anthropology

Op vrijdag 24 september vindt er een interessante conferentie plaats over ‘de hernieuwde maatschappelijke betekenis van religie’ in het Universiteitstheater van de UvA. Deze conferentie wordt georganiseerd door het NWO onderzoeksprogramma ‘The Future of the Religious Past’ en staat naast onderzoekers open voor belangstellenden uit de werelden van politiek, beleid, journalistiek en media. De organisatoren schrijven:

‘Religie, zo stelt menig godsdienstwetenschapper vast, is weer helemaal terug in het hart van de hedendaagse samenleving. Alle voorspellingen uit het verleden over de onontkoombare privatisering van religie ten spijt, zijn islamitische identiteiten alleen maar saillanter geworden, debatteren politici volop over hun manifestatie in het publieke domein, roeren ook christelijke groepen zich nadrukkelijker dan voorheen, en zijn media en populaire cultuur zwanger van religie, mystiek en spiritualiteit. Redenen genoeg, kortom, voor een conferentie over deze voor velen zo onverwachte terugkeer van religie.’

De bijeenkomst bestaat uit vier plenaire lezingen:

* José Casanova: The return of religion to the European public sphere * Annelies Moors: Living Islam: public debates and everyday life * Kathryn McClymond: Saddam Hussein: Execution gone wrong * Sophie van Bijsterveld: De maatschappelijke betekenis van religie

Gevolgd door een aantal parallelle Future-projectpresentaties:

* Willemien Otten (team Burcht Pranger): Tijd en natuur * Marten van der Meulen en Hijme Stoffels: Publieke participatie van migrantenkerken in Amsterdam Zuidoost en Danielle Koning: Omgekeerde zending: mythe of realiteit. Over evangelisatie-initiatieven van migrantenkerken * Yolande Jansen (team Ruud Peters): De rol van religie in de hedendaagse Islamitische wereld

* Karin Willemse/Jose van Santen (team Peter Geschiere): Mannen (-in wording) in een moderne wereld: mobiliteit, moraliteit en nationale identiteit in islamitisch Afrika * Nathal Dessing/Loubna El Morabet: Vormen en elementen van Islam in Europa: vroomheid, het verlangen naar kennis en de toekenning van religieuze autoriteit

En een afsluitende lezing: Stef Aupers: God in cyberspace. De ethiek van het transhumanisme en de geest van Sillicon Valley

Meer informatie en aanmelden kan op de website van NWO.

© Gisela Roeder

This picture of a store advertising poster for (Cuban-made?) condoms is Gisela Roeder’s first contribution to EthnoCuba, and hopefully not the last. It was taken at a peso pharmacy in Caimito, a municipality in Havana Province (soon to be a municipality in the new Artemisa province), this past July, 2010.

Slogan translation: DESEA (presumably the brand name: Desire). “A Job Well Done. You Have the Instruments.”

Productos Controlados are those sold by the libreta. I wonder how many condoms per person could one buy (how many times the government considers the normal rate of sex making)

Recently, the international press carried an article about Cubans’ creative condom usage: Condoms are used for everything except for their intended use. Here’s a link to a Global Post article which includes interesting images.

Commercial advertisements of this sort in peso stores are extremely unusual, particularly because rather than just inform on the quality of the promoted product, it seeks to lure consumers to use it through innuendo and evocative images- a “no-no” in socialist advertising (See article in Harvard’s Revista on the topic)

In the the mid-1990s, the famous timba band La Charanga Habanera, also tried to promote this not-very-popular product, upon government request. The song  “Mi Amor, Usa Condon” (which they mocked in their album cover by appearing themselves with condoms over their heads) was part of their “suspension concert” of 1997, in Havana’s Malecon. After this, they were banned from the media for half a year due to their allegedly lewd movements and disrespectful words.

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Folowing on from the previous post ….

… where does the methane released in swamps and paddy fields actually come from?

Image reproduced according to the licence at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Deinococcus_radiodurans.jpg

This image is not of a methanogenic bacteria but of an ‘extremophile‘ – a group that methanogenic bacteria belong to.

The culprits are ‘methanogenic’ bacteria. They reply on anaerobic conditions and break down the sugars in the plant material to produce energy (and release methane at the same time).

Perghaps also unsurprisingly they are also found in the gut of the cow.

First of all, congratulations to Daniel Lende and Greg Downey whose excellent Neuroanthropology blog has just made the move to a new science blogging platform: PLoS Blogs.  This new venture, under the auspices of the Public Library of Science -- which has been in the forefront of developing open-access journals in science and medicine -- includes a number of great-looking blogs, including science journalist Steve Silberman's NeuroTribes, The Gleaming Retort by John Rennie--who was editor in chief of Scientific American from 1994 to 2009, and pharmacologist David Kroll's Take as Directed, among several others.  Given that anthropological perspectives are often given short shrift in science-and-medicine-oriented venues, it is particularly gratifying to see Neuroanthropology included among the PLoS Blogs. Also, the blog of the Foundation for Psychocultural Research is starting to become more active.  They have just posted the first of several summaries of their conference on Cultural and Biological Contexts of Psychiatric Disorder, which Emily Ng reported on for Somatosphere in February.

A high-tech expedition that aims to create a detailed map of the wreckage of the Titanic has begun exploring the ocean floor where the ship sank nearly one hundred years ago, the crew said Thursday.

The bow of the RMS Titanic lies on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. A high-tech expedition that aims to create a detailed map of the wreckage of the Titanic has begun exploring the ocean floor where the ship sank nearly one hundred years ago, the crew said Thursday.

Sonar onboard an automated submersible vehicle combined with high-resolution video will be used to create three dimensional images of the fabled oceanliner.

The expedition, organized by the American group RMS Titanic, which holds exploration rights for the wreck, arrived on Wednesday aboard the scientific vessel Jean Charcot and started by laying flowers on the water's surface to commemorate the 1,500 victims of the shipwreck.

Transponders were then deployed at the bottom of the Atlantic to determine, with the help of sonar pings from an automated underwater vehicle (AUV), the exact position of the Titanic.

Finally, the AUV "Mary Ann" was deployed at 0647 GMT. She reached the bottom after diving for an hour and 40 minutes.

"Surveying of the Titanic wreck site has begun," said the expedition on its website.

Another robotic submersible equipped with a video camera will be deployed next.

Christopher Davino, president of RMS Titanic, said in a statement that the goal is to "create the most detailed portrait of Titanic's wreck site to date."

The team of experts, he said, "will be using some of the most advanced technology available to create a portrait of the ship unlike any that has been created before -- virtually raising Titanic and sealing her current state forever in the minds and hearts of humanity."

The mission, which set sail from St John's, Newfoundland, will provide real-time video and photo updates on Facebook and Twitter during a more than 20-day expedition.

Other images and information will be found on the mission's website, www.expeditiontitanic.com.

The Titanic, a luxury passenger ship once thought to be unsinkable, hit an iceberg on April 14, 1912 and sank in the early morning of April 15, 1912, killing 1,500 people.

After decades of searching, the wreckage of the Titanic was discovered in 1985 some four kilometers (2.5 miles) beneath the surface of the sea.

I recommend going to the website. It is well animated and full of great tidbits of information.
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References:
Physorg. 2010. "Mapping of 'Titanic' wreck begins". PhysOrg. Posted: August 27, 2010. Available online: http://www.physorg.com/news202104386.html

Neuroanthropology is moving! We’re joining a new Public Library of Science project: PLoS Blogs. We’ll be part of a new cluster of eleven science blogs at PLoS.

You can now find us at PLoS Neuroanthropology. Please update your subscriptions, come over and comment (or complain), and let us know what you think.

We are tremendously excited about this opportunity for many more reasons than we have space to articulate. Here we’ll touch on some of the main ones.

The Network

We are thrilled to be part of an initiative that combines serious scholars and serious writers together. That first. As a group, we share interests in science and medicine, in the public uses and misuses of knowledge, and in promoting awareness of ideas and research in a broad fashion.

This amazing new network of people includes writers we’ve followed, others we’ve admired from afar, and some new names with impressive track records. A Pulitzer Prize winner, the former editor-in-chief of Scientific American, professors at Duke and North Carolina Central University, a range of award-wining science journalists, and some top-quality science bloggers with rigorous science backgrounds – that is a great group of people. We are particularly excited to learn from the writers how to better practice this craft, and to engage with people with such an array of interests.

Anthropology within the Public Library of Science

One of the things that has us most excited, that really clinched our decision to make the move to PLoS, is that we hope we might act as a voice for anthropology in a scholarly and public forum built around science and medicine. Anthropology offers powerful insights from cross-cultural research and sophisticated integrative theory that deserve a much wider audience, one we hope to help grow here at PLoS Blogs.

