tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/ethnocentrism-15945/articlesEthnocentrism – The Conversation2023-04-05T12:24:51Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2020112023-04-05T12:24:51Z2023-04-05T12:24:51ZRacist and sexist depictions of human evolution still permeate science, education and popular culture today<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518818/original/file-20230331-1042-s84ty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C2048%2C1367&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Human evolution is typically depicted with a progressive whitening of the skin, despite a lack of evidence to support it.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stone_age_by_Vasnetsov_01.jpg">Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov/Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Systemic racism and sexism have <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70401-2">permeated civilization</a> since the rise of agriculture, when people started living in one place for a long time. Early Western scientists, such as Aristotle in ancient Greece, were indoctrinated with the <a href="http://www.beacon.org/Superior-P1495.aspx">ethnocentric</a> and <a href="https://www.akpress.org/a-brief-history-of-misogyny.html">misogynistic</a> narratives that permeated their society. More than 2,000 years after Aristotle’s writings, <a href="http://www.beacon.org/Inferior-P1278.aspx">English naturalist Charles Darwin</a> also extrapolated the sexist and racist narratives he heard and read in his youth to the natural world. </p>
<p>Darwin presented his biased views as scientific facts, such as in his 1871 book “<a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/39301709">The Descent of Man</a>,” where he described his belief that men are evolutionarily superior to women, Europeans superior to non-Europeans and hierarchical civilizations superior to small egalitarian societies. In that book, which <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-darwins-descent-man-holds-150-years-after-publication-180977091/">continues to be studied</a> in schools and natural history museums, he considered “the hideous ornaments and the equally hideous music admired by most savages” to be “not so highly developed as in certain animals, for instance, in birds,” and compared the appearance of Africans to the New World monkey <em>Pithecia satanas</em>.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Science isn’t immune to sexism and racism.</span></figcaption>
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<p>“The Descent of Man” was published during a moment of societal turmoil in continental Europe. In France, the working class <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Commune-of-Paris-1871">Paris Commune</a> took to the streets asking for radical social change, including the overturning of societal hierarchies. Darwin’s claims that the subjugation of the poor, non-Europeans and women was the natural result of evolutionary progress were music to the ears of the elites and those in power within academia. Science historian <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=OCG87poAAAAJ&hl=en">Janet Browne</a> wrote that Darwin’s <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691114392/charles-darwin">meteoric rise within Victorian society</a> did not occur despite his racist and sexist writings but in great part because of them. </p>
<p>It is not coincidence that Darwin had a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, an honor emblematic of English power, and was <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/darwin/oclc/644948405">publicly commemorated</a> as a symbol of “English success in conquering nature and civilizing the globe during Victoria’s long reign.” </p>
<p>Despite the significant societal changes that have occurred in the last 150 years, sexist and racist narratives are still common in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.21978">science, medicine and education</a>. As a <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=sOat2IwAAAAJ&hl=en">teacher and researcher</a> at Howard University, I am interested in combining my main fields of study, <a href="https://www.ruidiogolab.org/">biology and anthropology</a>, to discuss broader societal issues. In research I recently published with my colleague <a href="https://profiles.howard.edu/fatimah-jackson">Fatimah Jackson</a> and three medical students at Howard University, we show how racist and sexist narratives are not a thing of the past: They are still present in scientific papers, textbooks, museums and educational materials.</p>
<h2>From museums to scientific papers</h2>
<p>One example of how biased narratives are still present in science today is the numerous depictions of human evolution as a linear trend from darker and more “primitive” human beings to more “evolved” ones with a lighter skin tone. Natural history <a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/john-gurche-shaping-humanity/1836128.html">museums</a>, <a href="https://medium.com/paperkin/where-is-evolution-taking-the-human-race-6ddaf7eaddba">websites</a> and <a href="https://theculturetrip.com/africa/south-africa/articles/what-south-africas-caves-can-tell-you-about-humankind/">UNESCO heritage sites</a> have all shown this trend.</p>
<p>The fact that such depictions are not scientifically accurate does not discourage their continued circulation. <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/video/15-countries-largest-white-population-195712421.html">Roughly 11%</a> of people living today are “white,” or European descendants. Images showing a linear progression to whiteness do not accurately represent either human evolution or what living humans look like today, as a whole. Furthermore, there is no scientific evidence supporting a progressive skin whitening. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.24564">Lighter skin pigmentation</a> chiefly evolved within just a few groups that migrated to non-African regions with high or low latitudes, such as the northern regions of America, Europe and Asia.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Illustrations of human evolution tend to depict progressive skin whitening.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Sexist narratives also still permeate academia. For example, in a 2021 paper on a famous early human fossil <a href="https://doi.org/10.4436/jass.99001">found in the Sierra de Atapuerca</a> archaeological site in Spain, researchers examined the canine teeth of the remains and found that it was actually that of a girl between 9 and 11 years old. It was previously believed that the fossil was a boy due to a popular 2002 book by one of the authors of that paper, paleoanthropologist <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5nDp-kIAAAAJ">José María Bermúdez de Castro</a>. What is particularly telling is that the study authors recognized that there was no scientific reason for the fossil remains to have been designated as a male in the first place. The decision, they wrote, “<a href="https://newsrnd.com/news/2021-03-16-%0A---the-boy-from-the-gran-dolina-was-actually-a-girl%0A--.Skx4GEFC7u.html">arose randomly</a>.”</p>
<p>But these choices are not truly “random.” Depictions of human evolution <a href="https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801435492/ancestral-images/">frequently only show men</a>. In the few cases where women are depicted, they tend to be shown as passive mothers, not as active inventors, cave painters or food gatherers, despite available anthropological data showing that <a href="http://www.beacon.org/Inferior-P1278.aspx">pre-historical women were all those things</a>.</p>
<p>Another example of sexist narratives in science is how researchers continue to discuss the “puzzling” <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/jez.b.22690">evolution of the female orgasm</a>. Darwin <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70401-2">constructed narratives</a> about how women were evolutionarily “coy” and sexually passive, even though he acknowledged that females actively select their sexual partners in most mammalian species. As a Victorian, it was difficult for him to accept that women could play an active part in choosing a partner, so he argued that such roles only applied to women in early human evolution. According to Darwin, men later began to sexually select women.</p>
<p>Sexist narratives about women being more “coy” and “less sexual,” including the idea of the female orgasm as an evolutionary puzzle, <a href="https://www.iflscience.com/female-orgasms-are-not-puzzling-enigmas--43486">are contradicted</a> by a wide range of evidence. For instance, women are the ones who actually more frequently experience <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2020.1743224">multiple orgasms</a> as well as more <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00224490209552129">complex, elaborate and intense orgasms</a> on average, compared to men. Women are not biologically less sexual, but <a href="https://theconversation.com/data-should-smash-the-biological-myth-of-promiscuous-males-and-sexually-coy-females-59665">sexist stereotypes</a> were accepted as scientific fact.</p>
<h2>The vicious cycle of systemic racism and sexism</h2>
<p>Educational materials, including textbooks and anatomical atlases used by science and medical students, play a crucial role in perpetuating biased narratives. For example, the 2017 edition of “<a href="https://evolve.elsevier.com/cs/product/9780323547086?role=student">Netter Atlas of Human Anatomy</a>,” commonly used by medical students and clinical professionals, includes about 180 figures that show skin color. Of those, the vast majority show male individuals with white skin, and only two show individuals with “darker” skin. This perpetuates the depiction of white men as the anatomical prototype of the human species and fails to display the full anatomical diversity of people.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Textbooks and educational materials can perpetuate the biases of their creators in science and society.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Authors of teaching materials for children also replicate the biases in scientific publications, museums and textbooks. For example, the cover of a 2016 coloring book entitled “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Evolution_of_Living_Things_Coloring.html?id=mOUkMQAACAAJ">The Evolution of Living Things”</a>“ shows human evolution as a linear trend from darker "primitive” creatures to a “civilized” Western man. Indoctrination comes full circle when the children using such books become scientists, journalists, museum curators, politicians, authors or illustrators.</p>
<p>One of the key characteristics of systemic racism and sexism is that it is unconsciously perpetuated by people who often don’t realize that the narratives and choices they make are biased. Academics can address long-standing racist, sexist and Western-centric biases by being both more alert and proactive in detecting and correcting these influences in their work. Allowing inaccurate narratives to continue to circulate in science, medicine, education and the media perpetuates not only these narratives in future generations, but also the discrimination, oppression and atrocities that have been <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/disturbing-resilience-scientific-racism-180972243/">justified by them in the past</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202011/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rui Diogo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>From Aristotle to Darwin, inaccurate and biased narratives in science not only reproduce these biases in future generations but also perpetuate the discrimination they are used to justify.Rui Diogo, Associate Professor of Anatomy, Howard UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1040402018-10-18T16:11:11Z2018-10-18T16:11:11ZOxford-style debate: Ethno-nationalism and systemic crisis are symptoms of the present<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/238702/original/file-20181001-195260-vk39dv.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C4%2C828%2C503&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Gazi Islam.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article is the fifth and final in the debate series: “The impact reflected by Trump is here to stay”. This article argues against the motion. The fourth article in this series <a href="https://theconversation.com/oxford-style-debate-trump-education-identity-and-the-perpetual-feedback-loop-102534">“Trump, education, identity and the perpetual feedback loop”</a> expounds the nature of Trump-society feedback in arguing for the motion.</em></p>
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<p>In his 1999 book <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520229297/the-bridge-over-the-racial-divide"><em>The Bridge over the Racial Divide</em></a>, William Julius Wilson wrote that economic insecurity creates conditions that hollow out the civic values of liberal democracy, and constitutes the “breeding grounds for racial and ethnic tensions”. He states “in this social climate, some conservatives in the United States have attempted to unite white Americans around anger at the government and racial minorities”.</p>
<p>That was 20 years ago – but it is not the first time that the smoke of ethno-nationalist fantasy has been used to obscure the smouldering flame of economic insecurity. It has happened before, and now, 20 years on, it is still happening.</p>
<p>John Bellamy Foster described how capitalist democracies face a continued threat of authoritarianism. This threat derives from their ongoing tension between two normative orientations: A political regime based on liberal democracy and civil rights, and a capitalist market orientation focused on economic efficiency and growth. The two check and balance each other; capitalism provides a productive base for liberal democracy; liberal democracy keeps capitalism livable, and gives it a human face. The political centre thus comprises a tension, a negotiation between forces that balance each other. Advocates for socialism wager that substantive democracy can be extended and universalised if society moves away from a capitalist mode of production. By contrast, fascism holds that capitalism can be better managed by unchaining it from liberal democracy and civil rights, and by strengthening executive power and the repressive apparatus to protect an economy unconcerned with human well-being.</p>
<p>At this historical moment, how should we confront the impact that Trump has made on this fragile balance?</p>
<p>In my brief argument, I will argue four points:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>We must not make Trump the new normal, but recognise his ascent as symptomatic of a deeper crisis.</p></li>
<li><p>Trump is rooted in system dynamics that are obscured if we focus our attention on the figure of Trump – these are cultural and political in part, but I will argue their primary motor is economic.</p></li>
<li><p>Neglecting the economic hollowing out the American middle class creates a blind spot that ultimately reinforces nationalist and ethnocentric scapegoating.</p></li>
<li><p>Trump is symptom of the underlying structural eclipse of economic justice considerations. This was not carried out only by Republicans, but by the neoliberal capture of both parties.</p></li>
</ol>
<h2>1. We must not make Trump the new normal</h2>
<p>To see the impact of Trump as definitive and permanent means to ignore how it grew out of, and provides a caricature of late capitalism. Trump is neither new, nor normal. He is not new, because the figure he represents is a well-worn caricature of corporate power. Decades before his political pretensions, Trump was already seen as the paradigm of raw aspiration, cutthroat competition, in his television series, and in the published media. He is not normal, because what he stands for is not the everyman of the street he pretends to represent. Americans do not think like Trump, they do not act like Trump. Trump does not stand for America or American values. At least not yet.</p>
<h2>2. Trump is a superficial symptom of a more deeply-rooted social crisis</h2>
<p>The US has been living through a social crisis that is multidimensional in nature, involving economic, cultural, and political aspects. Following Nancy Fraser, I describe this as an economic crisis of retribution, a political crisis of representation, and a cultural crisis of recognition.</p>
