that we can change our class if we wanted to o Not just money, · Women thinks she's doing something wrong if guy she's dating doesn't have job or car · Went from poor country girl to wife of millionaire, she's trying to replicate rich people behavior o World cares about first appearance § Bright colors = good · Women getting makeover, makeup & hair makes her pretty & worthy · Want to put toes even with other toes, upright shoulders, direct eye contact o project confident & an equal & have class · guys talk to her more · everyone has shot moving up according to American dream, but in reality not as easy o takes entire lifetime to do so Tammy's Story - People Like Us episode 4 · child embarrassed to live there b/c messed up trailer in front yard, doesn't want friends to know where they live · children clean up when Tammy works, but doesn't like how she moves around · child embarrassed to show people his mom, doesn't dress herself up o first appearance matters · tammy kitchen okay, doesn't have furnace · her & 4 kids are bottom rung · kids don't know where to put junk, so they throw it into a huge pile o clothes, toilets, burnt stuff o doesn't want to clean it up b/c lazy, just wants to be on couch o and mom wont clean either, asks his mom to straighten up, they argue all the time · tammy been on welfare for 18 years, she works at burger king, trying to make living for kids o she grew up poor, her dad worked hard for 22 kids, she was proud of her dad, she's trying · she walks 1 mi to work, no car or license, they holler at her, call her trashy bitch, in rain · she just wants a good life, people treat her bad, including her own kids · she cleans men's bathroom · her friends think she should stay at home, rely solely on welfare · her dream is to college & become a schoolteacher · embarrassed b.c mom wears burger king outfit every day, even when going out · her son thinks he's high class, preppy, better than his mom & brothers o Matt degrades the way his brother dresses, doesn't hang out with him b.c of that, he & his friend only walk with him if he looks good o Matt trying to prove to his friend that he's in their class · Showing camera awards from school & athletics · Younger brother wants to be his older brother, wants to be popular · Matt wants to go to college for a couple years · Tammy's car dead, has no tires · Tammy needs to get stuff going, help her kids o She doesn't know what else to do Friends in Low Places - People Like Us episode 6 · Party people, go to side bars rather than trendier bars of Baltimore · They're young kids to elders, but trying to relate to older guys · Group is a bit educated, kind of started careers · Taboo to say dive bar in the bar, not welcomed (even though its true) o Find more genuine people there · Guys flirting with older women, making friends with older guys · Older guy saying they're not from this bar, older people own this bar o They're yuppies = people that live out of neighborhood & come to the neighborhood & spend money & act like asses without their nice neighbors seeing § Embarrass themselves with lower class · Guy says giving people courtesies that they deserve, she reminds him of his grandmother · Working behavior has just as many rules as upper class o Blue collar life is very painful, hard § Kids prepared for blue collar but no longer acceptable, college life expected now
Cartoon
All about perpective While American feminists might say that the greatests issue facing Muslim women in Iran, Iraq, Aghanistan, etc is their "opression" as symbolized by the wearing of body coverings What do you think Muslim women might say are their most pressing issues? - Acces to ed, getting to school safely - Freedom to move as they please - Hair being covered up not a huge priority
Minority and Majority
An ETHNIC MINORITIES may be defined as a group which is politically non-dominant, and which exists as an ethnic category - Minorities are created when the compass of a social system increases, as when formerly tribal peoples become integrated into nation-states - Minorities often become majorities if they are able to define the sys in new ways - Ethnic groups which are minorities in one place may become majorities in another
What is the state?
An autonomous regional structure of political, economic, and military rule with a central government authorized to make laws and use force to maintain order and defend its territory
Hometown association:
An organization created for mutual support by immigrants from the same hometown or region
What is Class?
CLASS is a sys of power based on wealth, income, and status that creates an unequal distribution of society's resources Surpluses usually have upward mobility, into the hands of an elite Class stratifies individuals' life chances and affects possibilities for upward social mobility WEALTH is the total value of what someone owns, minus debts
Children of the Plains Movie
Documentary from ABC news with Diane Sawyer Went to Pine Ridge Reservation (part of Lakota Sioux Tribe) & spoke to children See extreme poverty Star of film = young boy named Robert Looks Twice Don't know what happened to him "Faces of a forgotten people" South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation, Lakota Sioux people "Not about history, about the future" "Land in equal opportunity" Its not "All american kid" 12 yr old face looks like warriors" Really? RObert Looks Twice Long hair indian symbol of honor Has mastered traditional dance Lives with grandparents and 8 cousins in trailer Cold so turn on stove for warmth Floor and roof destroyed, roof leaking No lights, bugs inside Messy room, clothes in closet wet from leaks Wants to be first person to go to college Wants to be first NA president, DIane laughs No mall, movie theatre, bank, big house All run down public housing Stats 70-80% adults unemployed 70% will drop out of high school 80% adults are alcoholic Epidemic of suicide Roberts grandmother raises grandchildren, cousins kids Cousin Scars on hand from mom being high & spilling boiling water on him Roberts mom is an alcoholic Roberts mom works at a bar 2 hours away, is drunk Is also drunk when she comes to visit him Catch him crying on the hill of graveyard of his family b/c she was verbally abusive Roberts wears highest honor of eagle feathers at dance He wins prize money and shares it with his grandma Favorite food is dough cooked in oil, frybread Roberrt not jealous b/c builds up strength through hard road, becoming a warrior Ride horses up hills, young girl named Louise showing the land Everything sacred- animals, grass, teppe, dancing 10,000 years lived in discipline, ehersey to use more of earth than needed Louise almost killed herself last year, brother found her, that's what hurts her, seeing her family cry for her Her mom is also an alcoholic, hurts herself a lot Her home has no heat, collapsing & moldy Has 3 shirts, loves disney shows b/c see how stars have everything But loves the way she lives b/c part of her culture, but wants things to get better Her psychologist live 6 hours away, so here teachers & principal watch over her Principal is 74, has poor health, was raised on reservation School has asbestos in the floor, falling apart, but don't have the money Children dive into lunches b/c underfed at home Don't have food during the weekend Crying b/c has seen so many students in horrible circumstances Give louise feather prayer and bag of marbles and native name Stand against the wind so she remains strong & never feels alone Kids want to be teacher, grandma, football player, cowgirl when grow up Learn own language in elementary school Was prohibited before 1978 In 1940s children were being taken from their homes & westernized "Kill Indian and save the man" Trying to teach kids resilience, need failure for successes Heather graduated from Harvard Law Jason former marine trying to motivate new generation of entrepreneurs Have modern day warriors Vicki sunshine is actually named elena Wants to be first Lakota on American Idol Her boyfriend goes to specialized school Going to college Her mom had dreams but got pregnant Shock, elena is pregnant Elena sad b/c had to give up everything, but mom said don't ever make baby feel bad for life changing Elena and boyfriend get married but its hard to raise child Teen broth rates 3X national average, her friends also pregnant, her friends dropped out Elean graduates from school, tries out for American idol She was cut 1980 Supreme Court admitted that what they did to people was dishonorable Tashina dances like crazy, her uncle make her dance clothes She has 19 people in her house Sleeps in one bed with her family Her mother wanted to be a lawyer but got pregnant, is security guard at the reservation Works double shifts but makes only $9 an hour Her father gets the children ready for school DJ (father) applying to be a firefighter, wants to get own house Tashina wants to be a cop, put drunk people in jail Milton is captain of tribal police Tribe decided to keep reservation dry Lots of DWI deaths Made 17,00 arrests involving alcohol in one year Go to next town to get alcohol 4 liquor stores that sell 4 million cans of beer a year $7 million a year Joose is 12%, sells like crazy 90% of his clients are from the reservation Every family experiences alcoholism, get numb to it Terry runs substance abuse program to help people get sober Children start at ⅚ years old drinking Louise quit marijuana b/c knew bad Robert drug & alcohol free, doesn't want to experiment b/c sees what it does to you Film DWI accident, passenger died, it was Tashina's father DJ Have traditional drums, tables of cakes & quilts at funeral Tashina says her dad is now an Angel She's still dancing in joy Subway giving people hope, opened on reservation Women cried b/c hasn't eaten cucumber in years b/c so expensive Can get vegetables Many people applied for work Employee lost 125 lbs working at subway ½ of adults are diabetic, average life expectancy 58 for men 56 for women Carbs are new to people, fry bread easy to make, but bad for you Commodities boxes (food from gov) from feds are filled with starch Due to their illegal seizure of Lakota land and killing of 60 million buffalo Karleen creating beef jerky out of berries & buffalo to keep people healthy Successful business even sold in whole foods Natives dependent on gov b/c have no jobs Having baby helps get money Natives only have bad lands which have no resources for people No businesses on reservation b/c fed gov created sys that makes it so confusing & impossible to do business on the reservation So unbelievably regulated by gov Have no role models in community Want bank, laundromats, car wash, pizza place, movie theatre Why don't they leave reservation? It's their nation, their home, their identity, where would they go? Louise's mother got job at school & is drinking less, continues counseling, wants to apply to private school so can go to college Elena wants to go to college to study business Tashina won first place in tribal dance competition Invest in tribal companies, hire native people, build schools on reservations, become a teacher at Pine Ridge, offer scholarships for natives, get a mall on the reservation, better houses Robert wants to get into private native school, his mom called him saying she's sober, works as housekeeper & gardener Given blanket when leave to keep them warm on the path ahead Believe all humans, animals, rocks related Montage of people & cheesy inspirational music
The Nation-State
For a nation-state to exist, its leaders must simultaneously be able to legitimate a particular power structure and sustain a pop belief in the ability of the nation to satisfy certain basic needs of the pop Ex. Puerto Rico a nation-state, but not a country A successful nationalism implies, in most cases, an intrinsic connection between an ethnicideology of shared descent and a state apparatus
Internally displaced person:
Forced to move within his or her country or origin because of persecution, armed conflict, or natural disasters
Cultural IMPERIALISM/HOMOGENIZATION
Globalization causing cultural homogenization - Cultural ideas & products coming from western countries to periphery countries, making it look like western world = Whole world going to look western Cultural imperialism holds that the traffic in culture moves primarily in one direction- FROM THE CORE TO THE PERIPHERY - Process of cultural imposition and dominance This process, the theory goes, is leading to the cultural homogenization of the world Installation of Western versions of - Values, ethical systems, approaches to rationality - Technical-scientific worldview - Political culture Yes some homogenization occurring and there is power disparity between first and third worlds But there are 3 mistakes with Cultural imperialism theory
Ch 20- Public Anthropology
However, public anthropology, as the term is generally used, refers to a specific set of practices and positions within the discipline that aim to reach out beyond the confines of the academy. This can be accomplished through writing for different audiences, engaging in advocacy-oriented work in local communities, or by taking part in the transnational conversation about the ills and spoils of the contemporary world and what it means to be human. The common denominator of these practices is the conviction that anthropology should matter not just as an academic pursuit of knowledge but also as a tool to engage with the world in a practical, if not political way. Public anthropology amounts to an attempt to bridge the gap and overcome the alienation between the anthropological community as a closed professional group and the global society that anthropology studies and in which anthropologists take part. The ideal readership of the public anthropologist are neither paid (colleagues) nor forced (students) to listen to them or read their work. They could be academics working in other fields, or they could be anybody. At this point, it may be useful to distinguish, following Besteman (2013), between engaged and public anthropology, the latter explicitly aiming to contribute to a broad and non-specialised discourse about humanity, the former often engaged on behalf of a community or social grouping in which the anthropologist works. The relationship of anthropology to the wider public sphere has gone through several stages, or ebbs and flows if you like. In the nineteenth century, anthropology scarcely existed as an independent intellectual endeavour, but was largely a gentlemanly pursuit or an unintended, but not unwelcome side-effect of exploration and colonisation. Those who contributed to the emergence of anthropology as a distinctive field of scientific knowledge, from Lewis Henry Morgan in the US to Henry Maine and E.B. Tylor in England, positioned themselves in a broader ecology of ideas and the pursuit of knowledge. The professionalisation of anthropology as an academic discipline began in earnest around the last turn of the century, enabling later practitioners to withdraw increasingly from social concerns and other approaches to human culture and society. While many nineteenth-century anthropologists were not 'public anthro- pologists' in the contemporary sense, they certainly related to a broader public - from lay readers to policy-makers - than most academic anthro- pologists of the twentieth century. In addition, many early anthropologists, especially in the US, were involved in what would today be called radical advocacy or action anthropology. The institutionalisation of anthropology as an academic discipline in the twentieth century enabled many anthropologists to effectively withdraw from the surrounding society (Eriksen 2006; Low and Merry 2008). Concerns voiced by some, such as Radcliffe-Brown, to make anthropology a 'real science' modelled on physics and biology, encouraged this kind of retreat into the ivory tower, and, as the internal demographics of anthropology soared after the Second World War, the professional community grew large enough to begin to spin a cocoon around itself. Like a growing empire, it increasingly became self-contained, self-reproducing and self-sufficient, until the sheer demographic growth, decades later, again led to porous boundaries and defections. However, there has been no straightforward movement from openness to closure. Important anthropologists who contributed to the institutional- isation of the subject, such as Franz Boas, were engaged in broader societal issues, and Boas was an important public critic of racist pseudoscience. Among his students, Margaret Mead, the author of 44 books and more than a thousand articles, keeping up steam until her death in 1978, was arguably the public anthropologist par excellence in the twentieth century. There were also many others whose work was read outside the academy, and who engaged in various ways with the world at large. Malinowski gave lectures on primitive economics to anyone who would care to listen; Mauss was engaged in French politics as a moderate socialist; and so on. Moreover, applied anthropology had been a sub-field - often disparaged by those involved in 'pure research' - since well before the Second World War. As noted by David Mills (2006, p. 56-57), anthropologists had, since the early twentieth century, tried to 'convince the Imperial government that anthropology served a useful purpose and deserved funding'. Although applied research was funded by the Colonial Social Science Research Council until 1961 (Pink 2006), little basic anthropological research received such funding (Goody 1995). Anthropological methods and anthropological knowledge have nevertheless, at various times, been deemed useful by governments and business leaders, for example in the Human Terrain System of the US military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, where practicioners from anthropology (and other subjects) were drawn upon to enhance knowledge of local circumstances in war areas. Deeply controversial among American anthropologists, the HTS was denounced in a statement issued by the American Anthropological Association in 2007. However, strictly speaking, giving courses to army personnel on their way to remote places can perfectly well be seen as a form of public anthropology, provided soldiers are seen as members of the public. Such courses may lend legitimacy to the wars (which to many is problematic), but they may also, as has been argued by 'embedded' anthropologists in US and NATO forces, reduce suffering by providing a contextual and sympathetic understanding of local life-worlds. Anthropologists have always, to varying degrees, engaged with publics outside the academy. Sometimes, this has led to their academic marginali- sation - one could easily be written off as intellectually lightweight if one got involved in advocacy or applied work, say, for development agencies - and there has been, as noted by many (e.g. Pels and Salemink 1999; Borofsky 2011), a clear tendency to rank pure research above applied research. Similarly, the hierarchy ranking academic writing for insiders above lucid writing for the general public is also debatable. The fact remains that most of the anthropologists who are widely read by students put most of their intellectual energy into basic research and theory, and we therefore need to point out that they have all coexisted with other anthropologists, who either went out of their way to establish a broader dialogue about the human condition, or who actively sought to mitigate suffering and contribute to social change. Public