Anthropologies #13

Kinship in the 21st Century

April 2012

~ Contents ~

Introduction: Kinship in these times

Ryan Anderson

The Other in Us: Anthropology, Genealogy, and Kinship in the 21st Century

Shannon Perry

Fictive Kinship and the Anthropologist's position

Diana Patterson

Motherhood and Internal Migration in Quintana Roo, Mexico

Veronica Miranda

Kinship: Real, Imagined, Past & Present

Ryan Anderson


Photo: Glass plate discovered in a second hand store in Kentucky, 2011.  By Ryan Anderson.

Anthropology & Occupy (anthropologies)

[Note: This is a post that I wrote for the latest edition of anthropologies that tries to review some of the anthropological involvement and reactions to the Occupy Wall Street protests and movement]

On September 17, 2011, largely in response to an Adbusters campaign and growing frustration with the state of affairs in the US economy, people flocked to Zuccotti Park to, tents in hand, to make their voices heard.  Similar movements around the US (and beyond) were soon to follow.  One thing is pretty clear: there were many different opinions about OWS, and plenty of disagreements.  Some people felt it was a necessary step to take to challenge the status quo, while others seemed to see it as a harbinger of disaster for US society.

If nothing else, OWS certainly garnered its fair share of attention, whether in the form of support, solidarity, derision, or outright counter-protest.  Searching for meaning in the midst of such a massive (and contentious) social movement is anything but simple.  Contemporaneous events are all the more difficult to analyze, understand, and assess.  So where to begin?  Well, here's the basic OWS summary from Wikipedia (apropos for an issue that deals with Open Access):

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is a protest movement that began September 17, 2011 in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Wall Street financial district. The protests are against social and economic inequality, greed, corruption and the undue influence of corporations on government—particularly from the financial services sector. To effect change OWS uses "direct action" instead of petitioning authorities.[5]Their slogan, We are the 99%, addresses the growing income inequality and wealth distribution in the U.S. between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population. OWS was initiated by the Canadian activist group Adbusters and has led to Occupy protests and movements around the world.

Adbusters poster for OWS.

For people who feel like they already know everything they need to know about OWS, or who have already heard enough, maybe that quick summary is enough.  It gets to the point.  What I'm wondering, though, is where all the anthropologists (who study these sorts of things) were during all of this.  Where were you, for example?  I can tell you pretty much exactly where I was on September 17, 2011: sitting in front of this very laptop, working on one or another draft of a grant proposal.

Like many graduate students, I was basically buried in the process of becoming an anthropologist, for better or worse.  Considering many of the concerns that OWS protesters voiced, my trapped-behind-the-computer-fate is somewhat a part of the problem.  What happens, after all, if everyone is "just too busy" to deal with a social and economic system that has basically run right off the track?  I'm not going to try to answer that.  Instead, I'll leave that question hanging and see if anyone picks it up.

Anyway, my experience of "OWS" was mediated through things like TV news, twitter, blogs, and Facebook.  Does this mean that I was completely disconnected?  Does it mean that I was just some passive observer, and no more?  Not really (and see Adam Fish's post a little later on).  At the same time, I wasn't exactly in the thick of things, even if I tried to follow along, read up, and see what was going on.

One of the issues that I saw with OWS was that it was so polarizing: for some people there was no middle ground.  They were either for it, or against it.  During the whole time I wondered about the people who found themselves somewhere in between.  I also wondered who, among those really active voices, had actually been to an OWS protest and seen how things were actually playing out on the ground (outside of the clips and sound bites on TV).  Sometimes "being there" is a good antidote to both unflinching idealism and unending criticism and cynicism.  And the idea of "being there" is part of anthropology's stock and trade.  So where were all the anthropologists?

Read the rest on anthropologies, here.

Anthropologies #12: Occupy & Open Access

Occupy & Open Access

March 2012

~ Contents ~

Introduction: Anthropologies of Access
Ryan Anderson

The Public versus Publishers: How Scholars and Activists are Occupying the Library
Barbara Fister

Why We Protest
Daniel Lende

Picturing Direct Action
Laurence Cuelenaere

Liberating Cultural Anthropology? A Thought Experiment
Kim Fortun and Mike Fortun

We are the One Percent: Open Access in the Era of Occupy Wall Street
Jason Baird Jackson

The Last Days of Rome: The Rise of Open Access and the Fall of For-Profit Publishers
Doug Rocks-Macqueen

Occupy Austin
Kyle Schmidlin

Anthropology & Occupy
Ryan Anderson



Cover Photo: Ryan Anderson, 2012.

