New York bans large soft-drinks, but Concord knows where the true evil hides...In a new step toward understanding water , its availability, and its overall commoditization the town of Concord, Massachusetts made a legal move banning water...in the bottle.The precedent setting case came after a three-year campaign, called Ban the Bottle, comprising of local activists wanting to reduce fossil fuel use and waste. One activist, Jean Hill told the New York times in a 2010 interview, "The bottled water companies are draining our aquifers and selling it back to us." She declared, “I’m going to work until I drop on this."She sounds like the kind of activist that gets things done.Ban the Bottles website list facts making citizens aware of the magnitude of waste and fossil fuel needed to make plastic bottles. Their site states "It takes 17 million barrels of oil per year to make all the plastic water bottles used in the U.S. alone. That's enough oil to fuel 1.3 million cars for a year." Their website also states: "In 2007, Americans consumed over 50 billion single serve bottles of water. With a recycling rate of only 23%, over 38 billion bottles end up in landfills."The law is very specific in its target. the bylaw states,"It shall be unlawful to sell non-sparkling, unflavored drinking water in single-serving polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles of 1 liter (34 ounces) or less in the Town of Concord on or after January 1, 2013." There is an exemption for an "emergency adversely affecting the availability and/or quality of drinking water to Concord residents."So if the public water supply dries up in the event of a natural disaster then bottled water comes to the rescue.The town itself is not unified in this decision. The campaigning voice of a select group has caused a blanket effect over the entire populace. Sadly, despite the great waste, the single-serving bottles of water accounted for a great amount of revenue among the local convenience stores and vending machines. Other issues brought up by those unhappy with the law emphasis that towns are near enough together that anyone can go to a neighboring town and purchase what they want. As well stores are still able to offer large plastic bottles of water.In all of the three year campaigning, legislative time spent on drafting a law, and further time spent checking and enforcing the laws (first offense is a warning, second offense is a $25 fine, any further offenses), no one in Concord appears to have thought of the next step.The law itself focuses on a problem. In this regard it is easy to attack an evil. Why has no one considered the reason behind the flagrant rise in plastic bottles? Where is the alternative solution?The city of Concord should consider the cultural shift that has taken place over the last 20 years. What at one time was a voiced disclaimer of "who would ever pay for water in a bottle?", has grown to a community unwilling to trust tap water and further unable to gain access to public water due to the disappearance of water fountains. The main reason bottled water increased in popularity. Many times I have been to a city park where the water fountains sat broken and a hot dog vendor sold bottles of water. You can not take away what appears to be a need without offering a solution.I guess it really is easier to destroy than it is to create. Website for : Ban the Bottle
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The Anthropology of Water: Illegal Water
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AAA blog: 2013 AAA Annual Meeting Call For Papers – Executive Session Deadline Approaching
The deadline for Executive Session proposals of the 2013 AAA Annual Meeting is this Wednesday, February 6. Visit the Meetings page for complete details and to submit your proposal. Click here for details and submission requirements. All other session submissions will begin on Friday, February 15. The 112th AAA Annual Meeting will be held November [...]
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Erkan in the Army now...: Kemal İlter is our guest….
Director of Turkish Presidency
‘s Corporate Communication Department, Kemal Ilter, is a guest of our Bilgi Public Relations and Corporate Communicatons MA Programmmm
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The Immanent Frame: Recasting an agenda for peace
The International Criminal Court (ICC) celebrated its ten-year anniversary last summer. During its first decade of life, both the shadow and the actuality of international justice in the form of investigation, trial, and judgment have become a central feature of many conflicts, ongoing and concluded. Nearly a decade before the ICC opened its doors, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission attracted enormous global attention, and the moral sanction against racial violence at its core resonated across the globe. And yet, the concept of reconciliation that defined the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has not occupied the same coveted (if also contested) international space that international justice—through trials—does today. If anything, advocates of justice and trials have subsumed reconciliation and truth seeking into a package of justice that has trials at its core. In his new book, Just and Unjust Peace, Daniel Philpott forces us to rethink this ordering. Political reconciliation is at the center of Philpott’s conception of justice. The ethic of reconciliation is, in Philpott’s words, “a concept of justice that aims to restore victims, perpetrators, citizens, and the governments of states that have been involved in political injustices to a condition of right relationship within a political order or between political orders—a condition characterized by human rights, democracy, the rule of law, respect for international law; by widespread recognition of the legitimacy of these values; and by the virtues that accompany these values.” The six practices that Philpott identifies as core to reconciliation (building socially just institutions, acknowledgments, reparations, punishment, apology, and forgiveness) encompass much that is central to liberal peacebuilding, including trials, but together these present a far more ambitious standard for just peacebuilding. These practices aim to restore relationships, a task that Philpott identifies as fundamental to securing a peaceful future.
