As promised, here’s a recording of Monday night’s talk by Dr. Sandra Morgen of (University of Oregon) on “the Anthropology of DeKeynesification” hosted by the New York Academy of Sciences Anthropology Section and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Political Anthropology & Tracing the Genealogy of American Anti-tax Ideology
Another look at Wenner-Gren’s upcoming slate of conferences. For the month of October, we are sponsoring only a single conference, but it looks to be a good one!
Norms in the Margins and Margins of the Norm: The Social Construction of Illegality
Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons
October 25-27, 2012
Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium
The aim of this conference is to share theoretical and ethnographic knowledge on informal and illegal activities through the lens of social and political norms underlying shadow spheres of negotiation between legal and illegal actors. In particular the conference will focus on the political construction of criminality by States and supra- and international agencies on the one hand, with the social and geographic organization of crime and the development of criminal habitus, as well as everyday practices and poetic “heroizing” in informal and illegal circles, on the other hand. The above considerations suggest various potential tracks for analysis. How do State and supra-national criminalization activities construct landscapes of illegality? How are the legal and illegal sides of global capitalism’s underground economies intertwined? What are the ethical justifications given for the legal and illegal constructions? How are norms inhabited, legitimized and challenged in the marginal spheres of today’s illegal and criminal worlds? How are the legality and legitimacy of the illegality-producing societal spheres maintained and perpetuated? Another area of inquiry would bear on our practice as researchers. How can researchers circulate in the spaces created by penal policies, between the analysis of state-led coercive processes and the observation of criminal trajectories? What ethical, political and epistemological issues are raised by investigation of the illegal and criminal spheres? Faced with objects of this sort, what positions and reflexive policies can research advance?
For more on this conference, visit its page on the Royal Museum for Central Africa’s website.
Paul Fejos (1897 – 1963) is a figure that looms large in the history of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, serving as original Director of Research of the Viking Fund and President of the Foundation until his death and providing much of the style and flair that drove the organization’s development in its early years.
Trained as a medical doctor in Hungary and coming to anthropology later in life by way of his keen interest in ethnographic filmmaking, Fejos had previously made a brief but successful career as a director under contract for Universal Studios during Hollywood’s so-called Golden Age. His most infamous and well-regarded picture, 1928′s “semi-talkie” Lonesome, sees its first home video release this month from New York-based art house publishers The Criterion Collection. We worked to provide Criterion with materials to help produce this seminal release, and we are very proud to see Paul’s films reach a wider contemporary audience.
Prized by cinephiles for its experimental technique and strong European avant-garde influences, Lonesome‘s DVD and Blu-Ray release comes at the tail-end of a recent revival of interest in the film and the colorful renaissance man who helmed it. Criterion’s edition includes a new digital restoration, along with Fejos’ 1929 silent The Last Performance, a photo essay on the life of the director, essays, interviews, and rare photographs, all wrapped up in Criterion’s trademark impeccable packaging. It’s a beautiful package that offers up a rare gem of the late Silent Era, as well as a piece of Wenner-Gren history.
If you are in New York City this weekend, there will be free screenings of Lonesome running throughout the day on Sunday, September 23rd, on Queen Of Hearts boat docked at Pier 36, courtesy of All Tomorrow’s Parties.
Read an essay included with the DVD release, “The Travels of Paul Fejos”, by McMaster University’s Graham Petrie.
image courtesy Wikimedia Commons
The 24th of September marks the opening of the New York Academy of Sciences’ monthly anthropology section lecture series for the 2012-13 season. To start off a program of talks that we hope will be just as successful as last year’s, we welcome Dr. Sandra Morgen of the University of Oregon to discuss political anthropology and trace the genealogy of American antitax ideology.
