Development of Primatology and Primate Conservation in Vietnam Challenges and Prospects

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

WORLD ANTHROPOLOGY
Article

Development of Primatology and Primate Conservation
in Vietnam: Challenges and Prospects
`
Tha.ch Mai Hoang
Vietnam National University

WHO IS A VIETNAMESE PRIMATOLOGIST?

Many introductory textbooks for biological or physical anthropology include primatology as a branch of biological
anthropology, and in higher education programs in anthropology in many countries, including the United States,
primatology is taught as such. In Vietnam, there is no
formal training program in primatology or biological anthropology, and many scientists question why primatology
should be taught in an anthropology department, having been
trained instead in a vertebrate zoology or biology department. To gain a broader understanding among Vietnamese
scholars about the definition of a primatologist in Vietnam
and whether there might be a need for specific training programs related to primatology, I interviewed and reviewed
the work of several Vietnamese scholars who do research on
primates or were former primate conservation workshop
trainees.
Nguye˜ˆ n Xuˆan D˘
¯ a.ng (e-mail, July 3, 2015), a senior
mammal researcher working at the Department of Zoology
at the Institute of Ecology and Biological Resources (IEBR)
who considers himself a Vietnamese primatologist, defines
primatology “simply . . . as science of biology, ecology and
conservation of primates.” According to Nguye˜ˆ n Xuˆan D˘

¯ a.ng,
whoever studies primates should be considered a primatologist. In particular, he stated that Vietnamese primatologists
are researchers who publish about the biology, ecology, or
conservation of primates in both national and international
journals. His view favors research output as the primary
measure in defining a primatologist in Vietnam rather than
formal or informal education in primatology.
Indeed, most primatologists in Vietnam lack formal
training in primatology, and primate research combines
diverse methods beyond those with a solely primate focus,
such as comprehensive biodiversity surveys, applied biological research, environmental impact assessments, ecological
planning for the establishment of a protected area, and so
on. Vietnamese primatologists have formal training in mammalogy or zoology, ecology, archaeology, or environmental
science. This phenomenon is not necessarily unique to
Vietnam and may relate to contemporary discussions in

the international literature about the multidisciplinary
parentage of primatology (Riley 2013).
Ho`ang Minh D
¯ u´ c, a senior Vietnamese primatologist,
reviewed the history of primatology in Vietnam since the
early 20th century in his keynote presentation “Primatology
and the Conservation of Non-Human Primates in Vietnam”
at the International Primatological Congress in Hanoi,
Vietnam, in August 2014. In his presentation, he defined
primatologists as those who are “doing primatology,” meaning
doing research on or surveys of primate populations. His
terminology ignored the constitution of the term primatology
as a school or area of study (“-ology”), instead considering
“doing primatology” as an action—the action of doing

research on primates. This use of primatology reflects and
shapes how Vietnamese scholars understand the concept in
the context of Vietnam, and it may also open a forum of
debate about “doing primatology” versus “primatology” versus primate research that is beyond the scope of this article.
The perspectives of many mid-career and senior
Vietnamese scholars I interviewed also follow this way of
thinking. They note that a primatologist in Vietnam must
be someone undertaking primate studies for at least five to
ten years with authentic scholarly publications. Someone
who joined a primatology training program in the past and
is no longer doing primate research is not a primatologist.
To illustrate their point of view, they gave some specific
examples of “real” Vietnamese primatologists (including
`
Ho`ang Minh D
¯ u´ c, Nguye˜ˆ n Ma.nh H`a, D
¯ oˆ ng Thanh Hai, H`a
´
´
Th˘ang Long, Lˆe Kha˘c Quyeˆ t, and V˘an Ngo.c Thi.nh, among
others). In the opinion of one such primatologist, Ho`ang
Minh D
¯ u´ c, someone who used to be involved in research on
primates but is no longer involved, would not be considered
a primatologist (unpublished interview, July 20, 2015).
The clearest metrics that emerged when Vietnamese
primatologists defined themselves were ongoing research
related to primate populations and scholarly publications on
primate research. Although I agree that scholarly production
is important, I argue that quality should outweigh quantity,

and quality may be the more pressing issue at the moment
as there is a lack of strong training in Vietnam in the
theoretical foundations and methodological approaches
related to primatology and conservation biology. It may be
unnecessary to recognize someone as a “real” primatologist

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 118, No. 1, pp. 130–158, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433.
Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12515

C

2016 by the American Anthropological


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or not, but the importance of more formal training
opportunities related to primatology and conservation
biology in a primate habitat country like Vietnam cannot
be understated. Practitioners or managers cannot conserve
primates without rigorous scientific input and robust contextualization to fill the numerous knowledge gaps that exist
about Vietnam’s remaining, and globally important, primate
populations.
A SHORT HISTORY OF PRIMATE RESEARCH
IN VIETNAM

Ho`ang Minh D
¯ u´ c 2014 distinguished three stages of primate
research in Vietnam: (1) the initial period, prior to 1954;
(2) 1954–1986; and (3) 1986 to the present. The separation

of the stages matches with the history of the country, which
experienced two wars against France and the United States
during the second stage, followed by an embargo period.
The third stage begins with the start of the new open door
“D
¯ oˆ i mo´ i” policy in Vietnam in 1986.
In the initial period (before 1954), research on the primates of Vietnam was dominated by morphologically based
taxonomic descriptions from Western scientists based on
colonial collections in Western institutions. Those specimens were preserved in museums in London, Paris, and
Chicago. Some remarkable works in this period belong to
Auguste Pavie (1904; list of 7 primate species in Vietnam),
Ren´e Bourret (1942; list of 9 species of primates), and
Winfred Hudson Osgood (1932; list of 17 primate taxa in
Vietnam).
The period of 1954–1986 marks the first generation of
Vietnamese primatologists. Most work continued to focus
on morphologically based taxonomic descriptions of new
´
species (D`
¯ ao V˘an Tieˆ n 1960) and primate fauna (D`
¯ ao V˘an
´
`
Tieˆ n 1985; Lˆe Hieˆ n H`ao 1973; Van Peenan et al. 1969),
´
in particular gibbons (D`
¯ ao V˘an Tieˆ n 1983). The cumulative
research effort recorded 21 primate taxa (Eudey 1987). A
particularly important contribution to primate research in
´