Philpott suggests that the ethic of political reconciliation can succeed on two grounds where the liberal peace, and its alternatives, has failed. The first is in its ability to generate widespread consensus, and the second to deliver a more robust peace. Here Philpott is on to something. Undoubtedly, there has been significant domestic opposition in multiple cases to the incursions of the International Criminal Court, the international ad hoc tribunals, and other practices associated with liberal peacebuilding. Sometimes opposition has been grounded in the claim that international justice does not resonate with local understandings of justice or domestic traditions. But Philpott’s efforts at generating consensus may err in assuming that a prescribed ethic which is compatible with that “zone of agreement” between Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and also restorative justice can surmount this critique. In one sense, this is a minimalist approach that recognizes the need for bringing on board followers of a small number of major traditions with considerable global influence. In another sense, though, the basis for consensus is quite thin. Local traditions and customs as well as many faith traditions remain excluded or at least not explicitly included in justice and reconciliation efforts. At the level of practice, an ethic that embraces human rights as central to reconciliation may also be more problematic than Philpott acknowledges. Much attention has been devoted to the crucial role of agents in negotiating norms and introducing practices that resonate locally. Brokers, norm entrepreneurs, vernacularizers, and the like, who are capable of adapting, translating, negotiating, and articulating norms and practices into local contexts, are not part of this account any more than, perhaps, a negotiated consensus among stakeholders.
Scholars and practitioners cast their gaze on transitional states in the Global South when they think of peacebuilding. But, in the current international environment, generating consensus on the value of Philpott’s six practices among leaders in the North may be difficult, even when these practices sit comfortably within the zone of agreement that Philpott identifies. The liberal peacebuilding that Philpott critiques includes practices that liberal democratic states in North America and Europe have frequently shunned. Only weeks ago Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe threatened to withdraw Japan’s apology, one of the ethic’s core practices, for its World War II sex crimes. Whether naming, shaming, persuasion, or some other tactic by proponents of reconciliation and justice will be enough remains to be seen. Tougher sanctions from the international community may also prove crucial to generating consensus, as they did when softer efforts by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and its NGO supporters to persuade the Serbs to deliver Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague failed.
More important than consensus, for Philpott, political reconciliation aims to generate a more robust peace, one that goes considerably beyond simply ending violence and delivers restorations for the injustices incurred. The restorations that reconciliation strives for are important on their own terms, and so Philpott rejects the sparse frame of a consequentialist ethic. Consequentialism is not problematic, he claims; it is just incomplete. But Philpott does not attempt to articulate a causal theory for how to bring these restorations about, which is problematic, since the political context and the sequence in which his six practices are deployed may affect the outcome. For example, the relationship between socially just institutions and the use of punishment is hotly debated by consequentialists and liberal peace advocates. Consequentialists have argued that in the absence of robust institutions that can contain spoilers, punishment may trigger adverse effects that are harmful to any form of peace, let alone reconciliation. As another example, human rights are central to the political ethic of reconciliation, but forcing human rights into the conversations about reconciliation too early in a transition may well backfire. In Burma, civil society advocates have been reluctant to embrace the language of human rights for fear it will undermine their efforts to engage constructively in fostering a democratic transition. They also fear that premature engagement with human rights initiatives led by the state will lead to co-optation.
In many cases, peace and democracy have flourished without the kind of restorations Philpott refers to. Philpott may claim that the ethical conditions for political reconciliation have not been satisfied in such cases, but the relationship between practices (apology, for example) and product (a restored relationship, for example) cannot be assumed, and many things intervene along the way—a fact that Philpott will be painfully aware of given his extensive fieldwork and engagement in the real world of peacebuilding. Still, restorations may sometimes be settled through the satisfaction of democratic participation, may require renewed violence, or may be best settled through the apologies and reparations that Philpott prescribes. There are also fundamental sequencing questions that force us to look beyond the six practices of political reconciliation and toward preconditions that may determine their effectiveness. For many, reconciliation has been prescribed by the powerful as a means of co-opting revolutionaries and putting out rebellions. A just peace may depend on rejecting reconciliation until those who reject repression have succeeded in the violent overthrow of a repressive regime. Even those with benign intentions may seek to negotiate a peace that mitigates violence in the short term only to generate protracted repression and subsequent outbreaks of violence. The robust peace that Philpott’s ethic of reconciliation aspires to achieve may well presuppose a just war fought to a decisive end.
Political reconciliation sets the bar for post-conflict peacebuilding high. It encompasses much of what the liberal peace does, but asks for far more. At the same time that its efforts to generate consensus may not be ambitious enough, it may also simply be too ambitious. Just and Unjust Peace gives us a highly sophisticated, careful, rich, and persuasive conception of justice by which to evaluate post-conflict peacebuilding. Few works have attempted such a daunting task, and those that have do not compare. If, however, one accepts its aspirational—even utopian—qualities, Just and Unjust Peace articulates a vision for post-conflict states that will undoubtedly generate important debate and raise our expectations.
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Ethnography Matters: A Day in the Life: 3-wheeled Vehicle-based Fruit Vendor
Editor’s Note: A few weeks ago Fulbright Fellow Zach Hyman @SqInchAnthro introduced readers to the world of low-resource creativity in China. In this post he takes us into a day in the life of a 3-Wheeled Vehicle-based Fruit Vendor. Below is a rich ethnographic description, giving deep glimpses into the detailed financial exchanges and intricate processes that [...]