anthropology as such is, in other words, not new. Nevertheless, the problematisation of distinctions that were formerly taken for granted, notably between 'pure' and 'applied' work, and the development of a reflexive and critical discourse about the ways in which anthropology can be made relevant outside the academy, has been on the rise in recent years. As pointed out earlier, anthropologists working in the Global South often come to realise that many of the people they came into contact with had highly articulate and reflexive views of their own history, culture and identity. They certainly did not feel the need for anthropologists to identify who they were; in many parts of the world, local intellectuals had indeed read some anthropology and were familiar with its concepts. They were able to identify themselves and use some of the tools offered by anthropology to develop their own existential and political agendas, and did not see why they should need foreigners to do the job for them. In this world of multiple transnational networks and global flows, the divide between 'us, the knowers' and 'them, the objects of study' may have become untenable, and anthropologists now venture into fields, and delineate their topics of inquiry, in ways that were unheard of only a generation ago (see MacClancy 2002 for a sample). As Sam Beck and Carl Maida (2013) put it, the contemporary world is in every sense borderless. The consequences of the destabilisation of boundaries for the anthropological endeavour are many, and some of the most important consequences become evident in the debates around public anthropology: Who can legitimately say what, and on whose behalf can they say it? What are the benchmark criteria for good ethnography? What can anthropolo- gists offer to the societies they study? And - in a very general sense - what is the exact relationship between anthropological research and the social and cultural worlds under study? These questions, which were always relevant, have become inevitable, and increasingly difficult to answer, in the borderless world of the twenty-first century. Although there seems to be broad agreement within the discipline about the desirability of a public anthropology, there is less certainty, or agreement, not only about how to achieve it in a responsible way, but also about its very raison-d'être. What should an anthropology which engages closely with non-academic publics seek to achieve? There are several possible approaches to this question. A position enunciated at the time of the radical student movement of the 1960s saw anthropology as an inherently critical discipline, politically on the left (e.g. Berreman 1968). To the extent that anthropologists are closer to 'ordinary people' than other researchers, including other social scientists, advocacy on behalf of local communities facing potential conflict with corporations or states may seem to follow logically from the experiences and social obligations developed by the anthropologist in the field. It is doubtless true that when anthropologists act or write on behalf of the people they do research on, they are more often than not defenders of the particular and the local against various forms of standardisation, state power and global neoliberalism. While this can often be a necessary task, the critical role of public anthropology can be taken further than advocacy for various kinds of local movements. This is especially, but not exclusively, evident when anthropologists engage with issues in their own society. Doing anthropological research at home has its familiar rewards and pitfalls, mostly resulting from the close relationship of the researcher to the researched. For obvious reasons, this has been more thoroughly theorised by sociologists than by anthropologists, some of whom still tend to think of 'anthropology at home' as an exception. Accordingly, just as neo-Marxism was losing its position as the dominant non-orthodox theoretical orientation in the social sciences, Giddens (1984) pointed out that the social scientist enters into a 'double hermeneutic' relationship in his or her society, since the concepts and analyses of the social sciences are both informed by lay concepts and in turn influence them. There is, in other words, a two-way hermeneutic process taking place. For instance, the anthropological concept of ethnicity has entered everyday discourse, while the political concept of integration (regarding minorities) has, conversely, influenced social research on the issue. Social scientists are, in other words, entwined with broader public discourse and societal concerns whether they like it or not; indeed, critics of positivism have long pointed out that this is true of all scientific enquiry. Writing in the context of the burgeoning radical student movements in the late 1960s, Jürgen Habermas distinguished between three knowledge interests (Erkenntnisinteressen, Habermas 1971 [1968]), which he associated with the three main branches of academic inquiry. The natural sciences, he said, were driven by a technical interest, and found their justification in explaining natural relationships and processes in ways enabling control and technological progress. The inherent knowledge interest of the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) was practical (in the Kantian sense) and aimed to deepen and maintain the communicative community on which both society and individuality depended. Finally, the knowledge interest of the social sciences was liberating, aiming to expose and account for the power relations of society, thereby contributing to the critical self-understanding of its inhabitants. Habermas worried that the technical knowledge interest was becoming overly dominant across the academic disciplines. It is easy to see evidence supporting this view today, when most social science research is commissioned directly or indirectly by state institutions, humanities are judged on their instrumental usefulness, and New Public Management provides the yardsticks for assessing academic achievement. Seen against the backdrop of Habermas, Giddens, the critique of positivism and the perceived need for public engagement, it is evident that not all social science meets the criteria for representing a liberating knowledge interest. Some - perhaps most - social science is closely aligned with social engineering, planning and the formal structuring of society, and in state budgets, social research is justified by referring to its usefulness. It belongs to the domain of the technical knowledge interest. Its dialectical negation, the broad family of approaches and persuasions falling under the umbrella of critical social science, either aims to improve a flawed socioeconomic system by addressing racism, inequality, misogyny, etc., or to replace it with a better one. Anthropology is in a privileged position to develop a third way beyond system maintenance and social criticism, one which is arguably more in accordance with the young Habermas' (and his more radical predecessors in the Frankfurt school) notion of liberating knowledge (see Ferrándiz 2013). Being an inherently subversive and unpredictable partner in the long conversation about who we are and where we are going, anthropology does not take home truths for granted, refuses to be coopted by polarising discourses, and insists on the right to view society simultaneously as 'observer and participant'. Allow me a few examples from Norway, a country where public anthropologists are fairly thick on the ground (Eriksen 2006, 2013). In this small North European country, anthropolo- gists often give public talks in forums ranging from Rotary clubs to Oslo's popular House of Literature, they comment on public events in the media, and several write regular columns, op-eds and the occasional book for a general readership. An extraordinary and understudied ritual which is organised and participated in by thousands of 19-year-olds in Norway every year in May is the russefeiring, the graduation celebration of the school leavers. They dress in characteristic red uniforms with white nicknames and other insignia, drive around in usually dilapidated buses painted red and decorated in white, loud music blaring and horns honking; above all, they organise a series of large and boisterous outdoor parties culminating on Constitution Day, 17 May. A lengthy celebration of anti-structure in Turner's sense (1969), the russefeiring is generally tolerated, but it is also the source of considerable anxiety among parents and other respectable citizens who are directly or indirectly affected by it. Some time in the early 1990s, Eduardo Archetti was interviewed about this spectacle by the leading right-of-centre Oslo newspaper Aftenposten. The father of two teenagers himself, Archetti had first-hand insight into the phenomenon, and he explained to the journalist that this was a self-organised rite of passage. Moreover, he added, for many of these adolescents, it was their first experience of rituals which involved sex and intoxicating substances, and this went a long way to explain why it was so emotionally powerful and fraught with tension. Not the most reassuring statement for anxious parents, perhaps, Archetti's description was faithful to the experiental space inhabited by the russ themselves, conveying a sense of the complex emotions invested into the exciting and slightly dangerous celebrations. Archetti came across as a social scientist driven by curiosity rather than anxiety, which is an unusual and, to many, surprising position to take in a public sphere where social scientists are generally expected to share the concerns of the state and, more generally, to worry. My next vignette tells the story of a more contested and controversial situation, namely that of the Roma Gypsies in Europe. As in many other European countries, Norway has seen a considerable, to some extent seasonal, growth in the influx of Roma in recent years. Their presence has led to a series of local and national controversies: some accuse them of being simple thieves and criminals masquerading as an oppressed minority; others disapprove of their livelihood on moral and aesthetic grounds and have called for a general ban on begging. At the local level, there have been skirmishes regarding their right to camp in parks and other public spaces, and many have pointed out that the Roma tend to leave their designated campsites in an untidy and filthy state when moving on. The occasional eviction by the police from empty lots in the city has led to the mobilisation of support groups arguing for their right to stay, and a recently formed NGO, Folk er Folk ('People are People'), has the plight of the Roma as its main focus. Yet there seems to be no simple solution to this knotty problem. Although it cannot be denied that Roma and other Gypsies have suffered terrible oppression across Europe, from slavery and indentureship to attempted genocide, the conflicts between itinerant Roma and settled Europeans are real enough, not least seen from the perspective of the latter, who see their parks and recreation areas deteriorating due to the regular presence of people who scatter rubbish around and sometimes threaten passers-by. There are mainly two approaches to the contemporary Roma question which may shed light on it in different ways. According to the first, the Roma in Norway are best described as unemployed and homeless; according to the second, they avoid regular wagework for cultural reasons and are a nomadic people. The first perspective is characteristic of the Norwegian Left, including Folk er Folk, while the second perspective can be gleaned from the analyses and comments of Norway's leading scholar specialising in Roma Gypsies, the anthropologist Ada Engebrigtsen The begging and camping population of the capital increases perceptibly every summer, and Engebrigtsen is regularly contacted by the media for comments during the warm months. She has, over the years, contextualised the Roma Gypsies for the Norwegian public in many ways, refusing to moralise either way. She has confirmed that some of them steal, adding that this would be the case of most ethnic groups. Engebrigtsen has also pointed out that the term 'Roma' is unfortunate as a catch-all phrase for all Gypsies, since only some European Gypsies are Roma. She has on occasion explained that Roma girls often get married around the age of 14 to 16, which implies that persons of this age are considered responsible adults who often have children of their own. She has also stated that begging, to them, just forms part of their survival repertoire - there are no 'human traffickers' nor 'a mafia' sending Roma from Romania to Norway. They travel independently in search of a means of survival. Finally, Engebrigtsen (2012) has showed how group-based begging can be economically profitable, even if the hourly income can be as low as 20 to 40 kroner (€2.50-5). These snippets from Engebrigtsen's contributions to the public as a researcher of Roma Gypsies suggest that her role in the Norwegian media has neither been that of advocacy (for a minority) nor of anxiety (on behalf of, for example, the welfare state), but has rather consisted in asking open-ended questions and trying to make sense of, and convey some central elements of, the Gypsy life-world to the Norwegian public sphere. As a result, her work cannot easily be coopted by political interests, whether favourable or unfavourable to the Roma presence in Norway. It is morally ambiguous. My final short example is more generic than the other two, and it is included because it indicates a different dimension of the subversive potential of anthropology, namely that of turning a familiar story on its head, but it also indicates the risk of being categorised within a polarised political discourse. In the media debate about immigration to Norway, which has intensified significantly since the turn of the millennium, there are major concerns around the practices formally known as 'family reunification', whereby migrants already settled and with full citizenship rights in the country can 'import' a new person from the native country through marriage. Moral outrage often accompanies media stories about this practice, sometimes disparagingly spoken of as henteekteskap ('pick-up marriage') as opposed to an 'authentic' marriage based on mutual affection and individual choice. An underlying assumption is that these marriages are part of a racket which in practice increases the immigrant population in Norway in a morally illegitimate, if technically legal way. To strengthen this interpretation, it has been mentioned, rightly or wrongly, that a young girl or boy of Pakistani parents with Norwegian citizenship is spoken of as 'a golden passport' in their place of origin. An anxiety-driven social science perspective on this practice might either search for ways in which this kind of migration could be reduced (for example, by raising the minimum age, or by requiring a minimum income for the spouse residing in Norway), or arguing that these marriages are no less emotionally and morally valid than those of the ethnic majority. A characteristic anthropological approach to this kind of practice would take an informant's perspective. For example, it might convey the view of the Pakistani father. Suppose, the anthropologist might argue, you were not an affluent person in a rich, well-organised country, but a struggling father in a Pakistani town. Suppose, moreover, you had a son or daughter of marriagable age, and that you had relatives living overseas in a country, admittedly cold and expensive, but with huge economic opportunities, physical security, free education at all levels, a secular public sphere and a fairly reliable public sector? Living in a country where corruption is rife, the economy is in a shambles, the public administration is distant and inefficient and violence is common, wouldn't you - assuming that you wanted the best for your children and grandchildren - do everything in your power to help him or her find an appropriate spouse in that other country? There is no guaranteed outcome from this kind of thought experiment, but the detour via the Pakistani father's life-world does the job of adding nuance and complexity to an otherwise one-sided, myopic and intellectually lazy perspective. Without giving unequivocal answers, it enables the public to raise the question in a more informed way than before, thanks to the perspectives from methodological cultural relativism.
Nationalism and Minorities by Thomas Hyland Eriksen
In anthro, NATIONALISM is an ideology which holds that cultural boundaries should conform to political boundaries The state ought to contain only people "of the same kind" All nationalisms promote coherence or uniformity between the state and culture of its citizens in some form In the past, social theorists may have regarded nationalism as part of some archaic past, but it's actually a product of modernity Nationalism as we know it developed in both France and Germany at the time of the French Revolution It has duel origins in both the French Enlightenment and German Romanticism
The Gwich'in and their Traditional Foods:
Land seems barren but its not North of arctic circle = 24 hrs daylight in summer & 24 hrs dark in winter Can reach -40C in winter and in summer +30C Eat caribou, moose, fish, berries Flour, sugar, rice, oats, tea, pasta store bought People hunted all day, snow for water, constantly moving around Didn't have jobs, had to make use of everything from the land Change in health of natives who moved to community instead of living from the land - Live in town, only H&G on weekends - Town isolated so produce not fresh = Natives now eating processed foods since cheaper & more available - Increase in obesity & diabetes so trying to promote traditional foods Young don't eat traditional foods like elders, fear that will lose traditions Leave town How will survive if have no job? Can't buy food from supermarket Radio best way to communicate since dispersed community Hunting info & traditional info spread this way Developing school programs, cookouts, & physical activities to help Many elders use traditional foods & trying to teach youngers Dry meat & then step on it to make it tender Eat fat in addition to meat Freeze meat for later Pick cranberries Boil it, put custard & sugar, cook it with liver or white fish Fresh caribou meat better than going to store and buying chicken & pork chop Caribou eat lichens & willows & plants = good traditional meds, so eating caribou gives people those traditional plants Health of food sources directly directed to environment If no good habitat then no species, so have to preserve land Leaders need to make policies that preserve the environment = the food Caribou pops have decreased dramatically, need to focus on protecting them Pipeline could drive caribou away Tie to nature & species = identity, if lose land lose identity River not polluted, just drink water straight from it Beaver, muskrat, duck, etc People rich b/c nature provides for them
FIRST GENERATION:
Left home as an adult
PROJECT CAMELOT
Mid 1960s US military project that used anthropologists to achieve foreign policy goals Anthropologists seen as spies in host countries American Anthropological Association members raised concerns about the ethics of the project
BRAIN DRAIN:
Migration of highly skilled professionals from developing/periphery countries to developed/core countries - "Brain circulation"
We are the 99%?