this period stems from the late Professor D`
¯ ao V˘an Tieˆ n,
the Vietnamese founder of primate and mammal research at
the Department of Vertebrate Zoology, Hanoi University
´
of Science, Vietnam National University. D`
¯ ao V˘an Tieˆ n
collaborated with Professor Colin Groves of the Australian
National University to study the morphology, taxonomy,
and biogeography of Vietnam’s primates, mammals, and
other vertebrates (e.g., the adaptive radiation of northern
limestone langurs and the systematics of gibbons and lorises;
´
see D`
¯ ao V˘an Tieˆ n 1960, 1983, 1985, 1989). Many primates
and other mammals were collected as specimens during this
period to contribute to national Vietnamese collections at
the Hanoi Zoological Museum, Hanoi University of Science,
and at IEBR.
None of the research conducted during two first periods
focused on or mentioned the issue of primate conservation.
By contrast, primates and other wildlife were considered
natural resources for economic development (Lˆe Hie`ˆ n H`ao
1973). Primates and other wildlife were hunted for wild

131

meat and for use as subjects in medical research. Indeed,
the mission of the Institute of Ecological and Biological
Resources (IEBR), established in the 1960s, and the Forest

Institute of Planning and Inventory (FIPI) was to survey the
status of natural resources to advance Vietnam’s economic
development.
Also, it is important to note that, during the first two
periods, primates were not typically separated out as a target
group for surveys by Vietnamese biologists. Rather, primates
were included in overall biodiversity surveys of fauna or
mammals. Thus, there were very few specialized studies
on primates in Vietnam during the first two periods except
´
those mentioned above by D`
¯ ao V˘an Tieˆ n in collaboration
with Colin Groves.
Ho`ang Minh D
¯ u´ c’s “contemporary period” of primate
research in Vietnam (1987 to the present) is marked by the
open-door policy in 1986 and the lifting of the embargo
by the U.S. government in the 1990s. More Western
scientists and international nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) were able to come to Vietnam to conduct field
surveys for wildlife and primates and introduce conservation
ideas, opening new cooperative spaces for Vietnamese
biologists and forestry engineers. Many new field surveys
of primate conservation status, distributions, and species
compositions were conducted during this time. Academic
expertise and training were more concentrated in Northern
Vietnam at this time, so northern institutions and organizations dominated these surveys. As new northern institutions
and collaborations were established, Vietnamese expertise
on primate research expanded from Hanoi University of Science (H`a D`
¯ ınh D

¯ u´ c, Lˆe V˜u Khˆoi, V˜u Ngo.c Th`anh, and their
fellows) out to the Institute of Ecological and Biological
Resources (IEBR) (Pha.m Tro.ng Anh, Lˆe Xuˆan Canh,
Nguye˜ˆ n Xuˆan D˘
¯ a.ng, and their fellows), Vietnam Forestry
University (VFU) (Pha.m Nhˆa.t, D
¯ o˜ˆ Quang Huy, and
`
Doˆ ng Thanh Hai), the Center for Natural Resources and
Environmental Studies (CRES) (Nguye˜ˆ n Ma.nh H`a), the
Forest Institute of Planning and Inventory (FIPI) (D
¯ o˜ˆ Tuo´ c),
´
and Fauna and Flora International (FFI) (Lˆe Kha˘c Quye´ˆ t).
The World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) was the
first conservation NGO to settle in Vietnam in 1995. Many
surveys for the conservation status and distribution of primates were initiated by this organization in the 1990s. Also,
from the early 2000s to today, Fauna and Flora International
(FFI) has led a long-running primate conservation program
that continues to focus on surveys and monitoring of the status and distribution of primates in Vietnam. Several notable
and successful species-based primate projects were initiated by these international NGOs and others, including, for
example, one for Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus
avunculus) in Ha Giang Province in early 2004 and for Cat Ba
langurs (Trachypithecus poliocephalus) on Cat Ba Island in 2001.
Most of the primate-related work conducted by Vietnamese primatologists before 2003 focused narrowly on
primate rescue or surveys of presence or absence rather than
hypothesis-driven approaches. Exceptions are the work of


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American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 1 • March 2016

the second generation of Vietnamese primatologists such as
Lˆe Xuˆan Canh, Nguye˜ˆ n Xuˆan D˘
¯ a.ng (IEBR), and Pha.m Nhˆa.t
(VFU), who were trained in vertebrate zoology in Russia
and Vietnam. Again, because of their training in vertebrate
zoology or ecology, most primate researchers of this generation focused on questions of ecosystem structure (following
the ecology school of Eugene Pleasants Odum), and few
projects were designed specifically for primates. Rather,
primates were included in broader projects. An exception
is the collaboration between Lˆe Xuˆan Canh and Ramesh
“Zimbo” Boonratana in 1991–1992, which focused on the
feeding ecology and social structure of groups of Tonkin
snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus avunculus) in Na Hang
Nature Reserve, Tuyen Quang Province (Boonratana and
Lˆe Xuˆan Canh 1998a, 1998b).
An influx of primatological research and ideas came
to Vietnam from world primatologists, most of them
from Western countries, in the early 2000s. This influx of
knowledge and related training programs and workshops in
Vietnam initiated more in-depth, hypothesis-driven research
on behavioral ecology and taxonomy of Vietnam primates.
Indeed, I would expand on Ho`ang Minh D
¯ u´ c’s 2014 stages to
include a fourth stage of primate research in Vietnam, post
2003, which represents a new phase in the contemporary
state of primate research in Vietnam and is characterized
by an increase in the number of Vietnamese and other