<p>In the economic sphere there has been a crisis of redistribution. This crisis is marked by stagnating wages since the mid-1970s and unprecedented growth in the top 1%, who now earn roughly a quarter of national income. It is also marked by the decline of the social safety net - in terms of the decline of the welfare state; the erosion of public goods - such as schools, hospitals, infrastructure and public services; as well as eroding worker rights and protections.</p>
<p>In the political sphere, there has been a crisis of representation. On the one hand, the increasing privatisation of public goods has made public services less representative of citizen needs and more beholden to shareholder demands. On the other hand, a hollowed out public sector has reduced the government’s ability to secure public safety through environmental regulations, food and pharmaceutical controls, and workplace safety legislation. This crisis of representation has reduced the public legitimacy of government and made it a prime target for accumulated frustration.</p>
<p>Finally, in the sphere of civil society, there has been a crisis of recognition. Emergent social movements during and after the civil rights era eroded the sense of a homogeneous national population and pointed out the lack of inclusion of women and minorities in the national conversation. American culture was revealed to be a mosaic of multicultural identities, rather than a melting pot of universal values. What could have been an opening to a deeper democracy through pluralism, in the light of the political and economic crises described above, was instead turned into a source of fragmentation and division.</p>
<p>These crises are interrelated and each represents one side of a social totality; however, the conversation has largely marginalised voices promoting economic justice, and has focused on political, but especially cultural, concerns as a substitute. The taboo of uttering the word “socialism”, ensured that the economic narrative went unheard. In this empty space, an ethno-nationalistic myth has come in to fill the void.</p>
<h2>3. Trump’s identity and sovereignty discourses deflect attention from the roots of the situation</h2>
<p>The struggle against economic injustice has been distorted into a crisis of national unity and ethno-national identity. It is not the poorest that voted for Trump – the poorest voted Democrat, and the median income of Trumps most ardent support, was, as John Bellamy Foster notes, over $70,000. But the less educated did significantly vote for Trump, suggesting that is not poverty per se, but middle class fears of backsliding into poverty combined with a lack of information about the true causes of that danger that led to ethno-nationalist support.</p>
<p>As a result, the danger of “losing the American way of life” has not been seen in its true light, as the consequence of growing economic inequality in post-industrial society. This inequality, which has continued uninterrupted for 40 years, has eroded the sense of solidarity and has led citizens to view their neighbors as competitors in a zero-sum game.</p>
<p>Exacerbating this sense has been a policy regime that insists on taking the low-road of cutting expenditures rather than the high road of investing in human capital, sustainable development and social stability. This growing inequality has eroded the possibility for liberal democracy to effectively govern the country, leading to the hollowing out of key social and democratic institutions; schools & university, health care, public health and environmental regulation, public infrastructure and services.</p>
<p>Apologists increasingly deflect the core of the problem onto ideological battles that colonise the media and blogosphere. Social tensions and stemming from public budget cuts are misleadingly attributed to so-called culture wars and diminishing patriotism. Inefficiencies from overstretched agencies, budgetary suffocation and privatisation are cynically blamed on government overreach and red tape.</p>
<p>In each of these displacements, economic causes are occluded, and replaced by artificial sweeteners such as race, nation or most ambiguously “the people”. The latter term is effective only because of its slipperiness of reference, and for that reason we should not consider Trump a populist. To speak for the people means to care about their needs and their livelihood. Trump’s false appeal was only possible because his predecessors did not take these needs and livelihoods seriously.</p>
<h2>4. Trump ran as a Republican; but the underlying crisis is bipartisan</h2>
<p>The legitimacy crisis facing the US was not caused only by Republicans, but by the neoliberal capture of both parties. This is not a story of the failure of the centre to hold out against far-right extremists – it is the story of a centre that has not stayed true to its own values and its narrative of social justice, and has been dragged so far off the centre that it is itself increasingly indistinguishable from those on the right that it critiques.</p>
<p>In conclusion, The Trump presidency is a symptom of a system crisis that has been building for many years, and is a continuation, not a rupture, of that system. Ethno-nationalist politics is an ulcer in the upset stomach of American capitalism, a condition that will pass if given the right treatment and care. But when America is tired and overworked and its social fabric is sapped, the ulcer returns, and worsens, and eventually becomes deadly. Democratic values continue to live as long as we continue to speak; however, until we address the economic and social injustices this strain on our social fabric - this affliction - will return, in ever worsening forms. This injustice is not normal; it is not permanent; let us do what we can each day to remember the world that will come after this has passed.</p>
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<p><em>This concludes the debate series “The impact reflected by Trump is here to stay”. If you have taken the poll at the <a href="https://theconversation.com/fake-news-meets-fact-in-an-oxford-style-debate-revival-96253">start of this series</a>, let us know how your opinion of this issue stands now. Please vote by clicking <a href="http://www.easypolls.net/poll.html?p=5ba4eb13e4b05a9fecb013d2">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/104040/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Les auteurs ne travaillent pas, ne conseillent pas, ne possèdent pas de parts, ne reçoivent pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'ont déclaré aucune autre affiliation que leur organisme de recherche.</span></em></p>As part of the Grenoble École de Management’s 2018 Geopolitics Festival, four scholars explored the art of debate – an antidote for toxic conversations in the fake-news era.Gazi Islam, Associate Professor, People Organizations and Society, Grenoble École de Management (GEM)Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/922002018-04-05T10:07:00Z2018-04-05T10:07:00ZHow an uproar over aid and sexual exploitation ignored women’s actual experiences<p>The recent “Oxfam sex scandal” – during which some aid workers were accused of paying for sex with young women in vulnerable conditions – <a href="http://www.theweek.co.uk/in-depth/91833/oxfam-scandal-what-is-the-future-for-uk-foreign-aid">has focused almost exclusively</a> on the aid workers and aid organisations involved. But the perspectives and motivations of the young women who were paid for sex with money or material goods have hardly been discussed at all, and the contexts in which they live have been misrepresented and misunderstood.</p>
<p>The problem of transactional sex in areas hit by disaster, war, or extreme poverty is not strictly specific to the aid industry. Aid workers are not the only men who offer money and material goods in exchange for sex to impoverished young people – other foreigners, and also local men, are involved.</p>
<p>The focus on aid workers and their organisations has led to the mistaken belief that this problem can be solved mainly, if not exclusively, by punishing the culprits and the organisations for which they work. This thinking rests on the conflation of transactional sex with rape and sexual harassment – an issue that dates back to the United Nations (UN) “zero tolerance” <a href="https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/standards-of-conduct">policy towards sexual exploitation and abuse</a>, adopted in 2003. </p>
<p>That policy started with noble intentions. But it has <a href="http://www.e-ir.info/2015/10/21/the-uns-shame-sexual-exploitation-and-abuse-in-un-peacekeeping/">achieved little</a> in the way of curbing sexual exploitation by aid workers and peacekeepers. <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237460031_Making_sense_of_zero_tolerance_policies_in_peacekeeping_sexual_economies">Some have argued</a> that the failure to distinguish between consensual and non-consensual sex is one of the causes of this inability. The zero tolerance policy has been criticised also for framing the problem as a simple question of discipline and conduct detached from the UN’s broader human rights agenda.</p>
<h2>The women’s perspective</h2>
<p>There is a long debate among feminists on whether sex work is inherently exploitative or not. But even if we concede that it is, we need to recognise one fundamental distinction: unlike other forms of abuse, many of transactional sex’s “victims” accept and even seek out these exchanges themselves as a means of improving their often dire circumstances.</p>
<p>“Transactional sex” is a catch-all term for a <a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/wps/2018/02/06/shades-of-grey-in-sexual-exploitation-and-abuse/">wide continuum</a> of different relationships. At one end are relationships between adults that, even if an exchange of money and material goods take place, appear mutually beneficial; at the other end are relationships that are unambiguously damaging and exploitative. </p>
<p>The reporting on the Oxfam scandal often overlooked this distinction. Instead, the selfsame commentators who as a rule rail against the “white saviour” mentality <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/20/oxfam-abuse-scandal-haiti-colonialism">reverted to exactly the same thinking</a> by portraying poor women in conflict and disaster-affected zones as helpless victims.</p>
<p>This is not to say that the worst-case scenarios aren’t real. During my own research in post-conflict Côte d’Ivoire, I witnessed cases at the extreme abusive end of the continuum. Among them were incidents where girls aged 13 or 14 were pushed by the lack of opportunities and family support to sell sex for the equivalent of less than a dollar. Their clients were not just international personnel, but also local men. I was struck by how little support and attention the aid and peacebuilding community gives to the most vulnerable girls and women involved in selling sex, and just how far down the list of priorities they seem to sit.</p>
<p>And yet, not all these contexts are alike. Many testimonies from women involved in these types of relationships in post-conflict and post-disaster settings paint a more complex picture. According to one <a href="https://www.stabilityjournal.org/articles/10.5334/sta.gf/">survey</a> of Haitian women who reported having had sexual encounters with UN peacekeepers in exchange for gifts and money, many “experienced transactional sex to be highly beneficial”. According to the author of the report, these relationships “helped them meet daily life needs and enabled them to access resources and opportunities to improve the economic status of their household”. </p>
<p>Still, many also reported serious episodes of sexual and physical abuse. The report concludes that the individual benefits are offset by the fact that transactional sex “replicates and often magnifies the power imbalance present in male/female sexual relationships” in Haiti.</p>
<p>Others from Haiti described similar complexities. The Times ran an <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/charity-scandal-he-liked-lesbian-shows-says-teenage-lover-of-haiti-director-roland-van-hauwermeiren-oxfam-r9w5tv0l3">interview with Mikelange Gabou</a>, the only young Haitian woman who agreed to talk about her relationship with a disgraced Oxfam staff member. Gabou did not describe herself as a victim; instead, she drew a distinction between her own experience and that of “other women” whom the man has, <a href="http://www.itv.com/news/2018-02-16/woman-tells-itv-news-she-began-relationship-with-orgy-loving-oxfam-ex-haiti-chief-roland-van-hauwermeiren-at-17/">in her words</a>, “done wrong”. One might argue that Gabou’s case stands at the middle of the continuum, and the case of the “other women” at the more clearly abusive end.</p>
<p>To be sure, those responsible for sexual exploitation must be punished. But whereas punishing the perpetrators of rape and sexual harassment can put an end to their abusive actions, impoverished people can simply find other men to sell to. The illusion that by simply punishing “our men” we can “save” these women is just another example of how a discourse that aims to challenge ethnocentrism actually ends up reinforcing it.</p>
<h2>How aid can help</h2>
<p>The only true solution is to transform the structural conditions of poverty, inequality and gender discrimination that push people into transactional sex in the first place. This is far more than aid can ever achieve by itself – but cutting aid, as some sections of the British right proposed in the wake of the Oxfam scandal, surely would not help. Instead, the way aid is administered must be rethought from the recipients’ point of view.</p>
<p>In post-conflict settings, the type of scenario I am most familiar with, aid agencies tend to focus on two groups: those that could disrupt the peace process, and those who can help change things for the better. Teenagers who sell sex belong to neither category. They’re also often difficult to work with; they might have substance abuse or mental health problems, making them unpredictable or even violent. But these are reasons to engage with them more, not less.</p>
<p>Even small efforts can make a difference. In Côte d'Ivoire, <a href="https://www.agi.it/blog-italia/africa/storia_di_dona_bambina_prostituta_che_sogna_di_fare_la_sarta-2082325/post/2017-08-23/">a small programme run by two Italian NGOs</a> is providing education and training to teenagers formerly involved in sex work. Programmes like this don’t just offer material support; they help their beneficiaries restore their self-respect and envisage a different life.</p>
<p>The aid industry cannot tackle these problems simply by disciplining its own workers. The international staff responsible for misconduct deserve punishment, but they don’t deserve all the attention. Attention should be given to the people who need it the most: the young women, and in some cases men, who have to make extremely difficult choices in extremely difficult circumstances.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/92200/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Giulia Piccolino has received research funding from the European Union Research Council, Compagnia di San Paolo and the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation. She has been from September 2011 to June 2012 a United Nations Volunteer in charge of electoral assistance with the United Nations Operations in Côte d’Ivoire. She has no current affiliation with the United Nations or with any other relevant group. </span></em></p>It’s all too easy to miss the point about sex work in areas hit by conflict and disaster. How about listening to the people who experience it?Giulia Piccolino, Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Loughborough UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/931782018-03-20T10:42:58Z2018-03-20T10:42:58ZMerit matters in US immigration, but agreeing on what ‘merit’ means is complicated<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211080/original/file-20180319-31614-syzmve.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A naturalization ceremony in Los Angeles. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Fierce debate over who deserves to be an immigrant to the United States has drawn on for decades.</p>