Most Americans do not have an accurate picture of where they fit into the nation's class structure Inequality has been steadily growing since the 1970s Pew Research Center, 2008: 53% of Americans consider themselves middle class, including 40% of those making less than $20,000 a year and ⅓ of those making more than $150,000 a year 21% considered themselves "upper class" CNN, 2007 40% reported they were or would soon be in the richest 1% of the US pop
"Culture of Poverty:" Oscar Lewis (1959)
Poverty as pathology: poverty results from dysfunctional behaviors, attitudes, and values that make and keep poor people poor Feelings of marginality, helplessness, and dependency that shaped character and worldviews Most social scientist discredited theory as blaming the victims of poverty for structures beyond their control Yet, theory formed basis of key social policies in later parts of 20th century Moynihan Report: "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action"
SEGREGATION, ASSIMILATION, and INTEGRATION
Short of physical extermination, states may use one or more of 3 principle strategies in their dealings with minorities: - SEGREGATION means the minority group becomes physically separated from the majority, often accompanied by the notion that the members of the minority are inferior ASSIMILATION: Forced acculturation (Culture you move into later), forced to adopt other cultural norms - may be enforced or chose - Ex. Latinos in NYC 1950s = It is practically impossible if ethnic identity has a strong phenotypical component - INTEGRATION refers to participation in the shared institutions of society, combined with the maintenance of group identity and some degree of cultural distinctiveness = It represents a compromise between the other two options
SOCIAL STRATIFICATION
Social stratification refers to society's categorization of its people into groups based on socioeconomic factors like wealth, income, race, education, gender, occupation, and social status, or derived power (social and political) is the relative social position of persons within a social group, category, geographic region, or social unit
Migration
Sociological and anthropological research on migration from poor to rich countries has mainly concentrated on 3 topics: - Aspects of discrimination and disqualification on the part of the host population - Strategies for the maintenance of group identity - The relationship between immigrant culture and majority culture Increasingly, this research has to account for transnational relationship between the community of origin and the sociocultural environment in the host country, since most migrants maintain ties to their place of origin
The Modern Western-Style State
State: An autonomous regional structure of political, economic, and military rules These states are organized by a central gov with ability to make laws and use force to maintain order The primary difference between this conception of a state and earlier conceptions lies in the territoriality To the modern residents of states, the territory of the state often becomes synonymous with the state We erect barriers, monuments, walls, etc all out of a deeply held desire to define state boundaries, even in the case of friendly states
CHAIN MIGRATION:
The movement of people facilitated by the support of networks of family and friends who have already immigrated
Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving
This article explores the ethics of the current "War on Terrorism, asking whether anthropology, the discipline devoted to understanding and dealing with cultural difference, can provide us with critical purchase on the justifications made for American intervention in Afghanistan in terms of liberating, or saving, Afghan women. I look first at the dangers of reifying culture, apparent in the tendencies to plaster neat cultural icons like the Muslim woman over messy historical and political dynamics. Then, calling attention to the resonances of contemporary discourses on equality, freedom, and rights with earlier colonial and missionary rhetoric on Muslim women, I argue that we need to develop, instead, a serious appreciation of differences among women in the world—as products of different histories, expressions of different circumstances, and manifestations of differently structured desires. Further, I argue that rather than seeking to "save" others (with the superiority it implies and the violences it would entail) we might better think in terms of (1) working with them in situations that we recognize as always subject to historical transformation and (2) considering our own larger responsibilities to address the forms of global injustice that are powerful shapers of the worlds in which they find themselves. I develop many of these arguments about the limits of "cultural relativism" through a consideration of the burqa and the many meanings of veiling in the Muslim world I was led to pose the question of my title in part because of the way I personally experienced the response to the U,S, war in Afghanistan. Like many colleagues whose work has focused on women and gender in the Middle East, I was deluged with invitations to speak—not just on news programs but also to various departments at colleges and universities, especially women's studies programs. Why did this not please me, a scholar who has devoted more than 20 years of her life to this subject and who has some complicated personal connection to this identity? Here was an opportunity to spread the word, disseminate my knowledge, and correct misunderstandings. The urgent search for knowledge about our sister "women of cover" (as President George Bush so marvelously called them) is laudable and when it comes from women's studies programs where "transnational feminism" is now being taken seriously, it has a certain integrity My discomfort led me to reflect on why, as feminists in or from the West, or simply as people who have concerns about women's lives, we need to be wary of this response to the events and aftermath of September 11, 2001, 1 want to point out the minefields—a metaphor that is sadly too apt for a country like Afghanistan, with the world's highest number of mines per capita—of this obsession with the plight of Muslim women, 1 hope to show some way through them using insights from anthropology, the discipline whose charge has been to understand and manage cultural difference, At the same time, I want to remain critical of anthropology's complicity in the reification of cultural difference The presenter from the NewsHour show first contacted me in October to see if I was willing to give some background for a segment on Women and Islam, I mischievously asked whether she had done segments on the women of Guatemala, Ireland, Palestine, or Bosnia when the show covered wars in those regions; but I finally agreed to look at the questions she was going to pose to panelists, The questions were hopelessly general. Do Muslim women believe "x"? Are Muslim women "y"? Does Islam allow "z" for women? 1 asked her: If you were to substitute Christian or Jewish wherever you have Muslim, would these questions make sense? I did not imagine she would call me back, But she did, twice, once with an idea for a segment on the meaning of Ramadan and another time on Muslim women in politics. One was in response to the bombing and the other to the speeches by Laura Bush and Cherie Blair, wife of the British Prime Minister What is striking about these three ideas for news programs is that there was a consistent resort to the cultural, as if knowing something about women and Islam or the meaning of a religious ritual would help one understand the tragic attack on New York's World Trade Center and the U.S. Pentagon, or how Afghanistan had come to be ruled by the Taliban, or what interests might have fueled US, and other interventions in the region over the past 25 years, or what the history of American support for conservative groups funded to undermine the Soviets might have been, or why the caves and bunkers out of which Bin Laden was to be smoked "dead or alive, as President Bush announced on television, were paid for and built by the CIA In other words, the question is why knowing about the "culture" of the region, and particularly its religious beliefs and treatment of women, was more urgent than exploring the history of the development of repressive regimes in the region and the U.S. role in this history, Such cultural framing, it seemed to me, prevented the serious exploration of the roots and nature of human suffering in this part of the world, Instead of political and historical explanations, experts were being asked to give religiocultural ones, Instead of questions that might lead to the exploration of global interconnections, we were offered ones that worked to artificially divide the world into separate spheres—recreating an imaginative geography of West versus East, us versus Muslims, cultures in which First Ladies give speeches versus others where women shuffle around silently in burqas On the one hand, her address collapsed important distinctions that should have been maintained, There was a constant slippage between the Taliban and the terrorists, so that they became almost one word—a kind of hyphenated monster identity: the Taliban-and-the-terrorists. Then there was the blurring of the very separate causes in Afghanistan of women's continuing malnutrition, poverty, and ill health, and their more recent exclusion under the Taliban from employment, schooling, and the joys of wearing nail polish, On the other hand, her speech reinforced chasmic divides, primarily between the "civilized people throughout the world" whose hearts break for the women and children of Afghanistan and the Taliban-and-the-terrorists, the cultural monsters who want to, as she put it, "impose their world on the rest of us," Most revealingly, the speech enlisted women to justify American bombing and intervention in Afghanistan and to make a case for the "War on Terrorism" of which it was allegedly a part, As Laura Bush said, "Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes, They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment, The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women" These words have haunting resonances for anyone who has studied colonial history, Many who have worked on British colonialism in South Asia have noted the use of the woman question in colonial policies where intervention into sati (the practice of widows immolating themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres), child marriage, and other practices was used to justify rule, As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) has cynically put it: white men saving brown women from brown men, The historical record is full of similar cases, including in the Middle East, In Turn of the Century Egypt, what Leila Ahmed (1992) has called "colonial feminism" was hard at work, This was a selective concern about the plight of Egyptian women that focused on the veil as a sign of oppression but gave no support to women's education and was professed loudly by the same Englishman, Lord Cromer, who opposed women's suffrage back home. It is common popular knowledge that the ultimate sign of the oppression of Afghan women under the Taliban-and-the-terrorists is that they were forced to wear the burqa. Liberals sometimes confess their surprise that even though Afghanistan has been liberated from the Taliban, women do not seem to be throwing off their burqas. Someone who has worked in Muslim regions must ask why this is so surprising, Did we expect that once "free" from the Taliban they would go "back" to belly shirts and blue jeans, or dust off their Chanel suits? We need to be more sensible about the clothing of "women of cover, and so there is perhaps a need to make some basic points about veiling First, it should be recalled that the Taliban did not invent the burqa, It was the local form of covering that Pashtun women in one region wore when they went out, The Pashtun are one of several ethnic groups in Afghanistan and the burqa was one of many forms of covering in the subcontinent and Southwest Asia that has developed as a convention for symbolizing women's modesty or respectability. The burqa, like some other forms of "cover" has, in many settings, marked the symbolic separation of men's and women's spheres, as part of the general association of women with family and home, not with public space where strangers mingled Twenty years ago the anthropologist Hanna Papanek (1982), who worked in Pakistan, described the burqa as "portable seclusion.' She noted that many saw it as a liberating invention because it enabled women to move out of segregated living spaces while still observing the basic moral requirements of separating and protecting women from unrelated men. Ever since I came across her phrase portable seclusion, I have thought of these enveloping robes as "mobile homes," Everywhere, such veiling signifies belonging to a particular community and participating in a moral way of life in which families are paramount in the organization of communities and the home is associated with the sanctity of women The obvious question that follows is this: If this were the case, why would women suddenly become immodest? Why would they suddenly throw off the markers of their respectability, markers, whether burqas or other forms of cover, which were supposed to assure their protection in the public sphere from the harassment of strange men by symbolically signaling to all that they were still in the inviolable space of their homes, even though moving in the public realm? Especially when these are forms of dress that had become so conventional that most women gave little thought to their meaning, They also alter boutique fashions to include high necks and long sleeves, As anthropologists know perfectly well, people wear the appropriate form of dress for their social communities and are guided by socially shared standards, religious beliefs, and moral ideals, unless they deliberately transgress to make a point or are unable to afford proper cover. If we think that U.S. women live in a world of choice regarding clothing, all we need to do is remind ourselves of the expression, "the tyranny of fashion What had happened in Afghanistan under the Taliban is that one regional style of covering OT veiling, associated with a certain Tespectable but not elite class, was imposed on everyone as "religiously" appropriate, even though previously there had been many different styles, popular or traditional with different groups and classes—different ways to mark women's propriety, or, in more recent times, religious piety. Although I am not an expert on Afghanistan, I imagine that the majority of women left in Afghanistan by the time the Taliban took control were the rural or less educated, from nonelite families, since they were the only ones who could not emigrate to escape the hardship and violence that has marked Afghanistan's recent history, If liberated from the enforced wearing of burqas, most of these women would choose some other form of modest headcovering, like all those living nearby who were not under the Taliban—their rural Hindu counterparts in the North of India (who cover their heads and veil their faces from affines) or their Muslim sisters in Pakistan The British newspaper The Guardian published an interview in January 2002 with Dr, Suheila Siddiqi, a respected surgeon in Afghanistan who holds the rank of lieutenant general in the Afghan medical corps (Goldenberg 2002), A woman in her sixties, she comes from an elite family and, like her sisters, was educated. Unlike most women of her class, she chose not to go into exile, She is presented in the article as "the woman who stood up to the Taliban" because she refused to wear the burqa. She had made it a condition of returning to her post as head of a major hospital when the Taliban came begging in 1996, just eight months after firing her along with other women, Siddiqi is described as thin, glamorous, and confident, But further into the article it is noted that her graying bouffant hair is covered in a gauzy veil, This is a reminder that though she refused the burqa, she had no question about wearing the chador or scarf. Only are there many forms of covering, which themselves have different meanings in the communities in which they are used, but also veiling itself must not be confused with, or made to stand for, lack of agency. As I have argued in my ethnography of a Bedouin community in Egypt in the late 1970s and 1980s (1986), pulling the black head cloth over the face in front of older respected men is considered a voluntary act by women who are deeply committed to being moral and have a sense of honor tied to family. One of the ways they show their standing is by covering their faces in certain contexts, They decide for whom they feel it is appropriate to veil To take a very different case, the modern Islamic modest dress that many educated women across the Muslim world have taken on since the mid-1970s now both publicly marks piety and can be read as a sign of educated urban sophistication, a sort of modernity (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1995, 1998; Brenner 1996; El Guindi 1999; MacLeod 1991; Ong 1990), As Saba Mahmood (2001) has so brilliantly shown in her ethnography of women in the mosque movement in Egypt, this new form of dress is also perceived by many of the women who adopt it as part of a bodily means to cultivate virtue, the outcome of their professed desire to be close to God, Two points emerge from this fairly basic discussion of the meanings of veiling in the contemporary Muslim world, First, we need to work against the reductive interpretation of veiling as the quintessential sign of women's unfreedom, even if we object to state imposition of this form, as in Iran or with the Taliban, (It must be recalled that the modernizing states of Turkey and Iran had earlier in the century banned veiling and required men, except religious clerics, to adopt Western dress.) What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that humans are social beings, always raised in certain social and historical contexts and belonging to particular communities that shape their desires and understandings of the world? Is it not a gross violation of women's own understandings of what they are doing to simply denounce the burqa as a medieval imposition? Second, we must take care not to reduce the diverse situations and attitudes of millions of Muslim women to a single item of clothing, Perhaps it is time to give up the Western obsession with the veil and focus on some serious issues with which feminists and others should indeed be concerned, To be critical of this celebration of women's rights in Afghanistan is not to pass judgment on any local women's organizations, such as RAWA, whose members have courageously worked since 1977 for a democratic secular Afghanistan in which women's human rights are respected, against Soviet-backed regimes or U,S,-, Saudi-, and Pakistanisupported conservatives, Their documentation of abuse and their work through clinics and schools have been enormously important, It is, however, to suggest that we need to look closely at what we are supporting (and what we are not) and to think carefully about why, How should we manage the complicated politics and ethics of finding ourselves in agreement with those with whom we normally disagree? I do not know how many feminists who felt good about saving Afghan women fTom the Taliban are also asking for a global redistribution of wealth or contemplating sacrificing their own consumption radically so that African or Afghan women could have some chance of having what I do believe should be a universal human right—the right to freedom from the structural violence of global inequality and from the ravages of war, the everyday rights of having enough to eat, having homes for their families in which to live and thrive, having ways to make decent livings so their children can grow, and having the strength and security to work out, within their communities and with whatever alliances they want, how to live a good life, which might very well include changing the ways those communities are organized, Suspicion about bedfellows is only a first step; it will not give us a way to think more positively about what to do or where to stand, For that, we need to confront two more big issues. First is the acceptance of the possibility of difference, Can we only free Afghan women to be like us or might we have to recognize that even after "liberation" from the Taliban, they might want different things than we would want for them? What do we do about that? Second, we need to be vigilant about the rhetoric of saving people because of what it implies about our attitudes. We may want justice for women, but can we accept that there might be different ideas about justice and that different women might want, or choose, different futures from what we envision as best (see Ong 1988)? We must consider that they might be called to personhood, so to speak, in a different language. Reports from the Bonn peace conference held in late November to discuss the rebuilding of Afghanistan revealed significant differences among the few Afghan women feminists and activists present. RAWA's position was to reject any conciliatory approach to Islamic governance, According to one report I read, most women activists, especially those based in Afghanistan who are aware of the realities on the ground, agreed that Islam had to be the starting point for reform. Fatima Gailani, a U.S.