OAC Book Reviews Discussions - Open Anthropology Cooperative
2019-11-03T21:50:36Z
http://openanthcoop.ning.com/group/oacbookreviews/forum?feed=yes&xn_auth=no
NEW TITLE TO REVIEW: ENGAGING WITH CAPITALISM
tag:openanthcoop.ning.com,2013-12-06:3404290:Topic:204103
2013-12-06T02:02:17.965Z
Stacy A A Hope
http://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/StacyAAHope
<p><strong>LOOKING FOR A REVIEWER TO REVIEW:</strong></p>
<p><span class="font-size-4" style="font-family: arial black,avant garde;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Engaging-With-Capitalism-Research-Anthropology/dp/178190541X#reader_178190541X)" target="_blank">Engaging with Capitalism: Cases from Oceania</a></span></p>
<p><span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&field-author=Fiona%20McCormack&search-alias=books&sort=relevancerank">Fiona…</a></span></p>
<p><strong>LOOKING FOR A REVIEWER TO REVIEW:</strong></p>
<p><span class="font-size-4" style="font-family: arial black,avant garde;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Engaging-With-Capitalism-Research-Anthropology/dp/178190541X#reader_178190541X)" target="_blank">Engaging with Capitalism: Cases from Oceania</a></span></p>
<p><span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&field-author=Fiona%20McCormack&search-alias=books&sort=relevancerank">Fiona McCormack</a> <span class="byLinePipe">(Author, Editor)</span>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_2?_encoding=UTF8&field-author=Kate%20Barclay&search-alias=books&sort=relevancerank">Kate Barclay</a> <span class="byLinePipe">(Author, Editor)</span></span></p>
<p></p>
<p>For several decades people have been grappling with how to retain the material safety and cultural richness of indigenous non-capitalist societies and economies, but also gain the health, wealth, education and life opportunities the modern capitalist world offers. This book brings together examples of attempts to forge locally appropriate versions of modernity; development that suits the aspirations and circumstances of particular groups of people. Authors question how the market economy has been variously negotiated by groups who also have other systems through which they organize their social and economic life. What has worked for these people, what has not, and why? The volume addresses how, as a social and economic system, capitalism has been very effective in generating wealth and technological innovation, but has also been associated with great social inequity and environmental damage. Its inherent flaws have been highlighted by the escalation of ecological problems arising from growth-oriented capitalism and various economic crises, the latest being the Global Financial Crisis and its ongoing fallout.</p>
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<p>If interested in receiving this book to review, please contact me at <strong>stacy.hope@consultant.com</strong></p>
BOOK FOR REVIEW: Creating Authenticity. Authentication Processes in Ethnographic Museums
tag:openanthcoop.ning.com,2013-11-28:3404290:Topic:204065
2013-11-28T14:39:16.895Z
Stacy A A Hope
http://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/StacyAAHope
<p><b>We are looking for someone to review the following publication:</b></p>
<p></p>
<p><b>Creating Authenticity. Authentication Processes in Ethnographic Museums</b></p>
<p>Edited by Alexander Geurds & Laura Van Broekhoven</p>
<p>ISBN: 9789088902055<br></br> Series: Mededelingen van het Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde 42<br></br><br></br><b>Abstract:<br></br></b>‘Authenticity’ and authentication is at the heart of museums’ concerns in displays, objects, and interaction with visitors. These notions have…</p>
<p><b>We are looking for someone to review the following publication:</b></p>
<p></p>
<p><b>Creating Authenticity. Authentication Processes in Ethnographic Museums</b></p>
<p>Edited by Alexander Geurds & Laura Van Broekhoven</p>
<p>ISBN: 9789088902055<br/> Series: Mededelingen van het Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde 42<br/><br/><b>Abstract:<br/></b>‘Authenticity’ and authentication is at the heart of museums’ concerns in displays, objects, and interaction with visitors. These notions have formed a central element in early thought on culture and collecting. Nineteenth century-explorers, commissioned museum collectors and pioneering ethnographers attempted to lay bare the essences of cultures through collecting and studying objects from distant communities. Comparably, historical archaeology departed from the idea that cultures were discrete bounded entities, subject to divergence but precisely therefore also to be traced back and linked to, a more complete original form in de (even) deeper past.</p>
<p>Much of what we work with today in ethnographic museum collections testifies to that conviction. Post-structural thinking brought about a far-reaching deconstruction of the authentic. It came to be recognized that both far-away communities and the deep past can only be discussed when seen as desires, constructions and inventions.</p>
<p>Notwithstanding this undressing of the ways in which people portray their cultural surroundings and past, claims of authenticity and quests for authentication remain omnipresent. This book explores the authentic in contemporary ethnographic museums, as it persists in dialogues with stakeholders, and how museums portray themselves. How do we interact with questions of authenticity and authentication when we curate, study artefacts, collect, repatriate, and make (re)presentations? The contributing authors illustrate the divergent nature in which the authentic is brought into play, deconstructed and operationalized. Authenticity, the book argues, is an expression of a desire that is equally troubled as it is resilient.</p>
<p><b>Contents:<br/></b>Culture Sketching: The Authenticity Quest in Ethnographic Museums: An Introduction<br/> Dr. Alexander Geurds</p>
<p>Real, Fake or a Combination? Examining the Authenticity of a Mesoamerican Mosaic Skull<br/> Martin E. Berger</p>
<p>When is Authentic? Situating Authenticity in the Itineraries of Objects<br/> Prof. Rosemary Joyce</p>
<p>Authentic Forgeries?<br/> Prof. Oliver Watson</p>
<p>From Lukas to Liefkes? Age and Authenticity of Gold Jewellery from Sumba, Indonesia<br/> Francine Brinkgreve</p>
<p>The Real Stuff: Authenticity and Photography from East Greenland in the Netherlands<br/> Dr. Cunera Buijs</p>
<p>Alternative Authenticities (and Inauthenticities)<br/> Prof. Sally Price</p>
<p>Authenticity and Curatorial Practice<br/> Dr. Laura N.K. Van Broekhoven</p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-4"><strong>For more details please respond to this discussion or email Stacy Hope at <span style="color: #ff0000;">stacy.hope@consultant.com</span></strong></span></p>
BOOK REVIEW: Negro With a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey and His Dream of a Mother Africa
tag:openanthcoop.ning.com,2013-01-21:3404290:Topic:180724
2013-01-21T08:41:31.317Z
Stacy A A Hope
http://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/StacyAAHope
<p> </p>
<div class="entry-content"><p style="text-align: right;"><strong>Book Review Series</strong><br></br> ISSN 2045-5755 (Online)</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/HuonWardle">Huon Wardle</a><br></br> <em>University of St. Andrews</em></p>
<p style="text-align: right;">© 2013 Huon Wardle<br></br> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/" rel="license"><img alt="Creative Commons License" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/3.0/80x15.png"></img></a> <br></br> Open Anthropology Cooperative Press…<br></br></p>
</div>
<p> </p>
<div class="entry-content"><p style="text-align: right;"><strong>Book Review Series</strong><br/> ISSN 2045-5755 (Online)</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/HuonWardle">Huon Wardle</a><br/> <em>University of St. Andrews</em></p>
<p style="text-align: right;">© 2013 Huon Wardle<br/> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/" rel="license"><img alt="Creative Commons License" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/3.0/80x15.png"/></a><br/> Open Anthropology Cooperative Press<br/> <a href="http://openanthcoop.net/press/2013/01/19/negro-with-a-hat/" target="_blank">www.openanthcoop.net/press</a></p>
<p style="text-align: right;">Download as <a href="http://openanthcoop.net/press/http://openanthcoop.net/press/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Wardle-Negro-With-a-Hat-2013.pdf">PDF</a>, EPUB, MOBI.</p>
<p><strong>GRANT, Colin</strong>. 2008. <em>Negro With a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey and His Dream of a Mother Africa</em>. London: Jonathan Cape.</p>
<div id="attachment_813" class="wp-caption alignleft" style="width: 131px;"><a target="_blank" href="http://openanthcoop.net/press/2013/01/19/negro-with-a-hat/garvey/"><img class="align-full" src="http://openanthcoop.net/press/http://openanthcoop.net/press/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Garvey.jpg?width=121" width="121"/></a>Marcus Garvey. Image from the Library of Congress collection.</div>