primatologists who focus specifically on hypothesis-driven
primate research in Vietnam. The greatest contribution
during this period derives from Professor Herbert H.
Covert at the Department of Anthropology, University
of Colorado at Boulder. After an earlier research focus
on primate paleontology in the 1990s in Vietnam, in the
early 2000s Covert shifted to work on living primates in
Southeast Asia, specifically in Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and
Cambodia). Covert’s presentation in 2003 on primate taxonomy and conservation at Vietnam National University’s
Hanoi University of Science helped to trigger the further
development of primate research in Vietnam through its
impact on a number of young Vietnamese scientists; in
fact, it triggered my own career shift into primatology and
biological anthropology from vertebrate zoology.
Weak capacity and a lack of information exchange
were identified as major challenges for the development of
primate conservation and primate research in Vietnam, and
some training courses on primate conservation and primatology were successfully developed and taught in Hanoi in
this recent period (2006 and 2007) and in Ho Chi Minh City
(late 2010s) through the efforts of Professor Covert, Conservation International (CI), and his Vietnamese colleagues.
Nowadays, we know more about behavioral ecology,
locomotion, and vocalizations of many primates in Vietnam,
especially colobine monkeys (e.g., Tonkin snub-nosed
monkey) (Lˆe Kha´˘c Quye´ˆ t 2006, 2014), Delacour’s langur
(Workman 2010), red-shanked douc (Ulibarri 2013), and
black-shanked douc (Ho`ang Minh D
¯ u´ c 2007; O’Brien
2014). In general, higher-profile primate species in Viet-

nam, namely the gibbons, critically endangered colobines,

and the Tonkin snub-nosed monkey, have received the most
research, conservation attention, and especially funder
interest. Also during this period, a new species of gibbon
was described in Vietnam (Nomascus annamensis) (V˘an Ngo.c
Thi.nh et al. 2010). By the year 2015, 26 primate taxa have
been classified and recognized by international primatologists in Vietnam (Blair et al. 2011; Roos et al. 2014).
However, it is important to note that most of the emerging
Vietnamese primatologists in this contemporary period
received their formal graduate training in primatology or
biological anthropology abroad in Europe, Australia, or the
United States—not in Vietnam.
PRIMATE CONSERVATION IN VIETNAM: A
DRIVING FORCE FOR ENGAGED PRIMATOLOGY?

For more than ten years, Vietnam has been well known as a
globally important country for primate conservation (Nadler
and Streicher 2004; Nguye˜ˆ n 2004). Vietnam has the highest
number of overall primate taxa and endemic primate taxa in
Mainland Southeast Asia and the highest number of globally
threatened primate taxa in the region (IUCN 2015). Vietnam
is also home to the second-highest number of species on the
List of the 25 Top Most Endangered Primates in the World
(Schwitzer et al. 2015). How does the pressure to conserve
these species influence primate research in Vietnam?
Following the perspective of Russell Mittermeier 1978
in the Global Strategy for Primate Conservation—“to ensure
the survival of endangered and vulnerable species wherever
they occur”—five critically endangered primate taxa in Vietnam became the focus of many sponsors as flagship species
in primate conservation. Sponsors’ attraction to these
species was inspired not by field research but by their work

at the first primate rescue center in Vietnam, located in Cuc
Phuong National Park. Establishment of the rescue center
in 1993 by Tilo Nadler, representative of the Frankfurt
Zoology Society, Germany, represented one of the first
major acts of primate conservation in Vietnam, and the
center remains a key force for primate conservation in Vietnam today. Named the Endangered Primate Rescue Center
(EPRC), the rescue center followed the conservation model
of communist countries like Vietnam and China of the early
1960s. In 2005, a reintroduction program for the Hatinh
langur (Trachypithecus hatinhensis) and red-shanked douc langur (Pygathrix nemaeus), funded by the Frankfurt Zoological
Society and the Cologne Zoo, was launched in the Phong
Nha–Ke Bang National Park in central Vietnam with a semiwild enclosure for reintroduction. Two groups of Hatinh
langurs were translocated in 2007, and they were released
in 2012 (Nadler 2007, 2013). However, the function of the
center goes beyond rehabilitation and release, as release is
not often possible and capacity is limited. The function of
the center thus also includes conservation education, captive
breeding, and scientific research on the primates of Vietnam
(Nadler 2007, 2012, 2013, 2015). In addition, the EPRC
plays an important role in attracting the attention of the


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media and of Vietnamese authorities to raise awareness
about primate conservation in Vietnam (Nadler 2013,
2015).
To further the movement of saving endangered primates
in Vietnam, a second endangered primate rescue center was
established in 2008 in Cat Tien National Park by Jim Cronin,

the founder of Monkey World–Ape Rescue Centre, United
Kingdom. This center also works to rescue, rehabilitate, and
reintroduce endangered primates, especially pygmy lorises
(Nycticebus pygmaeus) and gibbons (Nomascus gabriellae), in
Southern Vietnam. Like EPRC in the north, the capacity
and management of this center remain largely in the hands
of foreign practitioners, although there are plans to hand
management over to Vietnamese practitioners in the future.
Another two animal rescue centers in southern Vietnam
are led by Wildlife At Risk (WAR) and are managed by
Vietnamese experts. These centers, established in 2006,
aim to rescue and rehabilitate a wide variety of animals,
including primates. Like the other rescue centers, the WAR
centers also maintain functions of conservation education
and species identification training to sustain the operation of
the center (B`ui Hu˜ u Ma.nh, unpublished interview, July 28,
2015).
Many research projects on primate behavior, ecology,
and biology have been conducted at rescue centers in Vietnam, mostly by foreign scholars and students (Nadler 2007,
2012, 2013, 2015). Much of this work has been published
in the Vietnamese Journal of Primatology, which was founded in
2007 at EPRC, and in the proceedings of symposia on primate conservation held once every two years, also at EPRC.
This important research conducted at rescue centers has
informed international primatologists and practitioners
about the diversity and conservation status of Vietnam’s
primate fauna.
Here I highlight the importance of rescue centers as
key nodes for primate conservation activities in Vietnam
because doing so is key to understanding the placement of
primate conservation in the broader context of biodiversity

conservation in Vietnam. Vietnamese biologists and
ecologists prefer not to separate out any special groups of
organisms from national conservation projects. They prefer
landscape-level projects that focus on broad biodiversity
conservation rather than species-based approaches that
target threatened taxa. Indeed, few biological or ecological
research projects funded by the Vietnamese government
over the last four decades focus on long-term, species-based
conservation. Most funded projects are short term and target
evaluations and inventories of wildlife as natural–biological
resources of a given area rather than the collection of
detailed ecological or genetic information of targeted species
groups.
Furthermore, as the global conservation community
moves from protection-based to community-based approaches, the capacity gap widens even further for Vietnamese primatologists and conservation practitioners, who
are not well trained in the anthropology of conservation. In