This public lecture explores how the concepts of “deKeynesinization” and “taxpayer identity politics” help make sense of the contours and resonance of right-wing politics in the U.S. today. The velocity of Tea Party activism that astonished many observers in 2009 was less surprising to scholars whose research has examined the history and/or varieties of anti-tax activism in the U.S. since the 1970s. I situate the political salience and production of taxpayer resentments and identities in the larger agenda of deKeynesinization. I use this concept to highlight and theorize the destructive dimensions of neoliberalization, i.e., the political project of undermining the assumptions, policies and institutions of the liberal, Keynesian state. Drawing on my and others’ research on tax politics, and on battles over public employee compensation and collective bargaining rights, I demonstrate how both the subject of taxes and taxpayer subjectivities provide valuable lenses through which to understand contested meanings and values about social provisioning, the public sector, and the State in contemporary politics.
As always, the 7:00 PM lecture will be hosted at the Wenner-Gren Foundation offices, preceeded by reception at 6:00 PM. The lecture is free to attend, but registration is required.
An elderly Kuay lady and informant at the Sanlong Jaya iron smelting site, near Rumchek.
Oli Pryce is Junior Research Fellow at St. Hugh’s College, University of Oxford. In 2009 he received a Post-Ph.D. Research Grant to aid research on ’The ‘Iron Kuay’: Ethnoarchaeological Investigations of Technological Continuity and Socio-Economic Interaction with the Angkorian Empire’ In association with Dr. Mitch Hendrickson (University of Illinois-Chicago) and Dr. Stéphanie Léroy (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). We asked Dr. Pryce a few questions about metallurgical archaeology and his research with the Cambodian Kuay.
How did you come to study Kuay metallurgy? In a nutshell, why do you find it interesting?
Prior to the Kuay project I had always worked in prehistoric archaeology: first in the Mediterranean and then in Southeast Asia for my Ph.D. from 2005. It was during my doctoral studies of predominantly 1st millennium BC copper production in central Thailand that I became aware of colleagues working around the world on the interpretation of social context of metal production through variation in the resulting slag chemistry and morphology. This may sound a little far-fetched but in many instances, and as was certainly the case for my Ph.D., slag is the most abundant archaeological material available on production sites, and thus we must attempt to squeeze the maximum possible cultural information from this outwardly unyielding waste material. Previous such case studies had naturally focused on much more intensively researched areas in Africa and Europe, but whilst these were of course very useful and made sophisticated use of rich datasets, I hoped to develop a more regionally-based methodology for cross-cultural ethnoarchaeological analogies. Southeast Asia is, or certainly was, extremely rich in metallurgical traditions but previous surveys of the available ethnographic and historical data by Bennett Bronson at the Chicago Field Museum indicated that the Kuay iron smelting tradition of north-central Cambodia, which ended only in around 1950, was the most promising.
It was at this juncture that good luck brought about the meeting of my former Ph.D. supervisor, Prof. Vincent C. Pigott (University of Pennsylvania Museum) with Dr. Mitch Hendrickson (University of Illinois-Chicago), one of the only Angkorian period (9th to 15th c. AD) archaeologists to work outside of the Angkor complex in Cambodia. Dr. Hendrickson’s « Industries of Angkor Project » or « INDAP » was established explicitly to investigate the economic, political, and social factors involved in the production and supply of raw and finished materials from Angkor’s hinterlands to the imperial capital. Iron and steel were of course essential materials for agriculture, building, and warfare, and the proposed major centre of production at the Angkorian complex of Preah Khan or Kompong Svay was situated 100km east of Angkor itself, but intriguing only 30km west from Cambodia’s largest iron oxide source, Phnom Dek or Iron Mountain, and the historic homeland of the Kuay ethnic minority. Given the convergence of our interests, Dr. Hendrickson and I set about investigating the hypothesis that the well-recorded 19th and 20th c. AD Kuay iron smelters around Phnom Dek were in fact the descendants of the Angkorian period iron smelters at Preah Khan of Kompong Svay. As it happens, we have so far established strong technological continuity – not stasis but gradual changes – going back to the 8th c. AD and thus pre-dating Angkorian state formation.