<div class="wp-caption alignleft" style="width: 131px;"></div>
<p>In the summer of 1925, the most frequent play in the Harlem ‘policy’ numbers game was 19359: those were the digits that the Atlanta federal penitentiary had assigned to inmate Marcus Mosiah Garvey, recently jailed for ‘mail fraud’. African Americans across the continent had already taken a massive bet on Garvey when they bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of shares in his Black Star Line; Garvey had envisioned a fleet of ships that would rival Cunard’s White Star Line or the United Fruit Company’s Great White Fleet. The difference would be that the Black Star Liners would be manned by black seamen and give passage to black passengers; and they would carry beleaguered black people back from the Americas to their homeland, Africa. Garvey’s prosecution for misuse of the U.S. mail struck the last nail in the coffin of an already faltering Black Star Line, but curiously next to none of these multiple thousands of people who had placed their money on Garvey’s dream came forward to assist the U.S. Justice Department in his downfall. In the decades after the First World War, and well into the 1930s, millions of people across the U.S., in the West Indies and in South and Central America joined Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). He was the leader of the single biggest black internationalist movement that has ever existed, but a decade after his death in London Garvey seemed already almost forgotten: only the Rastafarians of Jamaica continued to revere the one time ‘provisional President of Africa’, as their ‘John the Baptist’.</p>
<p>Reflections on Garvey typically reach for the word ‘enigma’, ‘enigmatic’. Speaking for myself, I first noticed him when I began fieldwork in Jamaica early in the 1990s. There he was, a self-repeating presence amongst the many murals painted on the zinc and chipboard walls of house-yards in downtown Kingston: always the same image – the bullish, proud face in semi-profile and, of course, the striking bicorn hat plumed with ostrich feathers. I am late, though, in reviewing Colin Grant’s biography; originally published in 2008 there is now a Vintage edition where he adds a forward explaining his choice of eponym -‘negro with a hat’ – a title I have not been alone in finding odd. The choice of phrase, he suggests, was deliberately aimed at alienating the reader: the author describes his experience at an exhibition where a photograph of a white man was simply titled ‘man with a hat’, while a black man became ‘negro with a hat’. Was not the ‘negro’ also a ‘man’? Thus explained, his aim becomes more obvious – is it possible for us to see beyond Garvey, the ‘negro with a hat’? At over five hundred painstakingly researched pages, including nearly twenty of bibliography and footnotes, this is clearly the definitive biography and has been widely praised. As we read, the protagonist takes different shapes on the page, engages in varied, sometimes mundane, sometimes strikingly eccentric, acts (making an unannounced visit to the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, for example).</p>
<p><b>Exploring Garvey’s mass support</b></p>
<p>Grant shows in comprehensive detail how a flood of money and support enabled the UNIA’s diverse projects; from black run laundries and restaurants in Harlem to black crewed ships and black aviators. The UNIA was backed by a complex coalition of refugee sharecroppers, Central American plantation and industrial workers, longshoremen and New York urbanites who offered money, and in many cases idolization, and to whom Garvey answered in his famously orotund way. There are gaps in the discussion, however. Garvey and his UNIA was above all an intrusion of the utopian and the fantastic into the actually existing American society of the time: explaining this in turn calls out for a type of socio-cultural interpretation that this book perhaps avoids engaging in.</p>
<p>Understandably enough, the bulk of the text is taken up with the period just after the First World War until the mid-1920s when Garvey’s fortunes were rapidly transformed and his ideas began to be treated seriously, even religiously, within a mass movement. Arriving in New York in 1916, one more clever, book-learned West Indian, leader of an obscure ‘association’ for ‘negro improvement’ with a hand full of followers, Garvey’s carefully nurtured skills as an orator abruptly caught the public attention of Harlem. Harlem was itself in a process of change beyond recognition due to ever increasing black immigration both from the Caribbean and from the U.S. South. Southerners were coming in great numbers to escape racist violence, Caribbean industrial workers were arriving too, often <i>en route</i> from the recently completed Panama Canal, while educated middle class West Indians were here establishing an income and an outlet for self-expression; all converging on what would become, for a while, the unrivalled artistic and intellectual epicentre of black social life in the Americas. Just a few years after his arrival from Jamaica, Garvey, initially by way of relentless soapboxing, had gathered tens, then hundreds of thousands of followers for his UNIA; much to the irritation of eminent black sociologist W.E.B. Dubois who already ran the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). Dubois increasingly viewed Garvey as an upstart foreign nuisance who was damaging the cause of black social progress in the U.S. Coming from the West Indies, where colour and class were understood differently, Garvey saw Dubois as a member of the brown elite, as someone whose interests were allied with the whites in power.</p>
<p>We can gain some sense of the chord Garvey struck by looking at his speeches, of which he sold phonograph recordings, along with his newspaper <i>Negro World</i>. Garvey personifies an era in which political charisma could fuse with mechanical reproduction and trigger a mass response. Listening to or reading his words now is a curious experience, because the message is a strange mix. A central motif is the ballad of the self-made man: Garvey tells his audience that they too can succeed by their own efforts, and here he uses language that Benjamin Franklin would surely have approved of. Much discourse is given over to berating his fellow blacks for using rude language and being discourteous to those around them. This is the conservative narrative of ‘improvement’ that remained at the core of the UNIA; a clear reflection of Garvey’s upbringing in colonial Jamaica where ‘discipline’ and ‘manners’ were of the essence. The second theme, closely following from the first, was that all human beings have the same capacities and potentials, people of the black race the same as people of the white: this was of course far more controversial. While in the British West Indies lip-service would have been paid to this idea so long as the preeminence of ‘things English’, the culture of Shakespeare and the <i>de facto</i> rule of white Britons was maintained, in contrast, in the U.S. of the 1920s, this kind of thought was uncontained gasoline waiting for a match. Here, white supremacy, both in politics and the human sciences, was orthodox. During the 1920s the scientific racism of the Galton society was only beginning to be challenged by figures such as Prussian Jew Franz Boas.</p>
<p>The third pillar of Garveyism was inflammatory in a different way; this was the idea of Africa for Africans ‘at home and abroad’. If Whites and Asians had their homelands, why should negroes not have theirs – Africa? The anti-imperialist entailment of this idea was of relatively little concern to white American politicians – on occasion they even supported it. In contrast, the notion of returning the African colonies to black people was deeply seditious from the perspective of the British colonial office; in response they tried as far as possible to ban Garvey’s massively successful newspaper <i>Negro World</i> from entering any of the British territories. Despite the great appeal of Garvey’s vision for blacks in the American South and in the Caribbean, the truth is that Garvey himself knew little of contemporary Africa. In part this was because he was barred from visiting the continent by the British, but his ideas were fundamentally a loud echo of a religiously framed ‘Ethiopianism’ that had existed in the West Indies since slave emancipation and before. Africa in this vision was the biblical Ethiopia from which emancipated slaves had long drawn hope and to which they might some day return – ‘Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God’ was the phrase repeatedly quoted by Garvey. This is why UNIA documents refer interchangeably to Africa and Ethiopia and why the Rastafarians would later focus their beliefs on repatriation there; no Rastaman would die before he reached the promised land of Ethiopia. When Garvey channeled thousands of UNIA dollars in arranging transportation of American blacks to one part of the actual Africa, specifically Liberia, the results were a fiasco. Likewise, when Garvey declared himself ‘provisional President of Africa’ (an idea he borrowed from de Valera, then ‘provisional President of Ireland’) this was plausible to him, as to those around him, because Africa was significantly a blank slate and a potent myth.</p>
