‘Miss Perkins’, a school teacher during the reign of Queen Victoria, introduces this special issue on anthropology and education. She reminds us that the Victorian era gave birth to anthropology: though initially deemed a highly controversial, even sacrilegious, pursuit, it came to be seen as promising hope for the betterment and civilization of humankind in the British Empire.
In this issue Paul Sillitoe traces the earliest dissemination of anthropology back to the activities of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in the 1840s and 50s, which eventually formed a separate Section H of Anthropology in 1884. Brian Street, taking a post-Victorian perspective, suggests that British anthropologists have lost their way with regard to education, and ignore the study of language and ethnography of communication at their peril. Paul Cooper examines how policy-makers in government and in universities increasingly, but mistakenly, regard education as a consumer service, a commodity which can be bought and sold. Sue Wright highlights the role of education in forming the social subject, and the ways anthropology can both contribute to and analyse this process. Keith Hart argues that academics have been far too elitist about university education and moreover have failed to organize themselves effectively. Despite their own long schooling, many now earn less than school teachers. David Mills looks at what European anthropologists are saying about the Bologna Agreement, which seeks to standardize university courses and qualifications across Europe. In a separate comment, Mills recollects past unfulfilled promises of anthropology’s potential in schools, and how it is now anthropologists who are forced to sit in the educationalist’s classroom.
Miss Perkins, our Victorian teacher for this issue, is played by professional actor Karen Powell, who regularly introduces schoolchildren to the Victorian classroom at the Ragged School Museum, Mile End, London. Modern teachers today no longer enforce discipline through the dunce’s cap, the cane or the backboard; the Queen’s portrait is unlikely to be found in today’s classrooms, and ink pens have been replaced by keyboards. Today’s anthropology is not the same as that of Victorian times – nevertheless, as contributors to this issue make clear, the hand of authority continues to be felt in education in various, albeit less visible, ways.

Brian Street 1
Thoughts on anthropology and education
Laura Peers 3
Repatriation - a gain for science?
Paul Cooper 5
The gift of education: An anthropological perspective on the commoditization of learning
Paul Sillitoe 10
Making links, opening out: Anthropology and the British Association for the Advancement of Science
Gustaaf Houtman 16
Anthropology and education: An interview with Sue Wright
Keith Hart 19
Letter from Europe: December 2004

NARRATIVE
Huon Wardle 20
The boy who knew how to fly

CONFERENCES
David Mills 22
The Bologna process and European higher education
Brian Morris 23
Ethnobiology, Social Change and Displacement

COMMENT
David Mills 25
Anthropology and the 'amateurs': A personal view

OBITUARY
Roy Ellen 25
John Bousfield (1948-2004)

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October 2004 – vol 20 – no 5

Front and back cover caption: BIO(IN)SECURITY. The front and back cover of this issue illustrate the contributions on biosecurity and bioterrorism on pp. 3-13.

The back cover photo is of a pamphlet issued in 1951 by the US Federal Civil Defense Administration, prepared as part of the civil defence education programme during the early years of the Cold War. The pamphlet lists ‘six survival secrets for biological warfare’, which consist of: keeping the home clean, reporting sickness, helping the authorities, avoiding rushing out after a bombing, avoiding food or drink exposed to the elements, and avoiding circulating rumours or believing in ‘wild stories’.

The front cover shows a molecular biologist working in a lab developing sophisticated protein detection technology that may be of use in biodefence. In the light of escalating claims concerning the threat of biological and chemical weapons, and following the anthrax scares in the US, biosecurity and biodefence have emerged as topics of political urgency as well as medical and scientific challenges. At the same time, epidemics of previously unknown diseases pose new problems for the protection of life on a global scale (BSE, SARS, avian viruses, etc.). Today, biological agents are perceived as a major challenge to security and health. We may already have passed into an era of global biopolitics: that is, an era in which living beings and fundamental life processes are being deployed for strategic ends, including destructive ones. Experts today are grappling with biosecurity in relation to a range of threats to health from both naturally occuring agents and those that have been altered through a range of human activities. Their work is defining one aspect of a global politics of biosecurity.