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C L O S E R: A Postcard from the UK
Closer Blog: A very brief report on my research trip to the UK and my meetings with Dutch Muslims there. Thanks to all of the people I had the opportunity to meet and hope to see you and others in June.Read more: A Postcard from the UK
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Aidnography - Development as anthropological object: Links & Contents I Liked 61
Hello all,One of the things I like about my weekly link review is that's it's always a bit unpredictable. So this week's list is much more eclectic and there isn't really a 'theme', well, that's not entirely true I guess. There are some interesting links 'working in development', e.g. getting 'hands-on' experience or the power of internal organizational referrals. There are also some interesting links dealing with the changing nature of academic reputation building, including Academia.edu's story and a new software to assess you 'impact' differently. But there are also many more interesting stories. Do check out Durham University's 'Writing on Writing' archive featuring short contributions from established social scientists on the nature of, well, writing in academia; and in case you are still stuck in a meeting, why not try out the 'DevCliche' bingo...and just as I was wrapping up the review Ed Carr posted a great new piece on the cultural shifts that are necessary for meaningful learning from failure.DevelopmentLiven Up Boring Meetings with DevCliches BingoKurante seeks to scale this emergent community of practice to facilitate transformative innovation through an inclusive sensitization training. We encourage you to collaborate with international development stakeholders and utilize indigenous libations to create a safe space where honest dialogue breaks through established norms and liberates innovation from existing power structures. If any of that made sense, then you’re ready to deploy #DevCliches Bingo at your next donor coordination meeting to liven up the multi-stakeholder consultative process.I think this amazing game is pretty much self-explanatory ;)!New People In Aid paper: The State of HR in International Humanitarian and Development Organisations 2013Seminal People In Aid paper, The State of HR 2013 is now available to download via our website. An essential read for all those within the humanitarian and development sector, this year's paper focuses on the changing landscape in recessionary times and how this climate of uncertainty presents challenges to the sector.I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but will definitely put this on my reading list...In Hiring, a Friend in Need Is a Prospect, Indeed Although Ernst & Young looks at every résumé submitted, “a referral puts them in the express lane,” said Larry Nash, director of experienced and executive recruiting there. Indeed, as referred candidates get fast-tracked, applicants from other sources like corporate Web sites, Internet job boards and job fairs sink to the bottom of the pile. “You’re submitting your résumé to a black hole,” said John Sullivan, a human resources consultant for large companies who teaches management at San Francisco State University. “You’re not going to find top performers at a job fair. Whether it’s fair or not, you need to have employees make referrals for you if you want to find a job.” I'm always a bit skeptical when a consultancy company like Ernst & Young announces a 'trend' from which they and their business benefit, but this is still an interesting article. Question is: Is this or will this be a trend in the development industry, and if so, what are the implications for job seekers, especially those who want to enter the industry fresh from universities or other specialized places?Hands-onI’ll say it again: Most aid, development and relief work is office work. Even in “the field”, the majority of the actual work that needs doing is around managing data and information and the flow of resources. This is the real “front line” “hands-on” work office work – just often in places where the offices aren’t as nice or where connectivity is poor or where it might be dangerous to walk outside. I won’t try to put a percentage on it, but as you consider a career in the aid world, you do need to understand that you will do a lot, if not mostly, if not almost exclusively office work. And while humanitarian aid and development can for many be an intensely rewarding career, I very strongly recommend that you adjust your expectations according to this reality.Talking about careers in the development industry: J. explains why 'hands-on' work in development often means 'hands-on laptop' work.Sure, measurement matters…but the culture of aid matters moreSo, a modest proposal for Bill Gates. Bill, please round up a bunch of venture capitalists. Not the nice socially-responsible ones (who could be dismissed as bleeding-heart lefties or something of the sort), the real red-in-tooth-and-claw types. Bring them over to DC, and parade out these enormously wealthy, successful (by economic standards, at least) people, and have them explain to Congress how they make their money. Have them explain how they got rich failing on eight investments out of ten, because the last two investments more than paid for the cost of the eight failures. Have them explain how failure is a key part of learning, of success, and how sometimes failure isn’t the fault of the investor or donor – sometimes it is just bad luck. (...)You could start to bring about the culture change needed to make serious evaluation a reality. The problem is not that people don’t understand the need for serious evaluation – I honestly don’t know anyone making that argument. The problem is creating a space in which that can happen. This is what you should be doing with your annual letter, and with the clout that your foundation carries.Ed Carr on the cultural shifts that are necessary to create a climate of learning from failures in the aid industry.Former prisoners and conflict transformation in Northern IrelandThe involvement of former prisoners as actors in the processes of transforming the conflict at the micro or macro level in Northern Ireland exemplifies the complex interplay of the multi-levelled approaches and how they evolve over time. Given the time that has now elapsed since the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, the next phase of peacebuilding or conflict transformation comes into focus. The predominance of former prisoners and their groups in specific spaces in Northern Ireland, particularly in interface areas of Belfast requires us to reconsider the nature of conflict transformation in these spaces. With the ageing former prisoner population and resulting reduction in the availability of individuals directly involved in the course of the conflict, a re-framing of conflict transformation in Northern Ireland is inevitable. Indeed, the truncation of the influence of former prisoners in conflict transformation will require individuals/communities within areas to engage with a peacebuilding narrative, not explicitly based in the conflict itself, but rather in the nascent peace in its wake.This is an interesting essay by Orna Young on the limitations and future challenges on including former prisoners into Northern Irish conflict transformation work after an extending period of (relative) peace. Warning: The post is a bit heavy on academic jargon at times... Justice for All: Mahfuza Folad and the resilience of Afghan CSOsDespite the burst of negative press regarding corruption of charities in Afghanistan generated by Three Cups of Tea and author Greg Mortenson’s alleged financial mismanagement of the Central Asia Institute, the reality is that hundreds of courageous and tireless Afghan activists are continuing