<p>Recently, President Donald Trump and hardliner Republicans have proposed overhauling the U.S. immigration system to focus principally on “<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-merit-based-immigration-means-in-different-parts-of-the-world-91304">merit-based</a>” immigration. As <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-itll-be-hard-to-put-trumps-immigration-plan-into-practice-2018-2?IR=T">they define it</a>, merit means being highly educated, fluent in English, relatively wealthy and having a job awaiting in the U.S. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, advocates of legal status for <a href="https://www.lawlogix.com/what-is-the-dream-act-and-who-are-dreamers/">Dreamers</a> – immigrants brought to the U.S. as children without authorization – argue that these individuals are particularly deserving of protection, while refugee organizations underscore the dire situation of <a href="http://www.rcusa.org/history/">asylum seekers</a>.</p>
<p>The lure of “merit” is clear: When choosing individuals for some reward, it may seem natural to prefer those who can claim to deserve it most. The concept of merit undergirds many aspects of everyday life: university admission practices, <a href="https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=48">civil service hiring</a>, police and firefighters’ examinations, sports teams’ tryouts and musical competitions.</p>
<p>However, as I discuss in my book “<a href="https://press.princeton.edu/titles/8333.html">The Measure of Merit</a>,” rewarding the “best” has often helped justify treating people unequally. My research shows that ways of assessing merit are rarely neutral, and that questions of fairness arise when individuals or groups feel they have not received the same opportunities as others.</p>
<h2>Equality and merit</h2>
<p>The use of merit to justify inequality has a long history in America. From the republic’s founding, Thomas Jefferson’s ringing declaration that “<a href="https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration">all men are created equal</a>” was balanced against the widespread belief that some people, whether because of birth or education or both, were more talented than others. These individuals, Jefferson and others argued, ought to be afforded greater opportunities, whether for advanced education or political leadership.</p>
<p>Jefferson celebrated the “<a href="http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch15s61.html">natural aristocracy</a>,” and James Madison and Alexander Hamilton argued that indirect election of <a href="http://supreme.findlaw.com/documents/federalist/federalist64.html">senators</a> and the <a href="http://supreme.findlaw.com/documents/federalist/federalist68.html">president</a> would help ensure that only the most meritorious would rise to positions of political leadership. Merit, in fact, proved a powerful way of allowing one to embrace equality and yet still justify often profound differences in opportunity. Thus, at the nation’s founding, women, African-Americans, Native Americans, noncitizen “aliens” and non-property-holding males were excluded from full political and civil rights.</p>
<p><a href="https://digitalhistory.hsp.org/pafrm/essay/struggling-freedom-early-republic">Resistance</a> was swift to the dominance of a privileged few, and slowly these basic rights were extended, first to <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/workingmens-party">white working-class males</a>, then <a href="https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/14thamendment.html">African-American men</a> and finally <a href="https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=63">women</a>. However, there are still many circumstances where merit is employed as a way of unequally doling out limited resources. In these instances, it is crucial to ask two questions: Why turn to merit to choose some individuals over others, and how exactly will merit be gauged?</p>
<h2>Complicating merit</h2>
<p>Merit is least controversial when the criteria for success are clear and the reward is appropriate. For example, few would protest that spots on the national Olympic track team go to the top finishers in an Olympic trial. There is only one measure of success – speed – and the Olympics seek a nation’s best at that event.</p>
<p>Even in this case, however, some might question relying on a single trial rather than, say, all races run in the preceding six months or year. Merit can be tricky no matter how clear-cut the criteria.</p>
<p>When the task itself is complex, ranking performance becomes harder. There are also often real questions about whether small differences in performance matter beyond a certain level of proficiency.</p>
<p>For example, what attributes are required to be a good firefighter? Strength, speed, agility, courage, fortitude, intelligence – and the list could go on. So, should only the strongest or most courageous applicants be chosen? Or would choosing from a pool consisting of all those who are strong, fast, smart and brave enough to perform a firefighter’s duties be better? Which approach will promote both competence and diversity? Merit can be an effective way to make choices, but also, as my book shows, a powerful means of rationalizing biases and rendering them difficult to see.</p>
<h2>Immigration and racial exclusion</h2>
<p>For almost a century, the United States had a relatively open immigration policy. <a href="http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2014/us-migration-trends.aspx">Millions</a> of Irish, Germans, Scots and Scandinavians, among others, emigrated to the U.S. in the wake of economic upheavals and political repression in their home countries.</p>
<p>However, starting in the 1880s, the government began to consider immigration restriction legislation, first with the <a href="https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=47">Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882</a> and culminating in <a href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act">1924</a> with the <a href="http://library.uwb.edu/Static/USimmigration/1924_immigration_act.html">Immigration Act</a>. </p>
<p>Merit was rarely explicitly mentioned as the rationale for preferring some groups over others. Nonetheless, the push to exclude Asians and then Eastern and Southern Europeans – mostly Catholics and Jews – echoed the period’s ethnocentrism and infatuation with eugenics. Lawmakers viewed some “peoples” – primarily Northern Europeans – as biologically and culturally “superior.” <a href="http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/immigration/restrictionleague.html">Restriction proponents</a> argued that immigration should privilege these “superior” individuals.</p>
<p>Similarly, policymakers today must examine the use of merit to determine how it privileges certain groups and individuals at the expense of others. </p>
<p>What truly are the important attributes desired of a legal immigrant? Money? Advanced education? Good character? Willingness to do labor native-borns will not? Family ties?</p>
<p>How we answer depends on what goals we want to accomplish and values we wish to represent. Do we reward solely those who are already prospering? Or perhaps we should enact an immigration policy that also reflects the founding creed, that all people “are created equal.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/93178/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Carson received funding for some of this research from the National Science Foundation, Wellcome Trust, and National Humanities Center. </span></em></p>How Americans decide who can come into the country and who can stay reflects beliefs about what makes people worthy of opportunity.John Carson, Associate Professor of History, University of MichiganLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/861252017-11-14T13:20:21Z2017-11-14T13:20:21ZMyanmar and Buddhist extremism<p>There is a <a href="https://theconversation.com/eyewitness-the-rohingya-horrors-and-aung-san-suu-kyis-whitewash-84750">desperate humanitarian crisis</a> underway in Myanmar, centring around the Rohingya Muslims. </p>
<p>There is what has been described as a “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/11/un-myanmars-treatment-of-rohingya-textbook-example-of-ethnic-cleansing">textbook case of ethnic cleansing</a>” against the approximately one million Rohingya who live in the western Myanmar state of Rakhine. As well as retaliations from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army – a militant group of Rohingyas – which has been held by the Burmese military to have <a href="https://theconversation.com/world-must-act-to-end-the-violence-against-rohingya-in-myanmar-83645">attacked a number of police and army posts</a>. </p>
<p>And there is also what was seen as a newly emerging democracy with a prominent international figure, Aung San Suu Kyi – the state counsellor of Myanmar and the nation’s de facto leader – guiding the country against a backdrop of <a href="https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/forum/religion-and-the-persecution-of-rohingya-muslims/responses/buddhist-inspired-genocide">Islamophobic Buddhist nationalism</a>.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/eyewitness-the-rohingya-horrors-and-aung-san-suu-kyis-whitewash-84750">Eyewitness: the Rohingya horrors and Aung San Suu Kyi's whitewash</a>
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<p>Buddhists are often regarded in the West as a peaceful people, so to hear of this kind of public prejudice may come as a shock to many. But looking at it from a Buddhist cultural perspective, one can begin to see why this is happening.</p>
<h2>Militant Buddhism</h2>
<p>Suu Kyi has used her own Buddhist faith <a href="http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/09/17/aung-san-suu-kyis-buddhism-problem/">to explain her ideas in the past</a>. But it was only in a televised speech to the Burmese nation, in mid-October 2017, that she used some standard Buddhist rhetoric for the first time in her comments on recent events. Suu Kyi <a href="https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/nyanaponika/wheel006.html#basic">evoked the Buddhist principles</a> of “compassion”, “loving-kindness” and “sympathetic joy” to overcome hatred. A “close adviser” later <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/13/aung-san-suu-kyi-unveils-relief-plans-for-rohingya-muslims-myanmar">briefed the media</a>, explaining that Suu Kyi’s speech marked an attempt to wrestle Buddhism out of the “hands of extremists”.</p>
<p>One could say that the Buddhist sentiments expressed in Suu Kyi’s speech are in line with the modern <a href="http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195183276.001.0001/acprof-9780195183276">Western understanding of Buddhism</a>. But look deeper into modern Asia and you will see Western perceptions aren’t wholly accurate. There is now a form of <a href="https://theconversation.com/militant-buddhism-is-on-the-march-in-south-east-asia-where-did-it-come-from-86632">militant Buddhism</a>, which often promotes the supremacy of Buddhism, and can be <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00472336.2017.1304563?journalCode=rjoc20">Islamophobic</a>, ethnocentric and chauvinistic in its preaching. </p>
<p>This is a Buddhism alien to the romantic, pacifistic, meditative and compassionate Buddhism of popular imagination, and – one would hope – much of Buddhist history. It is a Buddhism in which the Buddhist faith should be protected against the supposed threat of other religions (primarily Islam) overrunning Buddhist Myanmar. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/militant-buddhism-is-on-the-march-in-south-east-asia-where-did-it-come-from-86632">Militant Buddhism is on the march in South-East Asia – where did it come from?</a>
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<p>Led by the Mandalay-based monk <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEBaAiy5b4">Ashin Wirathu</a>, it is a religion which campaigns to punish those <a href="https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/citations?openform&fp=jrv&id=jrv_2016_0004_0002_0159_0181">who offend Buddhism</a>. In its organised form in Myanmar these nationalistic Buddhist ideas coalesce around a group popularly known as <a href="https://www.eastwestcenter.org/sites/default/files/private/ps071.pdf">MaBaTha</a> – the organisation for the protection of race and religion.</p>
<h2>Religious core</h2>
<p>The battle between the two emerging forms of Buddhism in modern Myanmar is linked back to two core principles of the religion.</p>
<p>The first is the familiar Buddhism of calm, non-attachment, and compassion. Until recently one could say this was dominant within Myanmar. <a href="https://www.spiritrock.org/document.doc?id=5335">Lay meditation movements</a> were important in the revitalisation of modern Buddhism and aspects of popular <a href="https://theconversation.com/mindfulness-has-lost-its-buddhist-roots-and-it-may-not-be-doing-you-good-42526">mindfulness meditation</a> originate from them. <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/burma-inside-the-saffron-revolution-5329400.html">The Saffron Revolution</a> of 2007 displayed little of the aggressive nationalism of the MaBaTha movement, with monks evoking the “discourse on loving-kindness” – <a href="https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/snp/snp.1.08.amar.html">The Metta-sutta</a> – as a Buddhist path of compassion to overthrow military rule.</p>
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<p>The other form of Buddhism has a more ritualised focus. At the risk of oversimplification, this practice is based upon the performance of personal and state rituals in order to protect society from danger. To be a practising Buddhist is to have recited certain texts, and to have paid homage at Buddhist shrines. To be a good Buddhist is to be a good Burmese, and, as it now appears, to “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/20/fake-news-burmese-back-aung-san-suu-kyi-myanmar-rohingya-crisis">stand with Aung San Suu Kyi</a>”.</p>
<p>It would be too simplistic to argue that Buddhist teachings are irreconcilably at odds with ideas of nationalism and patriotism. However, a sense of superiority and discrimination against minority groups does appear to be indefensible from a Buddhist perspective. Could Suu Kyi’s speech, and the idea that she wishes to use Buddhist teachings in a way at odds with Buddhist nationalism be an acknowledgement that Buddhism needs to become part of the solution in modern Myanmar, rather than an aggressive symbol used by Buddhist nationalists?</p>
<p>If Myanmar is to emerge from military rule and become a modern democratic state then it must <a href="http://readingreligion.org/books/saving-buddhism">save its Buddhism</a> from descending into extremism. If <a href="https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/religion-and-society/8/1/arrs080110.xml">Buddhist identity</a> is focused upon a narrow and uncompromising view of what it means to be Burmese, then it seems likely that Buddhism will become a form of state-sponsored religion promoted by the military. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this type of Buddhism, but it is clearly engendering a form of nationalistic fervour, and atrocities are being committed and justified. </p>
<p>Can Suu Kyi see beyond the flags and slogans and use Buddhist narratives of compassion and loving kindness? Observers expected this of her, and of the Buddhist nation, many weeks ago, yet we are still waiting.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/86125/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Fuller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>There is a battle of Buddhisms taking place on the streets of Myanmar.Paul Fuller, Lecturer in Buddhist Studies, Cardiff UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/815332017-08-04T09:07:26Z2017-08-04T09:07:26ZThe charity causes that Brexit Britain’s Leave and Remain voters support<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180231/original/file-20170728-15340-1ph75og.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">via shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The great British public are a charitable bunch. But people do not give out their hard-earned cash equally, and they prefer certain charities. A <a href="http://www.marketingtrust.org/downloads/Marketing_Trust_Charity_Begins_at_Home.pdf">new study</a> I led suggests that a person’s political views and attitudes towards their own country – and whether they voted for or against Brexit – can explain which causes they support. </p>