<p>Perhaps what drew more attention to Garvey’s movement – including astonishment and ridicule – than anything else was the mass pageantry of the UNIA. UNIA members often war quasi-military garb, with sabres and epaulettes for officials and black serge uniforms for ordinary members. Garvey would parade as a Professor in a gown and mortarboard, or as a Potentate in a turban, or, most recognizably, as an imperial Governor (or perhaps as Toussaint L’ouverture) in his cocked hat and braided uniform. This carnivalesque quality of the UNIA surely had West Indian roots. Marcus Garvey was no more a university professor than the 1960s calypsonian Lord Kitchener was an English lord, but there is more to the symbolism than either a cheeky inversion of the established order or an expression of a stereotypically colourful Caribbean parade. This aspect of the phenomenon of Garveyism asks for further explanation, but to interpret it we need to know something more about the West Indian colonial culture than we can gain from this book. Within the colonial situation, while acknowledging official power with its offices, rituals and uniforms, colonial subjects developed parallel frameworks that mimicked the official hierarchy appropriating some of its symbolic forms. But again, behind that fact, we also need to recognise how, by the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the Caribbean had become a society of migrants who, wherever they arrived, reorganized their social situation in particular ways.</p>
<p><b>The Imperial Emigrants</b></p>
<p>After slave emancipation in the 1830s, anglophone West Indians had quit the sugar plantations <i>en masse</i> and many thousands began to migrate abroad, both to secure subsistence for themselves and their families, but also as an act of escape and defiance. Migrant work came in the form of massive engineering projects – first a French organized railway across the Panama isthmus in the 1850s, then the first French attempt at a trans-oceanic canal complete by the U.S. in 1914, then a sequence of mostly U.S.-led railway projects in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil and Peru. Britain and the U.S. had rival interests in the South America, but a symbiotic relationship developed in which anglophone West Indian labour became crucial for the development of U.S. capitalism in South America. A case in point is the notorious U.S. company United Fruit which is unlikely ever to have existed in the form it took had not Jamaican workers supplied labour first on Minor C. Keith’s railways, then expertise in growing and cropping his Costa Rican bananas.</p>
<p>Work on these projects was deadly; thousands of West Indians died building the railways and in the three gargantuan industrial projects in Panama. Workers were blown to pieces in dynamite explosions, buried in mudslides, contracted pneumonia from sleeping week after week in the same clothes in the rain. Official medical intervention focused on diseases, particularly malaria, that killed whites disproportionately, but against which islanders often had good resistance.<a href="http://openanthcoop.net/press/2013/01/19/negro-with-a-hat/#sdfootnote1sym"><sup>1</sup></a> West Indians looked to practitioners of folk or ‘bush’ medicine and avoided the hospitals where they feared contracting TB and other diseases. The Americans imposed strict racial segregation on labour to the extent that, in Panama, white workers were ‘gold people’ because they were paid in gold, while black workers were ‘silver people’ because they worked for Panamanian silver dollars. Their status as West Indians offered them very little; certainly not remunerative employment, of which there was barely any to be had on the islands. They could, however, claim to be ‘British Subjects’; and in principle they could appeal to the British Consul for help. The figure of the West Indian threatening to complain to the British Consul became something of a stereotype and a joke. For its part, the colonial government put aside money for the repatriation of migrants to whichever island they came from, and had established savings banks and a postal order system so that remittances could be transferred home – a lucrative source of investment for otherwise impoverished island administrations.</p>
<p>On the one hand, West Indians treated their status as ‘British Subjects’ with gravity. White visitors of the period often comment on West Indian adults and children introducing themselves ceremoniously as ‘fellow Englishmen’. On the other, they created a parallel value structure. In 1910, Sir Roger Casement was investigating atrocities in the Peruvian Amazon. West Indian workers affirmed that the British Honorary Consul in Iquitos was in the pocket of the rubber tapping company that was organizing the killing and mutilation of Amerindians there, however, they had their own ‘Barbadian Consul’ – an elderly migrant called Carlton Morris.<a href="http://openanthcoop.net/press/2013/01/19/negro-with-a-hat/#sdfootnote2sym"><sup>2</sup></a> In the same year, Jamaican workers on the banana plantations of Costa Rica struck in protest at withdrawal of wages and the use of torture by overseers. One of the leaders of the strike was Jamaican Charles Ferguson; referred to as the ‘Consul’ – he was also an obeah man or sorcerer.<a href="http://openanthcoop.net/press/2013/01/19/negro-with-a-hat/#sdfootnote3sym"><sup>3</sup></a> Others involved included Jamaican migrant J. Washington Sterling accused in Limon of practicing medicine illegally – he was almost certainly likewise a ‘medicine man’, a sorcerer. Marcus Garvey arrived in Costa Rica in 1910, aged 23, to take up a position as a banana plantation ‘time-keeper’. He was quickly recognised by the authorities as a subversive, largely because of his criticism of local arrangements to celebrate the coronation of emperor George V, and his attempts to organize more elaborate festivities without consulting the British vice consul.</p>
<p>Notably, Garvey spent some of the first years of his adult life travelling across Central America, going as far south as Ecuador to visit West Indians railway workers there; a journey of nearly two thousand miles from Jamaica by steamer. On his way he published pamphlets and newspapers for the emigrant readership. These years in his career take up just a few pages of Grant’s biography, reasonably enough because relatively little is known about his travels: nonetheless, what we do know for sure is that, not only did the Central American workers become an indispensable cornerstone of support for the UNIA, but Garvey and Garvey’s wife Amy Jacques made repeated visits to Colon and Limon with the aim of re-gathering support there. In return, as Grant shows, they received staggeringly large sums of money, usually donated spontaneously at mass public meetings.</p>
<p><b>Reconfiguration in Harlem</b></p>
<p>In Harlem, the initial support for the UNIA was solidly West Indian. As Grant points out, West Indian migrants stood out in Harlem in the 1920s: here they were nicknamed ‘monkey chasers’, ‘King George niggers’ and ‘cockneys’. They were ‘incredibly addicted to waving the Union Jack in the face of their American cousins’ recalled the Jamaican poet Claude McKay (Grant 90-91). The islanders viewed themselves as the better educated and culturally superior subjects of a global empire: in turn, the pageantry and hierarchy of the UNIA mirrored imperial performances. Elsewhere, West Indian migrants had their black consuls and doctors, here Garvey paraded as an imperial official or a Professor. There were recitals of stirring poetry and Garvey often adapted lines from Shakespeare for his speeches. UNIA membership cards offered black people a new ‘flag of empire’; an ‘Ethiopian’<a href="http://openanthcoop.net/press/2013/01/19/negro-with-a-hat/#sdfootnote4sym"><sup>4</sup></a> one with a black hierarchy regarding which those ‘at home and abroad’ could be proud, and aspire to join. If Dubois’ movement was ‘national’, Garvey’s was ‘universal’, but the incipient model for his internationalism was the diaspora of West Indian colonial migrants. When the Chaplain of the UNIA, Antiguan born George McGuire, decided to canonise Jesus Christ as ‘the Black Man of Sorrows’ he was carrying this logic in a direction that Rastafarians would elaborate more fully, but he may well have adapted the idea from a figure already popular with West Indians in Panama – the ‘Black Christ of Portobelo’ – a statue processed in Catholic pre-Lenten carnival there. Either way, as Garvey reiterated; if whites can see god ‘through the eyes of whiteness’ then ‘we are going to see him through the eyes of blackness’ (Grant, 389).</p>