-based advisor to one of the delegations, is quoted as saying, "If I go to Afghanistan today and ask women for votes on the promise to bring them secularism, they are going to tell me to go to hell.' Instead, according to one report, most of these women looked for inspiration on how to fight for equality to a place that might seem surprising. They looked to Iran as a country in which they saw women making significant gains within an Islamic framework—in part through an Islamically oriented feminist movement that is challenging injustices and reinterpreting the religious tradition The situation in Iran is itself the subject of heated debate within feminist circles, especially among Iranian feminists in the West (e.g., Mir-Hosseini 1999; Moghissi 1999; Najmabadi 1998, 2000), It is not clear whether and in what ways women have made gains and whether the great increases in literacy, decreases in birthrates, presence of women in the professions and government, and a feminist flourishing in cultural fields like writing and filmmaking are because of or despite the establishment of a socalled Islamic Republic, The concept of an Islamic feminism itself is also controversial, Is it an oxymoron or does it refer to a viable movement forged by brave women who want a third way? In other words, might other desires be more meaningful for different groups of people? Living in close families? Living in a godly way? Living without war? I have done fieldwork in Egypt over more than 20 years and I cannot think of a single woman I know, from the poorest rural to the most educated cosmopolitan, who has ever expressed envy of U.S. women, women they tend to perceive as bereft of community, vulnerable to sexual violence and social anomie, driven by individual success rather than morality, or strangely disrespectful of God Projects of saving other women depend on and TeinfoTce a sense of superiority by Westerners, a form of arrogance that deserves to be challenged, All one needs to do to appreciate the patronizing quality of the rhetoric of saving women is to imagine using it today in the United States about disadvantaged gioups such as African American women or woiking-class women, We now understand them as suffering from structural violence, We have become politicized about race and class, but not cultuie. Even RAWA, the now celebrated Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which was so instrumental in bringing to U.S. women's attention the excesses of the Taliban, has opposed the U.S. bombing from the beginning. They do not see in it Afghan women's salvation but increased hardship and loss. They have long called for disarmament and for peacekeeping forces, Spokespersons point out the dangers of confusing governments with people, the Taliban with innocent Afghans who will be most harmed. They consistently remind audiences to take a close look at the ways policies are being organized around oil interests, the arms industry, and the international drug trade. They are not obsessed with the veil, even though they are the most radical feminists working for a secular democratic Afghanistan
STATELESSNESS
When a person does not have citizenship in any country, they are stateless This is outlined in the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons which says a stateless person is one who "is not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law" - Article 1, 1954 COnvention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons (A UN Treaty)
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
a socially constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group.
Multinational Corporation
A corporate organization that owns or controls production of goods or services in at least one country other than its home country.
Five Global "scapes" (Appadurai)
Arjun Appadurai's (1990) Theory of Disjuncture Way to organize what is moving around in globalized world Breaks global flaws into 5 "scapes" that are complex, overlapping, and interrelated - Most things moving around don't fit into just one category ETHNOSCAPES: The migration of people across cultures and borders - immigration MEDIASCAPES: The flow of media that shape the way we understand the world - Movie from somewhere else in the world that tells us about their culture = Parasite talks about social class TECHNOSCAPES: The scope and movement of technology (mechanical (phones, laptops) and informational (vaccines)) FINANCESCAPES: The worldwide flux of money and capital - World bank, IMF IDEOSCAPES: The flow of ideas and ideologies (sys of ideas that work together to construct realities & navigate lives) - Western ideology of gender = binary (male or female) has been spread to other places - Much overlapping & interconnection
What is Globalization?
Globalization is the intensification of global interconnectedness Suggests a world full of - Movement and mixture - Contact and linkages - Persistent cultural interaction and exchange Implies a fundamental reordering of time and space - Globalization does not = first time people from around the world come into contact with each other - Humans have always been in contact & moved around = What makes globalization different is # of people moving & at fast rate, and how affects human culture & societies - Ex. Silk Trade
Lecture- Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?
Ask them if they do before consider it
Consumer Culture
Despite falling incomes over past 30 years, many families maintain at least the experience of a middle-class lifestyle They accomplish this by working more (especially women); borrowing money in mortgages against the value of their homes; running up credit card debt; student loans; etc. Student loan debt reached $1 trillion in 2012, surpassing total credit card debt for the first time "Consuming class"—how is everything we do indicative of our class status through consumption?
1.5 GENERATION
Child of immigrants who is born in the family's home country but moves with parents to a new host country at a young age
Fallacy #3: WEST-CENTRIC
Cultural imperialism does not take into account all of the flows that circumvent the West entirely-flows of ideas, people, media, etc. from periphery nations to periphery nations - Ex. In reality for Cambodia, Americanization or Westernization is less threatening than Vietnamization - Ex. In China fear of Westernization is much less than the fear of pop culture from Hong Kong or Taiwan Other peripheral flows of culture are welcomed as resources that allow people to participate in the imagined realities of other cultures - Ex. Hausa of Nigeria consuming Bollywood films = Seeing tension of traditional values and desires of new generation in Bollywood films helped Hausa reflect on their own family & love relations
Egalitarian Societies
Egalitarian society is a group based on the sharing of resources to ensure success with a relative absence of hierarchy and violence (usually found in hunter-gatherer societies) Most humans who have ever lived have been hunter-gatherers Egalitarian societies practice reciprocity: an exchange of resources, goods, and services among people of relatively equal social status Meant to create and reinforce social ties
To Wear or Not to Wear?
Muslim woman explaining why she chooses to wear the veil Woman decides goes to Egypt and covers herself Super ignorant
De/Territorialization of Culture
Historically, anthropology has assumed an isomorphism (correspondence) between culture and place - Culture was a bounded entity occupying a specific physical territory - Ex. Japanese culture existed in Japan Now, they view culture as deterritorialized - This can refer to a general weakening of ties between culture and place, as well as the dislodging of cultural subjects (people) and objects from fixed locations in space and time - Ex. Japanese culture in Japan, but also have American culture in Japan Culture does not wander aimlessly, however - Reterritorialization is the process of reinscribing culture in new time-space contexts, of relocalizing it in specific cultural environments = the INDIGENIZATION OF MODERNITY (Sahlins) * Ex. Indigenous people adopted modern tech of snowmobile, but use in indigenous way ** Use to herd reindeer * Ex. McDonalds outside the US don't all sell burgers or fries, fits country its in ** In South America have rice & beans
Intro on Anthropology, Human Rights, and Statelessness
Human rights are simply defined as "rights inherent to all human beings" After World War II, the world was concerned with preventing the atrocities that had occurred (including the Holocaust) from happening again - For this reason, a group (chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt) was ensembled by the United Nations to create a list of human rights that would be rights ALL humans would have In 1948, the final version of the rights was published as the UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS (UDHR) - The UDHR contains 30 articles outlining the rights that every person in the world is to have such as: a right to assembly, freedom from torture, right to an education, and right to a nationality - Like many UN documents, the UDHR is not a legal binding document, but it can be used to call out countries who are not upholding the rights outlined in the document.
2014 Native American Youth Report
More than 1 in 3 Native children live in poverty The high school graduation rate for Native students is 67% = the lowest of any ethnic group in the country At Bureau of Indian Education schools (schools on reservations), the graduation rate is 53%, compared to the US average of 80% Suicide is the second leading cause of death for Native youth aged 15 to 24 and occurs at 2.5X the national rate 22% of Native youth suffer from PTSD, exceeding or matching PTSD rates among Afghanistan, Iraq, and Gulf War veterans And almost 3X the 8% rate of PTSD in the general population
The BURKINI
Many Muslim women (not all tho) keep themselves covered up to protect their modesty, a new type of bathing suit was invented called the Burkini In this suit, your face is completely uncovered Now these women are able to go enjoy the beach and the water with their children Certain members of the gov in France decided that they were going to ban the Burkini, even though they are not religious symbols and the face was uncovered - Clearly it was because these were Muslim women Check out CNN video
Nationalism and Ethnicity
Nationalism and ethnicity are related phenomena, but there are many ethnic groups which are not nations, and there are also nations which are not ethnic groups- that is polyethnic nations or countries which are not founded on ethnic principle Most of the world countries are polyethnic, but many of them are dominated by one ethnic group Ex. Kurds are nation, ethnic group that became politically mobilized, no state tho b.c no boundary There is rarely a perfect correspondence between the state and the cultural group Models of nationalism endorsed by nationalists rarely fit the territory
6 Misconceptions about Native American people
Native Americans still live in tipis Native Americans get lots of gov hand-outs Native Americans don't have to pay taxes Native Americans are rich off of casinos All Native Americans wear headdresses Another word for Native Americans is redskin
Native Americans and Avatar
Native Peoples of the Amazon see Avatar as Good, movie like real life, see how native struggle is deep, struggling for dreams of ancestors indigenous defending their rights In real life gov closes dialogue, makes natives wonder if they should do something similar to what happens in the movie = fight gov Movie shows no dialogue, war as only solution, and conflict is not resolved b/c everything destroyed & humans lives lost There should be another message Similarities between Navi and Native Americans spiritual beliefs: connection to planet, mother of all living things, nature gives humans power defending territory so culture lives on Do see representation of stereotypes about Native American culture with the Earth people thinking the Avatars were savages, natives only tech being bow & arrows
Nativism
Nativism is the political policy of promoting the interests of native inhabitants against those of immigrants, including by supporting immigration-restriction measures xenophic movement
Ranked Societies
Ranked societies are groups in which wealth (or at least access to resources) is not stratified but prestige and statues are Positions of high prestige (like chief) are usually hereditary ASCBRIBED, NOT ACHIEVED STATUS Redistribution: Form of exchange where accumulated wealth is collected from the members of the group and reallocated in a different pattern Potlatch is one example of this, practiced among some groups in the Pacific Northwest Elaborate feast and gift giving Earns status and prestige for the chief doing the giving
REMITTANCE:
Resources transferred from migrants working abroad to individuals, families, and institutions in their country of origin
FLEXIBLE ACCUMULATION (Harvey)
Rose to fix problems caused by Fordist system Is the current model The post-Fordist regime of flexible accumulation (Harvey 1989) rests on flexibility with respect to - Labor processes - Labor markets - Patterns of consumption And is characterized by the emergence of - New sectors of production - New ways of providing financial services - New markets - Greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organizational innovation What does this mean in the context of globalization? - Flexible labor markets = Don't have to pay workers same benefits = raises profits Rise of the part-time worker, reliance of migrant labor, end of the "one job/one career until retirement" model - Flexible patterns of consumption = If make product only need to buy once, can increase profits & avoid saturation by convincing consumers they need more of product "Get people to treat the things they use like the thing they use up," rise of disposability Ex. FAST FASHION has multiple seasons but shitty clothes, making consumers buy more clothes and more often Issue: More affordable but worse quality More sweaters but eventually have to replace them - New sectors of production = Allow companies to save money by outsourcing/subcontracting in countries were less safety regulations & lower taxes to increase profit Made possible by transportation & transportation tech - New markets = Due to advancements in transportation even if saturate market at home, can sell around the world = expand markets Due to advancement in technology can market products to consumers in periphery countries, increased niche marketing - Greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organizational innovation = Mechanization of the labor force, organization & communication tech facilitates outsourcing Creative solutions to Fordist system but come with social side effects, mostly negative for workers, gov safety, and natural environments
Theories of Class: Karl Marx
Studied emerging capitalist economy of 19th century Europe BOURGEOISIE, or capitalist class, own the means of production- factories, machines, tools, raw materials, land, etc. needed to produce PROLETARIAT, or working class, can sell only their labor to capitalists in return for wages Owners seek to constantly increase their income by having workers toil longer hours, faster, and for lower wages- the surplus value is a profit for the owner Class consciousness is a political awareness of their common position in the economy that allows the proletariat to unite and change the system Created CONFLICT THEORY - Claims society is in a state of perpetual conflict because of competition for limited resources - It holds that social order is maintained by domination and power, rather than consensus and conformity = Conflict theory views social and economic institutions as tools of the struggle between groups or classes, used to maintain inequality and the dominance of the ruling class - According to conflict theory, those with wealth and power try to hold on to it by any means possible, chiefly by suppressing the poor and powerless - A basic premise of conflict theory is that individuals and groups within society will work to maximize their own benefits - Marxist conflict theory sees society as divided along lines of economic class between the proletarian working class and the bourgeois ruling class
ANTHROPOLOGY OF HUMANS RIGHTS
The anthropology of human rights can be considered a sub-field of sociocultural anthropology. Although the UDHR was published in 1948, it wasn't until the 1990s that anthropologists became more interested in studying human rights - Prior to this time period, cultural anthropologists did not focus much on human rights Some anthropological works do not specifically reference "human rights" but still work on topics related to human rights. One of the major issues with human rights (which continues to be discussed today) was whether or not they were ethnocentric in nature - Human rights were created predominantly based on a Western, democratic style of living - For this reason, some argue that the UDHR cannot be applied to all societies as it does not take into account the complexities of different societies There is also discussion (both within anthropology and elsewhere) as to whether it is even possible to create a list of universal human rights - Some hold that human rights are culturally relative and depend upon each society as opposed to having a universal list of human rights. Today, the anthropology of human rights is considered to be a subfield of sociocultural anthropology, meaning that it is a specific focus of some sociocultural anthropologists. - Within the anthropology of human rights there are different focuses, some focus on human rights overall while others take up a specific human right such as the right to nationality which we will now discuss.