<p>We asked 1,004 members of a UK nationally representative consumer panel how much they agreed with a range of statements. Some of these statements were aimed at assessing their national identity, such as “If one feels loyal to one’s country, one should strive to mend its problems” and others their political attitudes, such as “Overseas development aid contributes to a more peaceful and equal world”. We also posed questions about their newspaper readership, preferred charitable causes and how they voted in the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU. Our results show that, similar to the referendum results, 51.2% of respondents voted Leave, with 48.8% Remain and a small number who chose not to say.</p>
<p>Overall, while 54% of respondents indicated that they trusted local charities, the picture for international causes was far less positive. Only 31% of people said they trusted international charities with only 26% intending to donate to an international cause in the future.</p>
<p>A local charity’s work is usually more visible locally than work undertaken across continents, and supporting such causes may help somebody feel part of their local community. But those who voted Remain in the referendum were more likely to trust and donate to international causes in the future.</p>
<h2>National identity and giving</h2>
<p>The survey also included questions measuring the extent to which individuals are patriotic (show a care for their country), nationalistic (seek dominance over other countries) and internationalistic (more concerned with global welfare). Statements here ranged from those which indicated national superiority – “For me, the United Kingdom is the best state in the world” – to those concerning international cooperation – “We should be more willing to share our wealth with other nations, even it if does not necessarily coincide with our political interests”.</p>
<p>From these questions, our respondents were most likely to be patriots (62%) followed by nationalists (47%) or internationalists (45%). Nationalists and patriots showed a positive preference for domestic charities and a neutral stance on international causes. This suggests that individuals with potentially xenophobic attitudes will prioritise home charities, but are not necessarily averse to helping out global causes – provided this does not compromise their own country’s well-being. </p>
<p>In contrast, internationalists supported international charities but were very negative towards domestic causes. From this it appears to be far harder to persuade someone who self-identifies as a “global citizen” to give to domestic charities. Their perceptions of global inequality and severity of need appear more powerful than any desire to help fellow nationals.</p>
<p>The survey also demonstrated that the way people voted in the UK’s referendum on EU membership is a powerful predictor of their donation preferences. Leave voters were more likely to be nationalist, more ethnocentric in their charitable giving and also support austerity policy as a means of reducing national debt. </p>
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<p>Remain voters, on the other hand, were more likely to be internationalist, positive towards international charities and supportive of overseas aid. This would suggest that if you know how someone voted in the EU referendum, you can with some confidence predict what sorts of causes they are most likely to support – a handy trick for charities with limited fundraising budgets.</p>
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<h2>Six types of potential donor</h2>
<p>Bringing the data together, the findings indicate the existence of six distinct clusters who vary based upon their charitable giving, political and national attitudes. For example, the “educated liberals” are professionals with a global outlook, pro-Remain attitudes and high trust in all charities – although don’t expect them to donate to causes for the armed forces or emergency services. Similarly, “young urban altruists” have an interationalistic mindset but also display patriotic sentiments, making them a potential target for both domestic and international charities.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the “anti-EU nationalists” harbour right-wing political views, read The Mail, Daily Express and The Sun, are typically less likely to donate to charity but display strong preferences for domestic causes. Although not as nationalistic, “home-first casuals” are also likely to have voted Remain and be more supportive of domestic charities. </p>
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<p>“Cautious pragmatists” accounted for 33% of our respondents and describe those people who are less politically engaged. Although they have lower levels of trust in charities than other groups they do donate a modest amount. For those charities after a group to avoid altogether in fundraising terms: beware the “disengaged cynics” who favour domestic over international causes but tend not to trust (or donate to) charities at all. </p>
<p>Our research shows that while some people believe that charity begins at home but can extend to other countries, others feel that charity begins and ends further afield. Targeting the right group of people is crucial for charities who want to fundraise effectively.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/81533/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Hart received funding from The Marketing Trust for delivery of the 'Charity Begins at Home' project. </span></em></p>New research has examined the extent to which charity begins at home for Britons.David Hart, Principal Lecturer in Marketing, Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, NewcastleLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/727702017-02-16T11:26:34Z2017-02-16T11:26:34ZTrump’s America and the rise of the authoritarian personality<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156939/original/image-20170215-19277-1l2j33a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Everett Historical</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Since the horror of Hitler’s Holocaust, psychologists have investigated why certain individuals appear more prone to follow orders from authority figures, even if it means that they have to sacrifice humanitarian values while doing so. </p>
<p>Apart from the Nazi regime, this issue is central to military atrocities such as the massacre in <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00049537308255828">My Lai</a> during the Vietnam war, and the systematic <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/306/5701/1482">abuse of detainees in Abu-Ghraib prison</a> in post-invasion Iraq. </p>
<p>But it also applies to civilian situations such as the recent unethical behaviour of some <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/29/customs-border-protection-agents-trump-muslim-country-travel-ban">members of the US border control</a> in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s executive order to ban Muslims entry to the country. Handcuffing a <a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/donald-trumps-team-says-5-9725070">five-year-old child</a> is not what you would necessarily consider “normal” human behaviour. Yet it happened.</p>
<p>While this issue has been debated on and off for decades, scientific research suggests that some people’s personality make-up gives them strong authoritarian and anti-democratic tendencies. That is, they either support or follow orders from authorities even when these orders could harm – or increase the risk of harming – other human beings. </p>
<p>After World War II, leading researchers, including <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/adorno/">Theodor Adorno</a> and <a href="http://www.feministvoices.com/else-frenkel-brunswik/">Else Frenkel-Brunswik</a> at the University of California in Berkeley, were interested in understanding how ordinary German people could turn into obedient mass murderers during the Nazi genocide of the Jewish population in Europe. </p>
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<p>Using research on ethnocentrism as a starting point and basing their work on clinical studies, they built a questionnaire with the overall aim of mapping the antidemocratic personality. The scale, called the F-scale (F stood for fascism), focused on aspects such as anti-intellectualism, traditional values, superstition, a willingness to submit to authorities and authoritarian aggression. An individual scoring highly on the scale <a href="http://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html">was labelled</a> an “authoritarian personality”. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, the F-scale turned out to be methodologically flawed which limited its use for understanding authoritarianism. </p>
<h2>Racist, sexist, aggressive, gullible</h2>
<p>In the early 1980s, <a href="http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/TheAuthoritarians.pdf">Bob Altemeyer</a>, a professor at the University of Manitoba, refined the work with the F-scale and came up with a new definition of the authoritarian personality. Altemeyer renamed the authoritarian personality “right-wing authoritarianism” (RWA) and defined it as having three related dimensions. These were: a submission towards authorities, endorsement of aggressive behaviour if sanctioned by authorities, and a high level of conventionalism – that is conforming to old traditions and values.</p>
<p>Among antisocial traits and attitudes investigated in psychology, RWA definitely ranks high up the naughty list. Right-wing authoritarians are, for example, <a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1005.399&rep=rep1&type=pdf">more racist</a>, <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0021-9029.2006.00117.x/abstract">more discriminatory</a>, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17440210">more aggressive</a>, <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103109002169">more dehumanising</a>, <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227686829_What_matters_most_to_prejudice_Big_Five_personality_Social_Dominance_Orientation_or_Right-Wing_Authoritarianism">more prejudiced</a> and <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/men/3/2/119/">more sexist</a> than individuals with low RWA. They are also <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17440210">less empathic or altruistic</a>. Another downside is that they tend to think less critically, instead <a href="http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/TheAuthoritarians">basing their thoughts on what authority figures say</a> and do.</p>
<p>Research findings also suggest that those with high RWA are more likely to follow unethical orders. For example, in <a href="https://prezi.com/killha_tsipq/reopening-the-study-of-extreme-social-behaviors/">a replication of the famous Milgram obedience experiment</a> in a video environment, high RWAs were found to be willing to use more powerful electric shocks to punish their subjects.</p>
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<p>Scoring high on RWA is theoretically in line with the anti-democratic personality suggested by Adorno and his colleagues. A plethora of studies shows that people with these traits are more anti-democratic – for example, they tend to support restriction of <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227602351_Effects_of_Right-Wing_Authoritarianism_and_Threat_from_Terrorism_on_Restriction_of_Civil_Liberties">civil liberties and surveillance</a>, <a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11211-008-0066-z">capital punishment</a>, the <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2010-01098-008">mandatory detention of asylum seekers</a> and the <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886915300799">use of torture</a> in time of war.</p>
<h2>Threat to democracy</h2>
<p>So can RWA pose a threat for a democratic society? The answer is generally speculative, but at least hypothetically the answer could be yes. Some indications of its potential danger can be found in the following fields of research.</p>
<p>A study <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223671030_Changes_in_authoritarianism_and_coping_in_college_students_immediately_after_the_terrorist_attacks_of_September_11_2001">on university students</a> has shown that the level of authoritarian attitudes is significantly higher immediately after a terrorist attack than during a non-threatening condition. This supports findings from longitudinal research showing that RWA increase when the world is <a href="https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/handle/2292/15140">perceived to be becoming more dangerous</a>.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156956/original/image-20170215-27421-1tuvb7z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156956/original/image-20170215-27421-1tuvb7z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156956/original/image-20170215-27421-1tuvb7z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156956/original/image-20170215-27421-1tuvb7z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156956/original/image-20170215-27421-1tuvb7z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156956/original/image-20170215-27421-1tuvb7z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156956/original/image-20170215-27421-1tuvb7z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156956/original/image-20170215-27421-1tuvb7z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">An unattributed meme doing the rounds online.</span>
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<p>How such reactions relate to people’s political choices has suddenly become very relevant. Researchers interested in understanding destructive political leadership suggest that one must look at how environmental conditions, the followers and the leader interact with each other. This is what is referred to as <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984307000367">the toxic triangle</a> – a society with a high degree of experienced threat, a narcissistic or hate-spreading political leader and followers with unmet needs or antisocial values is at risk of adopting a destructive political course. </p>
<p>So it’s unsurprising to hear that authoritarianism was found to be one of the factors statistically predicting <a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2016/01/27/donald-trump-is-attracting-authoritarian-primary-voters-and-it-may-help-him-to-gain-the-nomination/">support for Donald Trump</a> before the recent US election. </p>
<p>Not only this but <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17201543">experimental data</a> suggest that those displaying high RWA are more prone to be supportive of unethical decisions when they are promoted by a socially dominant leader – that is, a leader viewing society as a hierarchy in which domination of inferior groups by superior groups is legitimised. </p>
<p>Researchers in this area have suggested that individuals scoring high on RWA, and other antisocial traits and attitudes, are more likely to choose occupations in which the opportunity <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17440210">to be abusive to others</a> might arise. Based on this reasoning, one could expect that soldiers and police officers should have a higher level of RWA than comparison groups. And this appears to be borne out by research that suggests that both <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886915300799">soldiers</a> and <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17172149">border guards</a> have higher levels of RWA in comparison to the rest of the population. </p>
<p>How these findings relate to actual abusive behaviour remains to be investigated in future research. But the idea of having people with these traits guarding a democracy seems to me to be something of a contradiction in terms.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/72770/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Magnus Linden does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>After World War II, psychologists identified character traits that explained why so many people were complicit in Hitler’s crimes. Are we seeing something similar now?Magnus Linden, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Lund UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/707052017-02-02T19:06:42Z2017-02-02T19:06:42ZHard work, not ‘Confucian’ mentality, underpins Chinese success overseas<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155290/original/image-20170202-22575-1m1it5f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The research found a belief in hard work and enterprise drives the business success of Chinese living overseas.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">www.shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Our study of ethnically Chinese people in Malaysia shows some of the assumptions about what leads to their business success might be wrong. Past studies point to <a href="https://hbr.org/1993/03/the-worldwide-web-of-chinese-business">traditional Confucian values</a> and a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/feb/21/highereducation.news">refugee mentality</a> as a reason for success, but we found it comes down to a new set of beliefs in hard work and enterprise.</p>
<p><a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11187-016-9746-5">We used data on Malaysia</a> from the World Values Survey, which has been conducted since 1981 with samples of more than 1,000 respondents in each of over 100 countries. The survey questionnaire now has some 250 questions about different social, economic and political values and attitudes. We chose Malaysia in particular because it’s a country where Chinese immigration is both recent and historic and where the economic dominance of the Chinese is stark.</p>
<p>We compared <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Spirit_of_Chinese_Capitalism.html?id=1Bpr8TumVbUC&redir_esc=y">eight potentially relevant values</a>: Confucianism, low trust and confidence in the state, ethnocentrism (evaluating other cultures by your own), opportunism and belief in hard work, progress as well as free enterprise. We wanted to know whether the Malaysian Chinese show these values more than other ethnic groups in Malaysia.</p>
<h2>Chinese immigrants</h2>
<p>More than <a href="http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/publications/migrationreport/docs/MigrationReport2015_Highlights.pdf">10 million Chinese nationals currently live abroad</a>. If we add the descendants of China’s historical emigration waves, <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1755-618X.2011.01259.x/abstract">an estimated 40 million</a> Chinese people currently live in 130 countries across the world. Compared to other cultures, Chinese immigrants <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232520071_Finding_Universal_Dimensions_of_Individual_Variation_in_Multicultural_Studies_of_Values">tend to maintain their cultural identity and traditions more</a>.</p>
<p>They also have a huge economic footprint. Exact figures are hard to get because Chinese businesses and immigrants maintain a low profile not least to avoid the scrutiny that their success invites. However, a <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11187-016-9746-5">range of estimations exist</a>.</p>
<p>In Southeast Asia, <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=1Bpr8TumVbUC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">ethnically Chinese make up only 5% of the population but control between one and three quarters of the economy</a> according to a range of indicators (such as business ownership, investment, capital or taxes paid). In Malaysia, <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=v-4c1-6kgHEC&pg=PA233&lpg=PA233&dq=Ethnic+Politics+and+Political+Quiescence+in+Malaysia+and+Singapore&source=bl&ots=8xCVZZsmP8&sig=DHy0UvLBrreMVSrpEsopnqNA8Vs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwidgePu0fDRAhXBrJQKHTC9BcAQ6AEIJDAB#v=onepage&q=Ethnic%20Politics%20and%20Political%20Quiescence%20in%20Malaysia%20and%20Singapore&f=false">only a quarter of the population are ethnic Chinese</a>, but they own around 70% of <a href="http://www.sosyalarastirmalar.com/cilt2/sayi8pdf/shafii_norhasni_ahmad.pdf">business real estate</a> and <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/559399">market capitalisation</a>, control all the <a href="http://epublications.bond.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1012&context=business_pubs">top private listed companies</a> and make up eight out of the <a href="https://kyotoreview.org/issue-4/malaysian-chinese-business-who-survived-the-crisis">10 richest people</a>.</p>
<h2>Confucian values</h2>
<p>According to <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Spirit_of_Chinese_Capitalism.html?id=1Bpr8TumVbUC&redir_esc=y">previous research</a> Confucian values drive efficient family businesses, run autocratically by patriarchs based on interpersonal ties. These flourished in times of great uncertainty in informal, <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=pcRlgZttsMUC&redir_esc=y">cooperative Chinese networks</a>.</p>
<p>Similar <a href="http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/cjas/article/view/1767">theories were proposed</a> to explain the rise of the so-called “Tiger economies” (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) in the 1960s. </p>
<p>The Confucian values we examined include respect for tradition, security, the authority of elders and conformism. The individual is subsumed under the collective. </p>
<p>We found no evidence that the values of the Chinese in Malaysia are any more Confucian than those of indigenous Malays and Malaysian Indians. The much-touted Confucian culture is common to all three groups and probably reflects Asian values generally. </p>
<h2>The refugee mentality</h2>
<p>The other possible source of the success of Chinese people living overseas lies in the refugee mentality. It emerges from the trauma of emigration to often hostile conditions abroad. </p>
<p>It’s a belief in hard work and enterprise to overcome adversity, a mistrust of the state and other social groups as well as opportunism, the tendency to take advantage. </p>
<p>Progress and business risk taking became the only way to make a living for Chinese immigrants who were <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=pcRlgZttsMUC&redir_esc=y">originally excluded, often by law</a>, from the civil services or landownership.</p>
<p>We found evidence that the Malaysian Chinese have much lower confidence in government and may discriminate against other groups more than other Malaysians. Malaysia’s three ethnic groups did not however differ from each other in terms of interpersonal trust in strangers or opportunism.</p>
<p>We also found that ethnic Chinese had a much greater belief in free enterprise and hard work than the other Malaysian ethnic groups. However we found no differences in attitudes towards progress, science and technology. </p>
<p>Our analysis suggests that the Chinese people living overseas forged a new culture by adapting their traditional values to the immigration experience. That may explain their success in Malaysia and elsewhere. </p>
<p><a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Spirit_of_Chinese_Capitalism.html?id=1Bpr8TumVbUC&redir_esc=y">To some</a>, hard work, enterprise and distrust in the state may look like capitalist ideology. However, Western principles do not fit the typically <a href="https://geert-hofstede.com/china.html">pragmatic Chinese mindset</a>. It’s more likely these values developed in response to lacking state and social support abroad.</p>
<p>What are the lessons for present-day Australia? Will Chinese immigration take a different course to Southeast Asia where ethnic and economic conflicts continue to simmer? We found in our study that Chinese people adapt to the circumstances they face. The prospects of integration therefore depend both on the culture they bring and the <a href="http://www.afr.com/business/our-complex-relationship-with-chinese-australians-20151227-glvgml">conditions created for them</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70705/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Hoffmann received funding from the British Academy's Association of South-East Asian Studies in the United Kingdom (ASEASUK).</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Swee Hoon Chuah received funding from the British Academy's Association of South-East Asian Studies in the United Kingdom (ASEASUK).</span></em></p>Past studies point to traditional Confucian values and a refugee mentality as a reason for the business success of Chinese people living overseas, our research debunks this.Robert Hoffmann, Professor of Economics, RMIT UniversitySwee-Hoon Chuah, Professor of Behavioural Economics, Tasmanian Behavioural Lab, RMIT UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/553212016-05-03T02:31:15Z2016-05-03T02:31:15ZWhat does an anthropologist actually do?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120462/original/image-20160428-30973-zy8j2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">On the hunt for other cultures.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock/Gorosi </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ask any anthropologist what they do and they will find it hard to give you a direct answer.</p>
<p>If you’ve seen the television series <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460627/">Bones</a>, you probably think an anthropologist is someone who studies the remains of dead people to help solve crimes. Well, technically that’s a biological or forensic anthropologist. </p>
<p>Ask me what we do and I say anthropologists study living people. But don’t all social sciences study people? The answer is yes, but anthropologists do it via culture. </p>
<p>The other social sciences, such as psychology, engineering and ergonomics, specialise in singular aspects of people’s lives, making culture a kind of variable on the side. </p>
<p>This kind of reduction is academic and problematic. It is far removed from the everyday experience of being a human who creates, and is created by, a complex sociocultural, political and historical world. And that’s why we need anthropologists.</p>
<h2>Colonial past</h2>
<p>In its colonial heyday, the main aim of anthropology was to map a trajectory of man in which white, civilised peoples were considered the most recent advancement on an evolutionary scale. Their historical past was considered visible in the veritable living museum of coloured, primitive, natives.</p>
<p>That was an awkward moment in anthropology’s history, but one that was symptomatic of the world at that time. The anthropologist would don his pith helmet and safari suit in search of an exotic location to study. as a complete outsider (possibly an uninvited guest), “natives”, to map the noble history of man.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120474/original/image-20160428-30950-151fz2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120474/original/image-20160428-30950-151fz2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120474/original/image-20160428-30950-151fz2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120474/original/image-20160428-30950-151fz2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120474/original/image-20160428-30950-151fz2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120474/original/image-20160428-30950-151fz2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120474/original/image-20160428-30950-151fz2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120474/original/image-20160428-30950-151fz2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The old colonial idea of an anthropologist is that of a man in pith hat exploring the world.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/puuikibeach/8668026560/">Flickr/davidd</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>They would feel the same culture shock that you might feel when you travel to another country. But their aim was to triumph over it by learning firsthand what it is like to be a native; to walk a mile in their shoes, as the saying goes. </p>
<p>The methodological approaches developed to suit those ends are largely the ones that still distinguish anthropology: namely, ethnography (from the Greek <em>ethnos</em> for people and <em>graphia</em> for writing).</p>
<h2>On the ‘inside’</h2>
<p>Anthropologists use ethnographic methods designed to facilitate their competency in another culture to understand what people do, think, feel and say that might seem strange to an outsider but are completely familiar to an insider. </p>
<p>The golden standard of ethnographic research is participant-observation, where an anthropologist lives within a culture, as one of the natives, until they are competent or proficient in being one of them.</p>
<p>A minimum of one year is seen as necessary to understand annual ebbs and flows of seasonal variation and annual rituals.</p>
<p>This is exactly what happened to Polish anthropologist <a href="http://www.britannica.com/biography/Bronislaw-Malinowski">Bronislaw Malinowski</a> who, in the early 20th century, travelled from London to Papua New Guinea to study native patterns of exchange.</p>
<p>When the First World War broke out, he was unable to return to England but the Australian government gave him permission <a href="https://archive.org/details/argonautsofthewe032976mbp">to study</a> in the Trobriand Islanders, off the east coast of New Guinea. </p>
<p>For many, Malinowski is the grandaddy of modern anthropology. He removed the white lab coat of experimental science by clearly acknowledging his role in the production of scientific knowledge. He was there, he gathered and interpreted the data and so he included his voice in his ethnographic writing. </p>
<p>Malinowski’s <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/A_Diary_in_the_Strict_Sense_of_the_Term.html?id=Tu5-MtE-SVYC">personal diaries</a> (which were never intended for publication), show a man struggling between “us and them”, between the old regime of a racism legitimating colonialism and asserting difference, and a new regime emphasising sameness and questioning the superiority that any one culture has over another.</p>
<p>But Malinowski paved the way for future anthropologists to look at cultural difference for difference’s sake, without making arrogant, ethnocentric judgements.</p>
<p>However much an anthropologist seeks an insider perspective, they are required to maintain an objective, scientific view of what is happening around them, lest they go “native” as depicted in the 1999 movie <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151047/">In a Savage Land</a>, set in Papua New Guinea. </p>
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<p>Some anthropologists have gone to creative lengths to prove that what “we” do isn’t better, right or civilised. As American anthropologist <a href="http://www.livinganthropologically.com/2013/02/12/nacirema-rituals-horace-miner/">Horace Miner demonstrates</a> in his 1956 <a href="http://www.sfu.ca/%7Epalys/Miner-1956-BodyRitualAmongTheNacirema.pdf">fantasy ethnography</a> of the Nacirema people (hint: say it backwards), magic and medicine have more in common than you might think. It’s all about culture.</p>
<p>As such, culture is understood very simply as that which we do, think, say and feel. These things wouldn’t necessarily make sense to someone who was not “one of us”, but we could explain them. </p>
<h2>Among the bullfighters</h2>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120459/original/image-20160428-30986-132vnb0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120459/original/image-20160428-30986-132vnb0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120459/original/image-20160428-30986-132vnb0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120459/original/image-20160428-30986-132vnb0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120459/original/image-20160428-30986-132vnb0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120459/original/image-20160428-30986-132vnb0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120459/original/image-20160428-30986-132vnb0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120459/original/image-20160428-30986-132vnb0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Anthropologist Kirrilly Thompson getting the feel of what it might be like to be a mounted bullfighter.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kirrilly Thompson</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>In my own career as an anthropologist, I have studied many different peoples and their culture.</p>
<p>I have lived in Spain for 15 months to learn about the lives of mounted bullfighters. Back in Australia, I went to every fixture of the South Australian National Football League one season to learn the role of alcohol in fan culture.</p>
<p>I have also spent as little as two weeks catching rides in the cabs of train drivers to learn about fatigue at the controls, and I have interviewed animal owners about the risks they take to save their pets from bushfires.</p>
<p>In every instance, I have been the student of someone else’s way of life.</p>
<p>I can now understand and explain why aficionados of the bullfight don’t see bullfighting as cruel and why killing the bull in the bullring is, in fact, an expression of love.</p>
<p>I can explain why some football fans drink to dangerous excess, why metropolitan train drivers are loathe to report their fatigue and why some pet owners will run into burning homes to save their cat while their child waits in the car.</p>
<p>I may or may not agree with those behaviours and beliefs, but I can explain the internal cultural logic that makes them important, meaningful, natural and persistent. </p>
<p>If you listen without judging, you may learn about other ways to see the world. If you can handle knowing that your view might not be the only one – or even the right one – you may even see your own cultural beliefs and behaviours more critically than ever before. </p>
<p>If you can use this insight to explain cultural difference to someone else in terms they understand, but with which they may not necessarily agree, then you have started to walk your first mile in the shoes of an anthropologist.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/55321/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kirrilly Thompson is an Associate Professor at CQUni's Appleton Institute in Adelaide. She receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC. Kirrilly is the President Elect of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA ANZ) and Deputy Chair of the Horse Federation of South Australia.</span></em></p>Ask any anthropologist what they do and they will find it hard to give you a direct answer. But it ultimately comes down to studying people and their culture.Kirrilly Thompson, Associate professor, CQUniversity AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/427912015-06-09T04:18:27Z2015-06-09T04:18:27ZNavigating South Africa’s loaded political lexicon<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84106/original/image-20150605-8704-1m5hdvg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Liberalism means something completely different in South Africa compared with the US and UK, and has racist connotations. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The concepts and language people use when discussing politics don’t mean the same everywhere we go. This is certainly true in South Africa. </p>
<p>These differences manifest in ideologies like liberalism and conservatism, objectives like nation-building, and phenomena like populism or the substance of democracy.</p>
<p>Liberalism means something completely different in South Africa compared, for example, with America. For the majority of South Africans it is a dirty word. The roots of this go back to early colonialism.</p>
<h2>The role of racism</h2>
<p>The South African understanding of liberalism has been traced mostly to the early Cape history. Compared with the racist nationalism of the frontier farmers and later the Afrikaner migrants, known as <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/south-africa-1806-1899/great-trek-1835-1846">Voortrekkers</a>, South African liberals saw themselves as representing a more humane form of racism. For example, they supported a <a href="http://www.content.eisa.org.za/old-page/south-africa-historical-franchise-arrangements">qualified franchise</a> for black people. </p>
<p>During the apartheid period, liberals were against racial discrimination. But they were associated with big business, which most black opposition groups regarded as the economic basis of apartheid. This was a dominant view particularly among Marxists.</p>
<p>This tension is often referred to as the <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00076798700000018?journalCode=fbsh20#.VW_n62SqpBc">liberal-radical debate</a> of the 1960s.</p>
<h2>Liberalism laid bare</h2>
<p>Liberalism’s most serious crisis occurred when <a href="https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/u/0/#!exhibit:exhibitId=AQp2i2l5">black consciousness</a> founder Steve Biko split from the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/national-union-south-african-students-nusas">National Union of South African Students</a> and formed the South African Students’ Organisation. Biko’s <a href="http://abahlali.org/files/Biko.pdf">main target</a> was the white students who spoke against apartheid but did not act in solidarity with their black fellow members. </p>
<p>As a result, the paths of liberals and the internal resistance movement went their separate ways in the early 1970s.</p>
<p>Philosophically, <a href="http://www.da.org.za/2013/06/liberalism-has-always-been-a-powerful-force-in-south-africa/">South African liberalism</a> is focused on the individual in society. Its highest value is freedom – not equality. It insists on an open society where individuals have maximum opportunities to develop their own initiatives in a free market with the least possible intervention by the state or public sector.</p>
<p>This view holds that the state should be responsible for only the most general services such as military defence, international relations, public safety and some infrastructure.</p>
<p>Today, South Africa’s main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, comes closest to this stance. Its new slogan is <a href="http://www.da.org.za/2015/06/together-we-can-build-a-better-nelson-mandela-bay/">freedom, fairness and opportunity</a>. It remains to be seen whether the party, now led by a <a href="https://theconversation.com/first-black-leader-breathes-life-into-south-african-opposition-41275">black leader</a>, will change the fortunes of liberalism among the country’s majority black population.</p>
<p>In the US, this philosophy is typical of the neoconservatives, or today’s <a href="http://global.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1673405/Tea-Party-movement">Tea Party</a> movement. It is a variation on what was earlier known as <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-22079683">Thatcherism</a>. The tax policies of those parties are good indicators of the difference between liberals and conservatives. The Conservatives, or neoconservatives, are generally in favour of lower taxes as well as government spending.</p>
<p>On the other hand, liberals in the US – mainly in the Democratic Party – are in favour of big government and a greater role for the state, particularly in the social sphere. They support projects such as President Barack Obama’s health care reforms. This is why the party finds support from lower classes and trade unions.</p>
<p>In the UK, the <a href="http://global.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/326949/Labour-Party">Labour Party</a> is comparable with the <a href="http://global.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/157244/Democratic-Party">American Democrats</a>. The same values in the British context are not liberal but social democratic.</p>
<p>The European social democratic tradition has some points of similarity with the <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=206">African National Congress’</a> early policy propositions, especially those in the <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=c0ugBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA249&lpg=PA249&dq=rdp,+Jay+Naidoo&source=bl&ots=SffOvPtgqy&sig=BjAG0ie8nsmTS6ttJMi8Zx6hxRg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=CB1wVeTOC4Ot7Abz_4KgCA&ved=0CD0Q6AEwCDgK#v=onepage&q=rdp%2C%20Jay%20Naidoo&f=false">Reconstruction and Development Programme</a>, the Mandela administration’s programme for meeting the basic needs of South Africa’s previously marginalised majority black community, such as housing, health care, education and electricity. </p>
<h2>Conservatism has its own complexities</h2>
<p>Conservatism is an even more elusive concept. Historically it is associated with philosophers like <a href="http://www.edmundburkeinstitute.org/edmundburke.htm">Edmund Burke</a>.</p>
<p>Permutations of conservatism appear in religious, social, ethnocentric or racial, and political, forms. Religious conservatives, who are present in most of the main religions, prefer a theocratic approach to politics. Social conservatives often use religious arguments for their views on, for example, the status of women, abortion, the death penalty and sexual identity.</p>
<p>Many shades of conservatism are found in most countries. Today, one of its forms is right-wing European populism in the National Front (France), Lega Nord (Italy) or the Party for Freedom (Netherlands). </p>
<p>Conservatives are protective of their own group, lifestyle and culture. They are therefore very nationalistic or xenophobic and protective of the status quo. </p>
<p>South African conservatism falls in broad terms within this description. Parties such as the <a href="http://www.vfplus.org.za/2014-election-manifesto">Freedom Front Plus</a>, the <a href="http://www.acdp.org.za/">African Christian Democratic Party</a> and the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/inkatha-freedom-party-ifp">Inkatha Freedom Party</a> fit the description.</p>
<p>In philosophical terms, conservatism puts emphasis on the community as the main focus in society rather than the individual. Family and communal networks are seen as the essence of society.</p>
<p>In economic terms it tends more towards a welfare or social democratic orientation, but not absolutely in favour of free market ideology. </p>
<p>Contemporary English conservatism – presented by the Conservative Party since Margaret Thatcher – is exactly the opposite. It resembles very much what was earlier presented as South African liberalism. In many parts of the world, neoliberalism and neoconservatism can mean more or less the same thing. It all depends which country you are in.</p>
<h2>Nation-building is another kettle of fish</h2>
<p>A concept of equally divergent meanings is nation-building. South Africans are well-acquainted with the concept, especially since former president <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/page/biography">Nelson Mandela</a> included it in his post-1994 reconstruction and democratisation policies. </p>
<p>It was a post-apartheid strategy to forge a new national identity by way of reconciliation, cultural convergence, political accommodation and power-sharing, the removal of discrimination as well as historical redress. It was seen as a process necessary for the new South African state to forge one, united nation.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84100/original/image-20150605-8692-1c8c0ir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84100/original/image-20150605-8692-1c8c0ir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84100/original/image-20150605-8692-1c8c0ir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84100/original/image-20150605-8692-1c8c0ir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84100/original/image-20150605-8692-1c8c0ir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84100/original/image-20150605-8692-1c8c0ir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=974&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84100/original/image-20150605-8692-1c8c0ir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=974&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84100/original/image-20150605-8692-1c8c0ir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=974&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nelson Mandela spearheaded nation-building while Steve Biko, projected on the right, opposed liberalism.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nation-building as a concept has a completely different meaning in, for example, the US. American military leaders involved in Iraq and Afghanistan cautioned against the costs of nation-building. This referred to rebuilding the state after a period of conflict rather than unifying the people.</p>
<p>Nation-building in this sense means to re-establish education facilities, restore the water and electricity infrastructure, retrain the police force and establish a new defence force. The challenges of nation building are graphically explained in Paul Bremer III’s book <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/12/books/12kaku.html?n=Top%2FNews%2FWorld%2FCountries%20and%20Territories%2FIraq&_r=0">My Year in Iraq</a>.</p>
<p>These examples show that it is important never to take any political concept at face value. Meanings are determined by a particular historical context and even nuances of understanding among people of the same origin.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/42791/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dirk Kotze does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Liberalism is a dirty word for the majority of South Africans. This goes back to early colonialism. Liberals opposed apartheid but not the close relationship between capitalism and apartheid.Dirk Kotze, Professor in Political Science, University of South AfricaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/356752015-05-12T01:55:47Z2015-05-12T01:55:47ZSavage peoples: the racism of Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72991/original/image-20150225-25689-7wtx7l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Zannoni's 1771 Map of the British Isles shows the heart of the "civilised" world – at least according to Adam Smith when he was writing The Wealth of Nations.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons/Geographicus Rare Antique Maps</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Adam Smith may be the poster-boy for the modern “free market,” but his work was also deeply racist. The structure of his famous <a href="http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/adam-smith/wealth-nations.pdf">Wealth of Nations</a> (1776) – the “Bible” of capitalism – relies upon the contrast between “savage” and “civilised” nations. In its opening sentences, he writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Such nations, however, are so miserably poor, that, from mere want, they are frequently reduced […] to the necessity sometimes of directly destroying, and sometimes of abandoning their infants, their old people, and those afflicted with lingering diseases, to perish with hunger, or to be devoured by wild beasts. Among civilised and thriving nations, on the contrary […] the produce of the whole labour of the society is so great, that all are often abundantly supplied, and a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniences of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The endless pages that follow this statement seek reasons why those “civilised” nations have achieved wealth, while the “savage” nations have not.</p>
<h2>“Savage” peoples</h2>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/67773/original/image-20141219-31560-1dr292d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/67773/original/image-20141219-31560-1dr292d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/67773/original/image-20141219-31560-1dr292d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67773/original/image-20141219-31560-1dr292d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67773/original/image-20141219-31560-1dr292d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67773/original/image-20141219-31560-1dr292d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67773/original/image-20141219-31560-1dr292d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67773/original/image-20141219-31560-1dr292d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Adam Smith,</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The “savage” peoples are numerous indeed, characterised by consistent racial insults. </p>
<p>The ancient Peruvians and Mexicans were “in arts, agriculture, and commerce […] more ignorant than the Tartars of the Ukraine are at present”. </p>
<p>Further, “the ancient arts of Mexico and Peru have never furnished one single manufacture to Europe”. </p>
<p>The list grows quickly, including Turkey and Indostan. To these he adds ancient Egypt, “Mahometan” nations, the Arabs, Africa, the West Indies, Persia, Bengal, Siam, China, and North American indigenous peoples, who comprise “the lowest and rudest state of society”. </p>
<p>In the end, the whole world apart from Europe is characterised as “savage” and “barbaric”. Even then, he often characterises the otiose French or brutal Dutch in less than glowing terms.</p>
<p>From where does Smith gain all this information? Travellers’ tales are a major source, with their lurid and overblown creations of excess. But when he is short of even this unreliable material, he relies on nothing more than an “I believe”.</p>
<h2>China</h2>
<p>Nonetheless, China presents a problem for Smith. He is aware that China was still more populous, powerful and wealthy than Europe. What to do? </p>
<p>While Smith occasionally paid lip-service to this impression, he also suggests that China was not as good as it seemed. China was actually stagnant. Its great age was no longer seen as a benefit, a source of wisdom and wealth far deeper than that of Europe. Now stability becomes what is dull, boring, and melancholy. </p>
<p>China lacks any sense of progress or modernity, and then Smith goes a step further:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations in Europe. In the neighbourhood of Canton many hundred, it is commonly said, many thousand families have no habitation on the land, but live constantly in little fishing boats upon the rivers and canals. The subsistence which they find there is so scanty that they are eager to fish up the nastiest garbage thrown overboard from any European ship. </p>
<p>Any carrion, the carcase of a dead dog or cat, for example, though half putrid and stinking, is as welcome to them as the most wholesome food to the people of other countries. Marriage is encouraged in China, not by the profitableness of children, but by the liberty of destroying them. In all great towns several are every night exposed in the street, or drowned like puppies in the water. The performance of this horrid office is even said to be the avowed business by which some people earn their subsistence.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The echo of the ethnocentric bifurcation that opens Wealth of Nations is strong, except that now it is raised to an even more horrifying degree – the streets and rivers are full of dead babies, since some people earn their living through this practice. For Smith, China is more than “savage”.</p>
<h2>Structural Racism</h2>
<p>The structural racism of Wealth of Nations creates a distinct problem. </p>
<p>Smith liked to think that it was human nature to engage in commerce, to be entrepreneurial and seek profit through self-interest. How then does he account for the fact that most of history and most human societies have not operated in such a fashion? It must be due to ethnic peculiarities. </p>
<p>The Chinese, Arabs, and Africans are simply too barbaric and savage to have yet realised their own true nature as economic beings. Or perhaps they are not human at all. </p>
<p>After all, opines Smith, do they not engage in exposing their children, ban commerce with other nations, desire stagnation rather than progress, even lack the most basic of human virtues?</p>
<p><br>
<br>
<strong>This is the last in a series of three articles by Roland Boer on Adam Smith. See also:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://theconversation.com/the-myth-that-holds-adam-smiths-wealth-of-nations-together-35674">The myth that holds Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations together</a></li>
<li><a href="https://theconversation.com/how-cute-dogs-help-us-understand-adam-smiths-invisible-hand-35673">How cute dogs help us understand Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’</a></li>
</ul><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/35675/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Roland Boer receives funding from the Australian Research Council for a project called "The Sacred Economy." The material discussed here is related to the project, but is not directly funded by it.</span></em></p>To burnish the virtues of “civilised” Europe, Adam Smith relies on a barrage of racial insults. Where did his information about the so-called “savage peoples” come from in the first place?Roland Boer, Professor, Religion, Marxism and Secularism, Faculty of Education and Arts, University of NewcastleLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/403372015-04-21T16:01:38Z2015-04-21T16:01:38ZDivided we stand: nationalism on the march across Europe<p>As the lights dimmed on a televised debate ahead of the UK election, a group of four candidates clustered together at the side of the stage, shaking hands and even embracing each other. At the other extremity, a fifth candidate stood alone, peering down at his notes.</p>
<p>The huddle represented the parties on the left in this campaign, some of which could be part of a government after the May 7 vote. The lonely figure was Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP). He had just spent <a href="https://youtu.be/XTwjV7Xjdeg">an hour and a half</a> being berated by his opponents for his controversial views on immigration and the European Union and was now steering clear of post-debate pleasantries.</p>
<p>But while much distances him from the pack, he shares one important trait with two of the leaders grouped on the left. Their emergence at the forefront of British politics is down to the re-emergence of nationalism on the electoral scene in the UK.</p>
<h2>The new nationalists</h2>
<p>On the left, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party are pushing their small countries to the fore in the general election. The former wants more devolved <a href="http://www.psa.ac.uk/insight-plus/blog/show-us-money-st-david%E2%80%99s-day-deal-or-no-deal">power</a> in Wales and the latter, ultimately, independence for Scotland.</p>
<p>The movements represented by Nicola Sturgeon (SNP) and Leanne Wood (Plaid) do not equate greater independence with a withdrawal from Europe or other international organisations, though. Instead, their popularity has been built on what they see as positive and inclusive images of nationhood and people. Wales and Scotland want to win influence in a central British government that has long overlooked their needs.</p>
<p>Although it offers a rather different proposition, UKIP also claims to speak to people who have been overlooked by the increasing internationalisation of their country. The party won the European elections in 2014, securing more than a quarter of the British vote, with promises to break the EU from the inside. Its victory has been held up as a forceful demonstration of how euroscepticism is spreading in the UK.</p>
<p>The more established parties have been struggling to formulate their own responses ever since. And now, in the run up to the 2015 British election, the Conservative party has made holding a referendum on EU membership a central campaign promise.</p>
<h2>After the crisis</h2>
<p>As Europe continues to struggle to emerge from the global economic crisis, reactionary attitudes like those espoused by UKIP are increasingly prevalent across the continent. </p>
<p>On the whole, apart from the left-wing movements and parties that have gathered steam in Greece and Spain – two of the countries most damaged by the crisis – progressive movements with an international outlook have failed to gain much ground in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.</p>
<p>Instead, the more illiberal form of nationalism has gathered momentum as the crisis took its toll on Europe’s love affair with globalised politics. A sense of chauvinism and ethnocentrism has trumped left-leaning and inclusive alternatives.</p>
<p>In one of the more ironic examples of this trend, the European Parliament is now populated by <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-28107633">almost a third</a> of nationalist and eurosceptic members – politicians who represent their people in an organisation they want to destroy.</p>
<p>Euroscepticism has increasinlgy become linked to the far right. Traditional parties such as France’s Front National and the Danish People’s Party have hyped their anti-Europe discourse to target both the European elite (in a populist manner) and immigrants (in a traditionally xenophobic manner). Other parties founded on a hard eurosceptic platform such as UKIP and the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/11095700/Anti-euro-party-Alternative-for-Germany-extends-gains-in-Germany.html">Alternative for Germany</a> have moved closer to the far right by focusing increasingly on the issue of immigration and the control of their borders in a populist attempt to broaden their appeal.</p>
<p>Most recently, Finland’s pro-European government was ousted in the national election to be replaced by a centre-right party that opposes European bailouts and wants to focus on the national economy. The far-right <a href="https://theconversation.com/finland-election-anti-eu-right-marches-onto-centre-stage-40504">True Finns</a> came second and may find a place in the government as a result.</p>
<p>But a softer type of euroscepticism has also become mainstream, and it is now increasingly popular in many centre right and conservative parties. As distrust in the electorate increases, these parties tend to argue that the European union undermines the power of national governments by imposing supranational rules on its members. Such posture is of course contradictory as many of these parties have been in power and overseen the very policies they denounce. This can be seen in <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17332458">Nicolas Sarkozy</a> demanding a reform of the Schengen Treaty, or David Cameron’s promise of a referendum on the EU.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78765/original/image-20150421-9034-4h0f79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78765/original/image-20150421-9034-4h0f79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=769&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78765/original/image-20150421-9034-4h0f79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=769&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78765/original/image-20150421-9034-4h0f79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=769&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78765/original/image-20150421-9034-4h0f79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=966&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78765/original/image-20150421-9034-4h0f79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=966&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78765/original/image-20150421-9034-4h0f79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=966&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Italy’s Beppe Grillo.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.epa.eu/politics-photos/parties-photos/-five-stars-moviment-leader-grillo-talks-to-supporters-photos-51613497">EPA/Angelo Carconi</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The failure of what is seen as an increasingly globalised system, led by an elite who seem <a href="https://theconversation.com/distrust-of-the-political-system-not-the-far-right-is-real-threat-to-our-european-future-26662">far removed</a>] from the day-to-day lives of citizens has led to the return of nationalist sentiments we thought were on the wane.</p>
<h2>The immigration game</h2>
<p>These concerns have often been simplistically linked to the issue of immigration. This has started a vicious cycle that simplifies a very complicated issue. Mainstream politicians claim voters want them to focus on immigration – and when they do, the issue is further reinforced in the minds of voters.</p>
<p>However, this negative picture of the electorate is somewhat belied by the available data.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78772/original/image-20150421-9017-18ipbfj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78772/original/image-20150421-9017-18ipbfj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=261&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78772/original/image-20150421-9017-18ipbfj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=261&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78772/original/image-20150421-9017-18ipbfj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=261&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78772/original/image-20150421-9017-18ipbfj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=328&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78772/original/image-20150421-9017-18ipbfj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=328&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78772/original/image-20150421-9017-18ipbfj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=328&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">How important is immigration as an issue for the EU, your country and you?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/eb/eb80/eb80_first_en.pdf">Eurobarmoter</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When asked what the most important issues facing the EU were in a <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/eb/eb80/eb80_first_en.pdf">2013 survey</a>, 16% of respondents answered immigration, which was the 4th most cited issue on average. When asked the same question about their own country, immigration as a central issue fell in most cases, with the notable exception of the UK (12% on average, 6th out of 13 issues).</p>
<p>When asked about the two most important issues they were facing personally, the contrast is staggering. Immigration fell to 3% on average, to the 12th most important issue. The more European citizens considered their daily lives, the less immigration seemed prominent as an issue in comparison to inflation, unemployment, the economic situation of their country and taxation. </p>
<h2>Going global to going alone</h2>
<p>This indicates we should not necessarily understand the rise of nationalism as a desire to close borders to other workers, but instead to regain control of local democracy and create a fairer environment for all.</p>
<p>As alternative and positive visions of globalisation fail to take shape or win over the public imagination, nationalist nostalgia has provided a comforting narrative for some. People can reminisce and embellish their fantasised memories of the good old days when “we” felt at home, politics was not corrupt and politicians listened to “us”.</p>
<p>Despite this, it seems clear that UKIP will at best only win a handful of seats in the British election, but the media coverage of the party and its success in the EU elections has greatly amplified its message. </p>
<p>On the left, though, the Scottish nationalists appear poised to make big gains and are pitching themselves to voters as being a potential force for social democracy across the UK. Their rise has shown that a large part of the population want politics to be done differently, and that such demands should not be merely seen as reactionary calls.</p>
<p>The rise of these movements defined by regional and national identity across the spectrum has shown that a large part of the population wants politics to be done differently, and that such demands should not be merely seen as reactionary. </p>
<p>With assorted potential crises looming and ambitious and urgent action needed on issues such as global warming, exclusivist forms of nationalism such as that on the far right could have dramatic effect on the future of Europe and beyond. It is therefore crucial not to simplify the contestation of the current political system (both at the national and EU levels) as a wish for a return to closed borders and politics. </p>
<p>As collective international action has become unavoidable, it is crucial for Europe to regain a sense of unity and common purpose, based on a more positive and inclusive understanding of globalisation.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/40337/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aurelien Mondon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The SNP, Plaid Cymru and UKIP are the new faces in the UK election in 2015 but they reflect a wider change.Aurelien Mondon, Lecturer in French and Comparative Politics, University of BathLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/386942015-04-09T10:07:55Z2015-04-09T10:07:55ZStruggling with racial biases, black families homeschool kids<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77120/original/image-20150406-26496-uo448i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Homeschooling for black children is increasing.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&language=en&ref_site=photo&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&use_local_boost=1&search_tracking_id=rnmcz_JXAomneKWv1xBSiQ&searchterm=school%20black%20kids%20mother&show_color_wheel=1&orient=&commercial_ok=&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=&page=1&inline=801780">Mother image via www.shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Homeschooling, <a href="http://www.nheri.org/research/research-facts-on-homeschooling.html">common</a> among white Americans, is showing an increase among African- Americans kids as well. African-Americans now <a href="http://www.nheri.org">make up about 10%</a> of all homeschooled children in this <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21568763-home-schooling-growing-ever-faster-keep-it-famil">fastest-growing form of education</a>.</p>