133

2010, the government of Vietnam issued Decree number
117. Although a discussion about legal frameworks for
conservation in Vietnam is beyond the scope of this article,
Decree number 117 reflects a new mechanism to manage
protected areas that is more biodiversity oriented and also
more community oriented than the former strict protection
of timber. Although this decree opens the door to the
potential to address important issues linked to primate
conservation such as social justice and equity (Riley 2013),
as discussed above, most Vietnamese primatologists and
practitioners are trained as ecologists, foresters, zoologists,

or biologists and do not have backgrounds in anthropology,
social science, or humanities that might aid them in this
pursuit.
The trend toward community-based conservation also
relates to the funding policies of international sponsors
who fund primate conservation. In terms of international
sponsors’ interests, primate conservation projects generally
fall into two lines of approach in Vietnam: (1) flagship or
endangered species conservation projects and (2) landscapeor ecosystem-focused conservation projects. Flagship
species conservation projects in Vietnam are usually small
budget while landscape projects are larger budget and
larger scale. Therefore, big conservation organizations such
as WWF in Vietnam rarely focus on small-scale species
conservation projects and instead conduct sustainable
development projects with discourse toward global issues
such as climate change, carbon markets, community
development, and so on.
FFI and EPRC do comparatively more species-based
projects at smaller scales, such as in situ conservation
of the Delacour’s langur (Trachypithecus delacouri) in Ninh
Binh Province, Tonkin snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus
avunculus) in Ha Giang Province, and Cao Vit or eastern black-crested gibbon (Nomascus nasutus) in Cao Bang
Province. Their success has fostered the integration and
leadership of Vietnamese field primatologists (e.g., Lˆe Kha´˘c
Quye´ˆ t) combining participatory conservation with local
authorities and indigenous people through mutually beneficial partnerships.
This recent work is part of a process of empowerment
of Vietnamese primatologists. More and more Vietnamese
primatologists have been starting their own small NGOs,
raising funds, and managing primate conservation projects,

such as Dr. H`a Th˘ang Long and V˜u Ngo.c Th`anh’s conservation of grey-shanked douc (Pygathrix cinerea) and red-shanked
douc (Pygathrix nemaeus) in Central Vietnam. However, the
challenge for Vietnamese primatologists remains how to
practice primatology in the broader funding and academic
landscape of Vietnam while earning a living. Continued funding from species-focused sponsors is difficult to sustain, and
as discussed throughout this article, dominant institutional
frameworks in Vietnam preclude separation of primate (or
any species-based) conservation from broader biodiversity
conservation or conservation-related funding at the national
level. Again, I ask: Because many Vietnamese primatologists


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American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 1 • March 2016

must work in and affiliate with this broader field to maintain
their careers, what does it mean to be a primatologist in
Vietnam?
In addition to the above-mentioned challenges, Vietnam
lacks a primate action plan to guide long-term conservation.
The Society of Vietnamese Primatologists was established as a
branch of the Society of Vietnamese Zoologists in the 1990s
to assess primate status and distribution for the Vietnam
Red Data Book of threatened species. In 1998, the society
presented a proposal, which reviewed the distribution and
conservation status of 25 taxa of primates in Vietnam, to
create a primate action plan for the country (Pha.m Nhˆa.t
et al. 1998). This action plan has never been implemented
due to numerous reasons that are beyond the scope of this

article, and the society is no longer active.
Despite a loose link between the Society of Vietnamese
Primatologists and the International Primatological Society (IPS), very few Vietnamese primatologists became
members of IPS, and few attend the biennial IPS Congresses.
However, after the IPS Congress in 2014, which was held
in Hanoi, there was momentum for a reinvigoration of
the Society of Vietnamese Primatologists or a National
Primate Specialist Group to develop an updated National
Primate Action Plan and provide scientific consultancy for
primate conservation projects nationwide. Discussions are
ongoing. Without a strong primate action plan, political
will for conservation may be hindered and fundraising will
continue to be difficult, which will affect both primate
conservation and primatologists themselves. The fates of
Vietnam’s primates and its primatologists are inextricably
linked.
THE FUTURE OF PRIMATOLOGY IN VIETNAM

I argue here that primatology in Vietnam has several key
characteristics that shape its current and future development
trajectories:
1. Primate research in Vietnam is driven by the need
for primate conservation. At the same time, primate
conservation in Vietnam is founded on many imported models for what conservation is, both from
other communist countries and more recently from
Western scholars and NGOs. This in part has led to
comparatively more engagement of foreign scholars
than Vietnamese scholars in primate conservation
in Vietnam. What would a Vietnamese-generated
model for primate conservation look like, and how

might it incorporate indigenous knowledge better
than these imported models? The challenges inherent in exploring these questions are compounded
by Vietnamese institutional funding frameworks
(both academic and national) that do not recognize
primate-specific focuses.
2. Greater engagement of foreign scholars in primate
conservation has led to a larger role for foreign
scholars in shaping the study of and training in

primatology in Vietnam, with comparatively less
engagement of local scholars. This has led, in the
long term, to a lack of formal or sustained training
opportunities in primatology, especially opportunities that feature a leading role for Vietnamese
scholars.
3. Most Vietnamese primate researchers are trained
in biology, zoology, ecology, or forestry. They lack
training in the anthropology of conservation and
cross-disciplinary skills, which limits their ability
to practice conservation or apply for new crossdisciplinary funding mechanisms.
Overall, these characteristics indicate that we need at
least some opportunities for formal training in primatology
at Vietnamese academic institutions in the long run and also
multidisciplinary training opportunities.
A program (e.g., a master’s program in primate conservation) could train students in the fundamentals of
primatology and conservation biology and provide training
in the cross-disciplinary skills needed to pursue professional
work in primate research and conservation in Vietnam. The
challenge in establishing such a program is the present context of Vietnam’s academic institutions. The Ministry of Education will open a new program only after demonstration
of need and would require at least three Vietnamese primatologists holding doctorates at the proposed institution.
There is no institution in Vietnam with so many primatologists in one place. To resolve the problem, some senior

Vietnamese primatologists propose a simple model with a
course on primate conservation at both undergraduate and
graduate levels rather than a full program. This suggestion
recognizes that it is important for Vietnamese primatologists
to have broader training to be able to earn a living working
on biodiversity conservation issues.
Also, such a program might still lack multidisciplinary
training opportunities for students because of the broader
context of academic institutions in Vietnam. For example,
the subfields of biological anthropology and environmental
anthropology in Vietnam are brand new, in part because
they represent multidisciplinary fields of research. I taught
the first-ever courses in environmental anthropology and
biological anthropology in 2015 and 2013 (respectively) in
the Department of Anthropology at Hanoi University of Social Sciences and Humanities. These courses took place after
many years preparing for a move to this department from
my former department, the Department of Vertebrate Zoology at Hanoi University of Sciences. Before 1994, these
two universities belonged to the same central university,
the School of Arts and Sciences. But today, classes and students are not shared between these two universities despite
their location on the same campus. Links between natural
and social science schools and other research institutions
are weak in Vietnam, such that cross-disciplinary cooperation in research and training seems an all-but-impossible
mission.


