Anthropology.net

What is a community? Most people have some idea of what they mean when they use the word, but actually it’s a lot like “culture”, it is an abstract concept without an absolute definition, and therefore gives rise to hot debates about what it means to say that people are part of a community. This is not merely a semantic argument, but one that has a lot of implications in politics. Community is not some benign word, but one that carries with it a sense of power and entitlement that renders it a label worth fighting for. I remember once in a class our elderly professor was expounding his definition of community, saying that communities were defined by geographic boundaries, and that groups of people who come together around ideas or shared experiences cannot be called communities. A student who was hearing-impaired took issue with that, exclaiming that although hearing-impaired people were spread out across the nation and even across the globe, they found resources and support by connecting with one another and forming what they all call a “community” despite the lack of regional closeness. She said that together they have formed a “culture” of ideas and expressions, a common language, and a political and social presence. The professor responded that he would choose to define it as something else, like a “group”, a response that was not well received. The way many people use the word community, it tends to imply something beyond regional closeness; something that is generated by the people who are a part of it. How many people have said that they live in a neighborhood but don’t feel like it’s a “community”?

The old fashioned definition of “community” mandates that geographic location is the most important factor. That is, people that live close to one another, or that live within certain geographical boundaries, are in a community. Urbanization, the introduction of “communities” online that have no locational basis whatsoever, and the use of the word by various kinds of social and political movements, have called this definition into question. But even before that, the concept that communities should be defined by location is full of philosophical pitfalls. For example, where exactly do you draw the lines around a given community, where the community members say to draw it? What if they disagree? What if two populations are fighting over a piece of land, and disagree about which community it belongs to? What if no one in a given neighborhood knows one another, such as is the case in many urban settings? Is community only location-based, or does it require communal interaction among its members?

Others say that what’s important about community is the interaction between individuals that makes it happen; the idea that people form a network which may include certain shared social norms, a language or dialect, and other types of “communal” knowledge. This means, of course, that the hearing impaired are able to have a community, because they are able to connect with one another based on shared values and experiences and, often, a shared language. Lesbians and gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people may participate in local, national, and global communities which may include all of the above populations, while more specialized communities may exist within that that are comprised of say, lesbians. The values of these communities are often communicated through media and the arts, such as films and popular music, and through various kinds of technology. The internet, of course, has enabled people to get together with others with whom they identify in unprecedented ways, fostering discussions in forums, chat rooms, and blogs. For both the hearing impaired and LGBT folks, using the word “community” fosters a sense of pride and gives them larger political clout in, for example, the public policy arena. Community names and validates the space that people use to connect with one another based on shared values, experiences, and interests. Calling people a “group”, for instance, just doesn’t hold the same kind of clout.This notion of community as a pliable and constructed network of individuals, which can be instigated, developed and maintained through media- and technology-based interactions, is something that has caused scholars to debate over whether we should ourselves use the word when others use it. Some scholars, especially those who consider themselves activists, too, use the word to describe populations they study as a way of validating their sense of empowerment, a fact which the informants themselves often appropriate as further proof of their unity and power as a population. Other scholars recommend a more cautious approach, steering away from the word altogether, because it is a political act in itself for a researcher to name something a community. Also, using the word blindly may prevent the researcher from approaching a topic with a critical eye and getting at what people are actually doing as opposed to what they say they are doing.It’s an interesting debate, and I think the solution is probably context-driven; personally I tend to use the word community when my informants use it, but in the interests of empiricism and the critical perspective, this may not always be the best option. What I do know is that my professor, arguing that communities could only be formed by people who lived close to one another, appeared inflexible in his argument, which did not allow for the way in which technology has changed the communication landscape, nor for the dynamic nature of human language and thought to explore and describe such changes. That kind of inflexibility can be damaging to the relationship between researcher and informant, or professor and student, if the concept of community comes with a sense of empowerment that the professor or researcher (who is in a place of power) appears to be denying — even if that’s not his intention.

I find that most illustrations and other representations depicting the evolution of humankind depict the evolution of males by default. A Google image search of “evolution of man” turns up a plethora of illustrations depicting the evolution of exactly that, A MAN. Women, for some strange reason, are nowhere to be seen, though I’m sure we were part of the process. Although there is this illustration which turns up on a number of websites: the evolution of man and woman.

As well as the more advanced version.

Even though I have studied a great deal of anthropology, including some physical anthropology, and have always been interested in evolution, I find that only the image of males evolving is stuck to my brain. What women looked like through the years? The gradual progression of sexual dimorphism, when things happened and what it looked like? Not so sure. If anyone knows where I could see an illustration of the evolution of women, that is, something that doesn’t depict us constantly cleaning the floor, I would be much obliged. Even though anthropology has taught me a lot about how women as gatherers were usually responsible for bringing in the most sustenance, and how societies with matrilineal kinship systems and egalitarian property structures are typically more peaceful and less patriarchal, I still get other messages from a lot of the images and language associated with our discipline. This is despite the fact that the canon of anthropology, at least on the cultural side, has been developed and influenced by female scholars.