<p>The race politics that pushed U.S. blacks into espousing UNIA goals is laid out much more fully in the biography. Terrorism against freed African Americans had been ongoing from slave emancipation in 1865. In the thirty years before Garvey arrived in the U.S. more than three thousand southern blacks had been lynched; many more had been burnt out of their homes and forced into exile. These conditions, the devastation caused by the boll weevil on cotton harvests, and the search for work, propelled them North. Post-war demobilization, combined with a major economic downturn, triggered rioting by whites in many U.S. cities; the rioters attacked the black population, particularly black soldiers who some claimed were spreading Bolshevik propaganda.</p>
<p>Many joined Dubois’ NAACP, but Garvey’s movement was now visible too, offering an organizational structure and even employment prospects. Grant suggests that the difference in success between Dubois and Garvey derived from the fact that Dubois was an analyst and social philosopher whereas, quite simply, Garvey was charismatic, a visionary and a stupendously talented orator. We can still catch a glimpse of this in his writing, his rhythm and style are evangelical: looking back, people who joined the movement describe something akin to religious conversion. The U.S. government quickly took it that Garvey was a potential Bolshevik threat and they appointed a fresh-faced Edgar J. Hoover to investigate. From then onwards the UNIA was subject to surveillance and covert sabotage by the Bureau of Investigation.</p>
<p>If the only authenticated recording of him to survive is anything to go by, Garvey never lost a very distinct, highly polished, Jamaican accent. He and the other West Indians were doubly outsiders, in as much as geographical mobility had become so elemental in their worldview. The American blacks who joined UNIA were often exiles too – outsiders in their own country, drawn to Garvey’s utopia out of a different set of social facts. Importantly, then, the success of the UNIA was about the similarities but also the contradiction between West Indian and U.S. viewpoints. In both sites race hierarchy was an inescapable fact, but people of the Anglophone Caribbean had lived in societies where most people were black, where colour prejudice was muted in accord with the need to preserve colonial order, and where race/colour was a complex hierarchic continuum intermixed with class standing and ideas of ‘Englishness’. In the U.S., people were either white or they were black but that stark duality made little sense in the West Indies. The coalition and fusion of these alien perspectives amidst the oratory and pageant in Harlem is surely a crucial dimension of why Garveyism was so spectacularly successful. Garvey’s movement created an extraterritorial adventure, an anti-structural vista, inside which UNIA members could hold office at every level of the social hierarchy while belonging to their own empire, Africa.</p>
<p><b>Endgame</b></p>
<p>Despite the best efforts of J. Edgar Hoover, who cut his teeth destabilising the UNIA, there never was any plausible evidence of illegal activity on Garvey’s part. Garvey was a visionary with no capacity, or seeming interest in, the day to day accountancy of his multiple enterprises. Unfortunately, few of his rapidly put together leadership showed any greater competence than him. The U.S. government eventually recognised that the best method of solving the problem of the UNIA was not by by keeping Garvey in prison but to deport him to Jamaica; which they did in 1927. For its part, the British colonial authorities were coldly efficient in closing off contact between Garvey and the UNIA’s network of supporters across the empire. He was successively banned from visiting other British colonies and kept out of Panama and Costa Rica. In Jamaica, he was as successful as ever, putting on large scale spectaculars on the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture and other themes. He also founded Jamaica’s first political party – the People’s Political Party. Legal means were used to remove him from his elected seat as a city councilor; ironically or not, the barrister who prosecuted him would later become the leader of the People’s National Party and prime minister of Jamaica, Norman Manley.</p>
<p>In the mid-1930s Garvey moved to London – one of the few big cities he could now freely visit, but support for the UNIA was already dwindling. A new generation of pan-Africanists including CLR James and George Padmore had by now come to the fore: they were socialists and for them Garvey’s quasi-imperialist pomp was a ludicrous distraction. Having lost his organizational base, Garvey struck an increasingly strange and lonely figure in London. In 1940 he died of a stroke. In his absence from the U.S, the UNIA in Harlem had engaged in a chaotic sequence of internal battles and went into decline and the international network fragmented and ultimately disappeared. Costa Rica remains the last place worldwide where a UNIA branch has continued to exist as a functioning institution.</p>
<p>What then was Garveyism? The fact that I was still asking myself this question when I had finished reading Grant’s biography was what prompted me to write this review. Certainly Garvey is still with us as a range of significant ideas and images, like the pictures of him that re-occur on the walls of house-yards in Kingston, Jamaica. Some years ago, walking through my fieldwork site in Kingston, I was pursued by a local eccentric, Upsetter; ‘My Lord, My Lord!’ he called after me, trying to catch my attention. Two youths shouted at him reproachfully as he followed this white man up the street ‘what happen to you man – you forgot Marcus [Garvey]? you forgot Malcolm [X]? There is a great deal more, though, that could be said about the contradictory worldviews which briefly turned Garveyism into a mass social movement. The sudden explosive growth of the UNIA is an instance where an submerged nexus of utopian ideas and values briefly pierce the membrane of what actually exists and acquire a reality of their own.</p>
<p><strong>Notes</strong></p>
<div><p><a href="http://openanthcoop.net/press/2013/01/19/negro-with-a-hat/#sdfootnote1anc">1</a> Chomsky, A. <i>West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company</i>. Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press.</p>
</div>
<div><p><a href="http://openanthcoop.net/press/2013/01/19/negro-with-a-hat/#sdfootnote2anc">2</a> Casement, R. 1997. <i>The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement</i>. Dublin: Anaconda Editions.</p>
</div>
<div><p><a href="http://openanthcoop.net/press/2013/01/19/negro-with-a-hat/#sdfootnote3anc">3</a> Chomsky, A. ibid.</p>
</div>
<div><p><a href="http://openanthcoop.net/press/2013/01/19/negro-with-a-hat/#sdfootnote4anc">4</a> Bourgois, P. 1989. <i>Ethnicity at Work</i>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, page 85.</p>
</div>
</div>
Review of a book on Naples by Fran Barone
tag:openanthcoop.ning.com,2012-10-19:3404290:Topic:174385
2012-10-19T14:08:51.231Z
Keith Hart
http://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/KeithHart
<p>Dines, N. 2012. <em>Tuff City: Urban Change and Contested Space in Central Naples</em>. New York: Berghahn. 344 pp.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Ah, Naples! Capital of the Italian South, historical port city and Italy’s third largest metropolis. Sprawled beneath the looming shadow of the slumbering Mount Vesuvius, it is the birthplace of the Neapolitan pizza, Capodimonte porcelain and actress Sophia Lauren. Exports aside, the name brings to mind a chaotic, but vibrant, street life. One envisages a tangle…</p>
<p>Dines, N. 2012. <em>Tuff City: Urban Change and Contested Space in Central Naples</em>. New York: Berghahn. 344 pp.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Ah, Naples! Capital of the Italian South, historical port city and Italy’s third largest metropolis. Sprawled beneath the looming shadow of the slumbering Mount Vesuvius, it is the birthplace of the Neapolitan pizza, Capodimonte porcelain and actress Sophia Lauren. Exports aside, the name brings to mind a chaotic, but vibrant, street life. One envisages a tangle of narrow, cobbled streets hung with linens and densely packed with tourists and locals; a loud hum of activity from animated, gesturing Neapolitans; and the disorienting buzz of Vespas dodging and darting between impressive ancient piazzas. In the tourist literature, from guidebooks to newspaper editorials, foreigners love to wax poetic about Naples.</p>
<p></p>
<p><a href="http://openanthcoop.net/press/2012/10/19/tuff-city/" target="_blank">Continue reading</a></p>
NEW BOOK REVIEW: In Rousseau's footsteps: David Graeber and the anthropology of unequal society by Keith Hart
tag:openanthcoop.ning.com,2012-07-08:3404290:Topic:168129
2012-07-08T14:30:34.849Z
Stacy A A Hope
http://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/StacyAAHope