to lead civil society organizations (CSOs) and are pushing forward a burgeoning nonprofit sector in Afghanistan. Yet they face numerous challenges and limitations unique to the environment of Afghanistan, a nation struggling with conflict, extreme poverty, and extensive resource constraints. Despite the sometimes seemingly insurmountable hurdles, Afghan activists have met these obstacles with impressive ingenuity, passion, and dedication. Akhila Kolisetty once again reminds us that whenever politicians, media professionals or donor organizations have trouble finding 'civil society' in difficult places and get excited about building up the sector, they often overlook grassroots organizations that are doing great work and spent more effort 'on the ground' than thinking about funding application modalities...Security giant G4S rejects ‘World’s Worst Company’ nomination The world’s leading security company, G4S, says it doesn’t deserve to be nominated for Public Eye’s World’s Worst Company Award. Two activists examine G4S’s defence.The article reminded me that G4S and private security companies are a seriously under-researched topic in development research. G4S is a truly global company and I remember their logo in Kathmandu and the uniforms of 'guards' at private residences and offices of aid organizations. There was nothing dodgy in this, but there is an aspect of 'soft securitization' taking place in development that is rarely discussed. The aid blogosphere goes to HarvardManning essentially uses two frameworks to examine the international development blogosphere, that of public sphere and an “invisible college,” i.e. intellectual community. Like Tom, I think it’s useful to get an outsider’s perspective. I offer a few of my thoughts on Manning’s read and a challenge for the group as well. Jennifer Lentfer adds her comments to Ryann Manning's paper on development blogging that I briefly highlighted last week.AnthropologyProfile: Jane Guyer, ASA’s 2012 Distinguished AfricanistLife is more competitive, more difficult for the younger generation. We were poor, but we did not have an incredible sense of anxiety about climbing ladders, of achieving certain kinds proficiency, nor did we face the pressure of “self-branding.” Those pressures did not exist in our particular generation. It was much more the case that you could build a solid career, work with others in a team, and fulfill your role in your department. You had to work hard, but the stress was about whether I slept 4 or 6 hours, not whether or not one had created a unique profile to draw attention to oneself. I was hugely fortunate to raise kids in the 1970s, when we still had the 1960s ethic of helping each other. We were in babysitting and nursery co-ops run by the parents. I had to work one morning a week at our oldest child’s coop nursery school, and ran the accounts of an after-school program for the others.It seems a bit unfair maybe to extract a quote from this long and detailed interview with Jane Guyer that is not related to her research in Africa, but I got bis nostalgic about those 'good old days' without self-branding and impact factors...;)! Everyday Africa Takes Over InstagramThis week, the photo collective Everyday Africa, a project focussing on images of daily life in Africa, will be posting to The New Yorker’s Instagram feed. Nine photographers across the continent, from Mali to Kenya, are contributing. AcademiaWriting on WritingWe have written to a number of scholars who have made a significant contribution to the social science literature and asked them to write a short piece (500 to 1,500 words) offering their personal reflections on the process of writing. In these pieces, scholars from a variety of social science disciplines share their thoughts, feelings, pearls of wisdom, anecdotes, theoretical musings and much else likely to give insight and inspiration to those in the later stages of doctoral writing.Wow. If you only choose to click on three links in this week's review make this one of them! There are some true gems hidden on this slightly old-fashioned university website. Writing isn't a gift or talent, it's a skill which can be gained. Want a lean muscular body? - eat less, work out. Want a lean muscular mind? - work the damn thing! work it hard! And it's not a life and death matter, so forget the histrionics that sometimes lead otherwise perfectly sensible people to behave like characters from second rate operas, and get on with practising it. Those five hours each working day were incredibly productive for my friend (who is not fictitious), even though they may not seem to add up to ‘a lot of time'. But she did it purposefully and in an orderly, structured and planned way. No endless looking at websites, no going off for cups of coffee, no everlasting chats about this and that, no pathos of an ‘I can't do it' kind, just focused attention on the matter in hand and practising the craft.From Liz Stanley's contribution Podcast No. 19: Interview with Daniel Drezner The nineteenth Duck of Minerva podcast features Daniel Drezner of Tufts University. Professor Drezner ruminates on, among other things his intellectual and educational background, his experiences as an academic blogger.I started to listen to it over lunch, and it sounds quite fascinating for those who are interested in 'academic blogging'.“In The Studio,” Academia.edu’s Richard Price Is A Founder On A MissionIn this video, Price and I discuss the genesis of the site, what they’ve been doing to help architect their system, and the overall state of how academic papers are kept within the realm of academic journals, which he believes slows down the pace of discovery and innovation in science and technology. (...)This dynamic enables the journal industry to acquire the intellectual property for the entire world’s scientific output for free, and charge the scientific community and the general public $8 billion a year to get access to it. To get out of this mess, we need to build new reputation metrics, ones that don’t incentivize scientists to put their work behind paywalls. Ironically scientists would vastly prefer to have their work open access. It is just that the system of reputation metrics that has emerged in science doesn’t allow them to do it. Building a new system of reputation metrics is one of the most important things that Academia.edu is doing. It seems that Academia.edu has been gaining more momentum recently and is more actively pursuing its goals around access to information and cutting-edge research. On a side-note: You are most welcome to connect with me on Academia.edu!Publish or PerishAre you applying for tenure, promotion or a new job? Do you want to include evidence of the impact of your research? Is your work cited in journals which are not ISI listed? Then you might want to try Publish or Perish, designed to help individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage. Anne-Wil Harzing's new software is another step into the direction of managing research impact beyond the impact factor of mostly pay-walled journals... Journalism as researchFurthermore, the research review process can be very exclusive and protectionist, while the very public nature of journalism ensures that many different individuals and groups consider it and evaluate it at different levels and constituencies.(...)They work because they combine thorough academic research with sound journalism like good writing and design – in other words, the kind of journalism that is appropriate for academic content.As much as I like Andrea Moncada's ideas to bring research and journalism closer together to enrich both communities, I'm still afraid that it will take more time before written 'impact' will move from closed/open-access to 'why do we have to write a dry journal article in the first place?!'...