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The issue of cross- or multidisciplinary training also
relates to why Vietnam should but does not yet follow
the shifting trend in conservation from conservation biology toward a broader view of biodiversity conservation,

or conservation anthropology, that requires a multidisciplinary panel of approaches, skills, and paradigms. Vietnam
cannot easily follow this trend because of inefficient capacity and institutional boundaries, which is a shame because
Vietnam is an ideal research landscape to explore emerging
multidisciplinary topics in primatology such as ethnoprimatology and human primate interaction (Fuentes 2002, 2012;
Riley 2013; Workman 2004), ethical issues in vaccination
and laboratory primates, wildlife trade, genetics of primate
conservation, and so on.
In particular, the development of ethnoprimatology
in Vietnam might be very important. The 54 different
ethnic groups in Vietnam have diverse cultural values and
connections to their nonhuman primate relatives, and
Vietnam would be a ripe landscape for both theoretical and
engaged research on ethnoprimatological questions. For the
most part, these questions are left unexplored in Vietnam,
with the exception of some ongoing niche overlap research
by Western scientists.
Another option to support continued development of
primatology and primate conservation in Vietnam would
be to further harness the power of professional society networks such as the International Primatological Society (IPS).
For example, IPS could help support the reestablishment
of the Society of Vietnamese Primatologists or a Vietnam
Primate Specialist Group toward the development of an
updated action plan. In relation to this, they could help
support a series of Vietnamese-organized academic training programs in primatology, capitalizing on international
expertise but designed and led by Vietnamese researchers
to empower “habitat country” (Oates 2013:243) scholars
and recruit more IPS members. In addition, IPS could consider more sustainable funding beyond the short-term grants
available for “habitat-country nationals,” as has already been
suggested by John Oates (2013:243). IPS has already taken
a step in this direction with the new Sabin Prize for Excellence in Primate Conservation, which was awarded to Lˆe

Kha´˘c Quye´ˆ t of Vietnam in 2015 for his work on the conservation of Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys in Ha Giang Province.
Other anthropological societies such as the American
Anthropological Association might also seek to support
greater four-field training opportunities in Vietnam.
Primate rescue centers in Vietnam should continue to
serve their key role in primate conservation, due to their
convening power and history of important actions. Perhaps
this ongoing work could include incorporation into a curriculum of academic training as an outdoor classroom for
Vietnamese fellows.
However we move forward, the need for more formal
training opportunities related to primatology and conservation biology in a primate habitat country like Vietnam is
clear. Although primate conservation enthusiasts may pre-

135

fer immediate actions rather than taking the time for formal
academic training that includes theory, I question whether
we can conserve primates without rigorous knowledge to
inform our actions.
Even as I argue for the importance of formal training
in primatology, I end with a series of important queries for
Vietnamese primatologists and the world anthropology community: What is primatology in Vietnam without the need
for primate conservation? In other words, in the complex
institutional landscape of my home country, is primatology
relevant for Vietnam without engagement, or even with it?
When we think about the future of primatology in Vietnam
and the development of formal training opportunities, we
must also recognize what Vietnamese students can and cannot do with the skills they learn as they pursue diverse career
trajectories. Is it responsible to train more Vietnamese primatologists without also providing more sustainable funding
opportunities for careers in primatology or primate conservation for Vietnamese practitioners?

NOTES
Acknowledgments.

I am grateful to acknowledge Virginia
Dominguez for inviting me to write this article. I am in debt to
Mary E. Blair, Mayumi Shimose, and Emily Metzner for edits to my
English. Thanks also to the many Vietnamese scholars who responded
to my questions about the development of primatology in Vietnam.

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Blair, Mary E., Eleanor J. Sterling, and Martha M. Hurley
2011 Taxonomy and Conservation of Vietnam’s Primates:
A Review. American Journal of Primatology 73(11):1093–
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Boonratana, Ramesh, and Lˆe Xuˆan Canh
1998a Preliminary Observations of the Ecology and Behavior of
the Tonkin Snub-Nosed Monkey (Rhinopithecus [Presbytiscus]
avunculus) in Northern Vietnam. In The Natural History of the
Doucs and Snub-Nosed Monkeys. Nina G. Jablonski, ed. pp.
207–215. Singapore: World Scientific.
1998b Conservation of Tonkin Snub-Nosed Monkeys (Rhinopithecus [Presbytiscus] avunculus) in Vietnam. In The Natural History
of the Doucs and Snub-Nosed Monkeys. Nina G. Jablonski,
ed. pp. 315–322. Singapore: World Scientific.
Bourret, Ren´e
1942. Les mammif`eres de la collection du laboratoire de zoologie
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1983 On the North Indochinese Gibbons (Hylobates concolor)
(Primates: Hylobatidae) in North Vietnam. Journal of Human
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Northern Vietnam] (Vietnamese hardcopy). Hanoi: Scientific
and Technical.
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Leaf Monkey (Presbytis francoisi, Primate: Cercopithecidae).
Human Evolution 4(6):501–507.
Eudey, Ardith A.
1987 Action Plan for Asian Primate Conservation, 1987–1991.
Gland: IUCN/ SSC Primate Specialist Group.
Fuentes, Agust´ın
2002 Monkeys, Humans, and Politics in the Mentawai Islands:
No Simple Solutions in a Complex World. In Primates Face
to Face: The Conservation Implications of Human-Nonhuman