Ed Carr on Publishing, peer review, and how "only the senior faculty can save us"

Who can save us...from ourselves?  Who can put an end to the current fiasco that is academic publishing?  Since we are all so entrenched in this system, where can we look for a way out?  In a post about some of the issues that academia faces when it comes to the current politics of publishing and peer review, geographer Ed Carr over at Open the Echo Chamber makes the case that escape and salvation from may lie in the hands of senior faculty.  Is he right?  He might be.

Carr starts off the post by expressing his concern that academia is using practices like peer review as a way to segregate itself from wider audiences.  He argues that peer review is, at heart, not a bad thing, since it provides a way of vetting ideas in an important way.  But, he writes:

the practice of peer review in contemporary academia has turned really problematic. Most respected journals are more expensive than ever, making access to them the near-sole province of academics with access to libraries willing to purchase such journals. The pressure to publish increases all the time, both in rising demands on individual researchers (my requirements for tenure were much tougher than most requirements from a generation before) and in terms of an ever-expanding academic community.

One of the deeper issues, Carr argues, is that peer review can be riddled with politics that end up "slowing the flow of innovative ideas into academia" because those ideas may "run contrary to previously-accepted ideas upon which many reviewers might have done their work."  Ultimately, Carr writes, these issues with peer review certainly don't do much to help with the public image of academia (although he is speaking more specifically to geographers here, this applies to academics in general).

Here's Carr's solution, or, at least, his ideas for a way to start digging out of this trench:

So, a modest proposal: senior colleagues of mine in Geography – yes, those of you who are full professors at the top of the profession, who have nothing to lose from a change in the status quo at this point – who will get together and identify a couple of open-access, very low-cost journals and more or less pronounce them valid (probably in part by blessing them with a few of your own papers to start). Don’t pick the ones that want to charge $1500 in publishing fees – those are absurd. But pick something different . . .

Again, although he is speaking directly to other geographers here, I think this proposal applies to and should resonate with the anthropological crowd as well.  For Carr, such a move would be a critical step for opening up academic publishing to wider possibilities, conversations, and collaborations.  I agree,nd I think he is right that certain established faculty members are in an important position for inciting and promoting change.  It's a matter of interest and desire.

At the same time, coming from the position of a graduate student, I can't help but wonder how those of us on, well, lower rungs of the academic ladder can do to actively foster these kinds of changes.  Since we are all encouraged to publish publish publish, maybe it would be a good idea to start thinking more strategically about how and why we are publishing, and more importantly WHO we decide to publish with.  If every graduate student and new professor is constantly upholding the current regime by basically giving up the fruits of their labor (and effectively providing certain publishers with a never-ending stream of valuable products), why WOULD anything change?  So, in the end, I think that Carr is definitely right, but that many of these changes are going to have to start taking place on multiple fronts as well.

On that note, check this out.

Cross-posted on Savage Minds, of course.

John Hawks & Open Access News

From john hawks weblog:

"Today's NIH repository and the data access provisions of NSF grants were established by acts of Congress in the late 1990s. In my opinion, the agencies have in many areas gotten away with the bare minimum of compliance with these regulations. Worse, far from strengthening open access to publications and data, some in Congress want to reverse them. The current effort owes much to lobbying by academic publishers, and large campaign donations from officers and employees of those publishers to key Congressmen."

Read the rest here.

The sound & the fury (plus questions)

The sound: It was late afternoon.  I was in the middle of conducting an interview, recording the conversation with a small digital voice recorder.  Rain falling outside, in droves.  I could hear water rushing down the street.  The sound of water pouring from the roof.  Water dripping from here and there.  Clinking and clattering on the tin roof above.  Inside, one light in the corner of the room fought back the cold of the rain outside.  I was talking with a mother and her son amidst the incessant rain.  The sound of the rainfall wasn’t exactly overwhelming, just constant.  In the moment, it all sounded pretty nice.

The fury: When I finally checked the recording later that night, the rain made it almost impossible to hear the conversation.  The voices of mother and son were swept up in an auditory wrecking ball that sounded more like a tornado than raindrops.  The interview was still salvageable, but it was hardly a masterpiece of ethnographic audio.  Frustrating.

Read the rest on Savage Minds, here.

Defining Political Ecology

Political Ecology is an interdisciplinary collection of scholars and writers who investigate the politics of human-environment relationships.  Is political ecology a discipline?  A field of study?  A theory?  A framework for approaching problems?  Whatever it is, you will find a lot of geographers, sociologists, environmental scientists, and, yes, anthropologists who identify with the goals and perspectives of political ecology.  I think it's a pretty fascinating collection of ideas and interests.  But that's just me.

The Political Ecology Working Group at the University of Kentucky (of which I am a part) has a new series that explores key issues in political ecology through short online essays.  The first round asked the question: What is political ecology?  Here's a selection from the opening essay, written by Paul Robbins from the University of Arizona:

Political Ecology is a kind of text

Political Ecology represents neither a theory nor a method, but instead reflects a global community of practice, convened around a certain kind of text.

As a community of practice, political ecology has formed a general constituency: a global conversation revolving around a set of themes, which adopts a specific sort of critical attitude. It is drawn from a large group of people who write professionally (like university academics) as well as those in international agencies (e.g. FAO), NGOs (e.g. WWF), state bureaucracies (e.g. USEPA), and local organizations. Typically, its constituency operates in the borderlands between analysis and action and between social practice and environmental change. It is, however, a community that holds a deep skepticism precisely of the institutions within which it operates. Its members, prodded by a sense that something has gone profoundly wrong...

Read the rest of of this essay, and all the others, here.

Political Ecology: Where is the politics?

At the entrance to not so small Mexican pueblo not far from the where I am doing my fieldwork, a homemade banner waves in the afternoon breeze. It's not really a banner—it's a white sheet that has been spray painted with a message for all passersby. The sign proclaims support for a large scale mega-development that has everyone in the region in an uproar. Some people are against it, since they fear that it will pillage the environment, rob them of fresh water, and turn these desert landscapes into scenic afterthoughts for the eighteenth hole. This is a distinct possibility. Others, however, cry out in support of the project. They want the jobs. And who can blame them? It's not like there are exactly a ton of jobs around here. Nobody is getting rich, so when some large international developer says that they are going to bring in 19,000 new jobs, people listen.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, the once verdant wetlands have been completely ground away to carve out the beginnings of a new harbor and marina. Soon, the hotels will be built—and the golf courses. Always golf courses. All of this will require water, which isn't exactly abundant around these parts. Down the road, the conservationists fight to save the region, to make their case for finding a way to keep things as they are—at least to an extent. But the pressure of possibilities—those 19,000 jobs—pushes people apart. Real estate values skyrocket, people make the hard decision to sell their lands. But where does all of this lead? Where can it lead? If this isn't an ecology laden with politics, I don't know what is.

So here I am: the researcher, putting myself in the middle of all this. And the question is this: What am I going to do? Write a nicely worded article that will appear in some handsome and reputable academic journal? Or will I actually do something? Because these political ecologies aren't just here, they are everywhere. The politics of human-environment relationships are undeniably pervasive. See, for example, the ways in which the landscapes of my own home town are also being churned and transformed to make room for 18-holed, water sucking, wetlands-destroying leisure-scapes: 

Golf course in process.  Carlsbad, CA, 2005.  Photo: RA.

 

Bureaucracies & the power of nonsense

For some reason, I am feeling decidedly anti-bureaucracy today.  Does this ever happen to you?  What is it about bureaucracy that it is so difficult, that drives us mad?  Let me give an obvious answer that you would expect from some cultural anthropology type like myself: it's because of the inhumanity of it all.  The inhumanity of some bureaucracies can become so thick that they turn us all into blithering fools.

We get backed into a corner, with no place to turn.  Our choices are cut off--we are stuck with the hassles of lines, rules, and forms.  We wait on phones, we try to find official offices with no address.  You know what I'm talking about.  We become not just fools in this process, but blithering fools.  But there is power in the inefficiency of bureaucracies--Weber knew that, as did many others.  You know that too, don't you?  If you want to know more about this, please click here for more options.

Apologies for that...there must be some sort of glitch in the system.  I will send out a request for someone to post a note about composing an email to resolve this issue at a later date.  Please wait.  In the mean time, if you haven't read David Graeber's "Beyond power/knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity," well, you should.  Here is your chance.

Let me give you a short example of the hilarity of bureaucracy from some of my recent travel experiences:

 

Read the rest on Savage Minds.

Firefox is frozen

This is funny:

 

Found here.

UC Davis: Dissent and pepper spray

The police show the world how NOT to handle dissent and protests at UC Davis.  From the Huffington Post:

On Friday, a group of University of California, Davis students, part of the Occupy Wall Street movement on campus, became the latest victims of alleged police brutality to be captured on video. The videos show the students seated on the ground as a UC Davis police officer brandishes a red canister of pepper spray, showing it off for the crowd before dousing the seated students in a heavy, thick mist.

 And here's more from CNN:

The chancellor of the University of California, Davis, under calls to resign, Saturday called police use of pepper spray on seated Occupy protesters "chilling" and established a task force to look into the incident.

The video broadcast by CNN Sacramento affiliate KOVR showed an officer, in a sweeping motion, spraying protesters point blank on Friday before other officers moved in. Eleven people were treated on site for effects of the yellow spray. Two of them were sent to the hospital, university officials said.

Here's one of the videos of this incident:

Assistant professor of English Nathan Brown wrote an open letter to the UC Davis Chancellor.  Here's a selection:

I am a junior faculty member at UC Davis. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and I teach in the Program in Critical Theory and in Science & Technology Studies. I have a strong record of research, teaching, and service. I am currently a Board Member of the Davis Faculty Association. I have also taken an active role in supporting the student movement to defend public education on our campus and throughout the UC system. In a word: I am the sort of young faculty member, like many of my colleagues, this campus needs. I am an asset to the University of California at Davis.

Read the rest.  Here's my question: Now what?  I find it pretty shocking and disturbing that the police reacted to this protest in this way.  Yes, I can understand the fact that the police had a job to do, and I can understand the fact that UC Davis felt it needed to "do something" about the protests.  Fine.  But this?  Since when is it necessary to resort to these kinds of actions when dealing with non-violent protesters?  Why are these student encampments so threatening that they necessitate pepper spray and violence?  What were these police thinking?  What do they really think they accomplished with this?  Do we really want to sit back and watch as the government (and university officials) respond to dissent and protests like this?  At what point is enough enough?

Eating tool up close

I took this one a few years back, just found it, and am now posting it here.  Sometimes it's a good idea to look closely at the world around us.

Interview with Jason Baird Jackson, Part 3

This is the last segment of this three part interview with Jason Baird Jackson about anthropology and open access. See Part 1 here, and Part 2, here.

Ryan Anderson: I think this last point you make about the direct role that faculty and graduate students play in all this is really important. We all have choices, and ultimately the publishing and communication system is what we make of it. So, as a last question for you, what advice do you have for people who are interested in these issues but unsure where to start looking for others who share similar concerns, values, and commitments?

Jason Baird Jackson: The open access community is by its very nature, open. In North American and European contexts, finding folks eager to help students and established scholars negotiate these questions is pretty easy. If one is at a university with a research- oriented library, there will be one or more librarians specializing in these issues. Such librarians often lead workshops on such topics as “author’s rights,” “copyright issues for scholars,” and “open access.” Librarians have a strong service ethic and are usually very eager to help scholars get their bearings on these topics. They are SO eager to find faculty allies on these questions. If you give them a moment, they will also passionately explain why OA matters so much to the future of the library and its public service mission...

Read the rest on Savage Minds.

Quote of the week: Jason Baird Jackson

"I have long cared about the serials crisis and now that the world is thinking more critically about student debt, I want us all to realize the direct relationship between the scholarly communications system, and the scholarly society system, and the neoliberalization of the American research university. Skyrocketing tuition is a consequence of public disinvestment in public universities like mine and yours. Leasing (we no longer purchase) toll access scholarship at ever higher costs from exceedingly profitable commercial firms (and their society partners) is not helping close the inequality gap in higher education. It is hardly the only factor involved (ex: think health care costs) but it is one of the few factors in which faculty and graduate students have a direct role to play—as authors, as disciplinary policy shapers, as peer-reviewers, as editors, etc. As contributors to the scholarly publishing system, we have choices available to us. We can make our work open in a number of ways and we can support and encourage those whose values and commitments align with out own."

-Jason Baird Jackson, here.

(just wanted to highlight this in case some of you missed it)

Sociological Images: Playboy centerfold composites, 1960s-1990s

Lisa Wade over at Sociological Images (a fantastic site, by the way) posted this composite image of all the Playboy centerfolds from the 1960s to the 1990s. So what do you see in these images? Join the conversation in the comments here. 

Hat Tip to Matt Thompson at Savage Minds.