As research becomes increasingly international and interdisciplinary, researchers in all fields need to confront the complexities of worldwide variation and of cultural biases, including our own. Anthropology has done this work for over a century now, and is in a wonderful position to offer the fruits of these intellectual efforts, including hard won wisdom from our own field’s mistakes, to the work of science and medicine represented at PLoS.

PLoS and Blogs

As a non-profit, ad-free adventure, PLoS Blogs also suits what we’ve done long-term at Neuroanthropology. We’ve debated that topic several times, whether to go for ad revenue, whether to join a network that might pay us. We’ve always decided no. We didn’t start doing this for money, we haven’t kept at it for money. We do it because we enjoy writing and we like sharing our ideas with a broad public.

PLoS itself has taken bloggers seriously for quite some time. It offers bloggers access to preprint versions of articles on the same terms as journalists and organizations. The PLoS team has used its own weblogs – PLoS.org, everyONE and Speaking of Medicine – to highlight scholarly content in an accessible format. As Brian Mossup, PLoS Community Manager (and many thanks for the thrill of that initial call!), says, PLoS Blogs will open up “the discussion, and debate, on science and medicine.”

Although online discussions are no longer new to academia, many of us are searching for ways to better integrate online discussion with serious scholarship to increase the quality of the former and the vitality of the latter. We want PLoS blogs, and Neuroanthropology in particular, to be a place where readers can reliably turn to find a broad engagement with new research at the intersection of brain and culture.

The Principles behind PLoS

PLoS’s Core Principles - Open Access, Excellence, Integrity, Breadth, Cooperation, Community Engagement, Internationalism, and Science as a Public Resource – resonate deeply with us.

The Principles capture how we want science to be: open, international, and public. These values resonate with the ethics of anthropology, where integrity, breadth, and community engagement are core guiding principles for our research with people around the world. These values also correspond well with our home institutions, University of South Florida and Macquarie University, where top-notch science, interdisciplinary cooperation, public education, and community contribution are all fundamental to how these universities strive to conduct themselves.

What PLoS Does

There are also some selfish reasons to be part of PLoS. The Public Library of Science is a serious and powerful voice for open-access scholarship and education. We want Neuroanthropology to be a part of that.

PLoS One, the flagship interdisciplinary journal of PLoS, is soon to become the world’s largest journal, given how it is doubling in size every year.

The PLoS family extends to 1200 academic editors. In 2010 PLoS will publish roughly 8,000 articles, providing about 10% of new articles added to PubMedCentral and 1% of new articles added to PubMed.

At a time when scholars are widely discussing the potential of open access, PLoS is leading the charge to make new research accessible to scholars everywhere. To paraphrase a well-worn hacker’s aphorism: science wants to be free. We’d like to be part of letting it loose.

2.3 million page views per month. That’s what the PLoS sites average as a whole. If that’s not enough, PLoS emails Table of Content alerts to 100,000 readers on different weekly and monthly intervals. Its Twitter stream has 4300 followers; its Facebook group, 7000 fans. We’re both thrilled and humbled to be able to join such a vibrant community and will do everything in our power to return the trust.

Even though PLoS has been an innovator in the creation of the new Article Level Metrics Program, we know deans like their traditional journal impact factors right now. And here PLoS is strong. PLoS Biology has the highest impact factor in Biology, according to the Journal Citation Reports. PLoS Medicine is ranked sixth in Medicine, just after the major medical journals in the United States and Britain like the New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet.

Those are serious numbers in the impact game. The point is not simply that PLoS is successful, but that it’s changing the rules of that game. They’ve created this success using the power of online and open access and creating networks of scholars to ensure high quality.

PLoS Blogs and the Future

PLoS has revolutionized open-access, peer-reviewed scientific publishing since its founding in 2003. It opened up the world of academic publishing, making new research widely accessible regardless of whether a reader had access to a leading research library. We hope, and even believe, that blogs can go through a corresponding transformation, albeit in a different direction. Science blogging has different challenges and potentials for success.

Blogs have become an important channel for the popularization of science, often at an intermediate depth, between the level of the expert specialist and the most unfamiliar public or general readership. Because science blogs are so nimble, writers can respond quickly, posing questions, offering critiques, seeking connection and writing in open-ended fashion. We can comment as science stories unfold, responding both to the research and to popular versions, helping to highlight why findings are particularly interesting or exposing when someone’s over-reaching from the results.

For anthropologists, and for those interested in brain-culture relations, blogs are especially important because they provide a forum for synthetic work, a place where theorists and scientific analysts can try to draw conclusions from diverse sources and types of data. Although it may sound dry, the informal format can allow us to speculate and float ideas that might not yet be substantial enough to support a more traditional academic paper or book.

Finally, science blogs are fun, hopefully for the reader as much as the writer, as the rules for academic writing are relaxed and we can exercise our (sometimes warped) senses of humor. At Neuroanthropology, we like to think that anthropologists are particularly well suited for the role of online entertainment: nothing is quite as entertaining as the range of human oddity, including our own.

Recent controversies in the realm of for-profit science blogs and concerns about the business models for online publication suggest that, as with open-access publishing, a not-for-profit organization, founded on principles of community responsibility and accessibility, might offer the best way to bring together diverse talents.

We hope that PLoS can do for science blogging what it has done for academic journals, encouraging innovation and cooperation, offering an alternative model for supporting science, by people who are passionate about research.

Those of you looking for our weekly round up, you can now find it at PLoS Neuroanthropology – Wednesday Round Up #118.

That’s right – we’ve moved over to PLoS Blogs! Well, for the most part. Greg and I will be doing our main blogging over there now. More in just a bit about the move.

Here’s the link to our main Neuroanthropology page there. Please update your subscriptions. We really look forward to having you over there. This is a very exciting move for all of us.

If entire populations are forced to relocate by rising seas as a result of climate change, do they remain citizens of a vanished country?

Rising ocean levels brought about by climate change have created a flood of unprecedented legal questions for small island nations and their neighbors.

Among them: If a country disappears, is it still a country? Does it keep its seat at the United Nations? Who controls its offshore mineral rights? Its shipping lanes? Its fish?

And if entire populations are forced to relocate -- as could be the case with citizens of the Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati and other small island states facing extinction -- what citizenship, if any, can those displaced people claim?

Until recently, such questions of sovereignty and human rights have been the domain of a scattered group of lawyers and academics. But now the Republic of the Marshall Islands -- a Micronesian nation of 29 low-lying coral atolls in the North Pacific -- is campaigning to stockpile a body of knowledge it hopes will turn international attention to vulnerable countries' plights.

"At the current negotiating sessions and climate change meetings, nobody is truly addressing the legal and human rights effects of climate change," said Phillip Muller, the Marshall Islands' ambassador to the United Nations.

"If the Marshall Islands ceases to exist, are we still going to own the sea resources? Are we still going to be asked for permission to fish? What are the rights that we will have? And we are also mindful that we may need to relocate. We're hoping it will never happen, but we have to be ready. There are a lot of issues we need to know the answer to and be able to tell our citizens what is happening," he said.

Frustrated by the dearth of answers to the questions he was posing, Muller said, Marshall Islands leaders contacted Columbia Law School. Michael Gerrard, who leads the law school's Center for Climate Change Law, picked up the challenge and issued a call for papers.

Theoretical questions become real

Gerrard, who is arranging a conference sponsored by Columbia University's Earth Institute next year, said that when he began reaching out to scholars, he realized most were working in isolation from one another. And, he said, some of the most ticklish legal questions facing small island nations have been understudied -- because until recently, the notion of a country's extinction has been largely theoretical.

"The prospect of a nation drowning is so horrific that it's hard to imagine," Gerrard said. Moreover, he added, until just a few years ago, it was difficult to have a conversation in the international community about how countries might adapt to climate change.

"There was a concern that it would divert focus from mitigation. But now people recognize that even with the most aggressive imaginable mitigation measures, the climate situation will get worse before it gets better, and we have to begin making serious preparation," he said.

The plight of refugees is the most emotional of the looming questions. Deciding where to relocate citizens is just the beginning for a disappearing nation. Still unanswered: What will the political status of those displaced people be? Will they assimilate into the culture and economy of their new host country, or will they retain a separate identity?

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that rising sea levels, saltwater intrusion and accelerated coastal erosion could lead to as many as 200 million environmentally induced migrants worldwide by 2050.

The Carteret Islanders of Papua New Guinea could be some of the world's first climate "refugees." The land is expected to be under water by 2015, and Papua New Guinea's mission to the United Nations has already announced it would evacuate the approximately 2,000 islanders to Bougainville Island -- about a four-hour boat ride away.

Maldives wants a fund of last resort

Meanwhile, in the Maldives, President Mohamed Nasheed declared upon entering office that he would create a sovereign fund -- something of a last-resort insurance policy -- in the event that the country's 305,000 citizens would require relocation. The fund fell victim to budget shortfalls, but Maldivian officials have said it had the desired effect of raising awareness in the international community.