Primate Interconnections. Agust´ın Fuentes and Linda Wolfe,
eds. pp. 187–207. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2012 Ethnoprimatology and the Anthropology of the Human–
Primate Interface. Annual Review of Anthropology 41:101–
117.
Ho`ang Minh D
¯ u´ c
2007 Ecology and Conservation Status of the Black-Shanked Douc
(Pygathrix nigripes) in Nui Chua and Phuoc Binh National
Park, Ninh Thuan Province, Vietnam. PhD dissertation, School
of Natural and Rural Systems Management, University of
Queensland.
2014 Primatology and the Conservation of Non-Human Primates
in Vietnam. Keynote Presentation at the International Primatological Congress, Hanoi, Vietnam, August 11–17.
IUCN [International Union for the Conservation of Nature]
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Lˆe Hie`ˆ n H`ao
1973 Th´u kinh te´ˆ mie`ˆ n ba´˘c Viˆe.t Nam, Tˆa.p 1 [Economic value
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Lˆe Kha´˘c, Quye´ˆ t
2006 Nghiˆen cu´ u mˆo.t so´ˆ d˘
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(Rhinopithecus avunculus Dollman, 1912) o khu vu.c Khau
Ca, tınh H`a Giang [Research on some ecological features of the
Tonkin snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus avunculus Dollman, 1912) in Khau Ca area, Ha Giang]. MS thesis (Vietnamese hardcopy), Department of Vertebrate Zoology, Hanoi
University of Science.
2014 Positional Behavior and Support Use of the Tonkin SnubNosed Monkey (Rhinopithecus avunculus) in Khau Ca Forest,
Ha Giang Province, Vietnam. PhD dissertation, Department

of Anthropology, University of Colorado at Boulder.
Mittermeier, Russell A.
1978 Global Strategy for Primate Conservation. New York:
IUCN-SSC Primate Specialist Group and the New York Zoological Society.
Nadler, Tilo
2007 Endangered Primate Rescue Center, Vietnam—Report
2004 to 2006. Vietnamese Journal of Primatology 1(1):89–
103.
2012 Frankfurt Zoological Society: “Vietnam Primate Conservation Program” and the Endangered Primate Rescue Center,

Vietnam—Report 2011. Vietnamese Journal of Primatology
2(1):85–94.
2013 Twenty Years Endangered Primate Rescue Center,
Vietnam—Retrospect and Outlook—Report 2012. Vietnamese Journal of Primatology 2(2):1–12.
2015 Endangered Primate Rescue Center, Vietnam–Report
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57–72.
Nadler, Tilo, and Ulrike Streicher
2004 The Primates of Vietnam—An Overview. In Conservation
of Primates in Vietnam. Tilo Nadler, Ulrike Streicher, and
Ha Thang Long, eds. pp. 5–11. Hanoi: Frankfurt Zoological
Society.
Nguye˜ˆ n, B. T.
2004 Conservation of Primates in Vietnam. In Conservation
of Primates in Vietnam. Tilo Nadler, Ulrike Streicher, and
Ha Thang Long, eds. pp. 3–4. Hanoi: Frankfurt Zoological
Society.
Oates, John
2013 Primate Conservation: Unmet Challenges and the Role of
the International Primatological Society. International Journal

of Primatology 34(2):235–245.
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2014 The Ecology and Conservation of Black-Shanked Douc
(Pygathrix nigripes) in Cat Tien National Park. PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado at
Boulder.
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1932 Mammals of Kelly-Roosevelts and Delacour Asiatic Expedition. Field Museum of Natural History (Zoology) 18(10):191–
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1904 Recherches sur l’histoire naturelle de l’Indo-Chine orientale
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Ngo.c Th`anh, and Lˆe Xuˆan Canh
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422.
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2014 An Updated Taxonomy and Conservation Status Review of
Asian Primates. Asian Primates Journal 4(1):2–38.
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Frederica Chiozza, Elizabeth A. Williamson, Janette Wallis,
and Alison Cotton.

2015 Primates in Peril: The World’s 25 Most Endangered Primates, 2014–2016. Arlington: IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist
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World Anthropology

Ulibarri, Larry Ray
2013 The Socioecology of Red-Shanked Doucs (Pygathrix nemaeus) in Son Tra Nature Reserve, Vietnam. PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado at
Boulder.
V˘an Ngo.c Thi.nh, A. R. Mootnick, V˜u Ngo.c Th`anh, Tilo Nadler,
and Christian Roos
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137

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Workman, Catherine
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Workman, Catherine
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dissertation, Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke
University.

Comment

Primatology in Vietnam and Other Habitat Countries: An

Applied Perspective from India
Kashmira Kakati
Wildlife Biologist, India

Tha.ch Mai Ho`ang provides a comprehensive overview of
primate studies in Vietnam and offers suggestions on how
primatology in Vietnam may be improved. His initial deliberations on who can be defined as a primatologist do not seem
to me as important as the issues he raises about the quality and
relevance of primate research and conservation in Vietnam.
He cites weak capacity, lack of information exchange, funding problems, the government’s and international NGOs’
focus on landscape-level versus species-level conservation,
and the lack of training of primatologists in the social sciences
or anthropology. He also points out that imported models
of conservation and a preponderance of foreign scholars
have shaped primatology in Vietnam at the cost of inclusion
of Vietnamese scholars and indigenous knowledge. Many
of the issues in Vietnam are common to other South and
Southeast Asian countries. I discuss some of Tha.ch’s points
in light of my experience working in India, where I have
done both species-focused research on primate ecology and
wider landscape-level wildlife studies, addressing ecological
hypotheses as well as hoping that my findings would be used
toward conservation of species and habitats.
Tha.ch laments that “dominant institutional frameworks
in Vietnam preclude separation of primate (or any speciesbased) conservation from broader biodiversity conservation
or conservation-related funding at the national level.” I question whether primate conservation should be separated from
biodiversity conservation at all. It is true that big donors tend
toward landscape-level rather than species-level conservation, but many landscapes are selected for conservation due
to the presence of wide-ranging and charismatic species such
as elephant, rhino, or tiger. In Vietnam, it was the discovery

of a small population of the Javan rhino that influenced the
creation of the Cat Tien National Park in 1998 and there-

