Andre Gingrich

Concepts of race vanishing, movements of racism rising? Global issues and Austrian Ethnography

This article discusses a contradiction: while notions of race are disappearing from public and academic discourses, numbers of racist socio-political movements are rising. This paradox is examined, first, on a conceptual and methodological level, and some different uses of the relevant terms (e.g., ‘race’ and ‘Rasse’) between English- and German-language spheres are explored. Then, the paradox is assessed through an ethnographic case from Austria. The rise of racist and xenophobic attitudes during the 1990s is discussed for one region where explicit racist language was nevertheless minimal. The analysis relates this to the persistent reproduction of certain cultural practices. Local perceptions of ‘warrior monuments’ are taken as an example to argue that changes in official terminology may conceal, rather than disrupt, the emotional continuities of supremacist nationalism.

Brexit Referendum: first reactions from anthropology

My immediate reaction to the results of the British Referendum on leaving or remaining in the EU was to remember Alexei Yurchak’s book, Everything was forever, until it was no more (Yurchak 2006). In the book, Yurchak describes the feeling of many people in Russia when the Soviet Union broke up: it came as a complete shock because they thought it would never happen; but once it had happened, it was not really a surprise at all. The United Kingdom has had a tempestuous relationship with the European Economic Community (EEC) and then the European Union (EU), ever since it joined in 1973. The discussions against this huge European border experiment (one of the most radical border experiments I can think of) have been unceasing, and came from left and right (and of course from anarchists), from the centre and the peripheries, from populists and internationalists. Those in favour of whatever ‘Europe’ might mean were always much less newsworthy. Anthropologists were among many who lined up to critique everything about the politics, economics, ideology, structure and especially the bureaucracy of the EU (and some of them have contributed to this Forum). Yet once the referendum result was published, I realised that there is also much material in my field notes that shows that people did not really mean that the EU should cease to exist. Like the constant complaints against the habits of one’s closest kin, roiling against the EU is serious, but it does not really mean disavowal or divorce. Until, apparently, it does. This Forum represents the immediate reactions of 24 colleagues in anthropology about ‘Brexit’. The commentaries were all written within five days of the news coming out. Apart from having to trim the texts for space reasons, they have been left as they are, documents of immediate, often raw, reactions. In that sense, these texts are as much witness statements as they are observations; as much an echo chamber of all the endless discussion that came in the aftermath of the result as it is considered observation; as much an emotional reaction as it is analysis. I did ask all contributors to think about how to engage their knowledge of anthropology in addressing this issue. As their responses describe, there are many hugely serious and frankly alarming political, economic and ideological challenges facing both Europe and the world at the moment that have become entangled with Brexit. So this is not the time to sit back and say nothing. Others have been speaking out too, of course, including Felix Stein’s

Multiple Histories: Three Journeys through Academic Records, Medieval Yemen, and Current Anthropology's Encounters with the Past

This chapter sets out to reconsider the interrelation and non-identity between tribal and kinship relations in South-Western Arabias history through three cumulative methodological steps that are in part inspired by renewed debates on kinship in anthropology, but also by the École des Annales and other historians such as David Sabaean. A first step identifies different legacies of interactions between history and anthropology in the Euro-American academic record after 1945, and specifies their relevance for today. In a next step, prevailing relations between tribal structures and kinship relations will be assessed through a long-distance comparison between the medieval constellations in the Zaydi highlands of Yemen and elsewhere in Asia for an eleventh century time horizon. Thirdly, the outcome of this comparative analysis should then provide some indicators for a fresh assessment of existing source materials through anthropological perspectives, with special emphasis on gender, kinship and hierarchies. The argument concludes with a discussion of “multiple histories”, and how to approach and write them.

Science, Race, and Empire: Ethnography in Vienna before 1918

This overview of academic ethnography in the last decades of the Habsburg Empire is given through the example of Vienna as the Empire’s capital. Ethnography is scrutinized in its main dimensions through the four decades from the 1870s till after the end of World War I . Main trends, crucial phases, and key actors are identified and characterized to assess the roles of notions of race and racism. The overall period is marked by the emergence and formal establishment of an internally heterogeneous academic discipline called “Anthropologie und Ethnographie” (anthropology and ethnography). This took place along three main phases with different priorities and main actors. During that period, “Anthropologie und Ethnographie” was perceived as a more or less unified field of research—in institutional terms at first at the natural history museum since its opening in 1876, and later also at the University of Vienna as of 1912/13.