Characteristics of the Nation-State
The nation-state is based on nationalist ideology; that is the doctrine that state boundaries should correspond with cultural boundaries The nation-state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, the enforcement of law and order, and the collection of taxes It has a bureaucratic administration and written legislation which covers all citizens It has, at least ideally, a uniform educational sys and a shared labor market for its people Most nation-states have an official national language; some have even banned the public use of minority languages
Time-Space Distanciation (Giddens)
Thinks about consequences of social relations being spread across the globe Place has not stopped being significant in the organization of everyday life - However localities are now less dependent on co-presence, and more dependent on interactions across distance with absent others Think of - Imagine communities (Anderson) = Ex. New Yorkers or UConn = Can't be member if haven't interacted with them = Can be members of multiple communities = People have become more dependent on them as tech has allowed people to form stronger bonds - Transnationalism = Continuing ties & investment in cultures far away - Outsourcing = Dependent on absent others for getting products
Anthropology in the Military
Today anthropologists still work in the military, usually in one of two positions - On military bases, training officers or analyzing military culture - On the ground in active conflict zones, collecting data on local peoples = Called Human Terrain Systems Info can be helpful
Week #1 Online- NAs and Capitalism
Throughout human history people had to find ways to feed themselves. For most of that history they lived directly off what they found or produced on the land and water. Human societies adapt to their environment. To do so they need knowledge and strategies, which form important components of their cultures. To "subsist" is defined in Anthropology as producing food. For this week, let's talk about the five main subsistence strategies by which humankind have produced food: 1) foraging, 2) pastoralism, 3) horticulture, 4) agriculture, and 5) industrialism. We will also be covering human economics and the different systems of economic exchange. Let's focus on indigenous (native) peoples of the Americas. Often in human history, people used more than one subsistence strategy. Here in southern New England the native population of the 1600s had engaged in swidden horticulture and they also foraged. In the summertime, they lived along the coastlines and tended gardens of corn, beans and squash, and they also fished. In the wintertime they moved inland (seasonal mobility) and hunted and gathered what food sources were available in the forests. When the English colonists came, the natives adapted by learning how to deal with the market-place for food and other goods. New England natives believed that all of nature including the people, the plants and animals, and the spirits of their ancestors were interconnected. These relationships were imbued with a spirituality along with norms that require reciprocal relations. If the people had a good hunt, they would leave something in the forest for the animal spirits in order to reciprocate their good fortune. The world represented a system of balances that through reciprocity was kept in balance. However, often one group would try to dominate other groups of natives and make war (negative reciprocity). The winning tribe collected tribute in food and goods from the losers. This tribute was redistributed by the sachems and squaw sachems (leaders) to the warriors and people of their tribe. Natives of New England became exposed to market exchange due to the English and Dutch colonialism. At first they engaged in the fur trade with the Europeans by hunting beaver and bringing the beaver pelts into trading posts to exchange for desirable goods such as metal tools and cookware. (The native culture had lacked metallurgy). Within a few decades, the beavers were no longer to be found. All the natives had left to exchange was their land and their labor, which the colonists wanted cheaply. The native landholdings were shrinking. Indians often found themselves forced into indentured servitude. These economic pressures were the direct causes of King Philip's (Metacom's) War of 1675/76 against the English colonists. When the Indians lost that war, most of them also lost their freedom and were sold as slaves faraway. Those who remained acculturated quickly to the English ways so as to survive. (But they also strove to maintain their traditions.) What I described above are the economic systems of exchange, including reciprocity, redistribution, and market exchange. In the first two types of exchange, people's habits of exchange are embedded in the social and personal relationships that order their society. Reciprocal exchanges of goods and food form expressions of kinship and friendship. With redistribution as the means of exchange, the leaders redistribute to their people the goods and food taken as tribute. This act of generosity provided legitimacy to the sachem and squaw sachem's role as leaders and fortified his or her relationship with their people. In contrast, market exchange is impersonal, or thought to be so. Money and the price of goods and services define the terms of exchange, rather than personal relationships and obligations. It was this difference in norms regarding economic exchange that led to cultural conflicts between the New England native people and the English colonists. If friends, an Indian would go into a colonist's house and borrow tools, thinking he was doing nothing wrong. But then the English colonist, more intent on his possessions as belonging to him, would turn around and accuse his Indian friend of theft and trespass. I've used the case of historic New England Indians to illustrate for you the main anthropological concepts used to understand subsistence strategies (how people make their livelihoods) and economic systems of exchange. The case you will be studying and discussing (using the discussion board for your sections) is about an indigenous people in the present-day. You will read and watch videos about the Gwich'in people of Alaska and Canada. On Thursday, a PowerPoint lecture will be posted looking at these concepts in greater detail. Our present-day world is dominated by capitalism - an economic system of production in which people work for wages, while land and capital goods are privately owned, and firms now operating on the global level strive to make profits. The impersonal market-place is the dominant exchange system. The individualistic pursuit of money and profit, that characterizes capitalist relations, is contrary to the logic of collectivism that still characterizes indigenous (native) societies such as the Gwich'in. Today, many Native Americans including the Gwich'in are returning to their traditional foods and subsistence strategies. The traditional subsistence strategies involve collective activities such as group hunts, by which people preserve their culture along with their social identities. Also their traditional foods are healthier than the foods found in the stores that are products of industrial food production, heavily refined and filled with chemicals.
Do Fences Make Good Neighbors?
We don't talk about the Candian border that often. It must be pretty secure right? Its not at all secure, just monuments in a forest in a messed up line In the US, most of the discussion about immigration concerns the border with Mexico, which has become increasingly militarized The latest proposal is the erection of a double layered, 700 mile border fence 75 miles of the border is located on the Tohono O'odham Reservation, not far from Tucson, Arizona The Tohono O'odham oppose the wall, saying they need to freely cross the border to visit friends and relatives, take their children to school, and visit religious sites They also have concerns about the wall's restricting the free range of deer, horses, coyotes, jackrabbits, and other animals The Tohono O'odham cooperate with the US border patrol and the Department of Homeland Security in patrolling the border The fed gov is the trustee of all Indian lands and could build the fence through the reservation without tribal permission This would jeopardize the help that the Tohono O'odham now gives the gov Decisions made by states often pit groups against each other
Gwich'In Tribe Protects Caribou and Culture:
Wildlife refuge near Alaska Arctic village = remote settlement Natives have lived here for thousands of years All villages along route of caribou, their survival is survival of people Had to protect the area Boys sent to village to be raised traditionally Caribou vital to social fabric During hunt knowledge is passed down to next generation Only way to survive but also way to keep culture & spirituality alive Arctic national wildlife refuge established in 1980 to protect area - Oil companies tried to drill in this protected area = Right in the middle where the caribou migrate to go give birth * The sacred place where life begins * Even in famine don't go there and interrupt caribou Caribou and natives are part of each other - Like plains natives and buffalos were, when buffalos died so did Natives - That's why they're trying to protect lands, not about standing up to politics but protecting themselves When make important decision have prayer and ceremony, & then decide - They decided to protect lands but they need to work just as fast as politicians = Hard b/c they live naturally, fight for survival Prophecy = Voice from the North - Voice from north will rise, & when does it signifies time where humans have to change their ways
CAPITALISM
an economic system of production in which people work for wages, while land and capital goods are privately owned, and firms now operating on the global level strive to make profits
Theories of Class: Pierre Bourdieu
Studied the French education system in the mid 20th century to understand how class, culture, and power are connected SOCIAL MOBILITY is the movement of one's class position, upward or downward, in a stratified societies Technically, schools should be meritocracies Bourdieu found the ed sys was involved in social reproduction: the phenomenon whereby social and class relations of prestige or lack thereof are passed down generationally What facilitates social reproduction? HABITUS: the self-perceptions and beliefs that develop as part of one's social identity and shape one's conception of the world and where one fits into it Three types of (interrelated) capital ECONOMIC- wealth, income, property, stocks, etc SOCIAL- the people and social circles one knows, has access to, or can influence CULTURAL- knowledge, habits, tastes Ex. playing polo, speaking Italian, knowing how to dress for a black tie event
1924 National Origins Act
A law that severely restricted immigration by establishing a system of national quotas that blatantly discriminated against immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and virtually excluded Asians The policy stayed in effect until the 1960s
LABOR IMMIGRANT:
Moves in search of low-skill and low-wage work, often filling a niche that native born workers will not fill
ENTREPRENEURIAL IMMIGRANT:
Moves to a new location to conduct trade and/or establish a business
Transnational elite:
A class of highly successful, highly mobile individuals with ties to more than one nation, usually because of occupational pursuits
Nationalism and Industrial Society
A fundamental difference between kinship ideology and nationalism is the fact that nationalism postulated the existence of an "abstract community" As a nationalist or a patriot, one is loyal to a legislative sys and a state which represents ones "people," not to individuals one knows personally The nation only exists if one is capable of imagining its existence; it cannot be observed directly It is in this sense that the nation is an IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
News
Although all of this information on statelessness can be discouraging and depressing, the topic has been gaining more attention around the world - News headlines have more frequently discussed stateless issues around the world, more legal, academic, and government attention has been shifted to look at statelessness Awareness of an issue is absolutely the first step towards change
Contemporary Hate in the US
As has become all too clear, hate against different races, ethnicities, religions, and political groups has increasingly become mainstream and "in the open" in the US
Statelessness in the US
As the US has jus soli, all those born on US soil are eligible to obtain US citizenship and thus those who are born in the US are not stateless - However, there are many people who live in the US but were born elsewhere who are stateless = Ex. When the Soviet Union fell, there were many Soviet Union citizens who were in the US including some students who were on student visas * Some of those individuals were unable to obtain citizenship in the post-Soviet Union formed countries and thus were unable to leave the US as their Soviet Union passports were no longer valid * These individuals have been stuck in the US for decades unable to leave the country but also unable to obtain citizenship within the US. In US law, there is no definition of statelessness in US law and there is no path to naturalization for those who are stateless. Why does it matter that these stateless individuals do not have citizenship? - Citizenship is often called a "right to other rights" - If a person does not have citizenship they are often unable to obtain an ID, unable to legally work, to obtain medical care, to access higher education, to move freely throughout the US, to open a bank account, to legally marry in certain states, or to even enter buildings that require legal identification - Not having citizenship anywhere doesn't just mean a person does not belong to any country but also that a person is unable to access many other rights because of their lack of citizenship Because stateless individuals have no legal status in the United States, they are at risk of detention by the US government - However, when a person is normally detained, they are returned to the country in which they hold citizenship - Stateless individuals have no citizenship to any country and no country will accept them = Thus, there is nowhere to "return" stateless people to - Although there are laws in the US to prevent individuals from being detained for long periods of time (if it can be shown that there is no country to deport them to), some stateless individuals are detained for years.
