An Anthropologist In Situ Part II: A Business Accreditation Conference

I (Jenn) have recently been reflecting on the ways in which we can bring anthropological knowledge into non-traditional anthropological places - particularly, during conference season. First, I spoke about anthropological ethical standards in engineering classrooms and more recently, when I showcased lessons on intercultural competency during group work at an engineering conference. Just this past week, I attended a conference about accrediting our business program (within the Engineering faculty) and was struck by one unique practice of identifying other conference participants.

When one arrives at this conference, we're given your standard name badge. Like other conferences, the name of the individual (without title) is given and, in smaller font, their university's name. At anthropological conferences like the AAA or CASCA, conference-goers have seen their first name printed in bigger font than any other information in recent years, perhaps to create a more equitable approach rather than singling out or emphasizing those individuals who have risen to anthropological fame (henceforth called the anthro-glitterati ™ anthro everywhere!). This practice of identification and labeling fits into symbolic anthropology where anthropologists study "the way(s in which) people understand their surroundings, as well as the actions and utterances of the other members of their society" (Hudson et al. 2009).

Hudson et al. (2009) describe Victor Turner's perspective of symbolic anthropology where symbols help dictate and allow others to discern and interact with one another. "Turner felt that these "operators," by their arrangement and context, produce "social transformations" which tie the people in a society to the society's norms, resolve conflict, and aid in changing the status of the actors" (Ortner 1983:131).

Jenn's conference name
tag & basic ribbons

It was in this light that I understood the use of ribbons or badges at my most recent conference. As will be further described below, these ribbons allow conference-goers to discern their connection and placement of other conference-goers not only through individuals' and university names but also through the practice of attaching ribbons.

For example, I was told by a helpful and experienced conference-goer that I needed to identify my accreditation region (so that others would know which region I came from) as well as my own or my university's accreditation level (where they stood in their accreditation process, i.e. candidate, accredited, re-affirmation, etc.). You'll see from my badge I'm a first time conference-goer.

Further, if you held a position within the organization, there was a badge for that too, including evaluator, chair elect, etc.

The ribbon station (photo below) was clearly marked in one of the main halls of the conference and included many ribbons:

Ribbon Table

Ribbon choices

In addition to the ribbons describing your rank and geographic category, there were 'silly' ribbons, for example, my ("I heart bacon" and "totes magotes") ribbons:

Jenn's badge with the
addition of 'silly' ribbons

"Are you showing your ACBSP pride today? This attendee certainly is."

From my four day experience of this conference, I noticed that this practice of collecting and displaying silly ribbons was a mechanism to identify and distinguishing oneself from others and was often used as a talking piece either face-to-face or online. Here are three screen shots from the conference's twitter feed:

Tweet from Conference-Goer

#ACBSP2017 Twitter feed:

"Badges - High Impact Practice

I'm hearing about everywhere."

This last photo I took was of two participants who told me that ribbon collecting was tradition at the conference and the longer the chain, the better.

Conference attendees display their ribbons

Thus, as an anthropologist in situ, these identity making practices show a moment in time where individuals are able to identify and distinguish themselves among other conference goers and, I would argue, find new collectivity in the practice of ribbon gathering and displaying.

Quick links and further reading:

• Anthropological Ethics outside of Anthropological Classrooms (June 08, 2017, anthro everywhere!)
• An Anthropologist In Situ: Canadian Engineering Education Association 2017 Conference (June 15, 2017, anthro everywhere!)
• Symbolic and Interpretive Anthropologies (2009, Scott Hudson and Carl Smith and Michael Loughlin and Scott Hammerstedt - a student guide to anthropological theory for students)

More on racist mascots

In my house, we are already two months into baseball season -- which also means the resurgence of critical blogs, news articles and discussions about racist mascots. We posted last year about Racist Mascots (11 April 2016), and this post adds to that earlier and ongoing discussion.

Native Mascots Perpetuate Racism Against Indigenous People

Last April as the Toronto Blue Jays battled through the American League Championship Series, Cleveland's team arrived in Toronto for Game 3 of the series amidst a legal challenge to ban the use of that team's racist mascot and name. Where many of the Cleveland fans interviewed by Canadian media feel that "the team's nickname and logo are not offensive and should not be changed," well-known Indigenous architect, activist, and officer of the Order of Canada Douglas Cardinal filed an injunction against the team's name and mascot as offensive and discriminatory. Douglas argued

that the logo reflects stereotypes and misunderstandings about indigenous cultures, lumping diverse groups of First Nations into one offensive, homogenous cartoon.
“It’s much deeper and more profound than a logo being offensive. It’s really an indicator of why that relationship (between First Nations peoples and society at large) is so flawed. Because there’s this lack of recognition of what the true conditions of native peoples have been over the last 500 years.”

The last-minute injunction was overturned by the Superior Court and Cleveland proceeded to wear their racism on their sleeves throughout the series.