<p>Dear Book Reviews Members,</p>
<p></p>
<p>Professor Keith Hart has recently written a review of David Graeber's <em>Debt: The first 5,000 years</em> (Melville House, New York, 2011, 534 pages) in a Review entitled "In Rousseau's footsteps: David Graeber and the anthropology of unequal society," which can be accessed <a href="http://openanthcoop.ning.com/profiles/blogs/in-rousseau-s-footsteps-david-graeber-and-the-anthropology-of-une" target="_self">HERE.</a></p>
<p></p>
<p>Professor Hart…</p>
<p>Dear Book Reviews Members,</p>
<p></p>
<p>Professor Keith Hart has recently written a review of David Graeber's <em>Debt: The first 5,000 years</em> (Melville House, New York, 2011, 534 pages) in a Review entitled "In Rousseau's footsteps: David Graeber and the anthropology of unequal society," which can be accessed <a href="http://openanthcoop.ning.com/profiles/blogs/in-rousseau-s-footsteps-david-graeber-and-the-anthropology-of-une" target="_self">HERE.</a></p>
<p></p>
<p>Professor Hart places Graeber's <em>Debt</em> within the context of what he calls "the anthropology of unequal society," within the context of the human economy. His review is a provocative one, which I highly recommend our members to sign explore and engage.</p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p>I look forward to your thoughts on Professor Hart's OAC blog.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Book Reviews Editor</p>
NEW TITLES AVAILABLE FROM BERG PUBLISHERS
tag:openanthcoop.ning.com,2012-02-16:3404290:Topic:153304
2012-02-16T14:03:53.715Z
Stacy A A Hope
http://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/StacyAAHope
<p>Those of you interested in writing a review of one of Berg's publications, please send me a private message or email me at saah@st-andrews.ac.uk with the title, a writing sample and your address.</p>
<p></p>
<p>For a list of Berg Publications please click <a href="http://www.bergpublishers.com/Categories/ant/tabid/598/Default.aspx" target="_blank">HERE</a>.</p>
<p>Those of you interested in writing a review of one of Berg's publications, please send me a private message or email me at saah@st-andrews.ac.uk with the title, a writing sample and your address.</p>
<p></p>
<p>For a list of Berg Publications please click <a href="http://www.bergpublishers.com/Categories/ant/tabid/598/Default.aspx" target="_blank">HERE</a>.</p>
BOOK REVIEW: The Impossibility of Self: an essay on the Hmong Diaspora by Nicholas Tapp
tag:openanthcoop.ning.com,2012-01-17:3404290:Topic:150398
2012-01-17T16:34:42.803Z
Stacy A A Hope
http://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/StacyAAHope
<p><b><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3037734905?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" height="214" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3037734905?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="149"></img></a></b></p>
<p><span class="font-size-6"><b><br></br></b></span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-6"><b>BOOK REVIEW</b></span></p>
<p><b>The Impossibility of the Self: An Essay on the Hmong Diaspora</b></p>
<p><b><br></br></b></p>
<p><b><br></br></b></p>
<p><b><br></br></b></p>
<p><b><br></br></b></p>
<p><b>TAPP, N</b><b>.</b> 2010.…</p>
<p><b><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3037734905?profile=original"><img width="105" class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3037734905?profile=RESIZE_180x180" height="214" width="149"/></a></b></p>
<p><span class="font-size-6"><b><br/></b></span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-6"><b>BOOK REVIEW</b></span></p>
<p><b>The Impossibility of the Self: An Essay on the Hmong Diaspora</b></p>
<p><b><br/></b></p>
<p><b><br/></b></p>
<p><b><br/></b></p>
<p><b><br/></b></p>
<p><b>TAPP, N</b><b>.</b> 2010. <i><a href="http://www.lit-verlag.de/isbn/3-643-10258-4" target="_blank">The Impossibility of Self: an essay on the Hmong Diaspora</a>.</i> Lit Verlag: Munster, 320pp. €29.90</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The book, “The Impossibility of Self: an Essay on the Hmong Diaspora,” is a well thought out book which attempts to place the Hmong self into an anthropological context. The book is separated into four parts. The first part examines theories and approaches relating to the ‘self’. The second part of the book familiarizes the reader with the Hmong. The third part of the book discusses the changes that relate to Hmong identity and sociality. Finally, in the fourth section, there is an examination of the Miao (the Chinese Hmong) and a critical evaluation of the theories which explore the concept of the self. Tapp spends much time on well-known and sometimes not so well-known works relating to the subject of the self. The book examines the ‘self’ from the point of view that there is a dichotomy of the pre-modern, or production, self and the modern/postmodern, or consumption, self and discusses the different disciplines which have reflected upon the self. The premise of the book is primarily based on the work of D. Bell (1978) and D. Miller (1987; 1993). Bell’s perception of the self is a mirror of the ‘authentic’ while Miller’ perception of the self is that of a decontextualized self. The weakness of the book’s argument is that both Miller and Bell appear to perceive the world from a primarily Western perspective which troubled me throughout the text. However, putting that aside for the moment, let’s examine the text and the positive additions it makes towards Hmong studies and to the greater anthropological discipline.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>In the first part of the text, the book examines both anthropological and non-anthropological approaches to the self. Tapp considers how we as practitioners have viewed the self, either from a medieval European model, a classical Unitarian model, a romantic model or as a decontextualized modern, post-modern model.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Part two examines the social-historical context within which the Hmong are situated. Tapp examines how the Hmong’s past, and those voices which have shaped our present-day impressions of them, affected both Hmong perceptions of themselves and how Hmong specialists’ view them. He suggests that the writers of the past had particular frames of reference and objectives that in turn either mystified the Hmong or made assumptions about them. Priest, missionaries, soldiers and ethnographers had particular preconceived thoughts about who and what the Hmong were. Their views are sometimes romanticised images of the Hmong, or sometimes positive or negative, but all have an accumulative effect on the present Hmong and /or others’ opinions<a href="#_edn1" title="">[i]</a> about them. Tapp’s main point is that history and historic writings are perceived through the lens of the present<a href="#_edn2" title="">[ii]</a>. As a result when one reads about the Hmong or any group, for that matter, the writers’ objectives in the past should be considered. Tapp’s analysis deconstructs common perceived notions of who the Hmong were understood to be.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>In the latter chapters of part two Tapp examines the Hmong’s multiplicity of self, as he terms it. He proposes a different conception of ‘self’, which is multiple and contested through the examination of shamanism and funeral rituals contrasting them with globalising trends. Tapp argues that the Hmong have a new selfhood that is fragmented, modernist and textualized, creating a unified self. In addition, new modes of communication, such as mobile phones and internet/email, reinforce connections with distant, far off places and family, to create a borderless Hmong ‘national’ community. This perception of a national identity appears seemingly close to Anderson’s (1984) construction of “imagined communities”<a href="#_edn3" title="">[iii]</a>. However, Tapp discusses the Hmong’s national identity as attached to a virtual place, in other words detached.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The third part of the book explores the Hmong as transnationals, as Tapp delves further into their understandings of themselves in the world. Earlier in the text he argues that the Hmong have been part of a globalized world at least since the time of colonialism. However, contemporary Hmong have a vision of themselves with a virtual homeland (since they spread throughout Southern China and Southeast Asia and have had a very long history of being up-rooted). They see themselves tied to a mythical ancestral Chinese homeland, but envisage Laos or Thailand as homelands as well. This portion of the book examines how the Hmong attach themselves to places and formulate relationships either through marriage between transnationals who may have grown up on different parts of the globe. These transnational Hmong use the medium of the internet to reconnect or by visiting places such as China or Thailand to create a common sense of kinship, nationalism, and nostalgia.