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Sam Grace: What’s your animal?
Some people hate icebreakers – if you’re one of them, maybe pass on this post – but I’ve got one that I learned from my undergrad adviser* that I swear by. The central gist of it is that each student comes up with an animal that starts with the same sound as their name. For … Continue reading →
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teenthropologist: Carpe Diem/”YOLO”
I hang my head in shame over the fact that it has been months since I last posted anything/went back into the world of teenthropology. To be honest it was hard to keep up motivation in making posts when you have no idea who the readers are/there are no personal benefts other than submitting yet [...]
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Somatosphere: Book review – Sienna Craig’s Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine by Stephan Kloos
Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine
by Sienna R. Craig
University of California Press, 2012
344 pp., US$34.95 paperback
It is a truism that the world we live in today is increasingly interconnected. Yet, when it comes to medicine – and particularly “traditional” or alternative medicine – the tendency is often to delimit its study along disciplinary lines, or simply reduce it to the pragmatic question of patients the world over: does it work? Sienna Craig’s new book on Tibetan medicine is, above everything else, an attempt to go beyond such reductions and make visible the multiple elements and connections that make up contemporary Tibetan medicine (also known as Sowa Rigpa). What do George W. Bush’s neo-conservative policies, Himalayan mountain gods, climate change, and the Coca Cola company have to do with Tibetan herbal remedies? How do Sowa Rigpa practitioners create or negotiate connections between randomized controlled trials and tantric empowerments, and between the conflicting moral imperatives to conserve the environment and to help the patient? Tracing such unlikely connections and encounters across nations and continents, Sienna Craig’s Healing Elements offers a refreshing, lightly written yet erudite introduction into the world of contemporary Tibetan Medicine.
The book is based on Craig’s extensive engagement – as an anthropologist, grant writer, translator, fundraiser, co-investigator, and coauthor among other roles – with Tibetan and Himalayan practitioners of Sowa Rigpa over two decades. In particular, the book draws from ethnographic data collected in the Tibetan regions of China, in Nepal, Bhutan and the US between 2001 and 2012. As the title suggests, its main argument is framed by the central problem of efficacy: what does it mean to say that a medicine “works”? How is efficacy determined? What is at stake in these determinations? Rather than focus solely on the domain of pharmaceutical production (which is usually taken as the most pertinent to this issue – e.g. Craig & Adams 2008; Craig 2011), Craig expands the notion of efficacy to refer to the capacity to produce desired outcomes, whether through herbs, clinical encounters, project proposals or research methodologies. Efficacy therefore resides not only in clinical and pharmaceutical interventions, but also in socio-cultural, environmental, political, economic, epistemological and historical factors, at the confluence of which Tibetan medicine’s healing powers are constituted.
This is an important, if not altogether novel approach in anthropology (e.g. Nichter 1987; van der Geest et al. 1996; Whyte et al. 2002), which derives its brilliance here from Craig’s ethnographic prose illustrating this multitude of “healing elements” and their complex interconnections with deceptive ease, clarity and elegance. Tibetan medicine and the manifold domains of its efficacy can be fruitfully analyzed, the author argues, as social ecologies, a concept borrowed and expanded from public health, epidemiology and parts of medical anthropology. Thus, social ecologies refer to interdependent and mutually constituted relationships between human beings and their environments (p. 5), demanding a holistic approach to the study of health and healing resonating with that of Tibetan medicine itself. In Healing Elements, this approach takes the form of a wide-ranging, multi-sited exploration of Tibetan medicine’s various engagements – on part of its practitioners, patients and administrators – with biomedicine, clinical research, environmental conservation-development projects, regimes of governance, commodification and identity politics.
The book is organized in seven chapters (not including the introduction and brief conclusion, a glossary and the usual bibliography and index), which proceed from a focus on the practitioners of Tibetan medicine (chapters 1-3), through their patients’ experiences (chapter 4), to an exploration of Tibetan medicine’s products and materia medica (chapters 5-7). Each chapter contains a wealth of ethnographic encounters, observations and theoretical discussions, which together form an intriguing mosaic of the dynamics and diversity of contemporary Sowa Rigpa. Due to the sheer amount and diversity of the book’s material, the following discussion is limited to necessarily incomplete outlines of each chapter’s contents and arguments.
After an introduction of the central concerns, analytic framework and ethnographic context, chapters 1 and 2 chronicle a day each in the study’s main ethnographic sites, that is, Mustang in Nepal and Qinghai in Eastern Tibet respectively. Although mainly descriptive in their content and thus serving as an extended introduction in terms of situating the book’s narrative, each of these chapters takes up core issues of contemporary Sowa Rigpa. Thus, in chapter 1 we learn about the social ecology of Tibetan medicine in Mustang, where the amchi – the practitioners of Sowa Rigpa – find themselves enmeshed in a web of regional and global ideas, practices, goods, services and values, which poses both challenges and opportunities for them. Following two amchi brothers through their daily routine of treating patients, teaching students, compounding medicines, keeping medical records, and securing funding for all of this by engaging with foreign conservation-development organizations, Craig offers a good sense of the structural parameters that shape Tibetan medicine in this Himalayan border region.
