Is there any way to escape this tyranny of citation indexes? In an immediate sense, no: if your job is on the line, then by all means do your best to publish in these journals, since the alternative may be driving a taxi or starving. From a longer view, though, there are indeed alternatives.

One alternative, if your native language is not English, is to have parallel writing tracks: write the stuff you need for your career in English, for the international journals, and write the stuff that is closest to your heart in your native language. As a Hong Kong ethnographer once told me, “I write articles in English that help my scholarly career but that no one reads; I write books in Chinese that many people read, but that have no relation to my scholarly career….At the end of the day, if I don’t have any journal publications with high impact factors, so what? If people in Hong Kong still read and learn from my writings, I’ll happily close my eyes and go to heaven.”

A second alternative is to write books rather than articles. Books are refereed in a different way than articles: if you can write only 8000 words, then you’ve generally got to conform to Western standards if you seek to publish in the Anglo-American core, but if you write books of 80,000 words, you’ll probably be given more leeway by referees to develop your own arguments and present your own ethnography in full. In our citation-index-driven anthropological world of today, books don’t count as much as articles, but they are read, and may allow you the freedom to be yourself. This is apparent in the books of Scandinavian anthropologists such as Ulf Hannerz and Thomas Hyland Eriksen, who have made their names largely through books published in the Anglo-American core.

A third alternative is more radical: forget about the pressures to write in top-ranked journals, and put yourself on line. Today there are some excellent websites where you can place your work to be read by other anthropologists, websites such as academia.edu and researchgate.edu, among others. Many anthropologists place their previously published work on these sites; but these sites can also be used to forego the publishing process altogether: put your work online instead of at the mercy of a journal. Perhaps the critiques you will receive from on-line readers will be more intellectually trenchant than those you might receive from referees! Don’t take this step if your career is on the line, for it may be suicidal. But if you can afford to, jump in.

Eventually, the world of anthropological publishing, as now driven by citation indexes, will collapse: we will all be on-line. That step will be the single most important step for the creation of a global anthropology. I suspect that won’t come for another twenty or thirty years, though. Meanwhile, let’s all do as much as we can to help erode the power of global citation indexes, which are in effect Morgan and Tylor risen from the dead.

Gordon Mathews
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Guilherme Gitahy de Figueiredo

State University of Amazonas- Brazil

The WCAA initiative in creating this blog is laudable. It is very important that efforts be made to lay the groundwork for global debate in anthropology. However, it is important to know that to achieve this, it is not enough that anthropologists around the world publish in blogs or international journals.

In Brazil the biggest barrier to a global debate is not the language, but an international division of intellectual labor that makes the British, French, and American anthropologies more consumed than discussed. The role of central anthropologies unfortunately still seems to be to establish the premises of Brazilian anthropological work and debate. When these assumptions enter into controversy, these usually occur between followers of different Westerns orientations. Paradoxically, the debate seems more fruitful and creative when the topics are ethnographies of Brazilian themes.

Even when authors decide to counter Western premises with new theories, they are not read or taken seriously among their peers. Of course there are Brazilian theorists who are much celebrated. Numerous efforts have been made to build new schools of thought, consistent with national needs and interests. But a look at the references of Brazilian articles in the best journals would be enough to distinguish a strong tendency to quote Brazilian authors in relation to empirical matters and Western authors for theoretical guidance.

The organization of Brazilian anthropology according to external authors, currents and schools is a practice rooted in the intellectual life of colonial Brazil, when universities and publishers were banned and the new generations had to go and study in European universities. This indeed is not something specific of Brazil but is shared by most countries that were subjected to colonial actions, being accepted and even encouraged by the academies of hegemonic countries. Changing these habits is not easy, because they involve not only scientists. Paradoxically, the colonial customs are part of national history and identity. How can we build a “national” science if our own traditions are colonial? Below is an example taken from contemporary Brazilian research.

According to João Pacheco de Oliveira, concepts formulated by the colonial society and administration — for example the idea of “Indian” — in the conquest of lands and enslavement of black and indigenous peoples have become part of national history and identity by intellectuals and artists from the 19th century. Widely disseminated in schools and media, these ideas became unconscious assumptions that organize new intellectual productions. The proposal of Oliveira is the deconstruction of these ideas through genealogical research and historical anthropology, in collaboration with the peoples whose views are eclipsed by these colonial assumptions.