The challenge to ban the broadcast of the name and mascot was successful, however, in raising this discussion again in mainstream media, and highlighting ways in which people in relative positions of power are already acknowledging the connections between this imagery and institutional racism against Indigenous peoples. For instance, much was made of how the long-time radio announcer for the Jays, Jerry Howarth, stopped calling Cleveland and Atlanta by their offensive team names since a 1992 letter from an Indigenous fan. This announcer has also made a concerted effort to stop using "terms such as tomahawk chop and powwow on the mound." Local teams with similarly offensive team names or mascots have also recently been called upon to change because of how these symbols perpetuate racism in the everyday.

Indigenous artists are also using these kinds of moments to speak back to and challenge these sports symbols of institutional racism. See for instance, Artists Respond to Cleveland Team’s Racist Logo (Canadian Art) or Culturally Appropriate Chicago Blackhawks Logo by First Nations Artist Goes Viral (Indian Country Today).

In the classroom, these team names and symbols provide fruitful examples for discussing how banal imagery comes to support the status quo of institutionalized racism, as well as more general questions of representation, cultural change and the invention of tradition.

Quick links:

• Racist Mascots (11 April 2016, anthro everywhere!)
• Canadian activist seeking injunction against use of ‘Cleveland Indians’ name (16 October 2016, Toronto Star)
• Cleveland Indians Can Use Logo and Name in Toronto, Canadian Judge Says (17 October 2016, New York Times)
• Blue Jays' radio voice Jerry Howarth sticks to 1992 vow to not say 'Indians' (11 October 2016)
• Native Mascots Perpetuate Racism Against Indigenous People (4 March 2016, HuffPost Canada)
• Cleveland Fans Say Team's Name 'Honours' Indigenous Culture (17 October 2016, HuffPost Canada)
• HuffPost Canada Will Not Be Using Racist Sports Team Names (13 October 2016, HuffPost Canada)
•  Artists Respond to Cleveland Team’s Racist Logo (18 October 2016, Canadian Art)
• Culturally Appropriate Chicago Blackhawks Logo by First Nations Artist Goes Viral (18 Vovember 2015, Indian Country Today)

Islamophobia is Racism Syllabus

Adding to the impressive list of open access teaching resources, the Islamophobia is Racism Syllabus provides texts for "Teaching & Learning about anti-Muslim Racism in the United States."

The authors identify the following goals of their Syllabus:

1. Define anti-Muslim racism as an alternative to the concept of Islamophobia
2. Understand the relationship of race and religion to white supremacy through the racialized figure of the Muslim
3. Provide an intersectional and comparative analysis to anti-Muslim racism
4. Strategize ways to challenge anti-Muslim racism and resist white supremacy
5. The syllabus is organized by the following themes and topics, which move from broader framing issues to more specific examples. Later readings may benefit from the contextualization provided by earlier sections.  

Bringing into conversation a wide variety of interdisciplinary texts -- both scholarly and popular -- this syllabus interrogates the relationship between Islampohobia and Racism through the following sections:

I. Race, Empire and Islam
II. The Production and Reproduction of Anti-Muslim Racism
III. The Impact of Anti-Muslim Racism
IV. Policing, Security and Anti-Muslim Racism
V. Resisting Anti-Muslim Racism
VI. Further Reading and Resources

While this syllabus provides a valuable resource for teaching on these topics, what further reading suggestions would you like to add to this collection? Do you have additional ethnographic or anthropological texts you would like to propose? Or perhaps texts that interrogate this relationship in non-American contexts? If so, email (anthrolens@gmail.com) or tweet us (@anthrolens) with your suggestions and we'll add them here!

Quick links and further reading:

• Islamophobia is Racism Syllabus
• #BlackIslamSyllabus a Google Doc "curated by Dr. Kayla Renée Wheeler ....  The goal of this project is to provide teachers, professors, researchers, journalists, and people interested in learning more about Islam with resources on Black Muslims to promote a more inclusive approach to the study of Islam."
• additional Reading Lists, Syllabi, & Teaching Resources (anthro everywhere! page)

The Anthropology of Trump: turning an ethnographic lens on Trumpland

Way back in March we posted about The Anthropology of Trump: It's getting political in here (16 March 2016). In this earlier post, Jenn reviewed Paul Stoller's analysis of Trump's popularity.

Recently, an ethnographer working for ReD Associates, Morgan Ramsey-Elliot, has provided some nuanced insight into Donald Trump’s support in small-town America. (Perhaps underscoring George Leader's argument that Universities Need Anthropology Now, More Than Ever, Huffington Post Blog, 20 October 2016).