Your project intended to walk the line between cultural anthropology and archaeology, incorporating assemblage analysis within a more traditional archaeological framework alongside oral histories informed by the ethnographic tradition. What were the challenges of implementing such a research program, and how did you adapt to those challenges?
The IKP team of February 2010, Mitch Hendrickson, the author, Mr Chan, and the RUFA students.
Yes, the initial proposal did lay out a hybridised methodology, which had appeared to us as most suitable during reconnaissance work in early 2009 when we met several witnesses to Kuay iron smelting operations. However, once we arrived for our main field season around Phnom Dek it became apparent that we were late, much too late, for this type of work. One of our 2009 informants had regrettably died that year, and though we recorded an instance of a local lady who had been permitted to deliver food to the smelters as a prepubescent girl (thus respecting fertility taboos), the Kuay elders from numerous local villages who kindly agreed to be interviewed all transpired to have been too young to have actually participated in pre-1950 smelting activities. The last Kuay smelters, who would have been fit men to maintain an all-day relay for the bellows according to historical records, were not interviewed during the period when Cambodia was too politically troubled for foreign researchers. Particularly emblematic of the fragility of highly skilled technical traditions, the Kuay attempted to revive smelting activities in the mid/late seventies to comply with Khmer Rouge policies on self-sufficiency, but failed as all the smelting masters (chhay), the porters of at least 1200 years of metallurgical tradition, had died in the intervening quarter century. In response to this we decided to employ a solidly archaeological/archaeological science approach to reconstructing Kuay metallurgy, but continued to record the oral histories for the information they may reveal later and also because even the Kuay iron smithing tradition appears to be in terminal decline.
How did other anthropological studies of metallurgy in other regions of the world influence your project?
Massively. Research into traditional and ancient metallurgy has been carried out extensively from South America, to Europe, to South Asia, but where the deep-time perspective has been most intensively reconciled is in Africa with literally hundreds of case studies involving informant interview, experimental reconstructions, and archaeological excavations. Though I am obviously not expert in all these regions, through my general training in ancient technologies at the University of Sheffield and at University College London I was able to bring to the Kuay study an awareness firstly of the key thermodynamic principles that must be obeyed for iron metal to be produced, but also the simply staggering variety with which these challenges have been overcome in very different cultural contexts through time and space. The key insight for our interests was that as a skilled technology with numerous possible technical solutions, chronologically and spatially persistent traits in iron production may indicate the close and cooperative teaching environments to be expected of ‘social continuity’ at some level – i.e. we wouldn’t want to define ‘a people’ based purely upon their metallurgical tradition but we would expect technological changes over time consistent with innovations in response to cultural, economic, and physical environments for which we can investigate corroborating evidence.
What can study of the interactions between the iron smelters of the Kuay and the Angkorian Khmer teach us about imperial power? About modern-day Cambodia?
Local map showing the geographical relationship between Preah Khan of Kompong Svay and the Phnom Dek area sites. Courtesy of Dr. M. Hendrickson.
Although work is very much ongoing, what is fascinating about the Kuay study is that following Dr. Hendrickson’s work we can see that the architectural expressions of Angkorian state infrastructure (roads and bridges) do not extend beyond the Preah Khan of Kompong Svay complex in to the forested territory surrounding Phnom Dek: Preah Khan seems to mark a frontier of the Khmer Empire. My own iron smelting reconstructions, with the help of Dr. Michael Charlton, do not seem to suggest any substantial technological discontinuity between production sites at Preah Khan and those around Phnom Dek, but the work of Dr. Stéphanie Leroy certainly indicates that two different sources of iron oxide were used. At this stage then we might propose that Khmer workers at Preah Khan imitated Kuay practice with local materials, or that Kuay workers were active in a very much state-oriented production there; either as paid, indentured, or slave labour. What does seem more clear though is that the hundreds of smelting sites of various sizes all around Phnom Dek represent Kuay family or community-level production; with the resulting iron supply reaching Angkor c. 130km east through either tribute, taxation, or free market operations. This provisionally shows us that although the Angkorian Empire is celebrated for having extended over much of mainland Southeast Asia between the 9th and 15th c. AD, the precise configuration and penetration of imperial power probably varied quite significantly by region and period. At a more general level we might conclude that no imperial territory maybe under total control all of the time, but that once stabilised economic activity involving established or mobile populations is a prerequisite for long-term success. In terms of modern countries like Cambodia or its neighbours, the characteristics of national identity (culture, history, and language) are usually drawn largely from those of lowland governing majorities but through the careful coordination of archaeological, ethnological, and historical records we may be able to demonstrate that geographically marginalised minority groups have long participated in and contributed to the development of nation states.