Perhaps a similar deconstruction should take place globally. The challenges are great and global ethnographic investigations into anthropological practices would be welcome in order to find out their underlying colonial assumptions and mechanisms, and thus begin to explore ways to shape more balanced modes of power in world anthropology.
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Argumentos locais para um debate global

Guilherme Gitahy de Figueiredo
Universidade do Estado do Amazonas – Brasil

É louvável a iniciativa da WCAA em criar este blog. É muito importante que iniciativas sejam feitas para se abrir espaços para debates globais na antropologia. Porém, é importante sabermos que para se alcançar isto não basta os antropólogos do mundo postarem em blogs ou publicarem seus artigos em revistas internacionais.

No Brasil a maior barreira para um debate global não é a língua, mas a divisão internacional do trabalho intelectual que faz com que as antropologias francesa, americana e inglesa sejam mais consumidas do que debatidas. O papel das antropologias centrais infelizmente ainda parece ser o de estabelecer as premissas do trabalho e do debate antropológico brasileiro do que o de contribuir com argumentos num diálogo entre iguais. Quando essas premissas são polemizadas, é por conflitos entre os seguidores de diferentes orientações ocidentais. Paradoxalmente o debate parece mais fecundo e criativo quando os tópicos são etnografias de temas brasileiros.

Mesmo quando algum autor decide contrapor novas teorias às premissas ocidentais, dificilmente é lido ou levado a sério entre os seus pares. É claro que existem intelectuais brasileiros, teóricos, muito celebrados. Inúmeros esforços já foram feitos para se construir novas escolas de pensamento, condizentes com as necessidades e interesses nacionais. Mas uma consulta às referências bibliográficas de artigos brasileiros nas melhores revistas seria suficiente para distinguir ali uma forte tendência à citação de autores brasileiros em relação aos referentes empíricos e autores ocidentais para as orientações teóricas.

A organização da antropologia brasileira segundo autores, correntes e escolas externas é um costume enraizado na vida intelectual do Brasil colonial, quando universidades e editoras eram proibidas e as novas gerações tinham que ir estudar nas universidades européias. Isto, aliás, não é algo específico do Brasil, mas compartilhado pela grande maioria dos países que foram objeto de ações coloniais, sendo aceito e até estimulado pelas academias dos países hegemônicos. Mudar esses costumes não é fácil, pois eles não envolvem apenas os cientistas. Paradoxalmente, os costumes coloniais são parte da visão histórica e da identidade nacional. Como construir a ciência “nacional” se nossas tradições próprias são coloniais? Segue abaixo um exemplo retirado de pesquisas brasileiras contemporâneas.

Segundo João Pacheco de Oliveira, conceitos formulados pela sociedade e administração coloniais – por exemplo a idéia de “índio” – em sua conquista de terras e escravização de negro e indígenas se tornaram parte da história e da identidade nacional por obra dos intelectuais e artistas a partir do séc. XIX. Difundidas amplamente em escolas e meios de comunicação, essas idéias tornaram-se premissas inconscientes que organizam novas produções intelectuais. A proposta de Oliveira é a desconstrução dessas idéias através de pesquisas genealógicas e em antropologia histórica, em colaboração com os povos cujos pontos de vista são eclipsados por estas premissas coloniais.

Talvez uma desconstrução similar possa ser feita globalmente. Os desafios são grandes e investigações etnográficas globais sobre as práticas da antropologia seriam bem vindas para se descobrir as suas premissas e mecanismos coloniais subjacentes e, assim, começar a explorar caminhos para formas mais equilibradas de poder na antropologia mundial.

Why?  One major factor is language.  English has become the de facto international language, but many anthropologists around the world are far more comfortable writing in their own language.  Computer translations may be improving, but have a long way to go before they can enable a truly global anthropological communication.  A second reason is the history of the discipline: anthropology over its history has long been largely a matter of those from richer societies investigating those of poorer societies across the globe (or richer members of a given society investigating its poorer, often indigenous members), and so the idea of a global anthropology has taken a long time to fully emerge.  Today there remains a power difference in world anthropologies, with an Anglo-American core, and semi-peripheries and peripheries. This power imbalance works against the emergence of a genuinely global anthropology.