Types of Reciprocity
By Marshall Sahlins, 1965 Generalized: No expected timeline for payback; occurs between individuals with close kin or peer relations (and creates/solidifies these relations) Ex: Birthday gifts, rides to the airport, a cup of coffee for a close friend Balanced: Explicit expectation of immediate return. Can occur between those with close or neutral social bonds. Ex: Christmad gifts, trading or buying goods in a flea market or farmer's market setting Negative: Attempt to receive more in the exchange than is given. Can occur between strangers, and usually harms social relations Ex: Used car salesmen, inflated prices in situations with no competition, coercion, trickey
Week #6 HW Those Who Wear Levi's: Where am I Wearing
Cambodians make products for Americans, but don't sell in Cambodia If not making clothes, working fro American businessmen Whites speak poorly of Cambodians Prostittuion going on If not for foreign aid, kids wouldnt be able to go to school or speak english Girls marry cambodians to go expereince euro world, leave their families Extreme poverty Cambodians all want white skin and blue eyes People sleep on the floor Everyone walks to fatcory for work Has gaurds and wire Adulst don't go to college, they go to the factory Managers of factory from India Oustorucing Big companies like Gap, jcpenney, walmar, sears source from Cambodia Stuff sold in markets is stolen, have no laws to stop this Girls moved to capital to work, send money home to families back in the village Girls say need americans to buy jeans bc if don't they have no jobs Have issues of child labor in the past, but no longer Children desperate to work, falsify their age to do so NGOs not exacctly good, do the bare minimum Have union factory politcis going on Have major corruption Have to choose between family or financial freedom Americans choose financial freedom Cambodians choose fmaily Position of workers disntigusihed by color cap they were Yellow & pink = supervisors Levi's chose human rights oevr business wrongs until the business itself was thretaned Author says factories look well kept, like ones in America Have good machinery Workers get a break when music comes on, they steretch and shake out limbs for a couple seconds, and then get back to work
Fallacy #2: "WEST TO REST"
Cultural imperialism presumes that cultural flows move only in one direction, from the core countries (western) to the periphery (third world) Though there is an asymmetry, in reality, culture flows both ways The resulting peripheralization of the core unsettles the nation-states of the West - Western nations are no longer able to adequately nationalize all subjects under their domain = Third world countries not always the dominated, some rising = Can't indoctrinate citizens with nationalism bc have competitors * "US products superior" not possible anymore - The nation-states of the West become increasingly heterogeneous, and the West as cultural center of the world is being challenge = Many immigrants with ties to home countries = diverse cultures
Lecture: Native American Lives Today, Here Come the Anthros (Again), The Strange Marriage of Anthropology and Native America
Culture that has been here for so long & don't know much about them, enticing for Anthropologists to study them The female lead, Neytiri, is a modern Pocahontas with a Barbie Doll figure and a postcolonial London supermodel accent. Although endowed with the requisite spunky independence of a postfeminist Disney heroine, Neytiri is also very much in the iconographic tradition of those putatively scientific early-20thcentury National Geographic stills of bare-breasted native women: the "primitive" woman as object of mainstream desire even as she leaps onto dragons and swings through the treetops.1 And, as still so often in Hollywood, a white man anchors the plot: Jake, the gritty paraplegic former Marine who goes native and, true to the White Messiah formula, leads the heroic Navi defense against Sky People conquest Kroeber's work exemplified the SALVAGE ETHNOGRAPHY that defined U.S. anthropology a century ago, namely the attempt to learn as much as possible about native cultures and customs as they'd been before conquest's devastation And the final decades of the 20th century would bring the critiques of early U.S. anthropology with which we are all now familiar—the arrogant assumption of the prerogative to snoop uninvited into other people's business; the fact that white conquest made it possible for white anthropologists to study Indians in the first place; what Fatimah Tobing Rony (1996) calls the "ethnographic taxidermy" that froze native cultures in place as anthropologists sought to reconstruct them as they had once been and excused themselves from documenting either the bloody story of conquest or the trauma, poverty, upheaval, and disjunctures of native experience as it actually was. When asked once why he had not written about the sufferings of the Yurok, the people among whom he worked most, Kroeber replied that he "could not stand all of the tears. Kroeber and his Berkeley anthropologists wrote almost nothing about the actual 20th century lives of surviving Native Californians. This contributed to the widespread misconception that the last Indians had ridden off into history's sunset—that they were indeed Longfellow's proverbial "red sun descending." By the late 1960 and 1970s, the Red Power movement had gained national prominence with its rhetoric of Indian pride, activism, and resistance to white domination and dramatic actions like the occupation of Alcatraz Island. Anthropologists came under fire as just another face of white exploitation, most famously in VineDeloria Jr.'s 1969 Custer Died for Your Sins.Deloria lampooned anthropologists as obnoxious, pith helmet and khaki shorts busybodies interested in Indians only for career advancement; his book inspired the country singer, native activist, and movie actor Floyd "Red Crow" Westerman to pen his unflattering ballad "Here Come the Anthros," which opened "Oh, the anthros keep on coming like death and taxes to our land." Although the Red Power movement was a minority made up of mostly young urban Indians, it contributed to an increased native suspicion and even hostilitytoward anthropologists.8 Mosttribeswould begin requiring anyone wanting to do reservation research to get through their sometimes very demanding review boards, the time long gone when anthropologists could take and record what they wanted Along with other transformations, recent decades have witnessed anthropology's regendering from a mostly male to a mainly female profession (even if women still face special challenges). More people of color and fromthe ThirdWorld have also entered intothe profession's ranks, partly unsettling the old colonial calculus where white people always did the studying and brown people were always the studied. In line with these disciplinary developments, a predominantly female new generation of Native American scholars is increasingly shaping the anthropology of Native America - These scholars have focused mostly on their own tribes and, as evidenced by the pronoun switching in their ethnography between the "we" of the native and the "they" of the traditional anthropologist, they navigate the dilemmas of allegiance and analysis, insiderness and outsiderness, and secrecy and disclosure in ways that both overlap and differ from their non-native colleagues The new orientation toward a more engaged, morally and politically accountable Native American anthropology is evident both in recent experiments with collaborative ethnography and anthropological involvement in repatriating bones and sacred objects; tribal struggles for federal recognition; and language preservation and recovery Western conceptions of blood and nationhood—however much reworked—have shaped the terms through which Native Americans have imagined themselves. The very borderline between Indian and non-Indian is unstable and permeable no matter how clear and even biologically determined it may appear in lived experience. The last few decades have brought what has been called "a migration from whiteness to redness" where, now that it can seem cool and sometimes even advantageous to be native, whites with some Indian ancestry are more likely than ever before to check the Native American box on the census or college application, go to powwows, or otherwise embrace native heritage politics. In response, some tribal activists have recently challenged tenuous claims to Indianness - The gold standard for Indianness has become belonging to a federally recognized tribe. Only these groups, which the United States acknowledges at least in principleto be semiautonomous sovereign entities, can build casinos among other rights. Recognized tribes also set their own membership criteria; many periodically change those requirements, redrawing the boundaries of who will be in and out, native or not in the eyes of the law and the tribe itself. By contrast, unrecognized groups have complained about their disenfranchisement by a system where the federal government—the U.S. Congress and the Bureau of Indian Affairs—still makes the ultimate decisions about which tribes will receive the powerful stamp of Indianness and rights to self-government that recognition confers. The question of who counts as Indian is always subject to debate, doubt, and revision; a labyrinthine and ever-shifting geography of belonging and exclusion Sturm imported this interest in identity boundaries to the ethnography of the Western Band of the Cherokee Indians; it enabled her to probe questions of blood and belonging ignored or overlooked in earlier Native American studies scholarship that simply took the categories of white and Indian for granted. Unlike some tribes with more restrictive criterion, the Western Band has kept qualifications for membership quite loose, namely any descendant of those listed as Cherokee on the federal Dawes Rolls census of the late 19th century. This means that you can enroll with as little as 1,048th Indian blood and it has allowed the Western Band to grow into the second largest tribe in the United States with the clout of big numbers. Sturm does not shy away from the paradoxes and ugly side of blood politics, including efforts to disenfranchise black Cherokees, the so-called "freedmen." And yet, she manages to do so in a sensitive, compelling way informed by her extensive research. Her book may be the single most influential recent ethnography of Native America If indigeneity is constituted in relation to whiteness (and always also to blackness and other racialized identity formations), then the reverse is just as true. Some of my favorite new work—often interdisciplinary—turns the lens back onto whites and, among other things, scrutinizes the schizophrenic U.S. feelings toward Indians that juxtapose horror and enchantment, repulsion and desire, the wish to assimilate or even exterminate native peoples or to be just like them It strikes me that attitudes about Native Americans tend to migrate between what might be termed the poles of debt and threat: the idea of owing something to Indians for the crimes committed against them; and the reverse conviction that they endanger or threaten "our" values and welfare. Thus, we see fear, resentment, and occasional hostility connected to real and imagined worries about tribes pushing their weight around with big campaign contributions; expanding casino resorts at the expense of the environment and local homeowners; and otherwise bursting out of the slot that fixed Indians as pitiable, powerless survivors on remote reservations As much as orthodoxies should always be questioned, the urge in these books to unmask the myth of the Noble Indian too often simply updates the inverse old fable of the Evil Indian, now imagined not only as a cannibal and destroyer of nature but also a greedy casino tycoon Most cultural anthropology nowadays tilts very much to the opposite direction, namely toward a more redemptive view of indigeneity. We have many recent ethnographies about Native American battles for justice and opportunity across the continent 3 Most recent scholarship is quick to point out contradiction and that indigenous peoples very much belong to a globalized world; yet the preponderance of anthropology about them waging the good fight gives a somewhat one-dimensional view of indigenous experience. The darker sides of native life—the old reservation problems of unemployment, alcoholism, tribal infighting, sexual and domestic violence, and now diabetes—tend to be ignored in anthropology of late, or at least the most widely read recent ethnographies Sometimes, too, those who could claim to be indigenous choose not to mobilize around the label at all.29 Villagers in Peru, especially in the more southern regions, have brown skin, wear ponchos, speak Quechua, and otherwise seem to fit the stereotypical checklist for indigeneity. And yet, as I learned in my years there, these Andean peoples do not identify as "Indians," but instead as campesinos, peasants, or by their village, province, or sometimes just as Peruvians. This contrasts with neighboring Ecuador and Bolivia where many villagers have rallied around the banner of Indian power and pride That anthropologists even now in the 21st century propagate what might be called "Amazonianism"—the assumption of a primordial "Amazonian cosmology" uncontaminated by modernity and the West—also reflects the realities of a region that has been the last in the Americas to feel colonization's full brunt The best new ethnography of Native America goes beyond familiar postmodern pieties to show how "culture" may be fought over, claimed as intellectual property, sanitized and celebrated, given up for lost and then resurrected, museumified, and much more " The concept of an "anthropology of Native North America" is also a relic of the area studies tradition; it implies that native culture is somehow a thing unto itself, and not as, in truth, something that can only be understood in the context of settler colonialism, nationalism and state formation, the political economy of global capitalism, and other forces near and far
Time-Space Compression (Harvey)
David Harvey, 1989 Time-space compression refers to the manner in which the speeding up of social and economic processes has experientially shrunk the globe, so that distance and time no longer appear as major constraints on the organization of human activity and society - Internet is huge part of this For Harvey, globalization is the shrinking of space and the shortening of time and the speeding up of the pace of life However this is not gradual or continuous- it takes place in irregular, concentrated bursts call eruptions - Eruptions are caused by periodic crises of over-accumulation attributed to the global capitalist system = Capitalism is global sys bc markets & trade controlled by colonized nations = Western countries = Now closely tied through technology
CAUSESE OF STATELESSNESS
Gender discrimination - in 25 countries, mothers cannot pass their nationality on to their children in the same way that fathers can - Thus if a father is not a citizen of the country, does not claim the children, or for whatever reason does not pass his citizenship on to his child via jus sanguinis, then the mother is unable to give the child citizenship and the child is stateless Redrawing of borders and/or independence/creation of new states - Take for example the fall of the Soviet Union, when the Soviet Union fell, people who were formerly citizens of the Soviet Union could no longer be citizens of the Soviet Union as the country no longer existed = Although most people were able to get citizenship of the newly formed post-Soviet Union countries, not all were able to, thus some former Soviet Union citizens were left stateless Citizenship stripping - An example of this is what occurred in the Dominican Republic in 2013, that year, the Dominican Constitutional Court ruled that those who were born in the Dominican Republic but were of Haitian descent were actually not eligible for citizenship in the Dominican Republic - Approximately 200,000 people who were formerly citizens of the Dominican Republic were stripped of their citizenship as a result of this ruling Bureaucratic gaps in laws - Although not the cause of statelessness of those living stateless in the US, there are gaps in US law that do not allow stateless individuals to gain legal status within the US - Other countries have gaps in their laws that leave some individuals unable to obtain citizenship = Perhaps the most well-known stateless group in the world today is the Rohingya of Myanmar = The Rohingya are an ethnic group in Myanmar that experienced widespread persecution by the government = They began fleeing to neighboring Bangladesh as Myanmar claimed the Rohingya were not citizens of Myanmar and were also subjecting the Rohingya to intense violence and killings = Although Bangladesh has allowed the Rohingya to stay in a refugee camp, they will not allow the Rohingya to gain legal rights in Bangladesh = Rohingya children inherit the stateless status of their parents, thus the problem of statelessness continues from generation to generation. Most causes of statelessness involve discrimination based on: race, ethnicity, religion, and/or gender - In some cases, such as the Rohingya in Myanmar, children inherit the stateless status of their parents It is estimated that 15 million individuals worldwide are stateless - A 2020 Report estimates there are 220,000 people potentially stateless or at-risk of being potentially stateless in the United States.
PROFESSIONAL IMMIGRANT:
Highly trained individual who moves to fill an economic niche in a middle-class profession often marked by shortages in the receiving country
Article "Hunting as a Symbol of Cultural Tradition" Notes
His chapter focuses on the cultural aspects of hunting, trapping, fishing and gathering activities in one Northern Athabascan society. In general, their daily lives are very much involved with the modern monetary system and they are affected by western industrial culture. However, in several rural communities the traditional form of subsistence is still maintained. our experiences in surviving in this land are our culture, our traditions. Other Alaskan natives like Eskimo people are proud of their traditions of dance, songs and crafts as their `native culture', but you know, our land has had too extreme a climate for our ancestors to enjoy such fancy things. They struggled to survive. So, what our ancestors have maintained and passed to us is the way to Iive in and with this land. Our traditions are knowledge, wisdom and skills to survive in the bush.5 You know, our way of living is the best to live here. Nobody can beat us. Our bush skills are our cultural traditions like Eskimos' dances and songs. This is our way to live. These hunters explained that Gwich'in traditions include their lifestyle of hunting, trapping, fishing and gathering, and especially their bush skills which enable them to pursue this lifestyle. especially hunting and its associated bush skills, have come to be important as a symbol of cultural tradition and as a source of cultural identity in opposition to the wider, majority societ Thus, they live on both sides of the border between the U.S.A. and Canada, although their political status and social-cultural situations are different in Alaska and Canada. they live in these settlements throughout the year, occasionally engaging in traditional subsistence activities. It is very difficult to know how many people actually live in these settlements of northeastern Alaska and northwestern Canada (Fast 1995: 3-16), although according to statements by the Gwich'in Steering Committee the population numbers approximately 7,OOO This is the habitat of both large and small mammals such as moose, caribou, muskrat, beaver, wolverine, porcupine, snowshoe hare, mink, marten, or lynx that are targets for Gwich'in hunting/trapping activities. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) is located in the north of Gwich'in territory and is a habitat for the Porcupine River Caribou Herd, the Iargest caribou herd in the U.S.A, which consists of approximately 160,OOO animals. This herd regularly migrates through Gwich'in territory. Rivers of the Yukon and Mackenzie River systems that pass through Gwich'in territory also provide fish for the Gwich'in diet, such as chum salmon, silver salmon, king salmon, white fish, inconnu, grayling and northern pike. In their tenitory Gwich'in can also gather edible plants, including a wide variety of berries. om the 19th century, several European trading companies began to establish trading posts for the fur trade in and around Gwich'in territory That is to say, the Gwich'in, using their bush skills, came to have access to industrial tools for bush life such as guns, steel knives and adzes as well as luxury goods such as beads, tobacco and tea. This trading dramatically changed the Gwich'in lifestyle; instead of being nomadic hunter-gatherers they took up temporary residence around the trading posts where there was easy access to European traders, especially in the winter season which is the best time to trap animals with fur in excellent condition Following the inclusion of Alaska in the amended Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) in 1936, AIaskan Gwich'in communities established village councils to govern their lands in the early l940s. The U.S. Department of the Interior created several reservations for Native AIaskans. Around this period, most Gwich'in began to settle permanently, mainly because, as children became established in schools, their families found it impractical to stay away from permanent settlements In 1971, the U.S. Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act or ANCSA (Public Law 92-203). This act was designed to transform Alaskan Native villages into economic entities based on village corporations, and each Alaska Native became a shareholder in one of these corporations. This act also legally determined who is a Native Alaskan. Most Alaskan Gwich'in settlements are so-called `ANCSA settlements'. Each of them has both one `Native Village council', a non-profit administrative organization for individuals of Gwich'in and other indigenous Alaskan groups living in that settlement, and also one `ANCSA Village Corporation', a profit-making corporation which receives and manages the land estate for Native individuals who are residents of these settlements and also stock holders of the corporation. However, the Gwich'in of Chandalar Reserve used a special clause in ANCSA and elected to take direct title to their former lands and establish `Venetie Indian Reserve'. Two settlements located within the boundary of this reserve, Venetie and Arctic Village, have not established village corporations. `The Native Village of venetie Tribal Government' representing both villages, has authority over their land. Each village also has a separate tribal council to govern village matters. Gwich'in usually buy and eat ready-made food and drink such as bread, hamburger meat, eggs, coffee, milk or canned soda. Purchased western-style clothes are generally worn. Likewise, life in the settlements relies on electrical devices such as electric lights and refrigerators. Most Gwich'in households also have radios, TV sets or video cassette recorders similar to other American households. Transportation relies on manufactured devices such as automobiles, four-wheelers (small buggies), snowmobiles and riverboats with outboard motors. Consequently, most Gwich'in need a way to obtain enough money to purchase and run such manufactured items, but there is limited employment in and around their settlements. In addition, there are baniers for Gwich'in individuals seeking jobs, such as a lack of opportunities for business training, problems with adapting to western ways of working and job customs, and especially discrimination. Discrimination against indigenous peoples still exists in Interior Alaska. Most of the Gwich'in I interviewed have experienced discrimination, especially when trying to find jobs or at work. Due to these factors, there are few chances for Gwich'in people to get permanent jobs, and it is also difficult for them to work under westerners' orders. Ideally, all Gwich'in are stock holders of an ANCSA corporation, and many Gwich'in are on different kinds of social welfare programs conducted by Federal and State Governments, which consider them to be part of, in western administrative terms, `low-income households'. Such people can live in their villages without working to earn money, getting a share of the corporations' profits, being supported by welfare payments,and with food and a place to stay supplied by relatives or neighbors following traditional custom of sharing. Despite this, most Gwich'in who live in local settlements continue to hunt, trap, fish and gather. Hunting and trapping, in particular, are actively and frequently practiced by Gwich'in men. They often go out to the bush with snowmobiles, four-wheelers or riverboats, and hunt moose and caribou with high-powered rifles. They also lay traps and snares to capture small mammals to obtain meat. I observed that many of the Gwich'in adult males whom I met in Fort Yukon regularly check their traps and catch snowshoe hares. Even Gwich'in living in urban areas, such as Fairbanks, sometimes visit rural settlements and hunt for moose or caribou. Most Gwich'in males seem to give priority to hunting large animals over other activities. Many of them agree that it is not easy for them to ignore moose or caribou tracks they find on the way to other duties. One experienced hunter found a large bull moose on the way back from a trip to cut a Christmas tree for his family. He told me that it was very difficult for him not to chase it. I also observed that many Gwich'in males, especially those who are in their thirties or older, often help each other to prepare for hunting trips at the end of August, just before the start of the official hunting season for moose in September. AIthough late August was also the close of the salmon fishing season, their minds already had `gone to the hunting field'. Checking their rifles or bartering their equipment with each other they were preparing to go hunting for caribou. Talking about hunting trips they looked very happy. For Gwich'in females it is important to be careful not to disturb fathers, husbands, brothers and sons, especially not to touch any of their hunting equipment. Fishing arouses less excitement than hunting, although most Gwich'in households catch Iarge quantities of fish of the salmon-trout species every summer, the peak season for fishing. Many Gwich'in households in local settlements have their own fish-wheel or fishnet. All of the Alaskan Gwich'in settlements are located beside tributaries of the Yukon River system, which makes it easy to access good fishing points from people's homes without requiring overnight stays in the bush as in the past. Generally the Gwich'in love fish and preserve stockpiles of them by drying or smoking, going back and forth to their fish-camps or fish-wheels during summer. The Gwich'in also still gather several kinds of berries such as low-bush cranbenies, high-bush cranbenies and raspberries. They regularly go picking berries in August. They still have a thorough knowledge of the flora around their territory, especially how to find edible plants in the bush On the whole, the Gwich'in prefer to eat food obtained by their own efforts, rather than the ready-made food that comes from outside their subsistence economy. They hunt, trap, fish and gather not only on special occasions but also in their everyday lives. These foods are still indispensable in their everyday diet They also practice traditional crafts such as beadwork, and ways of making clothes using furs or skins of animals that they have hunted or trapped. Traditional clothes and the products of traditional crafts are used in everyday life, but are especially important at times of festivities andlor as part of public presentations made by representatives of their ethnic group Although some animal species are protected from sport and commercial hunting by Alaskan state regulations, indigenous Alaskans, including Gwich'in, are exempt from this regulation due to their Native rights. Even during the closed season, if Natives genuinely need the meat of protected animals for traditional rituals or feasts, they are legally allowed to catch such animals. Also, Natives can use government food stamps, normally only to be exchanged for food, to purchase ammunition or shells for their rifles/shotguns, or fishnets for their subsistence activities. `Real foods' contain substances which are good for their bodies and minds. One Gwich'in told me that there are `no poisons in it [meat from caribou, moose or fish]' so, `it makes our bodies strong'. By contrast, ready-made food, which is sold in stores, is `substitute' food. Moreover, fancy foods, such as coffee or candy, are sometimes considered to be `poison' because they contain substances which are `bad' for people's bodies and minds. In fact, some Gwich'in consume such `poisons' everyday, sometimes exceeding the average consumption of westerners when they stay in permanent settlements. According to one Gwich'in, when she stays in an urban area her body always gets into a bad condition because of bad foods. Once she comes back to her home settlement her body always recovers because she can eat caribou, moose and fish. Even today the Gwich'in share the meat of animals and fish obtained through subsistence activities with relatives, neighbors and friends. Sometimes they send caribou, moose or fish meat from their rural settlements to their relatives or friends living in other settlements or urban areas at their request using the postal service or local private plane companies. They always offer plates of this kind of food to visitors to their homes. Visitors to a person's home can eat any of these dishes freely even when their host is not present, especially once the meat is cooked. On the other hand, Gwich'in also purchase food or drink from stores. This kind of food is also often shared with relatives or neighbors and can be given without payment to relatives or close friends who ask for it. But, it is only ready-made food which Gwich'in commonly exchange and barter with each other. I believe that the primary reason for this taboo is that selling wild meat is illegal for any person in Alaska. However, the reason given by Gwich'in themselves relates, not to the illegality of this behavior according to a western regulation, but to the fact that these meats should be shared with relatives, friends and neighbors without being exchanged for money because that is their traditional way (see also Caulfield 1983: 58-59; Nelson l986: 1 1 1). Indeed, the Gwich'in maintain their custom of sharing food within their society eyen today. By asking, people can obtain food from others without payment. I observed that, even when able to reciprocate immediately, people generally avoid doing so because that could be interpreted to mean that they do not wish to maintain a social relationship with the giver. Generally, Gwich'in people never try to pay immediately for `real foods' which are given through their sharing custom, because such behavior could be understood as a refusal to keep their relationship with the giver.8 They also seem to consider that a person should not refuse another's offer because this damages social relationships in their community. At the same time, Gwich'in usually feel uncomfortable being in the position of a one-sided receiver. Besides food, Gwich'in tend to put a high value on other items, such as garments, which are regarded as being associated with their traditional lifestyle. For example, the ideal outfit in the winter season for the Gwich'in traveler is a suit consisting of a caribouskinjacket and a pair of caribou legging boots, completed with a fur hat. Gwich'in insist that this traditional wear is the very best for activities in extremely cold weather because it always keeps their bodies warrn and dry, despite its feather-light weight, and makes no noise to disturb game when hunting in the bush, although it is not often that Gwich'in wear this kind of traditional suit. They are also proud of the traditional technique of using a particular combination of fur for their fur hats to keep their faces from freezing. Even the newest models of commercial outdoor clothing, made of the latest synthetic materials, are not regarded as a substitute for their traditional wear. One of the best-known Athabascan crafts is beadwork. Gwich'in beadwork is made primarily using animal skins obtained by hunting. The beadwork, and various beads used for it, were introduced from Europe via the fur trade. It represents an extension of the Native tradition of garment ornamentation such as quill work. The Gwich'in still make a variety of beadwork items such as pairs of dance moccasins, mittens, gloves, gun cases, and baby straps. The Gwich'in apply beadwork to daily necessities and use it in daily life, but beadwork also plays an important role as a special gift to relatives and friends, that is, in maintaining social relationships within their community. It also has cultural importance as a visible symbol of their ethnic group. The representatives of Gwich'in groups or settlements at formal events, both within and outside their communities, often wear caribou or moose skin jackets with beautiful beadwork on the shoulders as their `forrnal wear' rather than western suits. Although originally introduced by Europeans, nowadays beadwork is regarded as a Native craft by Athabascans and non-Athabascans alike There are exceptions to the Gwich'in rejection of things western. Gwich'in hunters never compare firearms, steel knives, outboard motor boats and the like to the bows and arrows, bone knives, or birch-bark canoes which their ancestors used. Indeed, these industrially-produced tools have Iargely or completely replaced traditional ones. The difference between these tools and other western goods, such as food, is that the tools are used mainly for hunting, trapping or fishing, and allow these activities to continue. Gwich'in hunters never hesitate to use these Western devices, and are proud of their knowledge of and their ability to handle them. Experienced Gwich'in hunters tend to be careful in their selection of equipment for their activities and prefer military surplus equipment because `it is durable, reliable and useful'. All of them are proud of their thorough knowledge of their equipment and their skill in choosing the best equipment. They also have almost perfect skills for maintaining and repairing it. In fact, such knowledge and skills are indispensable for modern Gwich'in hunting activities. They consider their ability to handle these tools as a part of their survival skills and regard these tools themselves as integral to their traditional activities. They do not compare western tools negatively with their traditional ones, but proudly compare their ability to handle them with that of `non-Gwich'in people'. He stated that many survival skills which are being taught to military personnel nowadays originate from Native American traditions, including those of Northern Athabascans such as the Gwich'in. However, there are exceptions. In somejobs, such as acting as hunting guides, military survival instructors, and advisors to the State's Department of Fish and Game, Gwich'in individuals have an advantage over `white people' and are able to have power over their own situation. In particular, their orders are respected by others. It is important to note that in suchjobs Gwich'in are required to share their knowledge of their land and game, and to use the bush skills gained from their personal experience of traditional activities, that is, their way of living with their land. In other words, such knowledge and skills are advantageous and enable Gwich'in to get better jobs. The experience and bush skills gained from subsistence activities are considered by most Gwich'in as the key to changing their social relationships with western people and western soclety. On the other hand, the traditional Gwich'in way of hunting forrns what could be called an `untouchable' domain from which people of other societies are excluded. As I have mentioned, the Gwich'in put a high value on `real foods'. It is important to note that both `real foods' are never obtained through commercial transactions, nor is it permitted by law for non-Natives to catch wildlife for commercial purposes. Thus, obtaining and sharing `real foods' form a domain of Gwich'in life which non-Natives can never invade. This domain is connected with their tradition of hunting and other subsistence activities. They obtain `real food' only through these activities, and share in the traditiona} way. By contrast, ready-made food is purchased and owned by each individual using money which also is earned and owned individually. This capitalist form of economy allows only limited opportunities for Gwich'in people to maintain their social relationships. Thus, Gwich'in must obtain `real foods' and share them with others to survive socially in their community The fact that Gwich'in hunters accept western equipment suggests that they set a high value on things which are indispensable for their activities in the bush. In other words, the Gwich'in put a high value on things suitable for their bush activities regardless of origin. For Gwich'in it is the suitability for hunting or other bush activities that is the important point to consider when evaluating such objects. `Real is what we can touch, feel, or recognize. Bush is real world. We can feel everything in the bush'. On a hunting trip a Gwich'in hunter needs to feel and recognize everything around him to catch animals and also to survive. This is because they feel that the prefix `sub' of the word `subsistence' has negative or limiting connotations and, more importantly, `subsistence' primarily means `obtaining energy', whereas hunting and other bush activities have social importance for the Gwich'in. During these food gathering & preparation activities they have many chances to help and share with each other, that is, to maintain their social relationships. hese activities should not be considered as merely work to earn money in a capitalistic way. Gwich'in activities of hunting, trapping, and fishing are never completed without sharing `real foods' through which they can maintain social bonds within their community. So, it seems natural for Gwich'in people to consider that their subsistence activities cannot be replaced by any other occupation or by money. His son agreed with this and added, `We do everything to live'. Indeed, most rural Gwich'in do a wide variety of work every day. They engage in different kinds of subsistence activities to obtain not only food but also other necessities, such as firewood, in the appropriate season. They also butcher meat, preserve fish, cut wood and share the products of their labors with each other. They can make their own decisions about everything they need to do. By contrast, according to the father, people living in big cities can do only one thing as their occupation. They live only a small part of a whole life, `like a small piece of pie'. They do not have any control over other parts of their Iifie. So they can never feel the `reality of their life'. . But for Gwich'in people the blood quantum seems to be less important than living as a Gwich'in. Of course, they never regard people like me, those who are not related to any descent group in Gwich'in society, as `Gwich'in'. One Gwich'in person said,`Any person has to be born Gwich'in to be Gwich'in'. However, for anyone related to a Gwich'in person, that is, someone regarded as Gwich'in by other members of their society, what is most important is how they Iive; whether they hunt, fish and gather to obtain `real foods', or at least connect with and contribute to the Gwich'in system of sharing `real foods'. Any person behaving in this way, even those who do not satisfy the ANCSA requirement of blood quantum, would never face alienation from a Gwich'in rural community, at least at the level of daily life
Fallacy #1: "HYPODERMIC MODEL"
If cultural products of west overrun world (Cultural imperialism), then implies Third World subjects as passive consumers of imported cultural goods Hypodermic model of media effects (Morely and Robbins) presupposes that media texts have direct cultural effects on those who view them In reality they interpret media, ideologies, objects etc. according to their own cultural code - Non Americans don't interpret American media same way as Americans do = Characters, plot, etc interpreted in incredibly different ways
Meanwhile in France
In 2010 the gov of France passed a law banning the full face veil in public places The French people who supprot the law claim the face veil is discriminatory to women and violates French norms regarding secularism The result has been ongoing clash of cultural values Muslim women have launched demonstrations and protests, asserting their right to veil is a human right The Muslim population in France steadily grew over the past few decades due to transnational migration, and now is estimated to be about 5-10% of the total population - 5 million muslims in France, about 2000-2500 women cover their faces = Not many people Not all Muslim women in France would want to wear a face veil They don't But there are at least a couple thousand women who have insited that veiling and the freedom to express their religion is their right Also do it to be modest Quite a few Muslim women resist the law by continuing to wear the face veil - This resistance is called by anthropologists "cultural resistance" - The women are resisiting the imposition of French cultural norms on themselves
Transnational Feminism
Laura Bush, Former first lady, tooks trong inetrest in owmen of Afghanistan - Won human rights award - But she believed they needed to stop wearing veils - Women were appreciated that she cared but losing the veil wasnt an inetrest to them Trans = across borders - Rather than inter = between Global North/US viewpoint and values are decenterd The local becomes the center Muslim women are experts on themselves and their culture When Global North/US viewpoints are decentered, the status of US women is no longer the model for all cultures to aspire to - Feminists in US not deciding what's best for women abroad, those women tell their needs
Poverty as Structural
Leacock (1971): If there are no jobs, inadequate health care and education, and a systemic failure to invest in the infrastructure of impoverished communities, poverty cannot be changed by attitudes and values What appear to be characteristics of a "culture of poverty" are characteristics of poverty itself - Goode and Maskovsky (2001): Poor communities are not isolated spheres - Impact of global economic policies on U.S. economy (including outsourcing)
Aspects of State Power
Many modern states have standing armies, and virtually all have gov backed police forces The use of force outside of these institutions is typically illegal, or closely controlled and monitored POLITICAL POWER: the power to makes laws and control the population, is tightly controlled Non gov bodies are typically restirtcyed from making their own rules and regulations The state also frequently makes use of HEGEMONIC POWER: the power to create consent and agreement within a pop without the use or threat of force HEGEMONY is essentially the power to shape the way people think - It is used by the state to establish what should be normal behavior
UDHR Article 15: right to a nationaltiy
Now we will focus on article 15 of the UDHR which is the "right to a nationality". Article 15 makes two points. - "(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality." Nationality: "membership in a nation or sovereign state" Citizenship: "relationship between an individual and a state to which the individual owes allegiance and in turn is entitled to its protection" How citizenship is acquired: Citizenship can be gained at birth in two different ways jus soli and jus sanguinis - When a person is born, they could potentially get citizenship via jus soli (of the soil) or jus sanguinis (of the blood) = The United States has citizenship available via both, if a person is born on US soil, they are granted US citizenship at birth and if they are born to US citizen parent(s) they are granted citizenship at birth no matter where they were born = Jus soli is common mainly in the Americas - The majority of the countries in the world do NOT grant citizenship to people just because they were born in that particular country, rather they grant citizenship to a baby based on the parent(s)' citizenship In some cases, a person can acquire citizenship via naturalization - requirements for naturalization vary by country and are not guaranteed There are complexities between the differences in the US understanding of nationality and citizenship - For example, American Samoans are not US citizens rather they are considered US nationals, so they do not get all the rights of citizens - However, for the purposes of our discussion today, we will use citizenship and nationalty interchangeably
Children of the Plains got positive and negative reviews. Some argue it was nothing more than poverty porn
POVERTY PORN is typically associated with black, poverty-stricken Africans, but can be found elsewhere - The subjects are overwhelmingly children, with the material usually characterized by images or descriptions of suffering, malnourished, or otherwise helpless persons Movie made this way to make the audience react Think about this when watching movie Article - The 20/20 special about the Pine Ridge Reservation - The tone is set early as Diane Sawyer calls the Lakota "hidden" and "forgotten." These terms may be accurate in some sense, but they're strangely bland and neutral. It's as if Americans wanted to help the Indians all along but couldn't find them. - That isn't the case, of course. In reality, words like "neglected," "scorned" or "betrayed" would work just as well. But those would shift the blame from the Indians to the white man, and Sawyer doesn't want that. - The episode's first half is little but a grim litany of facts and images: unemployment, alcoholism, overcrowded trailers, crumbling floors and ceilings, and so on. There's no explanation for why this is happening—merely a statement of its existence. Are the Lakota responsible for their own plight, or is someone—the government or big business—causing it? You won't learn the answers here. - The stories are manipulative to the point of tears—literally. A boy cries because his mother is an alcoholic. A girl cries because she tried to commit suicide. The school principal, an old lady in a motorized chair, cries because her work is so difficult. - Even when the subjects don't break down and cry, their stories are framed negatively. Another girl gets pregnant and thinks her future is ruined. A five-year-old's father is killed in a drunk-driving accident. - It's not that any of these stories are false or unrepresentative. But they seem chosen for the maximum heart-tugging effect. You'll suffer with the children in the first half, and you'll feel their joy as things improve in the second half. - There's a term for this: "poverty porn. - Not only does the episode's first half ignore the causes of poverty, it barely mentions the outside world. When it does, it uses the passive tense. Schools were forbidden to teach the Lakota language. Children were removed to boarding schools. - Well, who ordered these things done? Why did they happen? And what were the consequences? Again, you won't learn the answers here. - Only in the second half does Sawyer mention America's sins a couple times: broken treaties, slaughtered buffalo, stolen land, unhealthy commodity food. But by then it's too little, too late. The "poverty porn" feeling predominates - Sawyer presents two Lakota "talking heads," and they offer some corrections to the narrative. But they're young and polite, and Sawyer puts them on the defensive. Surely the federal government isn't responsible for creating jobs on the rez? she asks the young man. Why do the Lakota cling to the reservation when they could leave? she asks the young woman. - Imagine all the sharp-tongued activists — people like Russell Means and Winona LaDuke — who could've demolished the show's passive hand-wringing. Or the tribal leaders and elders who could've spoken more forcefully on the issues. Sawyer doesn't give anyone with answers a voice; she seems to go out of her way to avoid them. - Similarly, where are all the people trying to make a difference? For every problem on the rez, there are scads of media reports, government hearings, tribal programs, charities and foundations, etc. People tackle problems such as suicide and domestic violence every day. An issue such as Whiteclay's alcohol sales, which the show touches upon, has inspired protests, lawsuits and documentaries. - True, no one's come up with a silver bullet to end these problems, but they've received a lot of attention. Even if the efforts haven't succeeded yet, the show would have mentioned the attempts. You'd never know people are working on these problems from Children of the Plains. - The message is clear. Somehow the Lakota have become poor without anyone noticing it. Fortunately Diane Sawyer, our intrepid white reporter, has arrived to save the day. The children are suffering, but she brings a smile to their faces. With Diane on the scene, everything's gonna be okay. - The show could've cut 10-15 minutes of the sad stuff and used the time to provide context instead. How did poverty come about? What are people doing about it? - This approach might not have left viewers feeling good about themselves like the Oprah Show. But it would've given them a greater understanding of Indian countries. That's the goal of a news program, right? Once this video was filmed, people were contacting ABC like crazy to help - Some family actually showed up to Reservation trying to find Robert Looks Twice and like chilled with him & his family for the day If you were in a position of authority, what would you do to fix the situation on reservations in the US? What problem do you think you'd run into?
Theories of Power: Max Weber
POWER is the ability to enforce one's own will on others' behavior - Can be executed with force or violence - Can be structural Authority is the legitimate or socially approved use of power - Depends on acceptance, on part of subordinates, of the right of the people above them to give orders Influence is a milder form of power presupposing implicit acceptance
When Heidi Met Lisa
Senators Heidi Heitkamp from North Dakota (Democrat) and Lisa Murkowski from Alaska (republicna) They met at a social gathering for female senators in Washington DC Event for females supporting each other & getting to know each other Hiedi mentioned wanted to help NA pops, and Lisa wanted to help indigenous pops in Alaska Got Native American Youth Report done Have so few stats on NA pop Wanted to know how to best support their people And Savanna Act Shockingly high rates of Native women being murdered and going missing Named after an indignous woman who was killed Interesting that it didn't cost any money, about tribal & state authorities working together Passed Senate 99 to 1, but guy blocked it so it wouldn't passed Heidi lost election but Lisa promised to reintroduce bill into Senate In Jan 2019 it was passed and as of March 12, 2020 it is sitting in desk in House
Defining Traits of a State
States typically have pops in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions In the modern world, the only upper limit to state growth is the amount of food that it can grow In terms of subsistence sys, states at the very least need to employ a strong form of agriculture All states make use of some form of agricultural intensification, whether fertilizer, irrigation, etc Social org within a state is generally removed from kinship These types of social org may include nationalism, city or local consciousness, ethnic groups, and so on POLITICAL POWER if firmly entrenched and bureaucratized This is a notion that political power, has, in a sense, gained a life of its own But the ruler of a state is less critical to the survival of the state overall Political institutions will continue to work even if something happens to the head of state States can organize standing armies as well as conduct massive construction projects
"DOWNWARD MOBILITY:" Katherine Newman (1999)
Studied economic and psychological struggles of 150 families, a majority of whom work full-time This is "a hidden dimension of our society's experiences because it simply does not fit into our cultural universe" They do not blame the economic system- instead, they blame their own failure, personal defects, unworthiness Main determinant of class positions & mobility is not work ethic, but structural barriers that have created an increasing gap in life chances
THE FORDIST SYSTEM
The Fordist System, or Fordism, refers to Henry Ford's model of centralized, mass assembly production - Replaced messed up industrial revolution working conditions = Child labor, dangerous codnitions, 7 day work week - Realized if treated workers well (5 day work week & apythed them well) they would buy ford's products themselves - System refers to Rapid economic growth and expansion = spread throughout the world It entails rigid arrangements between the state, capitalists, and workers in order to maintain high levels of employment, wages, investment, and consumption - Sys worked well bc goods cheaply priced, quickly produced, & workers bought them By the 1960s Fordism had become so successful and efficient, it began to overproduce causing - Saturated consumer markets = Have no one else to sell to once workers bought products - Reduced demand for product = Falling prices & sales - Fall in corporate profits - Massive layoff of workers = After this have the birth of modern union movement The fall in corporate profits caused a fall in government revenues, so the government had increasing difficulty sustaining welfare programs Printing more money = wave of uncontrollable inflation This caused the collapse of the Fordist system of mass production This classifies as a eruption Sidenote - Capitalism requires sustained & infinite growth Have rise of new ways in order to chase this growth
Anthro Conclusion Overview
The last chapter of our textbook (which is a whopping nine pages), discusses the need for, decline, and evolution of public anthropology today. I would like to reproduce the first two paragraphs in full, although it would be best for you to read the entirety of the chapter, as they should be considered when preparing for this week's exercise: To the extent that anthropological texts and lectures have an audience, all anthropology could be considered to be public. However, public anthropology, as the term is generally used, refers to a specific set of practices and positions within the discipline that aim to reach out beyond the confines of the academy. This can be accomplished through writing for different audiences, engaging in advocacy-oriented work in local communities, or by taking part in the transnational conversation about the ills and spoils of the contemporary world and what it means to be human. The common denominator of these practices is the conviction that anthropology should matter not just as an academic pursuit of knowledge but also as a tool to engage with the world in a practical, if not political way. Public anthropology amounts to an attempt to bridge the gap and overcome the alienation between the anthropological community as a closed professional group and the global society that anthropology studies and in which anthropologists take part. The ideal readership of the public anthropologist are neither paid (colleagues) nor forced (students) to listen to them or read their work. They could be academics working in other fields, or they could be anybody. They could be your aunt in Reading and your niece in Gdansk. At this point, it may be useful to distinguish between engaged and public anthropology, the latter explicitly aiming to contribute to a broad and non-specialized discourse about humanity, the former often engaged on behalf of a community or social grouping in which the anthropologist works. In other words, public anthropology aims to use the tools of anthropology and apply them to the world around us, and to have the knowledge gathered reach as wide an audience as possible. Not just fellow academics and students, but the public at large. From studying the Human Terrain System of the US Military, we know that anthropology can be useful to the government, and it can be used to critique cultures of the anthropologists' home societies.
Some Acts of Cultural Resistance in Defense of "The Veil"
Those women who wear the veil continue to do so regardless of fines imposed by the government - If really religious would be trapped in their homes Many people who disagree with the law have paid the fines on behalf of the women who continue to wear the veil Some people who did not wear the veil in the past have begun to do so in solidarity with the women who are being discriminated against
Theories of Class: Max Weber
Weber, writing during the expansion of capitalism during the Industrial Revolution, added to Marx's theories PRESTIGE is the reputation, influence, and deference bestowed on certain people because of their membership in certain groups Affects life chances Affects the way one is treated in social situations, and their access to influential networks Life chances are an individual's opportunities to improve quality of life and achieve life goals Members of a class share common life chances, experiences, and access to resources MODERNIZATION THEORY - refers to a model of a progressive transition from a 'pre-modern' or 'traditional' to a 'modern' society - looks at the internal factors of a country while assuming that with assistance, "traditional" countries can be brought to development in the same manner more developed countries have been
About that Veil...
Would you be willing to wear a veil or some form of concealment? - Hell no, don't have a reason Are there specific situations that would change your mind? - To protect myself from violence or to gain respect if abroad in Middle East = Journalist reporting from Muslim country for ex
CASTE system
basis of educational and job reservations in India Braham - single spiritual power that Hindus believe lives in everything Kshatriya - Warriors Vaishyas - worker class Shudra - servants and laborers Untouchable/Harijan/Dalit - impoverished, lowest Encompasses aspects of both 'culture' and 'society'; that is, it is both a symbolic system associated with Hinduism, and a set of rules and practices regulating social organisation, interaction and power in societies in the Indian subcontinent. Can be defined as a system dividing all of Hindu society into endogamous groups with hereditary membership, which are simultaneously separated and connected with each other through three characteristics: separation regarding marriage and contact; division of labour in that each group, at least in theory, represents a particular profession; and finally hierarchy, which ranks the groups on a scale dividing them into high and low castes Entails a ranking of people according to ascribed statuses, it provides rules regulating the interrelationships between members of different castes, and it creates mutual dependence of the castes through the division of labour, which implies that certain tasks can only be carried out by members of specified castes
AMERICAN DREAM
the set of ideals (democracy, rights, liberty, opportunity and equality) in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, as well as an upward social mobility for the family and children, achieved through hard work in a society with few barriers