Public health issues are now being reframed in relation to questions of post-Cold War security, raising questions as to the nature of the dangerous biological agents at large in the world, the likelihood of attack and the best ways of preventing it, and how to evaluate the adequacy of our current preparations. Criteria such as ‘prevention’ and ‘preparedness’ have become targets toward which various institutions and actors are working. Policy-makers, funding agencies, scientists and other experts are attempting to articulate the elements of a biosecurity apparatus. The current situation, in which the formation of such an apparatus is a matter of negotiation, entrepreneurial initiative and contingency, is an especially important moment for anthropological enquiry.

CONTENTS

Neil L. Whitehead 1
Rethinking anthropology of violence
Stephen J. Collier, Andrew Lakoff & Paul Rabinow 3
Biosecurity: Towards an anthropology of the contemporary
Monica Schoch-Spana 8
Bioterrorism: US public health and a secular apocalypse
Richard A. Wilson 14
The trouble with truth: Anthropology's epistemological hypochondria
Keith Hart 18
Letter from Europe, October 2004

COMMENT
Alan Barnard 19
Indigenous peoples
P.-J. Ezeh, Keith Hart 19
Anthropology and relevance

LETTERS
M. Strathern, P. Gathercole, B. Durrans 20
on the BM Department of Ethnography
I. Harper, J. Pettigrew & S. Shneiderman 21
on Nepali Maoists
P. Kalve 21
on globalization and insecurity
L. Riddle 21
on Routledge publishing

CONFERENCES
F.K.G. Lim and S. Thiranagara 22
Locating the field: Metaphors of space, place and context in anthropology
Max Carocci 23
Making it explicit: Presentation and representation of Native North Americans
Marta Bolognani 24
Generational interaction and social change in Pakistan
R. Angelopoulou and G. Lavranos 25
Palaeoanthropology and modern human populations of Eastern Mediterranean

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August 2004 – vol 20 – no 4

Front and back cover caption: Second-hand clothing. A master tailor, his son (on the right) and two relatives, all making women's office wear and chitenge (printed cloth) outfits, Kamwala shopping centre, Lusaka, Zambia. This photo illustrates Karen Tranberg Hansen's article on second-hand clothing in this issue (pp. 3-9).
Zambians from all walks of life like to dress well, and this results in a thriving clothing industry in all sectors, from imported new and second-hand clothing and locally manufactured items to bespoke garments made by small-scale tailors. Such tailors play an important role in fulfilling clothing needs and desires that are not met by new and second-hand ready-made clothing. Male and female tailors ply their trade in public markets, shop corridors, and from private homes in cities and small towns across the country. Many of them have engaged actively with the challenge posed by the import of second-hand clothing, 'beating' it, in the words of one master tailor, through speciality production.
Diversifying his production into popular styles of women's wear, the master tailor in this photo trained his son and two younger relatives. They are kept busy with the changes each season in fashions in women's two-piece 'office wear' and chitenge wear (which has become very popular in recent years thanks to the ready availablity, in an open economy, of good-quality and attractive printed cloth imported from South and Southeast Asia and from the Far East). 'Office wear' sees changes in the length and style of shirts and tops, and in the detailing of decorative trim, while fashions in chitenge wear show varying skirt styles and lengths, fitted or loose tops, elaborate trim, and highly constructed sleeves. Zambia's example demonstrates that the much maligned second-hand clothing import trade can coexist comfortably with local initiatives in clothing production.

CONTENTS

Tony Barnett 1
HIV: A challenge for anthropology
Karen Tranberg Hansen 3
Helping or hindering? Controversies around the international second-hand clothing trade
Caspian Richards 10
Grouse shooting and its landscape: The management of grouse moors in Britain
David H. Price 16
Standing up for academic freedom: The case of Irving Goldman

COMMENT
Sarah Pink and Richard Fardon 22
Applied anthropology in the 21st century
Peter Gathercole and Brian Durrans 23
Anthropology and the British Museum: On the planned abolition of the Department of Ethnography

FROM THE ARCHIVES
Sarah Walpole 24
A floating Museum of Mankind?