But it’s time to overcome this.  This blog and forum can maybe serve, in a small way, as a means of  overcoming the barriers to global anthropology.  Let’s discuss things! Let’s argue!  Wherever you are from, write down your opinions on any aspect of anthropology in the world today and send them on, to the e-mail address listed below.  We’d love to hear from you and throw your work out there to a global audience!  Send us a blog!  Register on this WCAA website and give us your comments!

Best,

Gordon Mathews

Blog Moderator

World Council of Anthropological Associations

e-mail: cmgordon@cuhk.edu.hk

In September I began contributing a monthly column to the American Anthropological Association’s new publication, Anthropology News Online. My column titled J Drive uses the interview format to feature current and recently completed research by junior faculty and scholars worldwide and from various institutional contexts.  J Drive gives the featured scholars and me an opportunity to chat about their research, teaching and publications. My own research interests coalesce around media, politics, Gandhi, gender and science in colonial and contemporary India. J Drive brings attention to a broad spectrum of topics and regional contexts. Recent columns included Shao hua Liu’s research on Aids and Leprosy in Taiwan, Lotta Bjorklund Larsen’s project on Svart Arbete and the informal economy in Sweden, and Huong Thu Nguyen’s study of sexual violence in Vietnam. An upcoming column will feature a collaborative research project on the youth and the elderly by anthropologists in Switzerland and Tanzania. With this open-access exchange, I hopeJ Drive will further the inclusion of new voices, emerging ideas and histories of anthropology in the pages ofAnthropology News Online and widen the world anthropologies network.  I invite WCAA members, anthropology enthusiasts, students and readers to visit J Drive: A monthly column in Anthropology News Online.

Thank you,

Ritu Gairola Khanduri

Universityof Texas

http://www.uta.edu/faculty/khanduri/about.htm

However, in all honesty, how many native speakers of English would be willing to write in international English, curtailing their jargon, limiting their circumlocutions, and simplifying their sentence structures?  American academics, not least anthropologists, have a mortal fear of sounding stupid.  One reason why anthropological writing is so often convoluted is to avoid revealing the relatively simple ideas one may be expressing—to avoid sounding stupid.  In some English-language anthropological writing, linguistic complexity is necessary, given the subtlety of the ideas being expressed.  In much more anthropological writing, the complexity seems unnecessary.  Complexity may reflect the fact that the authors are bad writers. Or it may reflect an “emperor’s new clothes” syndrome, whereby authors cloak ideas in impenetrable prose because those ideas themselves are unclear, or else all too clear.

If anthropology journals were to mandate that writers write in a standard international English—something that has happened to a degree in medicine and in the hard sciences—the problem of anthropology’s lack of true globality would largely be solved.  However, it is hard to imagine this happening.  Instead, it seems more likely that a two-tiered class structure would emerge, of Americans and other native speakers writing in complex English, and foreign scholars writing in “international English.”

Ideally, international English might liberate American anthropology from its rhetorical excesses (a tendency I date from Geertz: earlier writers like Benedict and Boas, read retrospectively, are marvels of clarity).  More likely, it would simply serve as a form of academic distinction.  Those who can write in a complicated way will, and those who can’t won’t—but with only the latter being fully comprehended by many of their readers.

Gordon Mathews

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

This is problematic because of one simple fact.  Anthropology is not the same in different places.  What constitutes a good anthropology article for Americans is not necessarily the same as what constitutes a good anthropology article for Japanese, or for Indians, or for Brazilians, or for Eastern Europeans.  This can be seen by reading the different flagship journals in different societies: this is one thing that our publication list on the WCAA website reveals.  The topics, the approach, and the writing style of these different anthropologies significantly differ.

So, if American Anthropologist and Current Anthropology and other top American journals seek to internationalize, will they publish foreign anthropologists only to the extent that their articles are couched in American discursive terms, reading like American anthropology articles?  This will in effect render these different anthropologists American.  Or will they publish these articles even if they are not discursively American—not addressing American anthropological concerns, and not following the norms of American argumentation?  This runs the risk of alienating these journals’ largely American audiences.  Because anthropology is not the same the world over, there seems to be no way beyond this dilemma.