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Part four of Tapp’s book initially examines the Chinese Hmong, or Miao. Tapp first explores the concept of romanticism in China, which gauges the metaphors of the ethnic other in China. However, historically, romanticism may arguably be based on a European or Western philosophical tradition and, therefore, may be a bit of a problematic fit. Nevertheless, Tapp endeavours to situate Chinese ideologies into a romantic mould. He concludes that aspects of romanticism did not exist before the 19<sup>th</sup> and 20<sup>th</sup> Century in China. He then, discusses the Miao from a contemporary Chinese perspective. The Chinese perceive the Miao as a romantic primordial Chinese. They are seen by the Chinese as backward and exotic country bumpkins, which has justified national public discourse to deny their participation in the modernisation project. Tapp suggests there is a valorisation/denigration of ethnic minorities at the same time. As a result, he situates Chinese Hmong as an ethnic minority who have a public Chinese self and private Miao self<a href="#_edn4" title="">[iv]</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>In the second half of part four, Tapp challenges the theories regarding the modern self and then removes the Hmong from its contradictory labyrinth. Tapp argues that the ‘self’ defines significance and meaning and that spirituality and ritual secure the meaning of the self. Thus, the Hmong shaman reconstitutes the self in a post-modern world; in a post-modern world, where the self has become referenceless. In contrast, the Self anchored in ritual and religious belief and is the primary foundation of identity for the Hmong where ever they may find themselves in space or time.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>In conclusion, Tapp’s attempt at examining the self from an anthropological perspective is daring. However, the most troubling part of the book was the theoretical arguments he decided to use and ignore. Tapp has decided to avoid Eastern perceptions of the self. The Hmong self should be considered from this Eastern philosophical milieu within which they exist. The Hmong, even with religious change and transnational migration, have been able to maintain non-western perspectives as was observed and illustrated by (<a href="#_ENREF_1" title="Fadiman, 1997 #2">Fadiman 1997</a>). Tapp, himself, in his earlier work mentions that the Hmong have many shared cosmological aspects with Chinese cosmology such as how they divide the world into a sky world, a living world and underworld (<a href="#_ENREF_2" title="Tapp, 1989 #37">Tapp 1989</a>). This Chinese cosmological aspect and its relationship to the Hmong self has not been investigated in his book. However, if it had, it might suggest that Hmong perceptions of self could be understood very differently and, to some degree, have common cultural representations of the self with those of Chinese philosophical constructions. He does mention Eastern ideas of self, but merely in passing. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>In the conclusion of this book Tapp states that Hmong spirituality and “ritual is the hypostasis which reinserts the self into a timeless and communal narrative of history” (p274). It has been argued by many in Hmong studies that the Chinese/Hmong religious cosmologies and spirituality share some similar foundations. He does suggest that the Chinese self was different and not based in romanticism, but it manifests questions about what the Hmong and Chinese selves have in common, if anything. However, if this omission is overlooked, Tapp makes salient points that might be taken into consideration when doing fieldwork or when (re)examining texts with regards to the Hmong. The text is a good overview of the work done in Hmong studies and although the premise about the ‘self’ is not fully explored, it presents a good place from which to begin thinking about the Hmong self.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Dr. Simeon S. Magliveras, <i>The American College of Greece, Deree College & Nanyang Technical University, Singapore<br/></i></p>
<p> </p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p>_________________________________</p>
<p>REFERENCES</p>
<p> </p>
<p align="left">Anderson, B. (1983). <u>Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism</u>. London, Verso.</p>
<p align="left"> </p>
<p align="left">Bell, D. 1978 <u>The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism</u>. Basic Books. New York</p>
<p align="left"> </p>
<p align="left">Fadiman, A. (1997). <u>The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures</u>. New York, Farrar, Staus and Giroux.</p>
<p align="left"> </p>
<p align="left">Frentress, J. and. C. Wickham (1992). <u>Social Memory</u>. Oxford, Blackwell</p>
<p align="left"> </p>
<p align="left">Herzfeld, M. (1997). <u>Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation - state</u>. New</p>
<p>York, Routlege.</p>
<p> </p>
<p align="left">Hirsch, E. and C. Stewart, (2005). "Introduction: Ethnographies of Historicity."</p>
<p><u>History and Anthropology</u> 16(3): 261-274.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Jenkins, R. (2008). <u>Rethinking Ethnicity: Arguments and Exploration</u>. London, Sage Pub. Ltd.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Miller, D. 1987;1993 <u>Material Culture and Mass Consumption</u>. Basil Black-well, Oxford.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Tapp, N. (1989). "Hmong Religion." <u>Asian Folklore Studies</u> <b>48</b>(1): 59-94.</p>
<p> </p>
<div><br clear="all"/><hr size="1" width="33%" align="left"/><div><p><a href="#_ednref1" title="">[i]</a> Jenkins 2008 discusses how ethnic groups envisage themselves suggesting that how a dominant groups categorise a subordinate group, positively or negatively, effects a subordinate groups perceptions of themselves.</p>
</div>
<div><p><a href="#_ednref2" title="">[ii]</a> Frentress and Wickham (1992) and Hirsch and Steward (2005) suggest that memory and history respectively are remembered, viewed, and understood, in the context of the present. Frentress and Wickham also suggest that those things which are not understood are then easily forgotten.</p>
</div>
<div><p><a href="#_ednref3" title="">[iii]</a> Anderson (1983) suggests that the national identity began with print capitalism. Tapp infers the Hmong boundless ‘national’ identities may be a function of electronic media in the same way.</p>
</div>
<div><p><a href="#_ednref4" title="">[iv]</a> Tapp’s understanding about concealment resembles Herzfeld’s (1997) concept of <i>cultural intimacy,</i> where public personae’s are expressed while at the same time private personas are cherished and shared with like individuals who share the same representations of the other. Herzfeld calls this type of behaviour, <i>disemia. He</i> used the example of the Greeks Hellenistic public personae and their private flawed Byzantine/ Romios self which contemporary Greeks would share with among themselves in private.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
</div>
</div>
COMMUNITY ART: NEW TITLE AVAILABLE
tag:openanthcoop.ning.com,2011-09-26:3404290:Topic:136413
2011-09-26T06:43:21.545Z
Stacy A A Hope
http://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/StacyAAHope
<a href="http://www.bergpublishers.com/?tabid=15057" target="_blank">Community Art</a> focuses on the forty year history of Free Form Arts Trust, an arts group that played a major part in the 1970s struggle to carve out a space for community arts in Britain. Exploring key issues for the anthropology of art and art theory, this fascinating text examines key themes and issues relevant to the study of art and anthropology today.<br></br> Kate Crehan, City University of New York.<br></br> (Full…
<a href="http://www.bergpublishers.com/?tabid=15057" target="_blank">Community Art</a> focuses on the forty year history of Free Form Arts Trust, an arts group that played a major part in the 1970s struggle to carve out a space for community arts in Britain. Exploring key issues for the anthropology of art and art theory, this fascinating text examines key themes and issues relevant to the study of art and anthropology today.<br/> Kate Crehan, City University of New York.<br/> (Full description and table of contents available <a href="http://www.bergpublishers.com/?tabid=15057" target="_blank">here</a>)<br/> <br/> <br/>
BOOK REVIEWS TO RECOMMENCE IN OCTOBER
tag:openanthcoop.ning.com,2011-09-15:3404290:Topic:134747
2011-09-15T11:51:28.711Z
Stacy A A Hope
http://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/StacyAAHope
BOOK REVIEW GROUP MEMBERS: Please expect new reviews as of October. I also welcome those interested in reviewing any publications, listed or not.
BOOK REVIEW GROUP MEMBERS: Please expect new reviews as of October. I also welcome those interested in reviewing any publications, listed or not.
BOOK REVIEW: Organizational Ethnography by D. Yanow et al.