"Trump Towns" (Quartz, 22 September 2016), highlights the incredible value of ethnographic research in making sense of social worlds. The insights that Ramsey-Elliot shares about people in small towns across America -- for instance in Texas and Colorado -- help to illuminate how Trump has gained such a vibrant base. What is striking from a methodological perspective, however, is that Ramsey-Elliot wasn't doing working on a project about political values when he learned these things. He was actually working as "an ethnographer with the consulting group ReD Associates, studying the lives and values of truck owners on behalf of a major US auto manufacturer." But, through his daily immersion in all aspects of his research participants' lives, he was also able to arrive at more complex understanding of why this ongoing American election cycle has taken on the character it has. Unsurprisingly, (to an anthropologist, anyway) this has to do with culture.

For instance, in teasing apart why so many Trump supporters oppose minority rights (e.g. "“homosexual” and “feminist” agendas") as 'selfish', Ramsey-Elliot argues that the answer is actually not as simple as prejudice alone:

It is true that fundamental prejudice plays a role in some conservatives’ attitudes toward minority groups. It is also true that, to Robby’s family and others like them, groups of people who are actually fighting for basic human rights look like individuals who have decided to elevate their own identities and needs and appear to be calling for special privileges. This idea is anathema in communities that value, and in many ways are structured around, subsuming individual needs and desires for the good of the group. For many I met in rural America, “minority” agendas and the individualism they are seen to represent are a manifestation of a larger problem: the vanishing respect for duty and self-sacrifice for the sake of the local community.

Cultural and structural changes in small-town life have deeply affected long-standing relations of mutual-help and community obligation. In this context, the discourse that Trump employs and his cultivated 'authentic' persona (not unlike that of Toronto's former Mayor Rob Ford) -- even when it is riddled with contradictions -- "feels far more authentic than that of more polished political elites."

[Trump's] frequent appeals to loyalty are a great example of how this works. Loyalty is, by definition, a deeply personal and contingent thing, and it’s a trait he has systematically attempted to build into a pillar of his personal brand (his proven track record of disloyalty is beside the point).  ...
The logic of such appeals to loyalty—contingent, personal, experiential—taps into a deeper reality about how many people relate to each other in rural America. 

Ramsey-Elliot, a New Yorker, concludes by arguing that people living on the "coasts" wont be able to understand the appeal of Trump until they gain a more nuanced understanding of everyday life across rural America. In other words, in order to understand these political divisions in America, we need to think like anthropologists about the social divisions.

Quick links and further reading:

• anthro everywhere!'s The Anthropology of Trump: It's getting political in here (16 March 2016)
• "Trump Towns" (Quartz, 22 September 2016) An ethnographer has a new explanation for Donald Trump’s support in small-town America
• Anthropologist Sarah Kendzior's take on how "Our fate was sealed long before November 8 (and not because the election’s rigged)" (De Correspondent, 2016)
• "Universities Need Anthropology Now, More Than Ever" (Huffington Post Blog, 20 October 2016).
• "Why Rob Ford appealed to so many in Toronto" (Toronto Star, 22 March 2016)

Hallowe'en & Racism

LSPIRG's (Wilfred Laurier University)
I am Not a Costume campaign

Boo!

Hallowe'en is a rich holiday for anthropologists to dig into for how it brings together many different social phenomena such as ritual and liminality, layers upon layers of changing tradition, and social justice in questions of cultural appropriation and racism in costuming.

Every year in recent memory, my social media feeds have been chock-full of snappy posts and often well-considered reactions to racist Hallowe'en costumes. While black-face still seems to be a good idea to some (it's not), other groups and cultures also frequently turn up in costume shops and Hallowe'en social events (also not a good idea).

These racist costumes -- like the ongoing use of racist mascots and team names -- have become important public sites for discussion around racism in the everyday, and how these common aggressions are actually part of larger systemic issues. For instance, this year in Canada, costumes parodying Indigenous people have been subject to criticism through public campaigns like this one in Regina, where 'warning labels' were attached to these costumes in a popular seasonal costume store:

In case you can't read the fine print, this warning label indicated that "The items contained in this package are offensive and promote the sexualisation of Indigenous women and peoples. Please avoid contact with these dangerous materials. 
There are well-over 4000 missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada. An inquiry is being pursued to address this issue. It takes everyone in Canada to fight against sexualised violence. That starts with outfits of this nature."

In the classroom, examining something that may seem frivolous -- such as
Hallowe'en costumes -- can help us to make sense of the much deeper and complex connections between these banal practices and systems of social inequality that are built on institutional racism and colonialism. How are these costumes connected to the broader social and political issues that are daily making headlines at the moment, such as MMIW in Canada, and the North Dakota Access Pipeline in the US? How do these costumes help to shed light on the ongoing processes of systemic violence against Indigenous peoples in North America by our governments and settler-Canadians/ Americans? What are the guidelines for choosing a costume that isn't racist?