Some journals in the United States will probably remain unaware of this dilemma, implicitly assuming that American standards of anthropology are universal standards of anthropology, and publishing accordingly.  Other journals will indeed understand; but there’s no obvious way out.  These journals may attempt to take a middle line, both preserving standards and encouraging diversity.  But where and how, exactly, is that line to be drawn?

In short, the era of internationalizing anthropology is only beginning.  It will be a lot more difficult than most anthropology journal editors, and most anthropologists, now may realize. To repeat a refrain I’ve often stated, anthropology must leave the era of Morgan and Tylor, with anthropologists from rich countries studying cultures from poor countries, and dominating the discipline, to become instead a truly global discipline.  That day will come, eventually; but it certainly won’t be easy.

Gordon Mathews

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

The ultimate solution to this problem is open access (see http://theconversation.edu.au/explainer-open-access-vs-traditional-academic-journal-publishers-2511).  Open access has been gaining considerable traction in recent years, with, for example, some authors posting pre-print versions of their articles on their websites. Discontent with closed-access journal publishing—which seems to have a greater stranglehold in the hard sciences, where journal prices are most expensive—have led institutions such as M.I.T. to make many scientific articles available on its data base, and has led protestors to place their work on various pirate sites (see http://theconversation.edu.au/putting-a-price-on-knowledge-the-high-cost-of-academic-journals-2475).  Within anthropology, discontent with this system is what has led to the efforts of WCAA to put together a world database of anthropological journals.

However, fact remains that the highest-impact journals in anthropology as well as in many other disciplines are, almost as a rule, those that require paid subscriptions, because these are the journals that many scholars want to publish in, and thus that can afford to be expensive.  The journal I edit, Asian Anthropology, is not open access; I would certainly like it to be, but it is not my journal but that of my department, most members of which maintain that closed access and a print edition are the only way to justify the journal’s existence. It is a professional necessity for increasing numbers of young academics throughout the world to publish in expensive print journals, with academics across continents worrying about what journals rank highest on the Social Science Citation Index.  Those journals that rank the highest are to a rough degree, anyway, those that cost the most to access, which is no coincidence.

Ultimately open access will win out—this is inevitable—but it will be a long-term struggle, simply because it seems in individual journals’ best interests to charge money and remain closed.  This is not because they are greedy for profits but because they seek the global prestige that closed access seems to often bring within the anthropological world.  This is how anthropology remains colonial, a situation that I myself am sorry to be helping, in a tiny way, to sustain.

Gordon Mathews

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

I have studied anthropology in Israel, and had amazing anthropological debates with my teachers and classmates in Hebrew. In the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where I pursue PhD studies, I sometimes discuss  in Chinese with my classmates and teachers contemporary anthropological issues. There is a world of anthropology beyond “anthropology in English.” And today I think that the University of Haifa was right. In my letter to the graduate school I wrote that there are certain terms that are so difficult to translate (like “embodiment”) so I had rather use English, but shouldn’t we strive harder to think about the correct terms in other languages? As anthropologists we advocate “multi-culturalism” and we fight against “Westernization” but do we really?

Phillip Demgenski writes that in order to “give way to a truly global anthropology, we should thus let go of the anthropology of the ‘far away’ and focus on an anthropology of the ‘here’ and ‘now.’”  On this note I must say that I do not believe that this is the “problem” of contemporary anthropology. Perhaps it was a problem decades ago, but today most anthropologists do research the “here” and “now.” Education, reproduction, wine, food, soap, shampoo, childhood, youth culture, stoke brokers are only few examples of the “here” and “now” topics that contemporary anthropology deals with. In our anthropology department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong we have a mainland Chinese student studying NGO’s in China, a German student studying the city of Qingdao, a Hong Kong student studying undocumented south Asian migrants in Hong Kong. I believe that many other students and anthropologists around the world study the “here” and “now.” Moreover, I do not think that we should abandon the “poor” and the “south:” Migration of rural people, asylum seekers, street children are some of the most important contemporary social issues that anthropology should try to understand and bring to the public knowledge.

I am not sure what the “problem” is but I do not think that it lies in studying  the “here” and “now.” We can go further and ask where “here” is?

I guess the problem lies in the fact that most not-written-in-English anthropology is not read, but it does not mean that it does not exist. Should we write in English? If we do want to reach a bigger audience I believe we should. But it does not mean there is no room for other languages as well. Great philosophy was written in Chinese, French and Germen. I believe that there is a place for both. So if we want people to read what we write about “here” and “now” we should keep in mind that we have a choice; at least we should have.

Avital Binah-Pollak

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

I would like to take up one of Gordon Mathew’s points in the previous blog entry, in which he writes that “only if anthropology becomes truly global can it ever hope to fully overcome its colonial legacy of the rich studying the poor, the North studying the South.” To someone who is relatively new to the study of anthropology, this is indeed an intriguing issue. When I think back to my time as a (non-anthropology) undergraduate student in the UK, and to what I saw of and heard about anthropology, what comes to my mind is a bunch of interesting people who all had stories to tell; stories of far-away places; places that were fascinating and electrifying, pure and untouched, romantic and maybe sometimes brutal, in short, places that were everything that the “here” and “now” was not. I have to admit that I was also charmed by these stories. Yet, did I ever consider what these “far-away” places and their people thought, felt, experienced? Did I ever consider the fact that these distant places in all their fascination were in reality perhaps nothing but the anthropologist’s own projections?

Why is only the “far-away” so fascinating, why do we not focus our attention on the “here” and “now”? And why do we pay so little attention to what the “far-away” have to say about themselves, about others or even about us in the “here” and “now”? By fixing the “far away” in space and time, we not only exercise hegemony over those places, we also place the anthropological discipline into a straightjacket and disallow anyone else to actively engage and participate in it.

To me, a global anthropology should not only be about inclusion, it should also be about de-stigmatising so-called native anthropology. I sometimes wonder why notions such as ethnicity or the nation-state, which the anthropologist has long identified as non-static, fluid, changeable, not to say imagined, suddenly become such prominent and determining factors when the discipline’s own identity is at stake. We should actually use the theories we have developed and apply them to our own discipline. To give way to a truly global anthropology, we should thus let go of the anthropology of the “far away” and focus on an anthropology of the “here” and “now”.

Philipp Demgenski

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

One article I found interesting was Alba Zaluar’s “Youth, drug traffic, and hypermasculinity in Rio de Janeiro,” in the Brazilian on-line journal Vibrant: http://www.vibrant.org.br/downloads/v7n2_zaluar.pdf Zaluar, drawing on extended interviews, offers a well-reasoned explication of why there is such violence in the favelas of Rio, one that resonates with, for example, Philippe Bourgois’s In Search of Respect on New York City crack dens, but that also offers substantial contrasts. Unlike New York, many of Zaluar’s informants rely on “private security” for their safety; Rio’s suburbs, as compared to North American suburbs, are poorer than cities are. Anyway, have a look!

I also read “The rise to prominence of Artemisia annua L. – the transformation of a Chinese plant to a global pharmaceutical” by Caroline Meier zu Biesen, in the on-line journal African Sociological Review:

http://www.codesria.org/IMG/pdf/The_rise_to_prominence_of.pdf
Biesen finds that the plant kills as well as cures some of those who ingest it for the treatment of malaria, and discusses how medicines may achieve “a life of their own” regardless of effectiveness, due to global pursuits of profit. This is common knowledge in a broad sense, but Biesen’s particular ethnographic explication is quite convincing, and devastating.
I also had a look at Popular Anthropology Magazine, a free journal based in the midwest of the United States: http://www.popanthro.com/index.php/en/home
At this point I await the beginning of my free subscription: I look forward to reading this journal.

Generally speaking, if a journal is in English, it is less likely to be open access, whereas if a journal is not in English, it is more likely to be open. Might this signify something larger: the eventual eclipse of proprietary English-language publications before a vast array of non-proprietary journals in an array of world languages? I wish I knew twenty or thirty different languages. Since I know how to read only a scant few, the flood of world output of anthropological journals remains closed: I remain at the mercy of Google translations… In any case, we are emerging into a new anthropological world, when anyone anywhere with a laptop and an internet connection can partake of the global accumulation of anthropological knowledge.
It’s exciting to be alive now!

Gordon Mathews
cmgordon@cuhk.edu.hk

Send me your blog and I’ll put it on–