FILM
Stephen O. Murray 25
Panting for ‘the Wild Man’ and Tobias Schneebaum: A review of Keep the river on your right: A modern cannibal tale by David and Laurie Shapiro
Jean Lydall 26
Migration story: Second Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival

CONFERENCES
Susanne Wessendorf 27
Future fields: European conference on fieldwork for graduate students and junior researchers

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June 2004 – vol 20 – no 3

Special Issue: Anthropology And Tourism

Front cover caption: The front cover illustrates David Turton's article on Mursi lip-plates (see pp 3-8). It shows Nga Mokonyi as she was in December 1969, a girl of 15 or 16 years, whose lip had been pierced a month earlier. She is carrying an earthenware pot, used for transporting water and for cooking sorghum porridge, the mainstay of the Mursi diet. Over her shoulder she carries the stalks of recently harvested sorghum (chewed for their sugar content, the fibrous residue being spat out).

At the time the photograph was taken Nga Mokonyi's future husband had already handed over a number of bridewealth cattle to her father, and she was to start living with him in approximately two years. By that time she would be able to wear a pottery or wooden plate several centimetres in diameter in her lower lip. Stretching the lip immediately after it has been cut is a painful and drawn out process, but many girls are prepared to persevere until they can wear plates with a diameter of up to 12 centimetres. The lip-plate is a mark of a woman's social adulthood and biological maturity, but in recent years it has also become an economic assset. Increasing numbers of European, North American and Japanese tourists are making their way to the Omo Valley, intent on taking photographs of women wearing lip-plates for which the Mursi are able to exact payment.

Thirty-five years after this photograph was taken, Nga Mokonyi is living close to the main tourist route into Mursiland. As she lines up with other women to have her photograph taken, competing to catch the eye of the tourists by making herself look as 'exotic' as possible, she knows that she is selling something tourists want, but neither admire nor respect. The lip-plate that she was once so proud to wear, and which cost her so much pain and discomfort, has become a symbol of her poverty and backwardness.

Back cover caption: Anthropology, tourism and journalism. This photo of a Shuar woman carrying a basket of plantains and laundry in Nayumpim, Ecuador, 1990, illustrates Rubenstein's article on Shuar migrants in this issue (pp 15-18). The mural on the front wall of the Shuar Federation headquarters incorporates symbols of the traditional hunter-gatherer homestead prior to colonization: a woman carrying a basket of manioc, a man with a blowgun, and a shrunken head hanging by the doorway. Manioc and plantains continue to form the staples of Shuar diet, but the last shrunken head ritual was performed in the 1930s, and today men have found work as wage-labourers or employees, some in North America. Most women, however, continue to cultivate basic foodstuffs back home. In the course of a day a woman will carry heavy baskets many times from the garden to the house. A strap, placed around her forehead, helps support the weight. Gardens may be as much as 20 minutes' walk downhill from the home, and the river where clothes are washed another 10 or 15 minutes. Rubenstein looks at how Shuar men become tourists of their own culture, visiting their commemorative tsantsa ritual objects and shrunken heads in a museum in New York.

In their article on eco-tourism, Russell and Wallace suggest that it can be damaging to the environment and argue for a more responsible 'eco-cultural tourism' that proactively involves host populations in its management. As David Turton demonstrates, the Mursi benefit from tourism largely in ways that reinforce cultural prejudices, earning cash for photos of the Mursi women's lip-plates, thus maintaining the stereotype of these as ancient 'tribal' markings. In Bali, the 2002 bomb blast has damaged tourism enough for Hitchcock to ask how government and anthropologists can collaborate in view of their converging interests in 'traditional' settlements, and whether there is perhaps a lesson here for developing tourism on the basis of Margaret Mead's past fieldwork.

Finally, Knut Christian Myhre suggests that Åsne Seierstad's bestseller, The bookseller of Kabul, provides food for thought on how stereotypes are unwittingly created and maintained, and asks why war journalism and prejudice go hand in hand with popular readings of Islamic societies, and whether (Norwegian) anthropologists are up to the challenge of conveying corrective insights through the mass media.

CONTENTS

Andrew Russell and Gillian Wallace 1
Irresponsible ecotourism
David Turton 3
Lip-plates and 'the people who take photographs': Uneasy encounters between Mursi and tourists in southern Ethiopia
Michael Hitchcock 9
Margaret Mead and tourism: Anthropological heritage in the aftermath of the Bali bombings
Steven L. Rubenstein 15
Shuar migrants and shrunken heads face to face in a New York museum
Knut Christian Myhre 19
The bookseller of Kabul and the anthropologists of Norway
Keith Hart 23
Letter from Europe, June 2004

COMMENT
James F. Weiner 24
Australian anthropology and the Hindmarsh Island Bridge case
Maryon McDonald 24
Debating the EU
Rebecca Marsland, James Staples, Ian Harper 24
Declining Anthropology?
Stephen O. Murray 25
Pseudonyms and Maoists

CONFERENCES
Susan Brin Hyatt 25
Keeping the bureaucratic peace
Mary Searle-Chatterjee 27
Identity, caste and the participant academic

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April 2004 – vol 20 – no 2

Front cover caption: The front cover illustrates Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney's article on Special Attack Force (kamikaze) pilots (see pp. 15-21). Kazuyo Umezawa, a Navy ensign, is shown on 28 April 1945, at the age of 18, about to embark on his 'no-return' mission from Kokubun Base, southern Kyushu, to meet his death as a tokkotai pilot. He was one of 3000 so-called 'boy pilots' (shonen hikohei) who, without finishing their higher education, were drafted towards the end of the war. State propaganda aestheticized their fatal missions, using the symbol of the cherry blossom to the extent that some pilots themselves fastened branches of cherry blossoms on their uniforms and headgear before taking off. When he was drafted, Kazuyo’s mother pleaded with the Office of the Draft that her three other sons had already been drafted, that she had been raising her children single-handedly since her husband's death from cancer at 42, and that her life would become even more difficult without Kazuyo. They replied that she was not the only one who suffered and that she should endure until Japan's victory. She persisted until an officer from the Draft Office threatened that she would be labelled a ‘non-national subject’ (hikokumin), at which point she gave up (Umezawa Shozo, 1996, personal communication). Despite his mother's strenuous opposition, Kazuyo wanted to help her financially as well as fulfilling his obligation of loyalty to her (ko), and he therefore volunteered as a Navy practice pilot. Financial incentives for recruits included the offer of higher payments for more dangerous positions and promotion of tokkotai pilots by two ranks upon death, which sharply increased the payment (onkyu) to survivors.
Shozo Umezawa explained how a few days before his brother's final flight Kazuyo had returned home cursing the Navy for killing young men. His facial expression reveals unspeakable sadness – a far cry from the radiant smile often portrayed in the propaganda photos of the tokkotai pilots.

Back cover caption: Supranationalism, nationalism and ‘indigeneity’

The back cover shows souvenirs displayed in a typical Brussels Euro-tourist shop. It illustrates the interview in this issue with Cris Shore and Marc Abélès on the European Union and its imminent enlargement (pp 10-14). The EU is a putative supranational project aimed at an indeterminate future, but lacking the ritual or cultural legitimacy that the European nation-states enjoy through their individual histories. Enlargement means that the EU will have to transcend its founding narrative, centred on avoiding war through a tight Franco-German embrace, to find a new grand narrative. Since the EU project is very much about engineering a future, its study poses a particular challenge to anthropologists.
If 'supranationalism' epitomizes an ideology of integration under assumptions of ethical and evolutionary superiority over parochial national bodies, in another take, Nancy Lindisfarne forefronts processes of globalization that are forming new transnational alliances, when she reviews the World Social Forum since 2000.
Justin Kenrick and Jerome Lewis argue against equating extreme nationalism with 'indigeneity' or 'indigenous' – but still envision these terms as no less culturally constructed than ideas such as 'the state' (or 'the EU'). 'Indigenous' points to lived realities best understood as including us all, not least the way transnational corporations make use of modern state power, or even academic arguments about who is ‘indigenous’ or not.
No more powerful symbol of an integrated world exists than the attack on the World Trade Center. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney prepares the ground for a bold analysis of the mythical narrative in the US media that too easily conflates Al-Qaeda civilian airline hijackers attacking Western urban targets with ‘kamikaze’ pilots attacking Pearl Harbor. In this issue, she examines the diaries of a number of young pilots at the end of World War II, and their thoughts, which reveal that they were cosmopolitan in their thinking, but forced to replicate in action the nationalist and militarist ideology that state propaganda aestheticized through the symbolism of the cherry blossom.