Quick links and further reading:

• Google search on "racist Halloween costumes" because there is actually just so much great content being written on these issues on the web.
• Google search on the "my culture is not a costume" campaigns, such as LSPIRG's (Wilfred Laurier University) 'I am Not a Costume' campaign, and the 2011 Ohio University 'We're a Culture, Not a Costume' campaign
• The relevANTH Guide to Choosing a Culturally Sensitive Halloween Costume (2016, relevANTH)
• Racist Halloween Costumes Get Temporary Warning Labels In Regina Store (2016, Huffington Post)
• Native Americans Try On "Indian" Halloween Costumes (2015, BuzzfeedYellow video, 2 minutes 30 seconds)
• Native Women's Association of Canada and their site on MMIW
• Related past anthro everywhere! posts: 
• The dos & don'ts of Cultural Appropriation (13 June 2016)
• Racist Mascots (11 April 2016)
• Anthropoliteia's #BlackLivesMatter Syllabus (5 September 2016)
• How To Support Blacademics & Be an Ally (8 July 2016)

How gender changes our jobs

One of the things I love about teaching anthropology is thinking about and showing how -- through everyday experiences -- broad processes shape local lives.

I think that these connections come out very clearly in this piece from The Atlantic, "What Programming's Past Reveals About Today's Gender-Pay Gap" (2016). The hook of the piece is that computer programming, which is now a male-dominated field, actually began as a career considered particularly suited to women. So, what happened?

The answer comes down in a very real way to how our

Margaret Hamilton, Programmer for NASA (1969)

conceptions of “expertise” are inseparable from gender. As Judy Wajcman, a sociology professor at the London School of Economics, has argued, “The classification of women’s jobs as unskilled and men’s jobs as skilled frequently bears little relation to the actual amount of training or ability required for them. Skill definitions are saturated with gender bias.” Gender stereotypes pervade definitions of competence and status, contrasting work that requires brain or brawn; mathematical or verbal ability; individualism or cooperation. When an occupation undergoes a shift in gender composition, the description of the job often morphs to better align with the gender of the incoming hires—such as when programming went from being understood as clerical work suitable for women to a job that demands advanced mathematical facility. When women replaced men as typists, it went from a job that was seen as requiring physical stamina to one that needed a woman’s dexterity. In providing profiles not only the male-dominated field of programming, but the female-dominated field of teaching, this piece underscores how our perceptions of different careers, their power, prestige, and the paycheck that goes along with them is deeply coloured by our culturally-informed ideas of gender.

Dr. Christine Darden. Courtesy NASA

This piece is also interesting to use to think about how structure and actions based on socially constructed qualities associated (even unconsciously) with gender and race have helped to shape certain fields, and to keep individuals out of working in certain fields, e.g. women and people of colour in STEM.

Quick links & further reading:

• "What Programming's Past Reveals About Today's Gender-Pay Gap" (The Atlantic, 2016)
• How does language shape our worldview? (17 October 2016) and other anthro everywhere! posts on language
• "Margaret Hamilton, the Engineer Who Took the Apollo to the Moon" (Medium, 2014)
• "Meet the Black Female Mathematicians Who Helped America Win the Space Race" (Observer, 2016)
• "What's Up with Chicks in Science?" Neil Degrasse Tyson responds to an old white dude about minorities (African-Americans and Women) in Science (YouTube, 3.30 minutes)
• "Alabama scientist, one of nation's few black female physicists, breaks ground in cancer research" (AL.com, 2016)

Fisher v. "Race"-based Admissions

The legal case of Abigail N. Fisher may be an interesting case study to get students thinking about the role of "race" (in quotations here in order to problematize the use of this term as a biological or genetic instead of social construction) in university admissions.

This case opens up the floor to many discussions including: definitions of diversity, "race", the 14th Amendment, ideas of access and systemic inequality, among others. 

There are a number of different perspectives that could be used to tease out the importance of social location and intersectionality in biological, sociocultural or legal anthropology classrooms: 

• How Fisher v. University of Texas Impacts Race-Based Admissions (Campus Answers, 2016)
• The Supreme Court dives into a dispute over what diversity means (The Economist, 2015)
• The Diversity Research-To-Practice Gap: Backlash to Fisher Case (Racism Review, 2016)
• Asian Americans and the Future of Affirmative Action (The Atlantic, 2016)

Anthropoliteia's #BlackLivesMatter Syllabus

Anthropoliteia (@anthropoliteia) is another great anthropology resource publishing in blog form, offering "critical perspectives on police, security, crime, law and punishment around the world."

One of their new projects is the Black Lives Matter Syllabus, "which will mobilize anthropological work as a pedagogical exercise addressing the confluence of race, policing and justice." First introduced on 30 August 2016, the project is an ongoing attempt to produce an anthropology-focused syllabus that doesn't "side-step the conversation" happening through and around #BLM. As an open project, the creators -- Dr. Sameena Mulla and the Anthropoliteia editors -- invite anthroplogists to contribute:

Circulate this call for resources and tools
Reflect on the matter and share your thoughts with us
Create and share any helpful resources
Speak openly and honestly with your students about current events
Support black students, staff, neighbors and colleagues

Further reading:

• anthro everywhere! posts on 'race & racism':
• How a Teacher's Race Affects their Ability to Teach about Race (11 August 2016)
• How To Support Blacademics & Be an Ally (8 July 2016)
• Black Disabled Woman Syllabus (19 May 2016)
• Why it's okay to say Black (13 April 2016)
• The growing #BlackLivesCDNSyllabus is available as a Google Doc. It is interdisciplinary with a focus on Canadian experiences through scholarship, literature and art.
• Candice Benbow's interdisciplinary Lemonade Syllabus

Census Data and the Social Construction of Race

Since Franz Boas, anthropologists have argued that race is not a biological but a social fact that varies across time and place. Using the US Census, Vox underscores this view, asserting that 220 years of census data proves race is a social construct (2016).

Surveying the changing racial categories used in the US census clearly demonstrates how something that many still take to be biological is actually something cultural. Rather than being fixed (based on biology and therefore unchanging) these are categories that rely on ideas of difference that are socially meaningful in a particular time and place, drawing on a range of signifiers (e.g. national origin, phenotype).

This piece is also interesting for how it underscores the census itself as a tool of power. Censuses (and census makers and takers) can create or support social categories of difference and the social inequality founded on these ideas of difference. In the classroom, we can use this article to think about how social ideas of difference, such as race, and how we/ our governments account for them have wider reaching effects.

US Census Categories for Asians in 1890 (Vox)

US Census Categories for Asians in 1940 (Vox)

US Census Categories for Asians in 2010 (Vox)

One person's trash...

One person's trash is another's treasure... or data, if you are an archaeologist or anthropologist working in a landfill.

Places where trash builds up can provide archaeologists important clues into past lives. For instance, in Toronto, Canada, when the Major League Baseball stadium was first built, archaeologists surveying the site found many interesting artifacts from what was then the lake shore in the early city. Most items had either been lost in the lake, or were part of the landfill extending the reaches of the city into the lake.

Archaeological teams have also dug into our more recent past. For instance William Rathje's Garbage Project, which "explores modern waste disposal, consumption, and recycling patterns" across North America. Or, the recent dig for Atari in a New Mexico landfill, which became a much publicized spectacle that "provided the necessary means to directly access the contemporary past for purposes of archaeological and historical research."

But, sociocultural anthropologists -- like Joshua Reno -- are also beginning to turn their attention to landfills and the people that work in this "secret world of activity that [is] utterly necessary to all of us, but completely hidden from most of us." In this interview, Reno digs into our social relationship with garbage.

What does trash, as material culture, tell us about our social worlds?

Quick links:

• "8 things they found when they dug under the Rogers Centre" (2015, Toronto Star)
• "Seeking the Truth in Refuse" (1992, New York Times)
• "Museums: The Truth is in Our Trash" (2002, Archaeology)
• "The Garbage Project & "The Archaeology of Us"" (by William Rathje, 1996, Symmetrical Archaeology)
• "Why We Dug Atari" (2014, The Atlantic)
• "The Anthropologist in the Landfill" (2016, the Atlantic)

How To Support Blacademics & Be an Ally

If you are working in academia, this post is for you.

Ellie Adekur has created this important resource on How To Support Blacademics: For Non-Black Faculty and Grad Students Teaching Black Faces in White Spaces.

Adekur is a is a PhD student in Human Geography at the University of Toronto, as well as human rights activist and social justice educator. This resource was posted today on Adekur's Facebook page in response to the latest instances of anti-Black violence witnessed across North America this week, and the need to address "anti-Black racism in classes, tutorials and office hours: professors and teaching assistants screening violent content, leaning on racist tropes, ignoring anti-Black comments, or singling out Black students to address problematic comments/opinions in the room."

This resource is not exhaustive, but it is a useful and important place for instructors to start rethinking their engagements in and outside of the classroom in relation to racism and social injustice. It contains simple, invaluable points or reminders about how to support our colleagues, students, and others in the university. As social scientists, especially as anthropologists, we already know these things intellectually, but for non-Black academics remember:

3. If you're not Black or racialized, don't pretend to be an expert. Don’t pretend to have all of the answers, or feel like you need to. Your empathy and allyship are constantly practiced, learned and always developing. 

You may also wish to check out this page of Links for Allies from White Ribbon.

UPDATE - 10 July 2016: Jennifer has also pointed out this article, "11 Common Ways White Folks Avoid Taking Responsibility for Racism in the US" (2016, Everyday Feminism), written by Robin DiAngelo. As a white educator who focuses on critical multicultural and social justice education, DiAngelo draws on her own observations as a white person facilitating anti-racism workshops with white Americans, and the outrage she frequently meets in trying to engage them in discussions of racism as systemic. Part of learning to engage as an ally requires that people with privilege (here, those who identify/ are identified as white) be willing to hear feedback on how their actions contribute to systemic violence. This might be a useful piece for students to reflect on in the classroom, perhaps as an exercise leading to a discussion about contemporary race and racism.