Diaspora and “Arabness”: Limits and Potentials for Critical Analysis

responds to this call by featuring a complexity of comparative case examples. By providing insights into different historical eras and various regional contexts, these comparative examples and insights allow for a critical assessment of theory in diaspora studies, while at the same time encouraging new conceptual elaborations in this field. This special section indeed fea tures the analytical strength of complex comparison: a majority of contributions are directly informed by comparative considerations of two or more diasporic conditions or suggest how to take them into account. Comparative endeavors across larger time spans, such as offered in some of these articles, clearly demonstrate the profoundness of transformational processes among diasporic communities within longer and shorter temporal rhythms. Other diaspora studies sometimes tended to adopt too hastily the point argued by Khachig Tololyan that diasporas are “exemplary communities of the transnational move ment.” 2 This view corresponded to a plethora of definitions, to divergent epistemic interests, and, in addition, to modes of applying the concept itself in ways that often were arbitrary: the results sometimes seemed to reflect authors’ preconceived opinions rather than the social realities that had been investigated. Several authors thus arrived at conclusions similar to Tololyan’s: “Finally, this multiplicity makes it necessary to ‘return to diaspora,’ which is in dan ger of becoming a promiscuously capacious category that is taken to include all the adjacent phenomena to which it is linked but from which it actually differs in ways that are constitutive, that in fact make a viable definition of diaspora possible.” 3 Another group of authors reacted to that first wave of diverse research in this field by insisting on the main concept’s very lim ited range of usage. 4 Others began to generally reject the concept: in Westwood’s wording, it

Small Island Hubs and Connectivity in the Indian Ocean World: Some Concepts and Hypotheses from Historical Anthropology

The present chapter explores methodological and conceptual contributions by historical anthropology for consideration in Indian Ocean studies. It sets out to feature, first, three main methodological aspects. In addition, second, the analysis also suggests three groups of theoretical concepts for precolonial times: The term “cosmopolitans” integrates key historical agents in long-distance maritime activities, such as captains and other leading ship crew members, interpreters, as well as long-distance traders and merchants with corresponding trans- and intercultural expertise and interests. The term “local cultural brokers” includes experienced pilots as well as their middlemen and apprentices, whose specializations combine their frequent intercultural experience with maritime visitors from distant regions, and the local and regional knowledge they can provide for them. The term “small island constellations” finally delineates small islands structural positioning in historical and regional contexts. This is further differentiated into five loose and intersecting forms, namely zero, isolated, binary, cluster, and buffer constellations.

German-language anthropology traditions around 1900: Their methodological relevance for ethnographers in Australia and beyond

1 The author wishes to acknowledge with gratitude the substantial academic discussions that have helped to improve this chapter: first, by Nic Peterson and Anna Kenny (both in Canberra), as this volume’s editors as well as academic hosts to the conference that preceded it; second, by Gabriele Weichart and Peter Schweitzer (both in Vienna); third, by the publishing house’s anonymous reviewers. My special thanks go to Eva-Maria Knoll (Vienna) for elaborating Figures 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4, which accompany this text. German-language anthropology traditions around 1900: Their methodological relevance for ethnographers in Australia and beyond

Comparative Method in Anthropology

This article presents comparison in anthropology as the fields third main methodological inventory, together with ethnographic fieldwork and historical anthropology. A new pluralism of comparative procedures is discussed by examining binary, regional, temporal, distant, and fluid versions of comparison. Finally dissociated today from previously predefined connections to grand theories, anthropological comparison primarily is of a qualitative orientation, remaining closely connected to fieldwork insights while moving from it to an additional level of careful abstraction that may allow for better distinctions between particularities and commonalities in human sociocultural lives.

Fieldnotes, Diary, and Retrospective Imagination

has always been a very important part of the autism story and that scientific evidence suggesting an autism epidemic must be carefully evaluated. In chapter 8 Grinker describes the search for effective interventions for Isabel. The difficulties surrounding Isabel’s school placement are offset by the story of her fascination with Monet’s painting of the Japanese bridge and the children’s book Linnea in Monet’s Garden, by Cristina Bjork. Chapters 9–12 remap the world of autism—and not only in a geographical sense. By speaking to parents and others who live in New York, in the mountains of Appalachia, in South Africa, in India, and in South Korea, Grinker deconstructs and closely scrutinizes the sociocultural and historical processes that have resulted in autism as a clinical diagnosis. Some of the stories in these chapters have familiar themes, among them that of the Zulu parents who left their homeland and moved to Cape Town to be closer to educational resources for their son. Others are uniquely and tragically American, including the story of a mother of two boys with autism who created a group-home development program for teenagers and adults with autism after her husband died in the attacks on September 11, 2001. Chapter 13 returns to Isabel’s story, this time with the focus on parent advocacy and school legislation. The struggle to secure Isabel’s school placement serves as the background against which Grinker examines the issues of parent advocacy and litigation. Chapter 14 revisits the main arguments of the book. Cross-culturally, Grinker writes, the symptoms of autism and its etiology are defined according to local theories of illness, personhood, and kinship, and there are variations within cultures in rural and urban areas and across racial and ethnic boundaries. In urban areas in South Korea, the diagnosis of autism is so stigmatizing that the preferred alternative is reactive attachment disorder, believed to be caused by lack of mother’s love. In large cities in the United States, African American children are diagnosed with autism more than a year later, on average, than Caucasian children, and their diagnosis generally requires more visits to clinicians. Such issues make autism centrally relevant to the field of anthropology, Grinker writes, because these variations are a product of complex interaction between culture and biology and are at the very core of anthropological concerns. Unstrange Minds’s contribution has been recognized by its selection as one of Library Journal ’s Best Books 2007 and as finalist for the 2007 Victor Turner Prize awarded by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology.