Anthropoblogogy (Anth-ro-po-BLOG-o-jee)

I first came to know Max Roach's jazz drumming through his rendition of "Anthropology." Talk about a different take on the discipline! Listen to some of his music at the New York Times.

Posted by Luis Vivanco at 7:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm currently writing the politcs chapter of the introduction to cultural anthropology textbook, and something this morning in The New York Times caught my eye: an article called "Ancient Nomads Offer Insights into Modern Crises"

This is the kind of "popular anthropology" that requires a comment. The underlying assumption this article makes is that nomadism is an "ancient" phenomenon and therefore it comes as a surprise to all of us that it still exists--which shouldn't be a surprise at all, unless your basic assumption is that the world is all becoming a version of one Western society (which it is not). Nomads still exist all over the world.

Further, it seems to suggest that if only we understand nomadism we will understand all our problems in the Middle East, from Iraq to Afghanistan. Take it a step further, and I can see the neo-cons saying that nomadism itself is the problem: it breeds terrorism, because as a non-centralized form of government, anything goes. Deep in this explanation lies a version the of magic silver bullet approach: if we can only figure out their "backwards" mentalities we can better defeat them, gain control over them, etc.

A couple of problems with this point of view. First, this is an old problem: the West is trying to make sense of non-state societies based on the assumption that the only proper way to have political order is a state hierarchy with a political elite at the top. This goes back to Thomas Hobbes, but British structural-functional anthropology essentially took on the same perspective: We are perplexed at how people can maintain an ordered society without centralized government. Much of early political anthropology was an exercise in explaining how order is maintained without formal institutions of government. But until we stop using the West and its definition of politics as the creation of social order as the baseline, we're unlikely to really understand radically different ways of organizing a society.

Second, it tends to put the onus for solving American geopolitical problems in the Middle East on an abstract problem of "cultural difference" while skirting the U.S.'s political responsibility for sowing chaos and pursuing military aggression.

Third, it reduces a highly complex phenomenon to a simple "ism"--nomadism--which the article doesn't even define. If we insist on discussing ideal types, we should be speaking in the plural, about nomadisms, which offer a range of possibilities through which people live with their livestock by moving through a landscape. To suggest that Maasai, highland Andean llama herders, and Iranian Basseri pastoralists are all essentially the same, and that if we only understand their "nomadism" we've got the key to whatever crises exist in their countries, ignores the important diversity between them and the fact that whatever crises exist in modern nation-states are rarely reducible to the "traditions" of their people.

The article did, however, say something interesting, which is "Pride in nomadism itself is on the rise, with many countries using what is an increasingly glamorous historical inheritance as an important nation-building tool." Political leaders in some places use the label "nomadism" to create political platforms, push their own agendas, and manipulate people. In other words, reference to nomadism is a resource for pursuing politics in contemporary nation-states. It is like any other appeal to "tradition" that our own politicians use to manipulate us.

Posted by Luis Vivanco at 6:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nevertheless, my 2006 book Green Encounters: Shaping and Contesting Environmentalism in Rural Costa Rica is coming out in paperback in the next few months. Berghahn Books, a respected anthropology publisher, published it in a series called Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology. It has sold well enough and been well reviewed that instead of being consigned to the publisher's dustbin, they're positioning it for sales beyond the world of library acquisitions. Get a discounted copy of the book from Berghahn here.

Posted by Luis Vivanco at 9:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Published from Williams Hall, home of the UVM Anthropology Department, this blog is a venue for me to share my thoughts on cultural anthropology. Since I've been writing an introductory anthropology textbook, I spend virtually every day thinking about it. So much so that I probably won't have time to work much on this blog, so don't hold your breath for updates. But you will find links to my research, course blogs, and whatever else I decide to post.

Posted by Luis Vivanco at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)