And while environmental migration is not a new phenomenon, the projected scale of human movement over a short period of time is unprecedented. But, noted University of New South Wales professor Jane McAdam, "there is at present no internationally agreed definition of what it means to be an environmental 'migrant,' 'refugee,' or 'displaced person,' and consequently, no agreed label for those affected."

Edward Cameron, former senior adviser to the government of the Maldives, added: "We see at the moment how many people are on the move in Pakistan." While the floods devastating that country have been displacing millions internally, Cameron asked, "What if they were on the move across an international border? They certainly wouldn't have refugee status."

But while questions abound over the status and rights of displaced persons, experts say that field of study is burgeoning compared to the study of sovereign rights of vulnerable countries.

McAdam, who has looked at the question of whether a disappeared nation could retain its U.N. seat, noted that there is no automatic triggering mechanism that "undoes" a state.

"Certainly states have ceased to exist in the past, but it's through occupation, war, state secession," McAdam said. The closest thing to an extinct nation would be a government in exile. Yet even that assumes the government will eventually return to its territory -- something climate change may make impossible.

"There's precedent for other things that we can draw on, but ... there's no self-executing formula for deciding when a country doesn't exist anymore," she said.

Cleo Paskal, associate fellow at Chatham House and author of "Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map," said one of her top worries is the fate of countries' maritime exclusive economic zones.

Those areas where countries have exclusive rights to the resources are measured from coastlines or offshore islands. But, Paskal noted, the laws assume the coastlines won't change or disappear. That's already happening.

Laws assume coastlines are a constant

"Any country with a coastline or offshore islands that are being used to anchor claims need to start thinking about if that coastline or offshore island is affected, and what will that do to the exclusive economic zone claims?" she said. "The core issue is that we have written our laws, regulations, subsidies on the assumption that the environment is a constant, and it isn't."

Moreover, as Paskal noted in a recent blog post, countries that take in climate "refugees" might make a case for governing the former nation's maritime zone -- something she described as a "very lucrative and geopolitically touchy proposition."

Meanwhile, Paskal and others warn that well before a country disappears under rising waters, it will face less provocative but deeply vexing problems.

"On your way down, before your country disappears, you've got desalination problems, agriculture problems, import problems. You might lose your fresh water; your land might start to degrade because of saltwater intrusion," Paskal said.

Cameron said threatened nations need answers to the vexing legal questions of land, water and migration for their own sakes as well as to send a signal to developed countries stalling on climate change action that "if you don't come up with a response, we're going to start looking at legal options." But more broadly, he said, the international community needs to start viewing climate change through the lens of human rights.

"What we're trying to do in this debate is take an old issue, which is climate change, and make people look at it in a completely different way ... as a human and social issue instead of an ecological issue," he said. "Climate change is not about polar bears; it's about people, and human rights helps us to understand it as a human issue."
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References:

Friedman, Lisa. 2010. "If a Country Sinks Beneath the Sea, Is It Still a Country?". Scientific American. Posted: August 23, 2010. Available online: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=if-a-country-sinks-beneath-the-sea-is-it-still-a-country
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500

The question of linguistic relativity is the topic of an August 29, 2010 New York Times magazine article, “You Are What You Speak”   Many linguistic anthropologists were surprised by the article’s representation of Benjamin Lee Whorf’s ideas and by the scant reference to the longstanding tradition of research in linguistic anthropology. Most often known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or the theory of linguistic relativity, the notion that the diversity of linguistic structures affects how people perceive and think about the world has been a canonical topic of American linguistic anthropology. This discipline’s exploration of the relation of linguistic diversity to perception and cognition has never ceased nor been relegated to the “loony fringes of disrepute,” as the article’s author Guy Deutscher puts it (assuming that he did not mean that as a characterization of our entire field). Across the decades, the pendulum has swung from more relativist to more universalist and back to nuanced relativist readings of the evidence, and anthropologists’ methods of investigation usually differ markedly from psychologists’. Nonetheless, various framings of the question of linguistic relativity have long remained on the anthropological agenda, from the days of Boas, Sapir and Whorf to the present.   Whorf’s own statements of his theory look little like the caricature that opens the NYT article and much more like the position that Deutscher himself offers as reasonable and compelling. Far from holding that “the inventory of ready-made words” in a language “forbids” speakers to think specific thoughts, Whorf argued that patterns of grammatical structures, often the most covert ones at that, give rise not to a language prison but to a “provisional analysis of reality” and habits of mind, very much as Deutscher concludes. This is a view that many in linguistic anthropology continue to find compelling, in varying ways.   Below are just a few references to the extensive linguistic anthropological background to the NYT article.  For starters, it’s useful – and fun!  - to read Whorf himself, with classic pieces available in: 1956  Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. John B. Carroll (ed.). MIT Press.   In many publications across a career focused on this area of investigation, John Lucy (Psychology and Human Development, U. Chicago) has offered historical overviews of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and detailed study of specific proposals about linguistic relativity, informed by both linguistic anthropology and psychology:   Lucy, John A.  (2004).  Language, culture, and mind in comparative perspective.  In M. Achard and S. Kemmer (Eds.), Language, Culture, and Mind.  Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications [distributed by the University of Chicago Press], pp. 1-21. 

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Lucy, John A. 1997 Linguistic Relativity. Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 291-312. Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews Inc.

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Lucy, John A. 1996 The scope of linguistic relativity: an analysis and review of empirical research. In John J. Gumperz and Stephen Levinson (Eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge, Cambridge Univeristy Press, pp. 37-69.

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Lucy, John A. (1985). Whorf’s view of the linguistic mediation of thought. In E. Mertz and R. J. Parmentier (Eds.), Semiotic Mediation: Sociocultural and Psychological Perspectives.  New York: Academic Press, pp. 73-97. Reprinted in B. Blount (Ed.), Language Culture, and Society: A Book of Readings (2nd ed.).  Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1995, pp. 415-438.

Lucy, John A. 1992 Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge University Press.

Lucy, John A. 1992  Grammatical Categories and Cognition: a Case Study of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge University Press.     For newcomers to the field, a good overview of linguistic relativity and its place in linguistic anthropology is offered by Sandro Duranti (Anthropology, UCLA) in a forthcoming article:   Duranti, A. in press. Linguistic anthropology: Language as a non-neutral medium. Raj Mesthrie (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Cambridge University Press.

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  For the late-20th century renewal of the question of relativity from a variety of perspectives, including chapters by authors mentioned in this blog entry, see: John J. Gumperz and Stephen Levinson, 1996. Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge University Press.   Over an extensive set of publications not designed for the casual reader, Michael Silverstein (Anthropology, Linguistics, and Psychology, University of Chicago) has brought Whorf to bear in formulating one of the key research paradigms of contemporary linguistic anthropology, the investigation of the linguistic and social concomitants of linguistic ideologies. The first half of the following chapter offers a good approach to Silverstein’s interpretation: Silverstein, M. 2000. Whorfianism and the Linguistic Imagination of Nationality. In Paul Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language. SAR Press.            Those intrigued by the controversially different readings of Whorf’s ideas may want to look at Emily Schultz’s (Anthropology, St. Cloud State University) original analysis of Whorf’s rhetoric and her politico-cultural account of its ambiguities.  The book’s title is all too apt for the NYT’s representation:   Schultz, E. 1990. Dialogue at the Margins: Whorf, Bakhtin, and Linguistic Relativity. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 1990.   The NYT article makes only brief mention of linguistic anthropologist John Haviland (Anthropology Dept. and Director of the Linguistic Anthropology Laboratory, UCSD), but it builds much of its central story around his seminal research on cardinal directions in the Australian language Guugu Yimithirr and indigenous languages of Mexico. Here are references for some of Haviland’s work, as well as fellow linguistic anthropologist Stephen Levinson’s (Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen) http://www.mpi.nl/people/levinson-stephen studies building on that, as also mentioned in the NYT:   Haviland, John B.  “Anchoring, iconicity, and orientation in Guugu Yimidhirr pointing gestures.”  Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. III(1), pp. 3-45.  (1993)   Haviland, John B. and Stephen C. Levinson (eds.)   Special issue: spatial conceptualization in Mayan languages. Linguistics  vol. 32-4/5.  (1994)     Haviland, John B.  “Guugu Yimithirr Cardinal Directions.” Ethos 26(1) (March 1998), pp. 25-47.  (1998)   Haviland, John B.  “Pointing, gesture spaces, and mental maps.”  In Language and Gesture: Window into Thought and Action, David McNeill, editor.  Pp. 13-46.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.   (2000)   Levinson, S. 2003 Space in Language and Cognition. Cambridge University Press.   The  series that Levinson edits on “Language, Culture and Cognition” from Cambridge University Press has published a number of advanced studies in this area, including recent books by linguistic anthropologists that address two of the key topics raised in the NYT’s article,  the discursive formulation of spatial relations (Bennardo) and evidential constructions (Kockelman):   Bennardo, Giovanni 2009. Language, Space, and Social Relationships; A Foundational Cultural Model in Polynesia.  Cambridge University Press.   Kockelman, Paul 2010. Language, Culture and Mind; Natural Constructions and Social Kinds. Cambridge University Press.     This list is far from an exhaustive inventory of the very extensive anthropological literature on the issues and data discussed the NYT piece, and captures only a few of the perspectives anthropologists have brought to the question. We welcome additions to these suggested readings.   For more on Deutscher’s article and on other journalistic representations of Whorf’s hypothesis from linguistic anthropology, check these links to comments by the former SLA webmaster,  Kerim Friedman (Department of Indigenous Culture, National Dong Hwa University):  

• My Problem with Journalism.
• Whorf.
• The new linguistic relativism: Guy Deutscher in the NYTimes « Neuroanthropology.