after drew government and international funding for the
site. Despite this, the Javan rhino went locally extinct there.
It is often difficult to use primate species alone to garner that
level of attention, and therefore funding, although it has been
achieved for certain great ape populations in Africa. As Tha.ch
notes, in fact, there is an attributed hierarchy among the primates themselves in terms of their appeal, with “gibbons,
critically endangered colobines, and the Tonkin snub-nosed
monkey” in Vietnam receiving the lion’s share of attention.
Given the realities, landscape focus is a good strategy in conservation and does not have to be exclusive of species-focus
studies. In fact, detailed and long-term studies on populations and ecology of species can, and should, effectively
inform their conservation at the landscape level. The critically endangered Hainan gibbon in China, just across the
Gulf of Tonkin from Vietnam, serves as a cautionary tale not
to put off species studies and monitoring until it is too late.
Tha.ch acknowledges the role of Vietnam’s rescue centers in primate conservation, especially in achieving the goals
of scientific research, captive breeding, and awareness. From
what I understand, however, it seems that primate rehabilitation into the wild, which should be a primary goal, is
perhaps not as successful due to a variety of reasons. This
is a problem that might be addressed by taking a wider
view, investing in protection, and involving communities
in order to repopulate forests with primates that have been
decimated by hunting. The wild populations of Vietnam’s 26
primate taxa are threatened by hunting and habitat loss. They
need research attention. On the one hand, hypothesis-driven
research on Vietnam’s primates does not have to preclude
conservation. On the other hand, wild primate research does
not always have to include a conservation goal at the outset.
Tha.ch dwells at length on training and capacity lacunae

for Vietnamese primatologists. While acknowledging the
contributions of foreigners and foreign collaborations to
primatology in Vietnam, he also suggests that these might be


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American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 1 • March 2016

preventing Vietnamese scholars from having leading roles.
From the perspective of my experience in India, within the
last two to three decades, high-quality institutions—namely,
universities, government institutes, and conservation
organizations—have produced a capable cadre of in-country
wildlife biologists, among them primatologists. Several
scholars have benefited, as no doubt Vietnamese scholars
have, from further training at Western universities. I would
expect that having foreign scholars in Vietnam should result
in a similar productive exchange of ideas and collaborations
with Vietnamese scholars. It is important that Vietnamese
researchers develop good funding proposals that will enable
them to tap the same sources of funding that foreign
scientists do. Many international conservation organizations
now prioritize funding to range-country institutions and
individuals.
Vietnam is one of the fastest-growing economies in the
region. In this context, the Vietnam government must improve the education and training of biologists within the
country and fund most of the research and conservation of
the country’s biological assets. At another level, perhaps it
is a matter of the Vietnamese scholars shaping their own

roles in primatology and stepping up to assume the leadership positions in which Tha.ch desires to see them instead
of merely foreign scholars stepping down. Science should
have no boundaries in the form of race or nationality. In preceding decades, Western scientists such as David Chivers
of the University of Cambridge, UK, and Warren Brockelman at Mahidol University, Thailand, were pioneers for
South and Southeast Asian primatology, having actively encouraged and trained range-country primatologists. It was
with the help of Western scientists like Alan Rodgers and
John Sale that the Indian government set up the Wildlife

Institute of India in 1982, which produced the first generations of trained Indian field biologists, many of whom now
have influential roles in conservation across the country. I
see, however, Tha.ch’s point that the knowledge, skill sets,
and resources that foreign scientists bring to the country
may not fully benefit the Vietnamese. To remedy this, Vietnamese government policy can create conditions in which
externally funded projects are mandated to build in-country
capacity as Bhutan, for example, has done.
Tha.ch calls for the formation of an action plan for primates in Vietnam—an excellent suggestion. While such an
action plan could be facilitated by the International Primatological Society (IPS) and international donors, it is vital
that the Vietnam government owns, funds, and implements
it to make it sustainable in the long term. The action plan
should not only prioritize species and landscapes for research
and conservation action but also detail how Vietnamese researchers will be trained, employed, and sustained in a multidisciplinary framework, as Tha.ch recommends. Tha.ch flags
the issue of biologists’ lack of social sciences training. This is
a drawback that afflicts conservation programs in the region
and has been discussed incisively by Freya St. John et al.
(2014). Although desirable, in field biology research or conservation teams it may not always be feasible to have a social
scientist, and cross-disciplinary training of biologists may
indeed be a solution.
REFERENCE CITED

St. John, Freya A. V., Keane, Aidan M., Jones, Julia P. G., and

Milner-Gulland, E. J.
2014 Robust Study Design Is as Important on the Social as It Is on
the Ecological Side of Applied Ecological Research. Journal of
Applied Ecology 51(6):1479–1485.

Comment

Primatology, Integration, and World Anthropologies
Agust´ın Fuentes
University of Notre Dame

Whether applying a comparative approach contrasting humans as primates to other primates, navigating the multifarious web of social and ecological interconnections between
people and other primates, or examining the mutual mutability of our bodies and biomes via the bidirectional exchange
of pathogens, primatology is a key arena for anthropological
engagement. From its inception as a field of study in the
early quarter of the 20th century to its core inclusion into
North American anthropology via Sherwood Washburn’s
“New Physical Anthropology” (1951) to its current status
as a locus for integrative approaches across anthropological subfields (via ethnoprimatology, see Fuentes 2012; Riley

2013), primate studies remains an area that draws on diverse
toolkits, stakeholders, and methodologies.
But primatology has never been exclusively rooted in
one locale, one cultural paradigm, or even one language.
From the 1950s, distinct schools emerged in Japan, the
United States and Canada, and various nations in Europe
(particularly Germany, the Netherlands, and the United
Kingdom). All developed their own particular approaches,
intermingling with one another but never fully fusing. In
the last decades of the 20th century, the historical (or,

better put, “colonial”) centers of power assisted and accepted the training and inclusion of primatologists from the
“source countries”—those areas in the Global South where
nonhuman primates range and where the bulk of primatological fieldwork is conducted.1 India, Indonesia, South