What are some next steps for this research? What do you see in the future?
At present we are broadly happy with our research questions and methodology but recognise the need to ‘thicken’ the dataset with higher density chronological and spatial coverage of Kuay production and settlement sites, and to increase the resolution of technological reconstructions by ever more careful excavation techniques and bringing in other expert opinion. The project is also amenable to geographic expansion: iron smelting material excavated by the Thai/Khmer Living Angkor Road Project are currently being studied by Mr. Pira Venunan, a Thai Ph.D. student at University College London, some of whose sites are located in linguistically ‘Kuay’ areas in northeast Thailand. Kuay sites are also known or suspected all the way up to and beyond the southern Lao border, so there is plenty of work to do! Although decades of research lie before us we share the ambition of being able to contribute towards a detailed long-term understanding of which social groups in which areas were providing which goods and services to each other and thus how their combined economic and political interaction contributed to the rich history of Southeast Asia.
Are you a current or past Wenner-Gren grantee and are interested in being interviewed for the blog? Contact Daniel Salas (dsalas@wennergren.org) for more information.
As we roll into the beginning of Autumn here in the northern hemisphere, we look forward to two Wenner-Gren-sponsored conferences in Europe.
Issues of Legitimacy: Entrepreneurial Culture, Corporate Responsibility and Urban Development
September 10-14, 2012
Naples, Italy
This conference will bring together a large field of anthropologists based in various countries and specializing in a wide range of ethnographic settings. Joining them will be an assortment of professionals in the fields of law, jurisprudence and economics to address issues of high contemporary intellectual relevance and of burning public concern raised by today’s increasingly competitive global economic scenario.
Urban areas are a dominant form of associated life that encapsulate the socioeconomic impact of increasingly significant international regulations and flows of capital and people. Governance have generally failed to constructively meet the challenges posed by the complexities and implications of this worldwide phenomenon. Anthropological analysis has identified entrepreneurial cultures rooted in the morality and ramifications of a ‘strong continuous interactions’ between the material and the non-material. Delegates will reflect on the significance, ramifications and impact on the broader society of such an empirical sine qua non. The role that individual and collective entrepreneurialism, and the attendant culture and social impact, have to play in such a scenario is too often frustrated by selective policies and the law. Eschewing confusion between individuality and individualism, anthropologists have demonstrated hoe this both encourages exclusion and widens the gap between governance and the govern across the world. The conference will reflect on the distinction between individual action and individualistic goals and on issues of legitimacy and responsibility in socioeconomic action and the management of political decision-making.
14th International Conference Of The European Association of Southeast Asian Archaeologists
September 18-21
Dublin, Ireland
The European Association of Southeast Asian Archaeologists (EurASEAA) brings together scholars working in Southeast Asian archaeology, anthropology, art history and philology. The EurASEAA conference is by definition international, uniting groups of people who do not otherwise normally meet, but who share a common interest in Southeast Asian heritage. The conference facilitates communication between different disciplines, addressing shared issues in anthropological debate and brings together the international community of research scholars to discuss, report, plan and promote new research. In 2012 the conference will run from the 18th-21st of September, hosted by University College Dublin, School of Archaeology. This is the first time EurASEAA has been held in Ireland, providing exciting opportunities for new engagement and collaborations in international heritage research and teaching. 2012 is also the year that Dublin is European City of Science; EurASEAA14 will be a ‘partner conference’ in this celebration, enabling involvement in a nationwide promotion of heritage and science studies. Video from the conference will be presented online, allowing public, student and academic participation nationally and internationally.