tag:openanthcoop.ning.com,2011-06-25:3404290:Topic:118047
2011-06-25T11:25:17.322Z
Stacy A A Hope
http://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/StacyAAHope
<p><strong><span class="font-size-5">BOOK REVIEW</span></strong></p>
<p><strong>ORGANIZATIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY: Studying The Complexities of</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3037728840?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3037728840?profile=original" width="150"></img></a></p>
<p><strong>Everyday Li</strong><strong>fe</strong> </p>
<p><strong><br></br></strong></p>
<p><b>YBEMA, S., YANOW, D., WELS, H., & F. KAMSTEEG (Eds.).</b> 2009.…</p>
<p><strong><span class="font-size-5">BOOK REVIEW</span></strong></p>
<p><strong>ORGANIZATIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY: Studying The Complexities of</strong></p>
<p><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3037728840?profile=original"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3037728840?profile=original" width="150"/></a></p>
<p><strong>Everyday Li</strong><strong>fe</strong> </p>
<p><strong><br/></strong></p>
<p><b>YBEMA, S., YANOW, D., WELS, H., & F. KAMSTEEG (Eds.).</b> 2009. <i><a target="_blank" href="http://www.uk.sagepub.com/books/Book232255">Organizational Ethnography: Studying the Complexities of Everyday Life.</a></i> Sage Publications Ltd.</p>
<p>vii + 287 pages.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Click <a href="http://openanthcoop.net/press/2011/06/27/organizational-ethnography/" target="_blank">here</a> for PDF and other versions.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Organizations appear bounded in so far as they are considered in terms of rigid structures, fixed hierarchies, and specifically designated spaces. Should they, however, be thought of anthropologically, the substance of everyday life—the contingency of human relations, creativity and failure, humor and irony, fear and desire, etc.—begin to manifest themselves inside organizations, forcing rigid divisions and bounded structures beyond convention, and away from such simple dichotomies as inside/outside, high/low, manager/worker, etc.</p>
<p> A venture by a group of scholars from Vrije University, Amsterdam, this edited volume on “organizational ethnography” lives up to what it says it is: an introduction to an alternative method of conducting organizational studies through the anthropological methodology, ethnography. The volume brings together a wide-ranging combination of contributors: hands-on professionals and managers, consultants, and academic scholars of anthropology, sociology, public policy, and business. Despite the differences in the authors' backgrounds and styles of presentation, each of the twelve essays here appear to echo and resonate with one another in their central quest as to what an ethnography of organizations look like. Grouped into three thematic parts, the essays also touch upon adjacent issues relating to the writing and doing of ethnography. These thematic areas are the challenges and limitations of ethnographic method, power and representation, and ethics and responsibility.</p>
<p> In their introduction to the book, the editors give a brief overview of the field of organizational studies, and explain the role this volume might play as a “method text” that sets apart ethnography as “constructivist-interpretative perspective” (9) from other positivist approaches common to the organizational studies field. The introductory character of the book suggests a widely targeted audience and interdisciplinary scope. Indeed, the editors promise the book to those both new and experienced in the field, “ranging from advanced undergraduate and graduate students to organizational scholars, researchers, consultants, and analysts”(15). Whether due to its mostly dry prose, numerous typologies, or its “how to” style of representation, this volume, with the exception of a few of the essays, resembles a neatly assembled textbook where all divisions are settled and all gaps reconciled. With that in mind, for what textbooks are worth as introductory tools, I would definitely recommend it as a good classroom guide to ethnographic method. You will find a few challenging intellectual discussions, but you will come upon a variety of interesting ethnographic experiences from the field. And the latter is one of the worthwhile features of the volume. In addition, the volume might serve as an invaluable source of literature in the sphere of organizational ethnography, as it provides extensive references throughout, and concludes with a detailed annotated bibliography.</p>
<p> Whatever innovation this volume might offer to the field of organizational studies, this review specifically focuses on how the authors have adopted ethnography as a research method; what intellectual issues, gaps and anxieties they raise in its regard, including those around trust, truth, authenticity, representation, norms and standards, etc; and finally, how they attempt to reconcile them.</p>
<p> In what follows, I will briefly comment on each of the contributions (not in strict order of appearance in the volume).</p>
<p> Anthropologist Kees van der Waal starts off the first part of the book by depicting ethnography as but a “generic research approach” (24). The story of his own professional conversion from an ‘innocent’ South African ethnologist to a critical organizational ethnographer serves to situate his writing, which defends the importance of theory for the ethnographic method. In doing so, he proceeds to lay out a foundational scheme of steps and list of tentative questions – including issues of access and ethics – to arm oneself upon embarking on the ethnographic project. It is true that if one has never done or read ethnography of any kind (which is arguably difficult to avoid for an anthropologist), this inventory should prove to be useful.</p>
<p> Along the way, my experience of this text was that of reading a practical manual about how to write a grant, or better yet an IRB proposal, or do research: “make realistic goals,” “think of a back-up plan,” “what is your methodology?” “how are you going to store data?” and “how to attend to asymmetrical relations of power in the field?” Separate advice given, which might serve some well, include caution against tying oneself to “obligations to obtain approval of one’s work in order to publish it,” while still offering the “draft publication for comment” (28). One the whole, the ‘manual’ attempted to explain how to ward oneself off a strong feeling of anxiety, when in the field and prior. But in doing so, it failed to point out that however uncomfortable, this anxiety is not a curse against which one needs spells and safety cushions; anxiety is what constitutes the ethnographic moment (See Devereux 1967).</p>
<p> The essay jointly authored by Michael Humphreys, a Professor of Organizational Studies, and Tony Watson, Professor of Organizational Behavior, both from Nottingham University Business School, targets mostly issues related to post-field research, and focuses on the writing-up stage of the ethnographic enterprise. They make, what I find to be, a curious distinction between “writing-up ethnographic research” and “writing ethnography.” This seemed rather limiting and exclusive, but simultaneously a useful heuristic tool on ethnographic styles and various audiences. Unfortunately, rigid exclusions follow throughout, and the authors, among others in the volume, argue for a narrow definition of ethnography that includes “a huge range from doctoral theses converted into extended monographs to short stories, plays and poems” (41).</p>
<p> Putting these differentiations aside, Humphreys and Watson further focus on the topic of ethnographic genres, and create a four-fold typology of ethnographic writing distributed across a “spectrum of truth” (53). Here, truth or validity becomes the measuring rod for the division, which is staged in correlative terms to “what really happened.” As such, they start with what they assume to be straightforward, “plain ethnography,” proceeding to a “semi-fictionalized” description, and conclude with a “fully fictionalized account” (43). The article is more than worthwhile, due to the extensive ethnographic examples given to illustrate the <br/> “truth spectrum.” At the same time, fixation on truth as a measure of validity and success, painfully reflects utopian dimensions of holism, and complements Euro-American academic standards of a ‘good’ scientific research and expectations thereof.</p>
<p> The following article by two Political Science scholars, Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow, resonates with Humphrey and Watson’s piece in its search for what it calls “trustworthy texts.” But if the latter concerns itself with the divisions between the writing and experience, the former focuses on the gap between writing a text and reader/reviewer expectations. In doing so, it sets up a six-tier evaluative criteria of trustworthiness comprised of “specific textual elements” based on the “standards and expectations” of the interpretative “Chicago School-style field research” (57). These, argue Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, aid ethnographers in their attempt to stage readers’ perception of the “overall trustworthiness of the research narrative” (58). As such, the authors claim that trustworthiness suggests a more “appropriate criterion than ‘validity’ […] and the like, as these are rooted firmly in a positivist scientific methodology that rests on the presumption of a real social work[...]” (62). Notably, the focus on trustworthiness in devising methodologies of research can be rendered as an indirect critique of Humphrey and Watson’s essay. This attempt to escape a correlation between the “truth” and representation is laudatory, but it too assumes the singularity of human experience and perception, and hence proceeds to devise strategies and create typologies for “proper” research design. The authors, however, do warn against taking their suggestions in a “checklist fashion,” but rather as a “starting point” of reflection about the “quality of a particular study” (63).</p>
<p> Likewise, Simon Down and Michael Hughes echo the concerns of the previous authors in relation to the authenticity of an account, and focus on the strategies of doing and writing organizational ethnography. Simon Down, a lecturer/researcher, and Michael Hughes, a worker/manager at a coke-making steel plant, jointly co-author an ethnographic account of an “experience of going through a corporate cultural change programme” (84). They do so by positing a concern about representation within the framework of power and ethics of speaking and writing, and attend to the issues of positionality, power, identity and reflexivity inherent to the question of representation á la Foucault and Spivak (1988). In doing so, they largely avoid the question of whether ethnographic subjects can speak for themselves. Accordingly, they frame ethnography in terms of autobiography, where both the researcher and the researched become the objects of study and reflection. In this piece, complexity of emotional engagement with human subjects – whether in the organizational, or research settings, or both – surfaces in the narrative. The authors contend that their co-produced story portrays “organizational life as it is lived.” As such, it does not make claims regarding authenticity of representation, but allows to “avoid the moral and emotional neutrality that social science so confidently claims, so often” (96).</p>