Quick links:

• Ellie Adekur's How To Support Blacademics: For Non-Black Faculty and Grad Students Teaching Black Faces in White Spaces (2016)
• Links for Allies from White Ribbon
• 11 Common Ways White Folks Avoid Taking Responsibility for Racism in the US (2016, Everyday Feminism)
• Via Facebook, MTV's Franchesca "Chescaleigh" Ramsey debunks 4 big myths about the #BlackLivesMatter movement that many students have probably encountered in just 4 minutes. (This easy, accessible piece also references law professor Patricia Leary's response to her students' complaints about her wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt earlier this year.)

Anthropology & Public Policy

One of the motivations for starting anthro everywhere! was to create a page where teachers and students (and skeptical relatives) alike could get a better idea of the wide range of things that you can do with anthropology or what an anthropological perspective can bring to a workplace. If you check out our page, "Applying an anthropological perspective outside of university" or our tag 'what can anthro do?' you can see how anthropologists are bringing their critical cultural perspective and ethnographic methodological approach to a wide variety of fields, including:

• Media: Journalism, Writing, Entertainment
• Marketing/ Brand & Product Development
• Health Professions
• Technology
• Finance
• Entrepreneurship

While there seems to be a lot of easily accessible material on the internet about the value of an anthropological lens in, say, the marketing or health sectors, I had a hard time finding any similar publications on what an anthropological perspective can bring to work in the fields of public policy or public service. Of course, these too are fields where anthropologists not only work, but excel. 

In order to address this issue, I recently went to Ottawa where I interviewed three public servants currently working for Canada's federal department of Indigenous and Northern Affairs who have backgrounds in anthropology. While this piece isn't ready for publication just yet, I luckily came across another interesting perspective on an anthropological or ethnographic perspective in a recent post from EPIC: Advancing the Value of Ethnography in Industry.

In "Human-Centered Research in Policymaking" (20 June, 2016 - part of the Data|Design|Civics Series) Chelsea Mauldin and Natalia Radywyl discuss how they were involved in a project to "use ethnographic research to develop the New York City Digital Playbook, a policy and operational guide to help City staff develop new and improved digital services for New Yorkers." Their work in this project will help advise on how to create digital services that will actually be used by those who need them, including vulnerable New Yorkers who might already have difficulty accessing city services, and who are not seen as the typical 'user' of digital technology. In spite of the innovative results promised should the City incorporate their findings, Mauldin and Radywyl write that the adoption of an ethnographic + design approach in policy making is still new.

Our work is part of a broad human-centered shift in policymaking. However, design and ethnographic work is happening primarily in the arena of operational policy – the strategic direction and day-to-day practices that inform how members of the public interact with government. Less enlightened are the “upstream” phases of policymaking that constrain operational policy. These are legislative policy, laws enacted by elected legislative bodies, and regulatory policy, the arena in which civil servants interpret how a given piece of legislation should be acted upon by operational components of government.

Hopefully, we will be able to provide more links to accessible, open-access writing about the connections between anthropology and public policy/ public service very soon! If you have come across this kind of work, write on it, or do it yourself, we would love to hear from you (anthrolens at gmail.com).

Quick links and further reading:

•  Applying an anthropological perspective outside of university (anthro everywhere! *now* with links to Public Policy & Public Service)
• Human-Centered Research in Policymaking (2016, EPIC)
• links to other articles in EPIC's Data|Design|Civics Series

Anthropologist, CTO

Is it really that strange to think that an anthropologist would be the best choice for a Chief Technology Officer?

According to Susannah Fox, the CTO for HHS (U.S. Health and Human Services), no, it shouldn't be:

“We’re living through this time right now where technology is a Trojan Horse for change ... . We say technology, but we mean innovation. We say interoperability and open data, but we mean culture change. And this is why the HHS CTO is an anthropologist. I know about culture change. I know how difficult it is for everyone involved.” (mobihealthnews.com, 2016)

For Fox, part of this cultural change has to do with understanding patients' needs, and the technology hacks that people are already doing, as in the #WeAreNotWaiting movement among people living with diabetes.

 Quick links & further reading:

• "HHS CTO: Technology in healthcare is a Trojan Horse for culture change" (mobihealthnews.com, 2016)
• "Why An Anthropologist, Not A Technologist Was The Best Choice For HHS CTO Role" (2016, Forbes)
• #WeAreNotWaiting via twitter
• Fox' blog post, "Love made visible" (2013) in which she reflects on her archaeology/ anthropology background and what this brings to her work in the healthcare sector.
• anthro everywhere's page, "Applying an anthropological perspective outside of university"

Mass Violence and Teachable Moments

This past weekend, Orlando, Florida witnessed the worst mass shooting in America's recent history. This violent, planned attack in a public place is tragic, and our hearts go out to the victims and their families.

As the LA Times discussed after the 2015 mass shootings in San Bernardino, California, a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and in an English class at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, in the US such violence has become "often both stunningly senseless and paradoxically routine." We continue to be shocked each time that mass public violence happens, mourn for the victims, and look for answers. As social scientists, and as teachers, we should also recognize these as teachable moments to talk about these mass shootings not as exceptional instances, but as part of broader patterns and systems of violence in (North) American/ Western society.

Precisely because mass shootings and less sensational instances of gun violence in America are so prevalent, there are already a number of interesting discussions and reflections from an anthropological or social science perspective available, such as:

• Jason Antrosio's "Semi-Automatic Anthropology: Confronting Complexity, Anthropologically" (2012) or "Gun Violence: New Guns or New Gun Control?" (2012)
• Daniel Lende's "Guns and Public Health" (2008) or "Newtown and Violence – No Easy Answers" (2012)
• Tim Wise's "Race, Class, Violence and Denial: Mass Murder and the Pathologies of Privilege" (2012) 
• Joachim Vogt Isaksen's "Why Do People Commit Mass Shootings?" (2013)

An important issue that has been little addressed in the days following Orlando, has been how such violence is part of a long history entangled with ideas of cultural and moral superiority. In my social media feed, I have been seeing many posts about how the headline that Orlando is the worst mass shooting in American history ignores an important part of that history. Many commentators point to Native American massacres, for instance, the massacre at Wounded Knee, where some 150 Lakota men, women and children were killed by the US government. While these deaths were distinctly connected to colonization and the systemic inequality this earlier history established, we continue to see such processes of systemic violence play out in many different encounters today (for instance, see our previous posts on Racist Mascots, or The Anthropology of Terrorism).

As a deliberate attack on LGBT+ people, Orlando shows us how homophobia is woven into these broader patterns, histories, and our cultural scripts in North America about belonging, violence, cultural difference, and masculinity. In America, the realities of how this structural violence is experienced is complicated by how easy it is for people to access a wide range of powerful firearms. In 2015, the connections between toxic masculinity and gun violence were explicit in the murder of female students in Roseburg, Oregon. In Canada, where gun violence is much less prevalent, we have nonetheless seen and remember these powerful connections in the 1989 Montreal Massacre. Homophobia is also intricately connected to these deeply held ideas of what it means to be a man in North America, and how homosexuality and non-normative gender expressions transgress and are thought to threaten such masculinities.

We see this not only in North America, but elsewere in the world as well. For instance, in Montenegro, the country's first Pride Parade (2013) ended in violence. Protesters focused on the parade's logo, the moustache, as a symbol of traditional Montenegrin masculinity. As the anthropologist Branko Banovic commented, in spite of the culturally contextual focus on the moustache, the discourse framing the controversy was "structured on the basis of a pattern with well-documented main elements ... : the centrality dichotomies of normal/abnormal, natural/unnatural, and moral/immoral; homosexuality regarded as an illness; religious institutions and officers that play an important role in the public debate on homosexuality; LGBT people who attack the core of national values; and the battle between the police and the right-wing groups."

Although these discursive themes are specific to the Montenegrin context, they resonate with what we've witnessed over the past few years in America -- for instance, in the recent and ongoing legislation regarding transgendered people and public toilets.

As social scientists, we can encourage our students to look for, debate, and dig into the cultural, historical, political, and economic factors that connect eruptions of violence like the Orlando shooting to broader processes of systemic violence and inequality in our societies.

Cultural constructions of illness

"The Diseases You Only Get if You Believe in Them" (2016, The Atlantic) looks at certain forms of illness that are culturally specific. In this piece, Julie Beck interviews Frank Bures, author of The Geography of Madness: Penis Thieves, Voodoo Death, and the Search for the Meaning of the World’s Strangest Syndromes (2016).

Although Bures' book begins and ends with the 'exotic' cultural syndrome of penis theft in places like Nigeria and China, the interview provides a really interesting discussion of cultural syndromes in general, and asks "why the United States is not immune from them, and why asking if they’re “real” is the wrong question."

Some interesting points for discussion here include  the cultural imperialism and ethnocentrism of Western medical knowledge above understandings of health and illness in other cultures, and a critical reflection on how Western experiences of health/ illness are also culturally constructed.

Black Disabled Woman Syllabus

Vilissa Thompson, Disability Rights Consultant & Advocate, has created the Black Disabled Woman Syllabus in response to the lack of intersectionality she has seen in disability studies. In her work Thompson has found that many people "are ignorant of the experiences of Black Americans in general, Black women particularly, and when broken down further, Black disabled women specifically."