Comments by Michel DeGraff on responses to his petition on Haitian Kreyòl

As it turns out, these responses echo age-old arguments about the (mis)use of language in Haitian schools and in Haitian society at large. Yves Dejean and many others have addressed such arguments in previous publications. See, for example, Yves Dejean’s 2006 book _Yon lekòl tèt anba nan yon lekòl tèt anba_. As shown in Dejean’s publications, many of these counter-arguments against his petition have been made made and un-made over and over again.

Unfortunately my current schedule won’t allow time to engage in these discussions. The good news is that I have already addressed similar arguments in a couple of mailing lists targeted to (mostly) non-academic types interested in Haiti and to educators and NGOs in Haiti—people who are much closer to the facts (and to the trenches!) of these debates. My responses on these mailing lists seem to apply to the responses that you’ve forwarded to me. So I’ll just cut-and-paste from these earlier posts and add a few more specific comments here an there.

Also see my recent Op-Ed articles in the Boston Globe in the U.S. and Le Nouvelliste in Haiti:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/06/16/language_barrier_in_haiti/ http://www.lenouvelliste.com/articleforprint.php?PubID=1&ArticleID=82891 Re the question “Kreyòl instead of French” vs. “Kreyòl alongside French” and re the comparison between Haiti vs. Germany, Switzerland, etc:

XXX in her post, like many before, has mis-interpreted the fundamental objective of Professor Dejean’s petition and my own position.

Fortunately some of the core issues in XXX’s post are already addressed in the following paragraph in Dejean’s petition—which I would invite XXX and others to re-read:

“Many countries in the world, especially in Africa and Asia, have 2, 3, 4 or more areas that lack a common language. This problem exists nowhere in Haiti. With Creole (i.e., a language that EVERYONE speaks in Haiti) as the language of instruction, all children would be able to study calculus, geography, history, etc., with utmost earnestness. Similarly they will be able to take advantage of any good program for the study of French, a language that has been implanted in Haiti since colonial times.”

Far from us any thought to “limit education” to Kreyòl and impose monolingualism on all Haitians. Our objective is “simply” for Haitian schools to make systematic use of Kreyòl as the language of instruction for all academic subjects, and especially for literacy, This objective is based on decades of research of the beneficial role of the native language as medium of instruction and on the robust fact that Kreyòl is the one language that *every* Haitian in Haiti speaks—and most as their *only* language.

Of course, using Kreyòl as the language of instruction does not prevent any Haitian schools that *already* have the financial means—a minuscule number in Haiti—to look and pay for *adequate* teachers to teach French, Spanish, English… and perhaps even Fongbe, Yoruba, Swahili, Chinese, etc. But all these languages would be taught as what they are, that is as *foreign* languages.

For now it’s not clear to me how many schools in Haiti would even be able to find and pay teachers who are competent to adequately teach French to the general population. The vast majority of Haitian teachers are still not fluent in French. No wonder that after two centuries of education in French (or some version of French) the vast majority of population still cannot speak French. Compare with, say, Spanish-speaking Haitians in the Dominican Republic, English-speaking Haitians in the U.S., French-speaking Haitians in Montreal, German-speaking Haitians in Germany, etc. The issue is clear: in Haiti for the past two centuries there simply has not been any adequate linguistic or pedagogical milieu that would allow Haitians to learn French.

Be that as it may, the education system in Haiti is still struggling to fund basic training of Haitian teachers and publication of Kreyòl text books, especially in mathematics and experimental sciences for the higher grades. So my hunch is that it is such efforts that currently deserve highest priority—efforts to ensure that the majority of Haitian children receive adequate instruction in their native languages so they can gain mastery in other domains, without any linguistic chip on their shoulders.

Another highest priority is a well-informed and massive educational campaign so that teachers, parents and students all understand the value of using children’s native language in their schools as an indispensable basis for building knowledge in all other cognitive and academic areas—as documented in decades of linguistic and pedagogical research.

For some online references on this topic, see:

http://www.unesco.org/education/information/wer/index.htm

Re the claim that French should be used as language of instruction in Haiti because most Haitian parents (allegedly) want their children to learn French in school—let’s assume, for the sake of argumentation, that there’s empirical support for such a claim (I myself don’t know of any such reliable statistics about “most Haitian parents”):

I remember studies going back to the 1940s and 1950s that suggested that most African-American children prefer to play with white dolls instead of black dolls. See, e.g., Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark’s famous dolls studies. For a fictional take on this syndrome, see Toni Morrisson’s “Bluest Eye.” In the Clarks’ studies, the majority of black children found the black dolls bad, dirty and ugly, while the white dolls were considered nice and pretty. And the black children often refused to identify with the black dolls.

In a related vein, there are studies from the 1960s onward that have documented the various ways whereby francophone Canadians in Montreal often look down upon their native French and consider anglophone Canadians superior (see, e.g., Lambert et al’s 1960 article “Evaluative reactions to spoken language” in _Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology_).

The “most Haitian parents wants French” argument could then be extrapolated to these cases to argue for: (i) the massive distribution of white dolls among African-American children, and (ii) the promotion of English over French in Montreal. Fortunately, black civil-right leaders like the Kenneth and Mamie Clark and Thurgood Marshall in the U.S. and pro-French language-policy makers in Québec knew better—though much work remains to be done on both fronts!

And I suspect that most serious scholars would not have used the Clarks’ and Lambert et al’s studies to argue for the widespread distribution of white dolls to black kids and the wholesale adoption of English in Québec. What these studies suggest is that stigmatized groups often internalize the stigmatization they suffer from, thus the need for aggressive policies to combat said stigmatization—be it linguistic or otherwise.

Here’s a quote from Kenneth Clark’s 1965 book _Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power_ about “The Psychology of the Ghetto” (p63f):

“Human beings who are forced to live under ghetto conditions and whose daily experience tells them that almost nowhere in society are they respected and granted the ordinary dignity and courtesy accorded to others will, as a matter of course, begin to doubt their own worth. Since every human being depends upon his cumulative experiences with others for clues as to how he should view and value himself, children who are consistently rejected understandably begin to question and doubt whether they, their family, and their group really deserve no more respect from the larger society than they receive. These doubts become the seeds of a pernicious self- and group-hatred, the Negro’s complex and debilitating prejudice against himself.”

So I myself would not take the claim that “most Haitian parents want French for their children” (a consequence of external and internalized discrimination) as a serious argument that French, a foreign language for most Haitian children, should be used as language of instruction in Haiti. The use of French as language of instruction for Kreyòl-speaking children in Haiti is exactly what Dejean’s petition argues against. And this petition is one step among others toward fighting centuries of “ghettoization” against monolingual Kreyòl-speakers in Haiti (i.e., the vast majority of Haitians).

Here are some related comments cut-and-pasted from a previous discussion on this topic on another mailing list:

As for the resistance you mention on the parts of parents about Kreyòl-based education: It is a well-established result in social psychology that the oppressed often internalize the stigmatization that is imposed on them by the élites of their society. The Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon has offered many case studies of linguistic insecurity in the context of colonial and neo-colonial societies, with an analysis of francophilia among (wanna-be) francophones in Africa and the Caribbean. The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci and French sociologists Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu have written quite on how State institutions, including the school systems, create and maintain these self-hating attitudes across generations that despise their local linguistic and cultural assets.

In the particular case of Haitian Kreyòl-speaking parents, their resistance to Kreyòl-based education seems related to the very sort of attitudes illustrated at ONG cluster meetings where Kreyòl is, by and large, effectively excluded and to the sort of arguments and value judgments voiced in your email below about French and Creole, with your claim that lack of fluency in French (i.e., taking French as a foreign language in Haiti) would be a cause of “impoverishment” in Haiti.

