Archive for April, 2011
Some treasures from the WCAA Publications list
I have been having a lot of fun exploring the WCAA’s website’s feast of journals—although I, like every other reader, would like more on-line offerings (disclaimer: I edit a journal that is not available on-line except for a fee. I can’t easily fight that, unfortunately…).
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–
1 comment April 28, 2011
A Listing of World Anthropology Journals
Hi, everyone,
The WCAA webpage now provides the websites of some 400 anthropological journals from around the world, some of which offer limited access to readers, and others full access. This, we think, is the only site in the world that provides, with a few mouseclicks, a glimpse of all the world’s anthropology. We think we have on this website every anthropological publication in the world that has a presence on the internet; if we have missed any, please let me know, at cmgordon@cuhk.edu.hk.
Surveying the state of anthropology in the world today, what we see is an unwitting domination by the Anglo-American core of anthropology; anthropologists throughout much of the world pay attention to the Anglo-American core, but it pays little attention to anthropologies beyond its bounds, and those other anthropologies pay little attention to one another. A website like this can, we hope, eventually enable anthropologists the world over to read anthropologies the world over. This is its aim: to take a step, however small, towards the creation of a global anthropology. 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. Maybe this site can help do that in a small way.
This site puts all the world’s anthropologies on a common platform, although of course language barriers remain. From this array of different journals, if we can gather an array of anthropological readers, perhaps discussions can start. Typically, Chinese anthropologists never discuss with sub-Saharan African anthropologists and Eastern European anthropologists and Indonesian anthropologists and Brazilian anthropologists and American anthropologists about the nature of culture and globalization, or anthropological ethics, or cultural and ethnic identity, or the nature of heritage, and so on, because there has been no place for such a debate. Maybe this site and this blog can serve as such a place. That’s why we begin this blog.
I will be adding commentary every week: my views are not those of WCAA, but simply my own, as an individual anthropologist. The more we can hear from all of you, the better: I don’t own this! Please send me your own commentary, at the address I’ve provided above, of no more than 500 words, on any topic relating to global anthropology, and I will put it on. Let’s get a conversation started!
Best regards,
Gordon Mathews,
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
6 comments April 6, 2011