As a point of contrast, chapter 2 describes a day at the Arura Tibetan Medical Group in Xining, the capital of Qinghai province. This is one of China’s largest Tibetan medical establishments, comprised of a hospital, a research institute, a medical college, a Tibetan cultural museum, and a pharmaceutical company. In this highly institutionalized, modern urban context, Sowa Rigpa is scaled up to a massive commercial enterprise. Yet, despite the evident commodification of Tibetan culture, Arura is also invested in “preserving” this culture through “strategic innovation” (p. 51) aimed at legitimating and transforming Tibetan medicine within China’s political and economic system. As in Mustang, here too Sowa Rigpa is tied to global regimes of governance like development agendas, technoscience and global pharma (cf. Craig & Adams 2008), and needs to articulate – indeed, produce – its efficacy both in biopsychosocial and political-economic ways, within specific social ecologies.
Chapter 3 discusses the issue of Tibetan medicine’s legitimacy in relation to lineage, gender, morality and the state in Kathmandu, Lhasa and Mustang. In particular, we learn about the efforts of Nepali amchi to gain official state recognition for their medicine, which – unlike in China, Bhutan, Mongolia and more recently also India – remains elusive. As these amchi forge strategies to make Tibetan medicine both legible to the state (cf. Scott 1998) and retain its traditional knowledge and efficacy, it becomes clear that official and professional legitimacy do not always overlap, and need to be actively reconciled. In this context, belonging to an amchi lineage can be both an asset and a liability, much in the same way as Nepali amchi as a group are regarded, within the professional field, as both valuable in their authenticity and marginal to contemporary Tibetan medicine. A vivid description of a meeting of the Himalayan Amchi Association (The Inner Life of an Association, p. 101ff) illustrates well the various personal, social, cultural, economic, political and moral issues at play in the amchi’s quest for legitimacy and the preservation of their knowledge.
Switching perspective, chapter 4 focuses on the social ecologies of illness and healing as experienced by patients. As they navigate diverse settings of medical pluralism in the Tibetan-speaking world (here: Kathmandu, rural Qinghai and Mustang), Craig describes how they carefully evaluate their options considering factors such as cost, trust, language, and the diversity of available treatments. As Craig shows, in such contexts the language of Tibetan medicine often also serves as social and political commentary, linking family relations, the supernatural world, government programs, geography, building materials, morality, Tibetan medical concepts and biomedical notions together into a larger cartography of life and suffering in particular locales.
Chapter 5, together with chapter 7 the book’s most profound in terms of ethnography and analysis, uses ethnographic material collected between 2002 and 2010 at three important Tibetan medical factories in the TAR and Qinghai (Mentsikhang, Shongpalhachu, Arura) to explore the industrial production of Tibetan medicines, and particularly the implementation of Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP). Showing how global and national regulatory agendas impact local social and pharmaceutical practices, Craig argues that the Chinese SFDA’s implementation of GMP in Tibetan medicine needs to be understood in the context of global pharmaceutical governance of Traditional Medicines (most notably by the WHO) and the international market for Complementary and Alternative Medicines.
While agreeing with Saxer (2010) that GMP rarely conflict directly with traditional pharmaceutical practices, this chapter focuses on the powerful and problematic indirect effects of such biomedically-oriented regimes of governance. The indirect effects of GMP include price increases for drugs, the closure of non-GMP factories, discontinued use of the local labor force, and a decrease in medical skill and knowledge among younger doctors (p. 161). While not mentioned by Craig, one wonders whether changes and innovations in actual pharmaceutical formulas and practices might not constitute another (direct or indirect) effect of GMP implementation. Importantly, however, the author does point out that GMP also serve as a way for the Chinese state to render Tibetan medicine “legible” (and thus governable and exploitable), inevitably mandating its standardization and commodification. As a consequence, Tibetan medicine in China is today increasingly defined by its exchange value (making profits) rather than its use value (healing patients), potentially occluding other Tibetan ways of healing people, stewarding landscapes, and articulating their identities (p. 180). However, Craig notes, of late the widespread fetishization of GMP has given way to disillusion and a more pragmatic approach, which has even led to efforts to re-create non-GMP facilities.
Chapter 6, titled “Cultivating the Wilds,” refers less to actual medicinal plant cultivation projects than to the ways in which various stakeholders “cultivate” wildness in the attempt to simultaneously exploit and conserve Tibetan medicine’s wild resources. As Sowa Rigpa depends on the ready availability of wildcrafted herbs, the problem of overharvesting and environmental degradation – exacerbated by the rapid growth of the industry – is an existential one. Yet, as wildness itself is considered a source of pharmaceutical potency, even conservation-minded amchi often give priority to their patients’ health rather than the environment, preferring rare, wildcrafted herbs to less endangered or cultivated substitutes. Discussing various models and notions of conservation, Craig links medical anthropology and political ecology here to explore the links between conservation-development projects and the commodification of nature and culture in regard to Sowa Rigpa.