You wrote today (July 21, 2010) that we should convince these parents that teaching in Kreyòl is, not a step backward, but an efficient teaching method. You also wrote that we should do so, not with words, but with paractice and exemple. Yet the practice so far—for example, the practice by yourself, by the education cluster and by many state and private organizations—is to use French or English, and exclude Kreyòl, thus excluding the very people that need to be convinced that Kreyòl is a valid language!

In effect, all these practices and examples convey the perception that Kreyòl is not “good enough” as a language and that it is drastically inferior to French, and that Haitians who speak Kreyòl only are not valid interlocutors in these debates about their education. In turn, these parents find themselves in an ideological trap that the State, the ONG and other public and private organizations have implicitly set up: these parents become victims of the widespread and deeply entrenched perception that social promotion in Haiti is irremediably linked to mastery of the French language, and that fluency in French is a proof of intelligence. But many Haitians know better. Witness the Kreyòl saying “Pale franse pa vle di lespri!” (=”Speaking French doesn’t mean that you’re intelligent”). Examples are not hard to find.

Instead of defending their children’s human rights and instead of insisting that they be educated in their mother tongue (per UNESCO’s own charter) so they too can have access to a quality education, Kreyòl-speaking parents become victim of this anti-Kreyòl perception and want their children to learn to read and write in a foreign language, namely French. When children are first taught to read and write in a language that’s foreign to them (and that’s what French is for most Haitian children: a *foreign* language), they cannot comprehend what they are “taught” and are reduced to silence in the classroom and to rote-memorization of French texts. Worse yet, they run a high risk of becoming academically handicapped for the rest of their lives. These facts have been established for more than 50 years of research and practice in psycholinguistics and education.

What’s sorely needed is a vigorous and sincere campaign for both the systematic use and the systematic promotion of Kreyòl in all social contexts—a campaign that will educate all demographic sectors about the social, psychological and pedagogical virtues of the use of Kreyòl at all levels of education, especially at the fundamental stages, starting with pre-school, in order to create strong cognitive foundations in the minds of our children. Such foundations simply cannot bypass the linguistic and cultural assets from our children’s homes and communities.

Such a campaign to elevate the status of Kreyòl and to ensure that parents and educators believe in its use as language of instruction has to start with the Haitian State and with the various organizations engaged in education in Haiti, including the NGOs and individuals on this email list.

To repeat, the practice and examples in NGO clusters, governmental offices and private businesses that rarely, if ever, use Kreyòl are among the factors that reinforce the perception that Kreyòl is not to be considered on a par with French. Given such practices, Haitian parents, even those who don’t speak French (the majority!), are simply making what they consider a “wise” investment in what they see as the differential values of the goods offered by Haiti’s “linguistic market”—to use a term-of-art from the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

So, Mr. XXX, let’s work together in *concrete* fashion via “practice and examples” so that one day the majority of Haitian children in Haiti, just like the majority of French children in France, can blossom in pre-schools, in schools and in universities that make systematic and expert use of their native language as language of instruction. That way, our children can grow to become competent and self-confident professionals in the language that they will most need to interact with virtually all their compatriots.

Re the “the teaching of both Haitian AND French” in Haiti, more cut-and-paste from a previous post to another list:

Re your stated desire that all Haitians become bilingual: My linguistics training and expertise, plus everyday observations of language learning in different contexts, have convinced me that fluency in any language is imposible without a certain minimum of exposure to data from that language. In Haiti, there’s simply not enough fluent French speakers or competent French teachers to ensure such required exposure to French. The only linguistic immersion in which most Haitians find themselves is Kreyòl.

Haitians in the Dominican Republic, in the U.S., and in Montreal routinely learn Spanish, English and French, respectively—much better than they ever manage to learn French in Haiti. This seems to me clear evidence that Haitians can indeed learn any language once they’re immersed in the adequate linguistic milieu.

Here’s one possible solution to this dilemma—one that may help achieve *total* bilingualism in Haiti: What about importing hundreds of thousands of competent French teachers or millions of fluent French speakers and disperse them throughout Haiti? This seems to be a minimal condition to ensure that some 9 million Haitians who speak Kreyòl only would, one day, become perfectly bilingual in Kreyòl and French.

Re the status and teaching of French in Haiti, another cut-and-pasted passage:

it may seem ironic that the best way to teach French to Kreyòl-speaking Haitians is to actually start with the fact that they don’t know French and to teach them French as a foreign language.

Such teaching of French cannot be relegated to teachers who don’t know French (the majority in Haiti), who have no formation in the teaching of French and whose jobs is to teach other subjects—reading, writing, math, science, etc. The teaching of French in most Haitian schools must happen in French-language classrooms by teachers who know French and who are trained as French-language teachers. It is a well-attested fact that most Haitian schools lack teachers with such a profile.

As for the claim that non-fluency in French will impoverish the country, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy—a myth that too many Haitians have bought into for too long, with the complicity of the élites and organizations that ignore the linguistic and cultural assets of our nation. This myth, among other fallacies, is at the root of the State’s failure to-date to educate its general population.

That’s why it’s so important to get rid of all these explicit and subliminal messages that put Kreyòl the status of a second-class language and to enlist every opportunity to use and promote Kreyòl in all institutions operating in Haiti, including NGOs, governmental offices and private businesses. How about a Morisseau-Leroy Prize or a Frankétienne Prize for professors that make the best use of Kreyòl in their classroom? Without relentless pro-Kreyòl-advocacy, parents (and teachers) will continue to reject Kreyòl (and Kreyòl books) as a valid medium of instruction. Unfortunately this rejection eventually impedes the cognitive and academic development of most Haitian children.

When Haitian schools start making competent use of Haitian children’s mother tongue, they will, at last, stand a chance to successfully teach them a variety of useful skills which they can use to serve their fellow Kreyòl-speaking compatriots, and they’l be able to do so in Kreyòl without any linguistic insecurity. Such practical skills can, in turn, concretely contribute to socio-economic improvement. In the current system, children in most schools do not learn to adequately read or write, they do not learn much that is useful, and they do not become fluent in French. What they end up “learning” are a bunch of formulaic phrases that they mimic without much understanding. Anyhow, in most rural communities, French is of relatively little practical value as compared to Kreyòl. So most schools amount to a waste of money, a waste of energy and a waste of hope.

I think we can do better than that.

-michel.

After watching for the first time the image, surely you belong to one of the two following sets: a) People who see a white glass or  b) People who see two faces staring at each other.

May be it is not so evident, but when we try to solve a mathematical problem we may have different perceptions about it, and therefore choose different mathematical tools in order to solve the problem. That selection will depend on different aspects, some of us are more “algebraical” than others,  or more “geometrical”, or “trigonometrical”,etc.

Just to set an example, I’ll share with you a problem that was with me during the past weeks.

I`ve found it browsing in an old book, plenty of good problems (Mathematical Activities, By Brian Bolt, Cambridge University Press). It can be easily presented, the data is clear and concise:

The point P, inside the square is in a place such as the distance to the three consecutive vertices Q, R and S are respectively 30m, 40 m and 50m. The question is: How long is the side of the square?

I tried to solve it by using different mathematical “tools” ,first Trigonometry, Sine and Cosine Rule, as I couldn`t find the solution I tried with a “mix” of  Circles and lines in a system of Cartesian Coordinates , no great outcomes, so I took a compass and a ruler and draw a couple of sketches just to estimate the result.

Finally, after drawing many diagrams, I tried to rotate a part of the diagram that provided an interesting shape and then I applied some properties of intersection of circles in Cartesian Coordinates, and at that point I was able to choose between trigonometry or distance between two points.

I don´t want to give up too much clues, so if you are interested you can choose your method freely.

As the MYP encourages open minded teaching and learning I think that sharing this class of problems with our students and also with our fellow colleagues, it’s a good way to explore the different roads and options that Mathematics provides.

Would you like to give it a try and share your thoughts? I hope so… 

In Mayo’s Hawthorne experiments (1928 – 33), the power of the social group was clearly identified. Mayo had been brought up with the ideas of Taylor’s scientific management, holding the view that low productivity was caused by environmental factor such as physical working conditions. However, at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company Mayo begun to develop a new line of thinking which was to form the basis of the ‘human relations school’ of management. Mayo discovered that job satisfaction increased through employee participation in decisions rather than through short-term incentives. This idea developed with the third stage experiments in the bank-wiring room where a group of workers was offered financial incentives to increase productivity, with a singular lack of effect. The output levels stayed stubbornly flat. Mayo concluded that the power of the working group was more important than the incentives and that the group norm on output – its code of behaviour – was dominant. So, if managers want to motivate they need to concentrate on social groups and interpersonal skills.

It is refreshing to see Mayo’s ideas still alive in recent research, but perhaps in not such a refreshing form. A recent article ‘Do-Gooders Are Unpopular Team Members’ in Wired.com reports that unselfish workers, who are the first to offer to help with projects, are among those that co-workers like the least, according to four separate social psychology studies.