Our President, Dr. Leslie Aiello, guest blogs on the recent symposium held in Sweden examining the life, career and politics of Foundation founder Axel Wenner-Gren.
One of the highlights of the summer for the Foundation was the two-day symposium on “Reality and Myth: A Symposium on Axel Wenner-Gren.” This meeting was co-sponsored by the Swedish Wenner-Gren Foundations and ourselves and was held May 30-31, 2012 at the Wenner-Gren Center in Stockholm, Sweden. The Chair (Seth Masters) and Vice Chair (John Immerwahr) of our Board of Trustees and a number of Foundation staff attended.
Axel Wenner-Gren is an enigma because in the 1930s he was one of the wealthiest men in the world, but has now slipped largely into obscurity. His surviving legacy is his philanthropic achievements through the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the Swedish Wenner-Gren Foundations that specialize in scientific research and international scientific exchange. The main purpose of the meeting was to understand more about his life and career.
The two-day symposium grew out of the research into the politics of Axel Wenner-Gren by Ilja Luciak (Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech University) who was jointly funded by both foundations. The symposium also provided the welcome opportunity for the Swedish and New York Foundations, which have been largely independent throughout their existences, to make contact and discuss common areas of interest.
Seth J. Masters, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, with Sydel Silverman, President Emerita
The symposium itself covered all aspects of Axel Wenner-Gren’s life and was divided into four sessions. The first session on the economic dimension of his life covered his career at Electrolux where he made his fortune in vacuum cleaners and refrigerators as well as his later economic ventures in Latin America and Canada. The second session on the political dimension surveyed his political ambitions and activities in Europe and the Bahamas leading up to and during World War II. It also covered the relationship between Sweden and Nazi Germany during the war years. The third session on the social dimension focused primarily on the histories of the New York and Swedish Foundations but also included an interesting presentation on the legacy of the Wenner-Gren scientific expedition to Peru in 1939-1940, which discovered many of the important archaeological sites along the Inca trail and lead to the founding of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cuzco. The concluding session on the social dimension provided the opportunity to hear from some of the surviving Wenner-Gren family and others who knew him personally about life during the height of his influence in Sweden and in the following years in the Bahamas and Mexico.
You can also listen to Sydel Silverman, a past Wenner-Gren President, talk about the story of New York’s Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
Download “The History of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, New York” now.
To learn even more about Wenner-Gren and the larger history of the Foundation, visit our History page.
We are saddened to announce that Dr. Frank Wadsworth, former Trustee and Board Chair, passed away on August 8, 2012.
Frank Wadsworth worked tirelessly for the Foundation from 1970 to 2006. Throughout his tenure, beginning as a promising young English professor who brought fresh ideas to the Board, through the long period of his inspired leadership, to his later years as elder statesman and astute advisor, he was a guiding light for Trustees, four presidents, staff, and anthropologists associated with the Foundation. His thirty-six years of service included ten years as Chairman of the Board of Trustees (1977-1987), ten years as Vice Chairman (1994-2004), membership in the Executive Committee since its inception (1992-2006), Chairman of the Nominating Committee (1986-2004), and crucial roles on three presidential Search Committees
During the time he was Chair of the Board, he steered the Foundation through a period of profound crisis and more than anyone else in the Foundation’s history, is responsible for its survival and wellbeing. He had to make decisions that were hard and unpopular at the time, but were instrumental in putting Wenner-Gren on a sound fiscal basis. Through his scholarly integrity and personal grace, he also restored the trust of the anthropological profession in the Foundation and its activities. His diligence, courage, wisdom, and dedication ensured that Wenner-Gren would continue to benefit anthropology long into the future.