<p> The second and third sections of the book interrogate the classic schizophrenic division in anthropology between self and other, inside and outside, and familiarity and strangeness. They also gear towards questions that relate to ethics and perceived limitations, pertinent to doing ethnography at home.</p>
<p> In their essay, Sierk Ybema and Frans Kamsteeg make a case for a “disengaged engaged” approach to organizational ethnography. They argue that ‘going native’ is counterbalanced by the theoretical or intersubjective “distancing,” where the latter is seen as a necessary prerequisite for doing ethnography. If a researcher is already “native” and “at home,” they ask (103), “How do we step back?” Here, the authors argue for cultivating ethnomethodological strategies of surprise and play, and holding onto the mystery and irrationality – such as “breaching intimate relations” with the researched, or movement between scales of focus and research sites – all in order to break with “taken-for-granted understandings” (110). Or perhaps, suggest the authors, ethnographers should stop trying to take themselves so seriously and speak like experts (113). Instead, they argue they should adopt the role of an idiot, or “organizational fool” (Kets de Vries 1990).</p>
<p> Similarly, Davide Nicolini suggests that it is the strategy of improvisation and taking chances that allows for an ethnographic “processual ontology” approach. This type of ethnographic research stands out in the edited volume, as it focuses not on individuals, but rather takes as its main object of study their mundane practice and activity. Such a strategy of following social practice also “partially coincides with multi-sited ethnography,” as it implies shifts in time and space (120). Nicolini illustrates this research method with a four year-long ethnographic research project that he conducted on telemonitoring serious chronic heart failure patients at home. In the process, he studies things and people indirectly, from the side – focusing not on the objects and subjects as such, but rather on the “interactional order” between humans and non-humans (125), on bodies and artifacts and their trajectories, on learning curves of novices and accomplishments of apprentices, “texture of dependencies and references” (128), “following the intermediaries” resources and conditions necessary for practice (130), and “comparing sites of the same practice” (131). As such, the author claims to proceed “rhizomatically,” following connections between things extending in time and space. Notably, such a rhizomatic shifting argues ethnographically against an idea that there is some deeper knowledge underneath, and deep immersion into the field will eventually lead to it. In fact, “zooming in” does not warrant either a deeper understanding or better grasp of organizational practices. Instead, concludes Nicolini, it is attention to the “fragmented, distributed, and fast moving reality” of virtual and multi-layered organizations that yields increased understanding thereof (136).</p>
<p> Contrary to Nicolini, Brian Moeran, an anthropologist with a focus on Business Studies, argues for a complete immersion in the field. Furthermore, he advocates for the “observant participation” where the ethnographer puts participation ahead of observation. Drawing on his own experience in a Japanese advertising agency, he suggests a business model of ethnography that insists on taking advantage of strategic connections to gain access into an organization (141). In doing so, he advises how to properly “make a pitch,” and cautions against taking all what people say as truths. In his account, Moeran also distinguishes observant participation from “traditional” participant observation, critiquing the latter for its limiting focus on holism, inactive approach, and restrictions that it imposes on a researcher in terms of their ability to be fully “incorporated” as a community member (139). This, I argue, results from an overly narrow definition of participant observation and understanding of what it has to offer to the ethnography of organizations.</p>
<p> Chris Sykes and Lesley Treleaven largely echo already raised concerns in relation to organizational ethnography as a method. They suggest a hybrid method theoretically akin to Brian Moeran’s “participant observer” in focusing on “useful” action, also paralleling the co-authored account by Simon Down and Michael Hughes in co-construction of knowledge.</p>
<p> Likewise, Mats Alvesson in his own piece takes issue with both interview-based qualitative research and ethnography, arguing that both are “time consuming,” politically-sensitive, “uneconomical,” and focus too much attention on the “empirical material” at the cost of researcher’s reflexivity and theoretical analysis (159). Instead, he suggests a “new” method of “at-home ethnography,” which, according to Alvesson, is “a study and text in which the researcher-author describes a cultural setting to which s/he has a ‘natural access’ and in which s/he is an active participant” (159). In addition, he argues such an at-home ethnography will not be constrained by staged methodologies and procedures or a-priori chosen research questions, and would be quite convenient in terms of exercise and economical in expense (163). Alvesson’s concerns largely resonate with the earlier discussed account by Sierk Ybema and Frans Kamsteeg, who attempt to break away from the constraint of familiarity, by creating critical distance through irony and the cultivation of surprise as it lends itself to reflexivity and recursiveness.</p>
<p> The final piece of the volume, co-authored by Halleh Ghorashi and Harry Wels, resonates well with the concerns of reflexivity. As such it focuses on what seems to be an oxymoron, the “complicity of engaged research.” The authors contend that we, researchers and our informants, are always already embedded in disciplinary power and structures of violence, and hence without reflexivity and critical awareness easily slip into the normalized modes of moral and political legitimacy. The authors give a liberally utopian and vague answer: to take responsibility by engaging with “all players in the configuration of power” (231), regardless of prior divisions and allocated roles, thus “contributing to a more just world” (247).</p>
<p> Similarly, Gary Alan Fine and David Shulman concern themselves with ethical issues that inevitably accompany any human interaction, including that in organizations. More specifically, they claim that any organizational fieldworker is guilty of “lies” s/he inevitably tells before, in and after the field. These lies ordinarily are hidden behind numerous representational techniques and strategies. “Such antiseptic accounts,” argue the authors with an air of moral righteousness, “cost readers and practitioners, offering an incomplete account of the practical ethical dilemmas” (177). Their piece, however, suggests two virtuous contributions. One the one hand, the authors lay bare the constraints and limitations that most of the ethnographers face due to their conditions of research, the demands of academic standards, IRB requirements, and discursive norms (178), thus dispelling the myth of a liberally “virtuous” ethnographer. On the other hand, it also combats an illusion of giving neat and holistic ethnographic accounts. Instead, the authors argue, “each ethnography tells a tale of multiple sites – the field site and the sites of the interventions of colleagues, mentors, reviewers and publishers.” And of course ethnographers tell lies, conclude the authors, “but through lying we also present truths about organizations that escape those who are not so bold” (192).</p>
<p> Finally, Nic Beech, Paul Hibbert, Robert MacIntosh and Peter McInnes support the conclusions of Fine and Shulman, and address the question of friendship relations in field research and beyond. Illustrated with extensive ethnographic cases, the authors uphold the fact that ethical concerns always arise as researchers are embedded in a multiples locations and relations at once. However, these concerns are rather mundane in the course of social life, so why one needs to reify these in the context of a fieldwork. Friendships do get breached and compromised, but they are also sustained and cherished.</p>
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<p> As a matter of conclusion, I wonder what the central preoccupations of the authors of the book – representation, truth, trustworthiness, authenticity, lying, reception, academic standards, and criteria of measurement – are symptomatic of? These issues are a concern for anthropologists as well, especially since the 1980s turn of “writing culture.” But in this case, I suspect, the anxiety has to do with the fact that organizational studies, a discipline with its own established methodologies and canons of legitimacy, has adopted a methodology foreign to it, especially the one that empirically interrogates the truth of received wisdom. Instead of attempting to suture them, they would do well to explore and exploit the gaps that the ethnographic method creates and makes visible in order to question received knowledge and truths, for this is very value and virtue of ethnography. Empiricism gives the researcher something to reflect upon. To be open to truth means questioning received ones. That is good scientific method.</p>
<p> In summary, the volume offers a fine introduction to interdisciplinary research, and makes a considerable effort to bridge anthropology and organizational studies, or rather enriching and extending the latter by borrowing the ethnographic method from the former. As such, it largely succeeds, and additionally gathers many useful references pertinent to both. At the same time, a general genre of the organizational ethnography situated largely in interpretative-constructivist approach that this book participates in, however innovative to the field of organizational studies is not to most anthropologists. Despite this, the book is of tremendous value precisely because of its reformulation of classic and perennial issues and problems of ethnography in a new setting, suggesting fertile ground for discussions in and outside the ivory tower. This is more than enough reason to assign the book for both undergraduate and graduate courses.</p>
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<p>Viktoryia Kalesnikava, <i>University of Virginia</i></p>
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