In the most recent study, entitled ‘The Desire to Expel Unselfish Members from the Group‘, psychologists found that unselfish colleagues come to be resented because they “raise the bar” for what’s expected of everyone. As a result, workers feel the new standard will make everyone else look bad.

“It doesn’t matter that the overall welfare of the group or the task at hand is better served by someone’s unselfish behaviour. What is objectively good, you see as subjectively bad,” said study co-author Craig Parks of Washington State University. The paper was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/21208051@N00/2223955889

Imperial Brains Blown Out

When you’re wounded an’ left on Afghanistan’s plains An’ the women come out to cut up your remains Jus’ roll to your rifle an’ blow out your brains An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.–Rudyard Kipling

Last night Senator John McCain tweeted, “I believe the President’s artificial date for withdrawal from Afghanistan will doom us to failure–our withdrawal must be conditions based only.” We can be certain that withdrawal will indeed be “conditions based,” and one of the conditions will be the defeat and humiliation of another demented superpower in decline, whose hands have long been bloodied in Afghanistan. What McCain doesn’t need to add is that he is quite content with the pace of current American and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan, which is averaging about three troops per day, exiting in caskets. Troops walking out of Afghanistan alive? Now that is what McCain objects to.

Yet, General Petraeus, in his recent propaganda campaign, went out on a very thin limb and claimed that the U.S./NATO was making “slow progress” in Afghanistan. What he does not add is that the Taleban is making very fast progress, having more money, more weapons, more fighters, and killing more Western troops than ever before…and this during the U.S. “surge.”

In honour of contemporary neo-Soviet political dinosaurs such as Senator McCain, and his fellow oligarchs in the military, we present three full length movies below about the USSR’s occupation of Afghanistan from 27 December 1979 to 15 February 1989. These are the three most prominent, and we have the benefit of watching the complete movies (if you have not seen them already). For some original Soviet documents on the Afghan war, see the National Security Archive’s “The Soviet Experience in Afghanistan.” For a detailed media time line tracking U.S. covert involvement in Afghanistan, starting years before the arrival of Soviet troops, click here, and you will see details on CIA support for leaders whose names are those currently associated with the “Taleban insurgency.”

The Beast (1988, USA)

Directed by Kevin Reynolds, and written by William Mastrosimone, The Beast is in English and Pashto, and tells the story of Soviet failure through the experience of a tank crew in Afghanistan, that loses itself, and is hunted by mujahidin. The tank commander, Daskal, is brilliantly played by George Dzundza, a despotic commander who fought as a child in the battle of Stalingrad (nicknamed “tank boy”). We witness various Soviet atrocities, and follow two different sets of protagonists: the Russians in their tank, and the band of mujahidin, who are shown in a sympathetic light and whose thirst for justice we are made to share.

The full series of segments that make up the film should advance automatically. Should the movie stop at the end of the first segment, you can watch the complete playlist here.

Afghan Breakdown/Afganskiy Izlom (1990, Italy, Russia)

This version of the film is in Italian and subtitled in Korean. Of the three films, this is my favourite. The movie was directed by Vladimir Bortko, and written by Leonid Bogachuk, Aleksandr Chervinsky, Mikhail Leshchinsky, and Ada Petrova. Michele Placido, an Italian television star, played the main protagonist, Major Bandura, a commander of a unit of Soviet paratroopers. The movie was based on research done in Kabul and Kandahar in 1988, by the movie director. The movie is set in the very late part of the Soviet occupation, and ends with withdrawal by air. Bandura and his fellow Soviets enjoy, as they describe, a lifestyle of comfort, privilege and luxury that they could never dream of back home. Indeed, as they begin to pack up, several of the key characters grow increasingly melancholic, dreading the return to their tiny apartments in Moscow. They make use of local markets in Afghanistan to buy various Western consumer items. The film ends with Bandura’s unit attacking a village, and being exterminated in return. You can read the complete story, and still possibly be able to follow the film even if you know neither Italian nor Korean.

The full series of segments that make up the film should advance automatically. Should the movie stop at the end of the first segment, you can watch the complete playlist here.

The 9th Company/9 Рота (Russia, Finland, Ukraine 2005)

A 2005 Russian box office hit, this movie is in Russian and subtitled in English. The movie is based on the history of the actual 9th Company, and we follow recruits from Russia to a training camp in Uzbekistan, to Bagram air base and then onto Khost where they are required to defend a mountain (Hill 3234) overlooking supply routes (sound familiar?). The movie was directed by Fyodor Bondarchuk and written by Yuriy Korotkov. This movie is also set in 1988. Different reviews tell us that Soviet war veterans found several inaccuracies in this film, and tended to prefer Afghan Breakdown above.

The full series of segments that make up the film should advance automatically. Should the movie stop at the end of the first segment, you can watch the complete playlist here.

If you see, or have seen, all three films, please let us know what you thought and which of the three you liked most.

Recent Related Articles:

• Nation: How the Soviet Army Crushed Afghanistan (time.com)
• Barack Obama is facing the “Gorbachev dilemma” (rt.com)
• NATO chief hopes for Nov Afghanistan handover deal: report (reuters.com)
• With U.S. Approval, Moscow Heads Back to Afghanistan (time.com)
• NATO says Poland must finish job in Afghanistan (reuters.com)
• 6 reviews of The Beast (rateitall.com)

Filed under: AFGHANISTAN VIGNETTES, COLONIALISM/IMPERIALISM Tagged: afghanistan, John McCain, movies, NATO, Russia, Soviet occupation, Soviet Union, USSR, withdrawal

photo

The first big assignment that Social and Cultural Anthropology students will complete during their course of studies is the observation portion of the SL Internal Assessment. For May exam session schools, this assignment will need to be completed very soon! For those scrambling to get this organized, here are a few tips…

In short, what do the students need to do? Observe human interaction for one hour. Take field notes during this time. Write an organized and detailed report of no more than 700 words. You (the teacher) will retain this report until later in the year, or in the students’ second year, when they will write an anthropological critique of this report.

When should the observation occur? Within the first six weeks of studying social and cultural anthropology.

How much guidance should I provide beforehand? This assignment is meant to be undertaken while the students are naive about anthropology. Having said this, you should aid students in… -Selecting an appropriate context to observe (for examples, see page 42 of Subject Guide and teacher support materials on the OCC) -Ensuring that they conduct their research in an ethical manner (see p. 40, Subject Guide) -Ensuring that they record detailed field notes -Provide students with criterion A for the SL IA (p. 43 Subject Guide)

It is okay to already be introducing students to the field of anthropology, including how anthropologists conduct and present research. All students should be reading and interpreting ethnography from early on in the course.  You may also have students do a short practice observation (e.g. ten minutes observing a family member at a daily activity) and discuss their experiences in class.

Where to observe? There are many possibilities for contexts for observation. Some of these are listed on page 42 of the Subject Guide and in the teacher support material available on the OCC. I have found it useful to guide students to locations where there will be enough of a critical mass to observe interaction but not so big that the student feels lost during the observation. For example, a church or a meeting of an interest group provides a contained context in which several people will be interacting with each over a period of time. Other possibilities include riding a long bus route, a bus stop, a sports game, a rite of passage, a ritual, a ceremony, a school cafeteria, a public meeting, a train station, a tourist attraction…the possiblities are many! On the other hand, a mall may involve so many people that the student has trouble figuring out whom exactly to observe. A crosswalk on a street corner may also be difficult as there is so much change in the people present that very little interaction may occur.

I also discourage students from observing while they are engaged in another activity –for example, working at their after school job or going out for lunch with friends. These situations do not provide a context for focused research.

Keep in mind that it is your job to ensure that students conduct their research in an ethical manner.

Can I see Samples? Yes! These are available in the teacher support materials, which can be found under “Assessment “ on the OCC. If you do not have access to the OCC, ask your IB Coordinator to help get you started.

Just for SL? For most teachers, their classes will consist of only SL students and so everyone will be completing this assignment within the first 6 weeks of classes. However, some teachers may have a mix of students who split into SL or HL in second year. In this case, it is likely useful to have all students complete the observation, as you may not know the level at which each student will complete the course until later in the year. This can also be a very good introductory assignment to help ease students into the fieldwork project that constitutes the HL IA.

Image: Wikicommons

This might appear to be an eclectic title for a post, but Phil Holden makes economics diagrams come alive through his videos on  Youtube and your students can do the same through Voicethread.

Phil Holden is a economics teacher who has made a series of excellent Youtube presentations on economic diagrams. He has garnered a huge following as his explanations are always clear and easy to follow.  Having your students upload a diagram to Voicethread and then provide a oral explanation is an excellent way to help them understand that diagrams are meant to tell a story. By explaining all aspects of the diagram, students gain a deeper understanding of the economic principles that underpin them.

Mirjam Dorgelo

In de Berlijn Blogs doet antropologiestudente Mirjam Dorgelo verslag van haar veldwerk in Berlijn. Waarom Berlijn? “Omdat het een stad is waar geschiedenis en herinneringen rondspoken”, schrijft ze op haar blog. “Een stad waar plaatsen tot symbolische plekken verworden. Een stad die ruim twintig jaar na de val van de Berlijnse Muur nog steeds verdeeldheid in zich herbergt. Een stad waar niet wordt opgehouden met bouwen. Een stad waar op bijna elke straathoek wel een herdenkingsmonument te vinden is.

“Een stad van kunstenaars. Een stad van Ossi’s, Wessi’s, Wossi’s en wereldburgers. Een stad met zo’n 3,5 miljoen inwoners. Een stad van Checkpoint Charlie, Under den Linden en Brandenburger Tor. Een stad van 890 vierkante kilometer. Een stad die imponeert.” Mirjam hoopt in haar onderzoek antwoord te vinden op de vraag hoe de relatie tussen fysieke plekken in de stad en ervaringen van burgerschap onder voormalig Oost-Berlijners zich over de afgelopen veertig jaar heeft ontwikkeld. Deel 1 van de serie: hoe anti-graffiticoating het verleden van Duitsland oprakelt.

Tekst en foto’s van Mirjam Dorgelo

zur erinnerung an 96 von den national-sozialisten ermordete reichstagabgeordnete der Weimar Repblik

Heinz Sokolowski – 48 J -Ost Berlin – 25.11.65 Nach 7 Jahren DDR-haft erschossen auf der flucht

In deze eerste weken is er geen ontkomen aan. De boze geesten van Berlijn onthullen zich op bijna iedere straathoek. Als er geen gedenkteken voor slachtoffers van de tweede wereldoorlog staat, dan wel voor de slachtoffers van het DDR-regime. De hoeveelheid en vormen van gedenktekens zijn werkelijk fascinerend.

Toen ik maandag tussen de 2700 betonnen zuilen van het holocaust monument liep moest ik denken aan Philippe Remarque.* Dat krijg je dus wanneer je je van tevoren besluit in te lezen in een stad. Dan denk je aan een Volkskrant correspondent terwijl je eigenlijk respectvol wilt stilstaan bij de vernietiging van zoveel Joodse levens. Maar het enige wat in mij opkwam (dankzij Remarque) was dat de antigraffiticoating van deze betonnen blokken geleverd is door het chemiebedrijf Degussa, en dat een dochteronderneming van Degussa in de nazi-tijd het gifgas Zyklon-B produceerde waarmee de Duitsers in de kampen miljoenen joden en andere slachtoffers vermoordde.**

Daar sta je dan… met je digitale spiegelreflexcamera in de hand omdat het doolhof van al die betonnen zuilen op een bizarre manier fotogeniek is; vanwege de toeristen die in de schaduw siesta liggen te houden, de zuilspringers, en het zonlicht dat een soort dubbel monument van schaduwen creëert. Dit laatste krijgt in retrospectief een betekenis waar ik me maandag niet van bewust was: de schaduwen lijken symbolisch voor het duistere holocaust verleden dat nog steeds een schaduw werpt over het hedendaagse Duitsland. Ik besluit om toch te fotograferen. Niet ondanks het monument, maar dankzij de architect Peter Eisenman die wilde dat het monument vrij te betreden is zodat de herinnering deel uitmaakt van het dagelijks leven.

Tsja. Het verleden van Duitsland. Je kunt er vrijwel onmogelijk aan voorbij lopen. En gezien de hoeveelheid aan publieke debatten over elke enigszins betekenisvolle plek in Berlijn is dat ook helemaal niet de bedoeling. Een van de studenten in Zentrum am Hauptbahnhof zei gister: “Het heden…? Daar zijn wij Duitsers erg slecht in. Bij ons gaat het altijd over het verleden of de toekomst.”Alhoewel ik me afvraag of dat nou specifiek is voor Duitsland – welk mens evalueert zijn of haar leven nou niet in het licht van zowel het verleden als de toekomst – kon ik de ietwat cynische verzuchting van Tom wel plaatsen. Het kan niet makkelijk zijn om in een land op te groeien waar altijd wel iemand de wacht houdt over het collectief bewustzijn. ‘Ik wil het niet weten’ is misschien nog wel meer not done dan ‘ich habe es nicht gewusst’.

Mirjam Dorgelo is masterstudente sociale en culturele antropologie aan de VU. Ze onderzoekt in Berlijn hoe de relatie tussen fysieke plekken in de stad en ervaringen van burgerschap onder voormalig Oost-Berlijners zich over de afgelopen veertig jaar heeft ontwikkeld. Haar blogbijdragen verschijnen ook op haar eigen weblog en op Zwerfpost.

* Philippe Remarque was van 1999 tot 2005 correspondent in Berlijn voor de Volkskrant en heeft een intrigerend boek geschreven over het dagelijks leven, de geschiedenis, de plaatsen en monumenten in Berlijn (Boze geesten van Berlijn).

** Toen het controversiële verleden van Degussa onthuld werd ontstond er zo’n ruzie over het monument dat de bouw enkele weken werd stilgelegd.

In this occasional series, Illustrated Man, I will explore the intersection of anthropology and comic books, graphic novels, comic strips, animation, and other manner of popular drawn art.

…

I was first exposed to the beauty of Studio Ghibli productions back in my dreadlocked college daze, years before I became the father of three girls. I’ve long treasured a secret joy found only in children’s programing and in my free time – back when I had free time – I’d randomly chose selections from the kid’s section of Hollywood Video (a commercial business that rented something called “VHS” — feature films stored on magnetic tape, I know it sounds weird).

This is how I discovered Hayao Miyazaki and the beloved classic, My Neighbor Totoro. A truly transcendent film, a gift to the future. I went on to become a huge Ghibli fan. I’ve seen twelve of their nineteen features (at least according to Wikipedia) and I am now eagerly anticipating the U.S. release of Tales of Earthsea, based on the fantasy series by anthropology scion Ursla K. Le Quin.

In the 1990s, as American popular culture began to take note of Japanese anime and manga Ghibli rose in profile as a preeminent studio. Eventually its stateside distribution would be picked up by Disney under the leadership of superfan, John Lasseter. This has been both a blessing and a curse. Unfortunately this has led to a redubbing of the treasured Totoro, which replaced the original cast with celebrity voices and changed the Japanese soundtrack to one Disney believed was more palatable to American ears. Prior to this Totoro was distributed in the U.S. by low-budget and cult favorite, Troma Entertainment. If at all possible, I encourage you to seek out the earlier Troma dub or, if you have an international DVD player, the Japanese language version with English subtitles. If the fiasco surrounding the Disney release of Jacques Perrin’s Oceans is any indication, it seems likely that Disney has taken creative liberties, intentionally mistranslated, or simply cut some aspects of Japanese culture to appease American audiences.

And yet, Disney produced the American release of Spirited Away, a film many consider to be Miyazaki’s masterpiece and which won an Oscar in 2003 for best animated feature, and, most recently, the early 2010 hit Ponyo. Disney has also sought to capitalize on Ghibli’s back catalog, producing original dubs of older features previously unreleased in the U.S. including the subject of this post, My Neighbors the Yamadas.

Right off the bat, American fans of Japanese popular culture will notice that My Neighbors the Yamadas does not look like an anime film. It has a completely different stylistic feel. In place of anime’s infantile, doe-like eyes and expressive hair on long and lean bodies we get something that appears to be watercolor over ink lines with the aesthetic character of a color comic strip in a Sunday paper.

The Yamadas is not directed by Miyazaki but Isao Takahata, a anime director famous in Japan but relatively less known to American audiences (most notably Roger Ebert championed Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies, calling it one of the greatest anti-war movies of all time). With the Yamadas, Takahata has created a genuine sleeper hit that is beautiful, sophisticated, and hilarious.

Narratively My Neighbors the Yamadas is a collection of vignettes almost all of which depict events in everyday life from the point of view of different members of the Yamada family. The short sketches are indicative of the material’s origin as a comic strip. There is the father, Takashi, and mother Matsuko. Teenage son Noboru and grade school aged daughter, Nonoko. Shige is the grandmother and Pochi the family dog. As in the previous entry for Illustrated Man on American Splendor, my appreciation of Yamadas stems from its detailed portrayal of the ordinary. Like American Splendor these are “slice of life” sketches and while the gags don’t hit pay dirt every time they come quickly and there’s enough of them so something is going to stick.