On his retirement in 2006, the Foundation renamed its Fellowship programs for international students in his honor. The Wadsworth International Fellowships and Wadsworth African Fellowships will be a lasting memorial to his involvement with the Foundation and the appreciation in which he is held by the Wenner-Gren community.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammad is captured consulting with his attorney in a courtroom sketch from a military commissions hearing in the prosecution of the 5 9/11 co-conspirators.
Aisha Ghani is a Ph.D. student in Anthropology at Stanford University. In 2011 she received a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant to aid research on ‘Conflated Identities: ‘Muslim’/'Terrorist’ and the Difficulty of Producing a Genuine Discourse about Terrorism,’ supervised by Dr. T. M. Luhrmann. We chatted with Aisha over e-mail to learn more about her fieldwork in the courtrooms of U.S. domestic terrorism trials and the role that legal proceedings play in shaping national terrorism discourse.
Tell us a little about the project that you’re working on.
Through observation of courtroom proceedings and case material in domestic terrorism trials and Guantanamo and Bagram detainee litigation, I examine how the Global War on Terror (GWOT) is imagined, articulated, challenged and reinforced in various kinds of U.S. Courts. I ask how the state’s “foundational” discourse in the Global War on Terror has 1) shaped and limited the nature of legal challenges that can and have arisen in courts, and how the discursive limits of the litigation have 2) worked in determining the kinds of ‘terrorist’ subjects who are called upon – and can call upon – the law. A crucial element of my research involves observing the ways in which ideas about Islam — including the Muslim sociality and subjectivity of accused terrorists– enters into legal spaces. What is the work of these socio-religious claims, and how do they relate to the legal and political claims being articulated in and through these cases? How do accused men, if and when given the opportunity to speak, choose to situate themselves in relation to the explicit and implicit legal and political claims of the state in the GWOT?
Outside of courtrooms, my research involves ethnographic interviews with family members of accused and convicted men, as well as interviews with lawyers and civil rights activists involved in litigation and/or advocacy efforts around particular cases and broader national security law and policy issues after 9/11. In engaging with these different kinds of people, I attempt to understand the ways in which their narratives of experience and public advocacy efforts, destabilize and nuance the meta-narratives of the state with respect to what Islam is, what terrorism is, and who accused men are, in ways that cannot perhaps be achieved through the language and processes of the law.
This upcoming August will be a busy month for the Wenner-Gren Foundation’s conference program, with two conferences taking place on two continents. Find out more below!
Africa, Anthropology and the Millennium Development Goals
August 13-14, 2012
Nairobi, Kenya
This meeting of the Pan-African Anthropological Association will turn an anthropological eye towards the so-called Millennium Development Goals, sets of development benchmarks set by the United Nations in 2000 with the aim of addressing widespread problems of extreme poverty, education, and social inequality in all 193 member nations, with a special focus on Africa and the developing world. Nearly a decade and a half later, it has become apparent that the intended goals of the MDG’s have not be achieved in Africa, and in fact the continent has backslid in key areas such as infant mortality and HIV prevention rates in sub-Saharan states. Whereas the MDG targets are clear, there are underlying forces which drive human behavior and which, if not taken into account, have the potential to derail the achievement of these goals. The conference will thus seek to examine how anthropology and anthropologists can address the cultural factors affecting the attainment of MDG targets and how they have so far engaged other disciplines and policy makers to provide solutions.
18th Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists
August 29 – September 1, 2012
Hensinki, Finland
The EAA’s annual conference aims to bring together archaeologists from all parts of Europe, the United States and other parts of the world to exchange ideas, develop partnerships, and to stimulate academic debate in a variety of archaeological fields, and to coordinate and enhance the management of cultural resources and the development of the archaeological profession, especially in the new democracies of Eastern Europe. These goals are acheived by dividing the conference into three major thematic blocks: Managing the Archaeological Record & Cultural Heritage; Archaeology of Today: Theortetical and Methodological Perspectives; and Archaeology & Material Culture: Interpreting the Archeological Record. The information shared at the conference will be reflected in future installments of the EAA’s publications, European Journal of Archaeology and The European Archaeologist.