Chapter 7, finally, explores the “social life” of zhije 11, a Tibetan medicine commonly known as the “birth helping pill.” Created, according to legend, by a 13th century female adept, this pill is today used to help aid and speed delivery and stop bleeding after birth. As a team of NIH researchers decide to conduct a double-blind randomized controlled trial (RCT) at the Lhasa Mentsikhang to compare its efficacy to that of the biomedical drug misoprostol, Craig – who was a member of that team – uses her unique access to document this mutual engagement between two medical systems. In particular, the account of zhije 11’s reformulation leading up to the trial stands out as an interesting case of pharmaceutical innovation, tying in with ongoing work on reformulation regimes (Gaudillière & Pordié in press), while the account of the ritual empowerment of these newly formulated medicines raises important questions about ethics and commensurability. Over all, this chapter illustrates both the creativity and agency of Tibetan doctors in their interactions with modern science, and their increasing reliance on modern science as a tool to validate their knowledge.
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Reading Healing Elements, it quickly becomes clear that Craig is an experienced author (her voice is distinct and consistent throughout the book), and that this book is written with the explicit aim of providing a serious yet accessible introduction to the field of contemporary Tibetan medicine. Its tone and style is both personal and didactic, often directly addressing the reader, with summary sections at the end of each chapter rehearsing the main arguments (“In this chapter, you have learned…”). Using the tools of creative non-fiction, Craig narrates ethnographic data largely through dialogues and personal observations – travelogue style – rather than dry descriptions. Theory, for its part, is presented concisely and in easily digestible chunks throughout the book, and serves to discuss the material at hand as much as to introduce the reader to the relevant literature. All of this makes this book an ideal, and so far missing, teaching resource on Sowa Rigpa, “traditional medicine,” and the problem of efficacy more generally.
Even though Healing Elements most explicitly addresses undergraduate and graduate students in medical anthropology, international health and development studies, this is an ambitious book that also aims to contribute to cutting edge scholarship on Tibetan medicine. It is no small achievement that Craig succeeds in both endeavors: her many, well-chosen ethnographic encounters, dialogues, observations and theoretical reflections not only serve as an engaging introduction to newcomers to the field, but also form, like pieces of a mosaic, a bigger picture that reveals, better than any single article or monograph on the topic so far, the complex interconnections that shape Tibetan medicine today. In short, this is an outstanding and long-overdue book that will doubtlessly serve as the standard monograph on Tibetan medicine for years to come.
Works cited
Craig, Sienna. 2011 “Good” Manufacturing by Whose Standards? Remaking Quality, Safety, and Value in the Production of Tibetan Pharmaceuticals. Anthropological Quarterly 84(2): 331-378.
Craig, Sienna, and Vincanne Adams. 2008 Global Pharma in the Land of Snows: Tibetan Medicines, SARS, and Identity Politics Across Nations. Asian Medicine 4: 1-28.
Gaudillière, Jean-Paul, and Laurent Pordié. in press The Reformulation Regime in Drug Discovery: Revisiting Polyherbals and Property Rights in the Ayurvedic Industry. East Asian Science, Technology and Society.
Nichter, Mark. 1987 Kyasanur Forest Disease: An Ethnography of a Disease of Development. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1(4): 406-423.
Saxer, Martin. 2010 Manufacturing Tibetan Medicine: The Creation of an Industry and the Moral Economy of Tibetanness, PhD Dissertation, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. Forthcoming at Berghahn Books.
Scott, James C. 1998 Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
van der Geest, Sjaak, Susan Reynolds Whyte, and Susan Hardon. 1996 The Anthropology of Pharmaceuticals: A Biographical Approach. Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 153-178.
Whyte, Susan Reynolds, Sjaak van der Geest, and Susan Hardon. 2002 Social Lives of Medicines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stephan Kloos is a medical anthropologist with over 10 years of research experience on Tibetan medicine and nationalism in the Tibetan diaspora and the Himalayas. He received his PhD from UC San Francisco and Berkeley in 2010, and currently works as a Marie Curie Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Stephan has authored a book as well as several journal articles and book chapters, their topics ranging from the socio-economic transition of health care in Ladakh, the engagement of Tibetan medicine with modern science, to exile Tibetan nationalism, medical history and postcolonial theory. For more information see www.stephankloos.org.
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Museum Anthropology: Goodwill Donates Native American Vest to Burke Museum
Goodwill Donates Native American Vest to Burke Museum
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CONNECTED in CAIRO: Human Rights and the Elections in Egypt: Live on Facebook
Now that the parliamentary elections are coming, the NGO Human Rights First is bringing together Egypt’s “Facebook Girl” Esraa Abdel Fattah and journalist and activist Bassel Mohamed Adel Ibrahim for an interactive discussion on Facebook about human rights issues in Egypt. And you are invited. The discussion, titled Human Rights Challenges as Egypt Prepares for Parliamentary Election, will [...]
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anthropologyworks: Society for Medical Anthropology launches newsletter
Welcome to the new quarterly electronic newsletter from the Society for Medical Anthropology: Second Opinion: News and Ideas. The first issue features details on a joint international conference with a thematic focus on “encounters and engagements” in Tarragona, Spain, recent awards and achievements of SMA members, and a new anthropology and medical health interest group.
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ACCESS DENIED: News Round Up In-Brief
U.S. News On Tuesday, January 29th, President Obama addressed a Las Vegas audience and declared a need for immigration reform. The full transcript of his address can be found at the New York Times website. Although the President’s proposed immigration plan may grant “provisional legal status” to many undocumented immigrants living in the United States, [...]