This syllabus, intended as a "living" document, currently provides a range of resources for educators and students on:

• Black Feminism / Womanism
• The Black Disabled Body & Identity
• Articles About Blackness, Feminism, &/or Disability
• Books about Blackness in America
• Fiction & Poetic Works
• Audio / Video
• Music

Additional links:

• Chronic Illness, Coping & Critiques: Writings of a Chronically Ill Anthropologist by Niki Thorne (York University) who has already shared and commented on Thompson's work and hashtag #DisabilityTooWhite (19 May 2016)
• Laurence Ralph's Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago (2015, University of Chicago Press) is an accessible ethnography that engages issues of race, (chronic) illness, and disability.

Systemic racism in Hollywood

In this Vulture.com (2016), George Takei talks about Hollywood's systematic whitewashing of Asian characters. These comments follow on the casting of white actresses Scarlett Johansson as "Major Motoko Kusanagi, a cyborg leading an elite police task force in a futuristic Japan" (Huffington Post Canada, 2016) and Tilda Swinton "as the Ancient One, a Tibetan male mystic" (New York Times, 2016) in the upcoming Ghost in the Shell and Dr. Strange features, respectively. While these upcoming features have brought attention to the issue of whitewashing characters in Hollywood, it is by no means a new phenomenon. (Mickey Rooney's Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) comes readily to mind as an example where an Asian character has been portrayed through a stereotypically racist caricature for comedic effect by a white actor.)

As the NY Times questions:

Why is the erasure of Asians still an acceptable practice in Hollywood? It’s not that people don’t notice: Just last year, Emma Stone played a Chinese-Hawaiian character named Allison Ng in Cameron Crowe’s critically derided “Aloha.” While that film incited similar outrage (and tepid box office interest), no national conversation about racist casting policies took place.

Obviously, Asian-Americans are not the only victims of Hollywood’s continuing penchant for whitewashing. Films like “Pan” and “The Lone Ranger” featured white actors playing Native Americans, while “Gods of Egypt” and “Exodus: Gods and Kings” continue the long tradition of Caucasians playing Egyptians. 

In all these cases, the filmmakers fall back on the same tired arguments. Often, they insist that movies with minorities in lead roles are gambles. When doing press for “Exodus,” the director Ridley Scott said: “I can’t mount a film of this budget" and announce that “my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such.”

This is a useful think piece for students who may be used to thinking about racism and white privilege only in relation to whiteness vs blackness. Why can't Scott mount a film with such a massive budget without a white lead actor? What does this seemingly frivolous issue say about race in our society?

Racism in/and Medicine

In The Pain Gap: Why Doctors Offer Less Relief to Black Patients (2016, The Daily Beast), Keith Wailoo (Princeton professor in History and Public Affairs) discusses how the treatment of patients' pain by medical professionals is affected by systemic racism.

This article/ issue would be useful in discussions of how structural violence -- the kind of 'normalized' violence that is often difficult to see -- has concrete effects for those it is directed against. It also speaks to how our understandings of health and how we treat illness is also culturally constructed, and is directly affected by other cultural norms, beliefs, and practices such as North American understandings of racial difference.

You can also check out Wailoo's website where he provides further links to popular media on the how pain (and healthcare) is political.

Latest (US) Statistics concerning PhD Job Market across Disciplines

Higher education has released an article today concerning what Scott Jaschik, the author, calls a tightening of the PhD market across all disciplines.

The quick quote at the top of the article reads: As number of new Ph.D.s rises, the percentage of people earning a doctorate without a job waiting for them is up. While all disciplines face the problem, some have particularly high debt levels.

Here are the stats relevant to anthropology and social science in general:

Number of Doctorate Recipients:
Field                           2004              2009              2014
Social Sciences          7,043             7,829             8,657

Percent of Doctorate Recipients with Job or Postdoc Commitments:
Field                            2004              2009              2014
Social Sciences          71.3%             72.9%            68.8%

Debt of New Doctoral Degree Graduates, 2014 (we just lost out to Education):
Field                   Mean Cumulative Debt           % with debt greater than $70,000
Social sciences               $34,999                                               22.6%

Everyday rituals

There's a reason that Horace Miner's (1956) Body Ritual Among the Nacirema has become a classic text in introduction to anthropology classrooms. It provides a fantastic, immersive introduction to confronting students' ideas about exotic otherness and the power of representation in academic texts (plus, it's always fun to watch students grapple with the realization that the Nacirema are actually...!). It also provides a useful introduction to thinking about another classic concern in anthropology: ritual.

The issue of everyday rituals is also something that Josiah Harrist has addressed in this article for Kill Screen (2016). In this piece, Harrist takes an anthropological approach (citing Victor Turner) to thinking about table top gaming as a form of ritual that players engage as members of a closed cultural group in the context of the game play. Addressing rites of passage and rituals of purification, political power, harvest, and commemorative or calendrical rituals, this short piece offers useful insights for thinking about the role of ritual at multiple levels.


Another useful link for teaching Miner:

• Jason Antrosio (Living Anthropologically blog) has written a post (with lots of links!) about teaching Horace Miner, “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” in an intro to anthropology course.