<p>However, the reasons for black kids to be homeschooled may not be the same as white kids. <a href="http://jbs.sagepub.com/content/43/7/723.abstract">My research</a> shows that black parents homeschool their children due to white racism. </p>
<p>This may come as a surprise since, for many, we live in an age of <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2010/05/28/197390/when-colorblindness-isnt-colorblind/">alleged color blindness</a> and <a href="https://news.vice.com/article/half-of-america-thinks-we-live-in-a-post-racial-society-the-other-half-not-so-much">post-racialism</a>, characterized by the declining significance of race and racism. </p>
<p>My research found strong evidence to suggest that racism is far from being a thing of the past.</p>
<p>I found <a href="http://academic.udayton.edu/race/2008electionandracism/raceandracism/racism02.htm">covert institutional racism</a> and individual racism still persist and are largely responsible for the persistence of profound racial disparities and inequalities in many social realms. Schools, of course, are no exception, which helps one understand why racism is such a powerful drive for black homeschoolers. </p>
<p>In the Spring and Fall 2010, I interviewed 74 African-American homeschooling families from around the US. While the size of my sample does not allow me to claim that it is representative of the whole African-American homeschooling population, it was nonetheless large enough to allow me to capture the main reasons why black parents tend to homeschool their children.</p>
<h2>Eurocentric curriculum and teachers’ attitudes</h2>
<p>When it comes to schools, there are at least two important areas of concern: the curriculum and teachers’ attitudes and behaviors.</p>
<p>School curricula continue to promote a worldview developed by Western civilization. This wholesale <a href="http://knowledge.sagepub.com/view/counseling/n377.xml">Eurocentric orientation</a> of most schools’ curricula, in a society that, ironically, is becoming increasingly brown, speaks volumes about a pervasive <a href="http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-ethnocentrism.html">European ethnocentrism</a>, that is, the notion that every one in the world thinks and does or should think and do like Europeans. </p>
<p><a href="http://genius.com/Peggy-mcintosh-white-privilege-unpacking-the-invisible-knapsack-annotated">Peggy McIntosh, an anti-racism activist</a>, often cites a list of things she can take for granted as a white woman. Her list reflects the nature of the curriculum that students grow up being exposed to.</p>
<p>As she says: “When I am told about our national heritage or about civilization, I’m shown that people of my color made it what it is;” as well as “I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that attest to the existence of their race.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77121/original/image-20150406-26483-1wr0m1d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77121/original/image-20150406-26483-1wr0m1d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77121/original/image-20150406-26483-1wr0m1d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77121/original/image-20150406-26483-1wr0m1d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77121/original/image-20150406-26483-1wr0m1d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77121/original/image-20150406-26483-1wr0m1d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77121/original/image-20150406-26483-1wr0m1d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">As school curricula is Eurocentric, African-Americans find themselves quasi-excluded from the curriculum.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&language=en&ref_site=photo&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&use_local_boost=1&search_tracking_id=rXPHTL6YTUCr8AHctG9qTw&searchterm=europe%20school&show_color_wheel=1&orient=&commercial_ok=&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=&page=1&inline=2155837">Boy image via www.shutterstock.com</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For black people, <a href="http://journalofafricanamericanmales.com/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2014/02/Lundy-2014.pdf">as I found</a>, it is a totally different experience. Indeed, while European culture and thought are implicitly presented as universal and Europe as the only place from which great ideas and discoveries originated, Africa and African-descended people find themselves quasi-excluded from the curriculum. </p>
<p>As one of the fathers with whom I spoke in Atlanta succinctly articulated, “All we learn about is their stuff, and we know nothing about our stuff, our history, our culture.”</p>
<p>This results in a general school-sanctioned ignorance about Africa and its descendants and in a disdain for the black experience, as I found through my interviews. Eventually, this becomes a pervasive and potent form of institutional racism.</p>
<h2>Racial stereotypes harm black kids</h2>
<p>Furthermore, the attitudes and actions of white teachers (<a href="http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2006/2006030_1.pdf">who make up 85% of all public school teachers</a>) were questioned by many of the African-American parents <a href="https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=african+american+homeschooling+as+racial+protectionism">with whom I spoke</a>. They consistently portrayed white teachers as “overly critical, unresponsive, unqualified, insensitive, offensive, mean, hypocritical, and using double standards.” </p>
<p>Indeed, many white teachers seem to bring into the schools the many racist stereotypes and attitudes that have been ingrained in them, in particular the notions that <a href="https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=african+american+homeschooling+as+racial+protectionism&start=10">blacks lack in intelligence, or are notoriously lazy and bent on criminality</a> .</p>
<p><a href="http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ839497.pdf">Studies of the impact of negative white teachers’ attitudes</a> on the school experience of black children reveal that there are two areas where teachers’ unchecked prejudices have been particularly visible and tragic: the over-referral of black students to special education programs and to the criminal system.</p>
<p>Indeed, <a href="http://www.nyclu.org/issues/youth-and-student-rights/school-prison-pipeline">African-American students are more than twice as likely</a> to be labeled cognitively “deficient” than white American students. Although they only make up 17% of the student population, they nonetheless represent 33% of those enrolled in programs for the mentally challenged.</p>
<p>What appears to be a <a href="http://www.nyclu.org/issues/youth-and-student-rights/school-prison-pipeline">false and incorrect labeling</a>, has a dire impact on the ability of black students to attend college and achieve social mobility. </p>
<h2>Harsh school punishments</h2>
<p>Likewise, black students account <a href="http://www.nyclu.org/issues/youth-and-student-rights/school-prison-pipeline">nationally for 34% of all suspensions</a>. In reality, harsh school punishments have become one of the primary mechanisms through which the <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wnet/tavissmiley/tsr/education-under-arrest/school-to-prison-pipeline-fact-sheet/">school-to-prison pipeline </a> operates, pushing large numbers of black children out of school and into the “justice” system to feed the prison industrial complex that has blossomed over recent years.</p>
<p>Certainly, the parents I interviewed were very much aware of and concerned about the “traps” set by many public schools for black children. One mother in New York poignantly declared, “I say America does not love my children. You know the statistics about prisons and all that. They have a plan for my children, and I am not going along with it.” </p>
<p>Given this state of affairs, it is hardly surprising that a growing number of black parents, frustrated with a school system that is quick to criminalize and disenfranchise their children, turn to homeschooling as an alternative.</p>
<p>Thus, for many black parents, homeschooling equates with a refusal to surrender their children to a system that they see as bent on destroying them. For them, it is an act of active and conscious resistance to racism.</p>
<h2>African-American homeschooling</h2>
<p>By taking the constant threat of harassment and discrimination out of the picture, homeschooling provides African-American parents the space and time to educate and socialize their children for optimal personal development. </p>
<p>I found the home education is planned and delivered primarily by mothers, who stay at home, or work from home. This mother-led home education process is commonly observed among homeschoolers.</p>
<p>In general, two strategies are commonly observed among black home educators: imparting self-knowledge and self-esteem through positive teaching about Africa and African-Americans. </p>
<p>While finding ready-to-use educational materials can be challenging, most parents reported creating their own materials, by drawing from different sources, such as books, documentaries, the internet, field-trips, etc. </p>
<p>Many go out of their way to provide exposure to black people who have achieved greatness in their domain, for instance, literature, science, or history, in an effort not only to educate their children about their history and culture, but also to instill racial pride and confidence in them. </p>
<p>In other words, many black homeschooling parents engage in <a href="http://icher.org/blog/?p=585">racial protectionism</a>, so that they will have the self-confidence and knowledge necessary to face and overcome the hurdles that white racism appears to place in their path.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38694/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ama Mazama does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A scholar finds black parents are homeschooling kids to protect them from racism and what they see as a Eurocentric education.Ama Mazama, Associate Professor and Graduate Director, Temple UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/121982013-02-13T19:21:50Z2013-02-13T19:21:50ZAs American as “Apple” pie: how Samsung hopes parochial appeal will pay off in the US<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/20223/original/m98fzzqt-1360730317.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=21%2C21%2C1385%2C887&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Samsung has spent more on marketing than Apple, HP, Dell, Microsoft and Cocoa Cola combined. But it hopes to replicate the tendency of people to buy products from their own country when it moves production to the US.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It would be easy to simply attribute the massive rise in Samsung’s popularity to its equally massive spend on marketing. It <a href="http://www.asymco.com/2012/11/29/the-cost-of-selling-galaxies/">has been estimated</a> that Samsung spent around $11.5 billion in 2012 on advertising, promotions and other activities. </p>
<p>This is more than Apple, HP, Dell, Microsoft and Coca Cola combined. But it can be argued that no matter how much Samsung spent, it would not have had the results it has, if it hadn’t been for fundamental cultural changes in how people view a company’s and their technology’s country of origin. </p>
<p>Samsung has benefited both from its current place in the history of these changes and also its direct manipulation of how its products are culturally perceived.</p>
<p>Consumer attitudes to buying products outside of their own countries has changed in recent years alongside both the growth in manufacturing in countries like Japan and then China and the related decline of manufacturing in developed countries of the western world. </p>
<p>In fact, there is a term for this attitude called “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_ethnocentrism">consumer ethnocentrism</a>” which refers to the tendency of people to favour products that come from their own countries.</p>
<p>In 1987, Professors of Marketing, Terence Shimp and Subhash Sharma <a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3151638?uid=2&uid=4&sid=21101798618867">defined a scale</a> to measure the degree of “ethnocentrism” of consumers. <a href="http://www.westeastinstitute.com/journals/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/3-Khairul-Anuar-Mohammad-Shah-and-Hazril-Izwar-Ibrahim-Full-Paper-Ready.pdf">Measurements</a> of consumer ethnocentrism in various countries has shown that consumers in Europe are less ethnocentric than in the US who are in turn less ethnocentric than consumers in Asian countries. </p>
<p>Although consumer ethnocentrism can have a very strong influence on consumer purchasing, its influence has started to change because products are no longer manufactured in the same country as the company that sells them. It is actually difficult to find products that are not hybrid in the sense that they are manufactured in a different country to the company’s home country and this weakens the ethnocentric effect. </p>
<p>After all of the publicity surrounding Apple’s use of companies like Foxconn in China, it is very clear in consumers’ minds that iPhones are made in China. Even the labels that exhort that the products are “Designed in California” don’t necessarily convince US consumers that the iPhone is a particularly US product.</p>
<p>The other factor that is important in allowing consumers in western countries in particular to accept products from countries like Korea has been the use of Google’s Android as the operating system. Google and Android are very firmly associated with the US and are perceived very highly. </p>
<p>In fact, Google is the world’s 2nd <a href="http://brandirectory.com/league_tables/table/global-500-2012">ranked brand</a> after Apple. The use of Android by Samsung and other eastern manufacturers has allowed them to mask their phones as being as American almost as Apple’s. </p>
<p>As a result of this, Samsung has risen in the brand rankings to 6th from a position in 2011 of 18. It is the only non-US company other than Vodafone (yes - I was surprised about that as well) in the top 10.</p>
<p>The improvement in Samsung’s general brand was helped by an incredibly <a href="http://www.marketingmag.com.au/news/samsung-wins-olympic-sponsorship-gold-nike-upstages-adidas-again-17854/#.URpVt1pATH0">successful marketing</a> sponsorship of the Olympics. This again helped establish Samsung as a global brand strongly tied with the general success of the athletes and the event itself.</p>
<p>Samsung has been expanding its investment in the US with a <a href="http://allthingsd.com/20130211/setting-up-shop-in-the-valley-and-nyc-samsung-aims-to-boost-its-software-side/">recent announcement</a> that they are setting up Open Innovation Centres in New York and Silicon Valley. These centres will be responsible for driving software innovation, an area that Samsung is not seen as currently being very strong in. </p>
<p>Investing in the US and creating jobs has always been an effective strategy in changing attitudes of a country’s citizens towards foreign companies. Something that companies like Japan’s Toyota pioneered decades earlier.</p>
<p>Of course, Samsung has been producing products that have earned technical acclaim and has been manufacturing and selling them on a grand scale. It has dominated the smartphone market and has become the world’s biggest <a href="http://blogs.strategyanalytics.com/WSS/post/2013/01/25/Global-Smartphone-Shipments-Reach-a-Record-700-Million-Units-in-2012.aspx">smartphone vendor</a> shipping 213 million smartphones in 2012. </p>
<p>By comparison, Apple shipped 136 million iPhones and Nokia, a measly 35 million. However, to achieve this success, they needed to become a nation-agnostic global corporation, but in essence, no different from any other successful US company.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/12198/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Glance does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It would be easy to simply attribute the massive rise in Samsung’s popularity to its equally massive spend on marketing. It has been estimated that Samsung spent around $11.5 billion in 2012 on advertising…David Glance, Director, Centre for Software Practice, The University of Western AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.