The vignettes are strung together in thematic segments, often with ironic titles like “Domestic Goddess” for a series of stories about Matsuko. Her stories center around the labor of being a housewife: doing the laundry, shopping, changing light bulbs, doing the dishes, and getting the house ready for company to visit. “Marriage Yamada Style” features Takashi and Matsuko together, doing little things for one another, annoying each other, eating out, and fighting over the TV set. Like in a musical, realism can suddenly give way to fantasy sequences, like when their epic battle over the remote control turns into this dance number:

My Neighbors the Yamadas is made all the more unique by its use of haiku as a segue between vignettes. Irascible Shige visits an elderly friend in the hospital that seems more like a country club. But when she demands of her friend, “Just what are you in for?” the friend turns to tears and they walk away together in silence. A narrator’s voice reads “No sign of death’s approach in the cicadas’ voices.”

In another scene Noboru takes a phone call from a girl while Matsuko and Shige watch with great interest. After he says goodbye he bounds to his room and turns up the music loud, with shouts of ecstasy he dances on his bed. “The scent of plums on a mountain path. Suddenly dawn.”

Takashi stumbles home late from work and is completely exhausted, everyone is asleep save Matsuko who is watching TV. He demands dinner and without looking up from the TV she informs he can have beancake or a banana. Disgusted he spits out, “Who wants to come home after a hard day’s work to beancake.” And she gets up, “So the banana, then?” He struggles even to get a cigarette to his lips he’s so tired as she fetches his fruit and some tea before sitting down to watch her show. Absentmindedly, Takashi puts the banana in his mouth without peeling it. “Turn toward me. I’m lonely too. The autumn dusk.”

I queried my friend and anthropologist of Japan, Chris Nelson, about the significance of haiku in My Neighbors the Yamadas. To my mind it served to elevate the quotidian events of the Yamadas’ life into something beautiful, equating poetry with the chores of a housewife, the insecurities of a socially awkward teen, the trials of a small child lost in the mall. Additionally, I read it as marking the stories as particularly Japanese as if the haiku was doing some nationalist work too. The original Japanese movie trailers, which come packaged as special features on the Disney DVD make clear that the Yamadas were marketed not only as a typical family, but as a quintessentially Japanese family.

Though he had not yet seen the feature, Chris took a break from archival work in Okinawa to offer this thoughtful reply:

I don’t think that the use of poetry is really marked or unusual in this particular Japanese context. In fact, I was reading your message in a coffee shop after I had been turning the pages in the weekend paper (local, not national). There in the middle were two pages of poems submitted by readers. Most of them have the same kind of seasonal cues that you’ve mentioned. What the poem does is tie the particular event of the story to the season, but also to something more abstract. It works to tie something from daily life to the ineffable. If I were a poet and I was going to write a poem, I would try to do the same thing.

It speaks to connoisseurs of poetry, who get the allusions. It also challenges me to try to say something novel with all of these “already saids.” The Ghibli folks are extending this to cartoons, but there’s also something pleasantly familiar about that to most viewers, who have seen this in lots of conventional TV animations (many made in the visual style of this one). In the case of the animation, it also provides a kind of narrative closure for the story and links a modern animation to older forms of popular performance.

There is much in My Neighbors the Yamadas that an anthropological audience will find pleasantly familiar. The English dub, staring Jim Belushi and Molly Shannon as the dad and mom, is available on Netflix and is totally adorable. I watched it with my seven year olds and they thoroughly enjoyed it. The only thing I could compare it to are the early years of The Simpsons. Those first three seasons when The Simpsons was irreverent and quirky with a sweet, affectionate core that stands in contrast to the wacky, bawdy, and self-referential years that followed. So Yamadas is family friendly, but like the early Simpsons it depicts an imperfect family in a way that will amuse adults, not because of its references to popular culture but because its representation of domestic life are humorous and honest. The Yamada family bickers and can be petty, even passive aggressive, but their faults are all recognizable and realistic.

Like my father told me, “You can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your relatives.” Que sera sera, what will be will be.

Today, President-Elect Leith Mullings wrote a letter to all AAA members, asking for input regarding the next major public policy project for the association. Read her letter below, and feel free to submit your ideas and post comments.

August 31, 2010

Dear Colleagues,

One of the most important roles of the American Anthropological Association is to help anthropologists make significant contributions to the production of public knowledge. Our public education project, RACE Are We So Different?, is a wonderful example, having garnered award-winning acclaim through concurrent museum exhibits, a book project, a website, and more, thanks to nearly $4.5 million in grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Despite today’s difficult economic climate, it is time for us to build on the success of this project and begin the process of developing our next public education initiative.

The Executive Board has enthusiastically endorsed this direction and as President-Elect, I would like to invite you to consult with your constituencies and share any ideas about potential topics and formats that might be suitable for our next public project. As you think about this, please keep in mind that the project should be something to which anthropologists can make unique contributions and ideally could involve all four fields of anthropology. Equally important is the relevance of the topic to public concerns and anthropology’s ability to increase public understanding of these issues. I would also encourage you to think about how the project could be implemented in ways that will engage the public in a lively—and perhaps participatory—manner.

At this preliminary stage of the process, we are hoping to solicit a range of ideas from a broad section of our membership. If you have a suggestion you would like to share, please:

• Identify the topic and its relevance to both anthropology and the public
• Explain anthropology’s unique contribution to the topic
• Suggest an appropriate format (K-12 initiatives, museum exhibition, publications, website, TV show, etc.) to present the topic in ways that could invigorate public discussion
• Include any ideas on how to raise foundation support

Please send me your thoughts by slow mail or email by October 30th. All correspondence will be reviewed by an advisory committee/task force.  This task force will meet at the November Annual Meeting where they will solicit additional input and feedback. After reviewing the suggestions and proposals, the committee will present recommendations to the Executive Board, which will determine the next steps.

This is the time to let us know your thoughts about what AAA’s next major public education project should be. I will be very excited to hear all the good ideas that are out there, and I thank you for taking the time to share them with me.

Sincerely,

Leith Mullings

President-Elect

American Anthropological Association

Ph.D. Program in Anthropology

CUNY Graduate Center

New York, NY 10016

LMullings@gc.cuny.edu

Filed under: Association Business, Events and Exhibits

Call for Papers: Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting Seattle, Washington (March 30 - April 2, 2011)

Session Title: Museum Engagement and Applied Anthropology

Session Organizer: Robert P. Connolly (University of Memphis)

The session is conceptually framed around The Participatory Museum by Nina Simon and the contribution that applied anthropologists bring to the discussion. Simon (2010:ii-iii) defines a participatory institution as: a place where visitors can create, share, and connect with each other around content. Create means that visitors contribute their own ideas, objects, and creative expression to the institution and to each other. Share means that people discuss, take home, remix, and redistribute both what they see and what they make during their visit. Connect means that visitors socialize with other people—staff and visitors—who share their particular interests. Around content means that visitors’ conversations and creations focus on the evidence, objects, and ideas most important to the institution in question. The session aims to discuss the building of sustained and engaged relationships in museums along with the methodological and theoretic contributions of applied anthropology to the process.

Relevant questions session papers may address include:

· As cultural institutions how do museums demonstrate their value and relevance in the 21st Century?

· Can museums serve as “third places” for social engagement?

· What is the relevancy of shifting population demographics and inclusivity to community engagement through museums?

· How do theoretic orientations, such as the constructivist approach and free-choice learning, inform on the Participatory Museum.

· How does the Participatory Museum influence the authority of voice in both content and function of cultural institutions?

· What can applied anthropologists add to the discussion of Participatory Museums?

· How can museums function as dynamic venues for sustained and engaged relationships with a diversity of communities.

Although papers are not required to remain within the parameters of Simon’s discourse, for reference, her book is available at:

http://www.participatorymuseum.org/

If you are interested in participating, please send a brief summary of your proposed contribution to Robert Connolly at rcnnolly@memphis.edu by September 1, or before.

It’s administration-bashing week here at SM. I just posted an unconscionably long comment (in the age of Twitter anyways…) at the AAA blog, where Bill Davis has recently and magnanimously agreed to re-publish his September Anthropology News article on “Free Journal Access as a Public Issue”. The thrust of the piece seems to be that, after extensive secret analysis, the AAA staff have confirmed that charging anthropologists $5564 a piece to publish in an AAA journal is a Really Bad Idea. Bang-up job boys, keep up the good work!

a) it’s called open access, not free access. Please stop.

b) who was it that suggested the AAA should move to an author pays model? Can you please say who suggested this, because it is a really bad idea. A point we apparently agree on.

c) can you please focus on the problem: the AAA faces a severe funding crisis. RE-EVALUATE EVERYTHING NOW. Stop trying to fund the AAA by selling journals and figure out how to fund the AAA. I wish I could be clearer. Maybe it is my English that is the problem?

update: I originally wrote AAA President… when I meant Executive Director. Clearly evidence of fundamental confusion on my part, and not a Freudian slip indicating something about the nature of real power in the organization. I have no idea how Virginia Dominguez feels about stupid business models, but I sure hopes she agrees with Bill Davis and me.