Anthropology has, like most other sciences, been traditionally male-dominated. However, there have been a number of influential female anthropologists, the most popular of course including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and some more contemporary women like Sherry Ortner. Other prominent female anthropologists can be found here.

Many of these anthropologists have questioned traditional philosophical paradigms that were based on deeply rooted Western canons whose development were heavily centered on the male perspective. Many female scholars have challenged traditional notions of sexuality and gender, Margaret Mead is perhaps best known for her endeavors in that arena, and in their own lives, ahead of their times, exhibited the fact that women can do science, write well, conduct intensive fieldwork, and lead very interesting personal lives. While these women were typically relegated to lower posts than their male counterparts, or earned a lower rate of pay, they introduced and influenced a great body of work that contributes a great deal to what anthropology is today. Female scholars have also developed a lively discourse in feminism and feminist anthropology, working to understand gender and power from a cross-cultural perspective. Women almost everywhere face various kinds of oppression, but not everyone experiences oppression, or empowerment, in the same way. In recent years, it has also become important to look at how gender inequality affects men, the concept of “maleness”, and the gender continuum which varies apart from biological sex.

Despite all of this, anthropology still seems alarmingly malecentric. For a field so heavily developed and influenced by women, I have to wonder where the women are depicted, and who understands their impact. It has been said that the way we talk about things filters what we understand of our reality. Images work the same way. If I’m a woman and I want to know how we as humans evolved, but all I can find are pictures of apes turning into men, I can’t see where we are in the picture. I don’t see humans, I see men. There are a lot of discussions going on in our field about how science textbooks, particularly in the field of biology, reinforce patriarchal notions, associating the male body with the stereotypical role of aggressor and sexual predator, for example, through the use of precise language and visual depiction. It seems that anthropology should be at the cutting edge of questioning and confronting those stereotypes.

Instead of attempting to foster some sense of objectivity, an activist anthropologist goes into a project both embracing and confronting her own biases and political agenda. The practice of activist anthropology, according to Christopher Hale of the University of Texas at Austin,

“asks us to identify our deepest ethical-political convictions, and to let them drive the formulation of our research objectives.”

Rather than attempting to suppress those convictions,

“activist research endorses the contrasting tack of making our politics explicit and up-front, reflecting honestly and systematically on how they have shaped our understanding the porblem at hand, and putting them to the service of our analytical endeavor.”

The researcher utilizes personal convictions as a strength, incorporating it into her methodology. Part of activist anthropology involves developing the research questions and project while working with informants, allowing them to participate in the production of knowledge which will contribute to understanding the issues they face and how to resolve them.

“The goal is to carry out the research such that a specified group of people can actively participate, thereby learning research skills themselves, contributing to the data collection, taking an active role in the process of knowledge creation.”

I think that Hale is right that people will provide much better data if they are involved in the data-production process, and that activist anthropology can be a very useful approach when you’re working with activists, or with a population that is experiencing the effects of economic and other kinds of oppression, or that is dealing with ethnic conflicts, etc. Most of the time I think that it is crucial to fully address, and even to embrace one’s own personal-political stance and account for how it directs and affects the research process — in any project. However, I imagine that some kinds of research endeavors require some attempt at distancing oneself — suppressing the subjective, as it were, to some degree. For example, what if the researcher is working with populations that oppose each other, and her own bias gets in the way of generating data, while an appearance of neutrality might grant her more insight into the big picture? What if she’s working with a population whose ethics and politics contradict her own? In other words, how feasible is activist anthropology if the anthropologist is trying to study an “elite” population and doesn’t already sympathize with their concerns? Isn’t there some value to the traditional “outsider” and constructivist “mock-objective” approach in situations like these?

Hale asks some similar questions in the paper, but doesn’t address them there. I wonder what others think …

While convalescing and experiencing the sordid experience of having new holes in my mouth, I decided to see if I could find any cross-cultural studies about the appearance and treatment of wisdom teeth in various parts of the world. I first got this idea while sitting in the chair perfectly awake with a drill buzzing in my mouth. Prior to the surgery I found a lot of disagreement about whether wisdom teeth need to be removed as often as they are. Some people think that there’s a general medical panic about them that isn’t actually based on any facts. It seems like something we could learn a lot about if we looked at how people deal with wisdom teeth around the world, and whether wisdom teeth cause a lot of problems in places where they don’t get extracted. I guess the anthropology of dentistry isn’t a big field, so I found nothing. The following article, however, mentions wisdom teeth as an evolutionary biproduct, labels humans as “cookivores” rather than omnivores or herbivores or whatever, and contains a lot of interesting hypotheses about why Americans are getting fatter.

The article lists various cultural culprits including: lots of work and lack of time, television rather than the dinner table absorbing the center of family life, the advent of technology, and the ever-present cornucopia of enriched and over-processed foods that are available to Americans. Okay, so there’s an epidemic of obesity; seems to me there’s also a parallel obsession with dieting and losing weight. I can’t help but wonder how much of this obsession has permeated the medical industry … like the possibly unnecessary removal of wisdom teeth, perhaps? After all, I’m sure that many women will tell you that the BMI – which is used to calculate whether or not someone is obese or just overweight – must be based on a man’s body as the prototype. The article says that people in industrialized societies are steadily getting fatter, but I think the issue may be more complex – after all, the “ideal” body type that models represented in the old days was more buxom and has only recently dwindled to anemic status. Maybe part of the equation has to do with people watching TV, seeing a model rejoicing over a Coca-Cola, and thinking, “Real people don’t look like that.” Does Uma Thurman make you think of doing push-ups?

Here’s an interesting article about gay vacation spots … I have seen in several places the statement that “gays and artists” are at the forefront of gentrification. This idea is interesting to me because I did a study in a LGBTQ* community in California to see how the arts were intertwined with the history of the community as well as the national “gay rights” movement. What I found is that historically, where LGBTQ people congregate has a lot to do with where is safest. It’s true that Bohemian artsy places like San Francisco may resonate with LGBTQ groups for cultural reasons — music, the arts, color, symbols, festivals, antique shops and the like. But in the case of the community that I studied, before it was a LGBTQ community it was fairly poor and largely populated by elderly folks. Because of the ideal location of this place and the safety of its streets (assaults were frequent in other parts of town), it provided a sort of safe haven that allowed LGBTQ folks to leave the underground and start buying property, building businesses, and building a largely LGBTQ-oriented community. Demographics steadily shifted from elderly and retired couples and individuals, to young single adults and same-sex households. Around the same time, artists and left-of-center folks started moving in too; now lower-income LGBTQ families and individuals are moving into less expensive outlying areas that border and intersect with other low-income areas.

It’s interesting to me how this article paints a happy picture of these upper-class gay vacation towns, without addressing the larger political and social issues, and even makes the comment that “gays and lesbians can vacation almost anywhere these days”. I beg to differ – as far as I can tell, discrimination is commonplace, and where LGBTQ folks hang out has a lot to do with where they feel safer – in numbers. I think that it’s important to understand that LGBTQ identity is a highly mobile identity, in that many people move or travel to construct that identity among other people who share it. It’s not something that one is born into; if one wants the identity and the culture, one has to find it, and to some extent, create it. People I have talked to have expressed a basic feeling of being deprived in areas where heterosexual couples are allowed to express their affection for one another on streets, in restaurants, at public events, etc. while same-sex couples often face negative scrutiny, comments, and even assault just by holding hands. As a result, many people feel a sense of celebration and pride in areas where people are allowed to express their feelings for another person of the same sex. I have a hunch that the people at the forefront of gentrification are generally already fairly low-income and are looking for a place to land that is cheaper, safer, and offers opportunities to network with others like themselves. These people may often be gay … or artists … I would personally like to see more research about the relationship between gentrification and these populations.

*Please note: I use the acronym LGBTQ because it is a common and inclusive way to speak about lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgendered people, and people who identify as “queer”.

According to Israeli ambassador Dan Gillerman:

“Hezbollah, Hamas, together with Syria and Iran comprise the world’s new and ominous axis of terror, an infamous club the entry to which is the blood of innocents and the terrorizing of the entire world.”

I find the use of the term “axis of terror” very interesting. More on the conflict between Israel and Lebanon can be found in this article.

I’m thinking of the discussion that came up a couple of entries ago, this one called “Where is Anthropology Going?” It seems that anthropologists might have the tools to go into a place like this and help opposing sides understand one another. After all, being a cultural anthropologist takes both a lot of diplomatic skill, and being able to respect and attempt to represent the people you’re working with. Strangely, you rarely see anthropologists on the front lines at times like these. I think there are probably many reasons for this, one of them being that anthropologists issue a lot of political statements but may be discouraged by the nature of the field from getting too politically involved … in the interests of attempting to be objective where no objectivity exists, perhaps. (I’m with the camp that says that everything is subjective, “hard” science or not.)

I wonder if anthropologists should attempt to get more involved in world affairs and what it would take to accomplish that? Historically, several anthropologists have worked for the U.S. government as “spies” and subsequently been shunned out of the discipline. Spying is a different line of work from diplomacy, but I wonder if the stigma carries over to all government work. I suspect it does.

But which do you think is really more ethical – getting actively involved in promoting human rights and peace in as many contexts as possible, or hanging back and observing, watching, and doing under the umbrella of academia?