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The Other Sociologist: What The Sociology of Shoes Says About Gender Inequality
High heel shoes were once a status symbol for powerful men, from horse riding soldiers in 16th Century Persia, to European aristocrats in the 17th Century. Since the Enlightenment period, heels became associated with “irrational” fashion and pornography, and so “impractical” shoes became a symbol of femininity. What changed? Today’s post examines how history and [...]
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Language Log: Love toilet
James Errington sends this along via Twitter:
(Not to be confused with Saturday Night Live's Love Toilet…)
So, what is this àixīn wèishēngjiān 爱心卫生间 if it is not a "Love toilet"? There's no problem with wèishēngjiān, which does mean "toilet", but àixīn 爱心 can mean "love, benevolence, compassion". In this case, àixīn wèishēngjiān 爱心卫生间 is a toilet made and/or maintained by a benevolent or charitable group for those who cannot afford a pay toilet.
Incidentally, the photograph above was taken in the Sibsongbanna (compare Thai Sipsongpanna สิบสองพันนา ["twelve thousand rice fields"]) Airport in the heart of the Tai-speaking area of southernmost Yunnan Province.
[Thanks to Gianni Wan, Fangyi Cheng, and Rebecca Fu]
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FoodAnthropology: Another Proposed AAA Panel: Human Experience in the Genomic/Post-Genomic Age
With the completion of the sequencing of the human genome and subsequent onset of the Genomic/Post-Genomic Age, genetic technology now plays a more prominent role in many aspects of modern day life. Applications of genetic technologies may be found within … Continue reading →
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tabsir.net: Egypt Week in New York
Egyptian pianist, Mohamed Shams
EGYPT MINI-SERIES FEBRUARY 2013
LINCOLN CENTER
NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS
BRUNO WALTER AUDITORIUM
(entrance @ 111 Amsterdam Avenue @ 64th street)
PROGRAM
SATURDAY FEBRUARY 2 @ 2.30 PM
Opera in Arabic:
On translating opera into classical and colloquial Egyptian Arabic, with Baritone Raouf Zaidan, Bass Baritone Ashraf Sewailam and Kamel Boutros, piano – moderated by Nimet Habachy of WQXR Classical Music Station New York
SUNDAY FEBRUARY 3 @ 2.30 PM
Music for Piano and French Horn:
Recital by Amr Selim (winner, Northeast Horn competition 2012), and Seba Ali, both winners of the 2012 Ackerman Chamber Music competition 2012 at Stony Brook, NY
And a choreographic offering specially created for Seba and Amr by Cherylyn Lavagnino with Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance (CLD) dancers Ramona Kelley and Justin Flores
MONDAY FEBRUARY 4 @ 6 PM
Music of Arab American composer Mohammed Fairouz
With the Cadillac Moon Ensemble, Ensemble 212 and the Mimesis Ensemble
Curated by Katie Reimer
(more…)
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Simple Anthropology Blog: Objects of Time – A new book by Kevin Birth
I came back three weeks ago from my intensive holidays in Peru and there would be many new things to write about. The trip really opened my eyes in many things, not only personally, but also anthropologically. Travel costs always money, especially to another continent, but every penny I spent in Peru was definitely worth it.
When I was in Peru, my travel book was Objects of Time from Kevin Birth and I was supposed to write a nice review about it when coming back. Unfortunately the book got missing, I either left it in a bus or a hotel room, so I never finished it. Nevertheless, I enjoyed my reading and I can definitely recommend it.
As many of the anthropological books (and the initial reason I felled in love with anthropology), this book is also an eye opener. I’m not the biggest fan of Births (a bit dry) writing, but the ideas behind the words are very interesting. If you want to take a look of a small preview of the book, click the .PDF link to the publishers website.
If someone has written a good review of Objects of Time – Kevin Birth, please let me know by sending me an email or commenting this post!
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The Global Sociology Blog: Horror Feminism
So, the other say, I made the claim that American Horror Story is a feminist series. Let me explain, based on the two seasons we have so far. As a disclaimer, I should add that AHS is one of my favorite shows on TV right now and I am a big fan of the concept of keeping most of the same cast from one season to the other while completely changing the narrative so that each season is a self-contained mini-series.
When I started watching AHS, I was instantly reminded of the original title of the Stieg Larsson’s Millenium series: Men Who Hate Women. Both seasons have that theme, along with the theme of women who fight back, not always appropriately, but that is patriarchal distortion for you.
The first season revolves around men’s transgressions (mostly sexual through infidelities) and how women related to them cope with that. Almost every woman in that season was subject to masculine degradation and reacted – not always well, and not always against the right target – within the constraints of a patriarchal system. See how Ben Harmon pretty much decides on his own to transplant his family across the country after his infidelity and constantly hectors his wife about trying to get over his transgression.
This theme of men who get to hate on women with abandon because the patriarchal system makes it easy and brings to bear no consequences for them is even clearer in the second season, whether it is former Nazi doctor Arden, Father Timothy Howard, or serial killer Dr Oliver Thredson. In response, women try to fight back with the weapons they have or make for themselves, as do Sister Jude and journalist Lana Winters. Again, sometimes they strike wrong (against each other as the patriarchal context distorts relationships and prevents solidarity), but they do strike. And not unlike Lisbeth Salander, they do end up punishing the men who hate women.
I do hope this theme continues in the upcoming seasons.
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