CONTENTS

Nancy Lindisfarne 1
Another world is possible
Justin Kenrick and Jerome Lewis 4
Indigenous peoples’ rights and the politics of the term ‘indigenous’
Cris Shore and Marc Abélès 10
Debating the European Union: An interview with Cris Shore and Marc Abélès
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney 15
Betrayal by idealism and aesthetics: Special Attack Force (kamikaze) pilots and their intellectual trajectories (Part 1)

COMMENT
Bill Watson 22
Muslim politics and the coming elections in Indonesia

CONFERENCES
Glenn Bowman 25
Anthropology as art, art as anthropology: Tate Modern, London
Anna Streissler 25
Agency, Discourses of Power and Collective Representations: Socrates

OBITUARY
Angela Hobart & Michael Hitchcock 26
Professor Dr I Gusti Ngurah Bagus (1933-2003)

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February 2004 – vol 20 – no 1

Front and back cover caption: CONFLICT IN NEPAL This photomontage, taken from the cover of the journal Ekkaison Shatabdi (‘The 21st Century’), issue 58, March 2002, shows the bodies of dead policemen in front of the destroyed palace of Mangalsen, Achham, in western Nepal. The ancient royal capital of the kingdom of Achham, now the headquarters of Achham district, was attacked on 17 February 2002 by Nepal’s Maoist insurgents. The ensuing battle between the guerrillas and state security forces was one of the bloodiest in the eight-year-old civil conflict which began when the Maoists declared a ‘people’s war’ in 1996. According to the Nepali Defence Ministry, 57 soldiers, 49 policemen, and five civilians were killed, and scores of Maoist rebels were also reported dead. Over 8000 people – Maoists, security personnel and civilians – have been killed since the conflict began, and an alarming rate of disappearances and other human rights violations committed by both the Maoists and the security forces makes Nepal one of the world’s most rapidly escalating hotspots.

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY extends recent focus on anthropology and terrorism, war and conflict with two articles looking at the situation in Nepal. Marie Lecomte-Tilouine (translated by David Gellner) considers the coincidence of regicide and Maoist rebellion by looking at the continuities between royal and Maoist symbolism. Judith Pettigrew, Sara Shneiderman and Ian Harper address the ethical issues of conducting ethnographic research in a country such as Nepal where violent conflict unexpectedly engulfs one’s fieldsites and compels radical changes to fieldwork methodology.

CONTENTS

Gerald Mars 1
Refocusing with applied anthropology
Keith Hart 3
What anthropologists really do
David Z. Scheffel 6
Slovak Roma on the threshold of Europe
Marie Lecomte-Tilouine (translated by David N. Gellner) 13
Regicide and Maoist revolutionary warfare in Nepal: Modern incarnations of a warrior kingdom
Judith Pettigrew, Sara Shneiderman and Ian Harper 20
Relationships, complicity and representation: Conducting research in Nepal during the Maoist insurgency

CONFERENCES
Nancy Lindisfarne 26
Weasel words and straight talking:
AAA 2003

LETTERS
Hilary Callan 27
Uniting UK anthropology
Elizabeth Colson 27
Male bias?
Dennis T.P. Keene 27
Samoan correction

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(back to top)

Anthropology Today

CONTENTS 2004 – vol 20

CONTENTS

NARRATIVE Huon Wardle 20 The boy who knew how to fly

CONFERENCES David Mills 22 The Bologna process and European higher education Brian Morris 23 Ethnobiology, Social Change and Displacement

COMMENT David Mills 25 Anthropology and the 'amateurs': A personal view

OBITUARY Roy Ellen 25 John Bousfield (1948-2004)

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NARRATIVE
Huon Wardle 20
The boy who knew how to fly

CONFERENCES
David Mills 22
The Bologna process and European higher education
Brian Morris 23
Ethnobiology, Social Change and Displacement

COMMENT
David Mills 25
Anthropology and the 'amateurs': A personal view

OBITUARY
Roy Ellen 25
John Bousfield (1948-2004)