World Anthropology

Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Madagascar, Brazil, Mexico, Costa
Rica, Thailand, China, and Vietnam all began to develop
primate research programs relying on both internal and
external expertise. The bulk of these programs had conservation as a central focus, and very few of them were
housed in, or had explicit connections to, departments of
anthropology.
This is exactly what makes the current state of primatology in Vietnam so interesting. Tha.ch Mai Ho`ang introduces
us to the history of primate studies in the country and draws
a map of the focus on conservation and the myriad of disciplinary backgrounds Vietnamese primatologists bring to
bear. Even more so than in most other countries, the emergence of primatology in Vietnam is extensively intertwined
with conservation actions and conservation funding.
Tha.ch argues that primatology in Vietnam is an activity,
a perspective, and not necessarily a cohesive discipline. It
is the process of doing primatology that makes one a primatologist in Vietnam not the particulars of the degree or
training one holds. Given his overview of the central role of
conservation, of all stripes, in the development of primate
studies in Vietnam, it is not surprising that the act of primatology has developed as an organic response to the local
contexts and national perspectives, ideologies, and realities
of Vietnam, as opposed to an imposed and formalized school.
This makes the World Anthropology section a good venue
in which to contemplate Tha.ch’s call for a multidisciplinary
entanglement in Vietnamese primatology centered in and
around anthropology.

Tha.ch proposes that “Vietnam is an ideal research landscape to explore emerging multidisciplinary topics in primatology such as ethnoprimatology and human primate
interaction, ethical issues in vaccination and laboratory primates, wildlife trade, genetics of primate conservation, and
so on” (this issue) and also points out that “the 54 different ethnic groups in Vietnam have diverse cultural values
and connections to their nonhuman primate relatives” (this
issue), concluding that Vietnam is a ripe landscape for theoretical and engaged anthropological primatological research.
He also points out that integrated approaches, and training,
are required to most effectively navigate this landscape and
produce the kinds of outcomes that matter to the people
and other primates of Vietnam. Herein lies the rub: in Vietnam, there is no precedent for this kind of integration.2
Due to his experiences in the Department of Anthropology
at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Tha.ch is currently
attempting to construct, under the tent of anthropology,
the kinds of multidisciplinary and integrative training and
research programs for which the diversity and complexity
of the Vietnamese primatological landscape call. But this is
no easy task. With no historical precedent, little familiarity with a multifield North American–style anthropology in
the government and academic structures, and only a handful of established professional positions available, the uphill
trajectory for this project is steep.

139

Tha.ch notes in this issue,
When we think about the future of primatology in Vietnam and
the development of formal training opportunities, we must also
recognize what Vietnamese students can and cannot do with
the skills they learn as they pursue diverse career trajectories.
Is it responsible to train more Vietnamese primatologists without also providing more sustainable funding opportunities for
careers in primatology or primate conservation for Vietnamese
practitioners?

This is a common crisis globally for anthropology. There
is great intrinsic value in developing a core of researchers
and scholars in countries outside of the current centers of
academic training (the colonial academies noted above), but
there is also an ethical dilemma: What is the future for
such scholars? What are the opportunities for anthropologists and primatologists who are trained in this 21st-century
intellectual ideal but whose job opportunities and livelihoods are enmeshed in economic, political, and academic
grids of continuing inequality and limited infrastructure and
support?
It is, as Tha.ch details, necessary to engage in a collaborative project between Vietnamese scholars and those from
outside to co-develop the funding infrastructures that can
facilitate the emergence of his integrative program. One can
see this as a call for anthropologists who are situated in,
and have the support of, the traditional centers of anthropology and primatology to assist as best we can to destabilize the juggernaut of colonial legacies and make anthropology and primatology truly world disciplines. Tha.ch Mai
Ho`ang and his national and international collaborators are
working on this in Vietnam. I wish them great success and
hope that a myriad of others will be inspired to join this
project.
NOTES

1. The one exception is Japan, where free-ranging primates
(macaque monkeys) exist and long-term field studies on social
behavior were pioneered. Japan maintained its very strong local
focus and established research and training connections with all
other major primate areas (Neotropics, Sub-Saharan Africa, and
South and Southeast Asia).
2. Nor is there in most other places.
REFERENCES CITED

Fuentes, Agust´ın

2012 Ethnoprimatology and the Anthropology of the Human–
Primate Interface. Annual Review of Anthropology 41:101–
117.
Riley, Erin P.
2013 Contemporary Primatology in Anthropology: Beyond the
Epistemological Abyss. American Anthropologist 115(3):411–
422.
Washburn, Sherwood L.
1951 The New Physical Anthropology. Transactions of the New
York Academy of Sciences 13:298–304.


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American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 1 • March 2016

Comment

Development of Primatology in Habitat Countries: A View
from Brazil
´
´
Julio
Cesar
Bicca-Marques
´
Pontif´ıcia Universidade Catolica
do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre,
Brazil

Tha.ch Mai Ho`ang’s thoughtful and critical evaluation of
the development of the field of primatology and primate
conservation in Vietnam (this issue) addresses elements that
characterize the history of primatology in many (perhaps
most) habitat countries. Harboring the highest primate
diversity in the world, Brazil is one such country, although
it is culturally distinct and 25 times larger than Vietnam. As
a scientist who began studying primates in the second half
of the 1980s soon after graduating in biological sciences,
I lived through the last 30 years of Brazilian primatology.
Here I compare the picture Tha.ch draws of Vietnam with
my perception of key events in the establishment and
consolidation of Brazilian primatology. I offer the Brazilian
case as an example of how Vietnamese primatology can
ensure that resident scientists (nationals and foreigners
alike) play a more active role in shaping the future of the
field.
Similar to Vietnamese primatology, Brazilian primatology is a field of biology instead of a subdiscipline of anthropology. The few undergraduate and graduate programs in
anthropology in Brazil focus on sociocultural, linguistic, and
archaeological anthropology, rarely offering courses on biological anthropology. This connection with biology resulted
in a strong bond between Brazilian primatology and primate
ecology and conservation. However, it also probably played
a critical role in the country’s deficiency of formal training
in primatology early on and the scarcity of academic positions for primate researchers in comparison with countries
in which the field belongs to anthropology, such as in the
United States. In the Brazilian academic system, primatologists often compete for faculty positions with a wealth of
specialists, including other mammalogists, vertebrate zoologists, ecologists, and animal behaviorists, to name just a
few. As a consequence, most Brazilian universities do not
have a single primatologist, and only a few of them have
two or more among their faculty. Unlike in Vietnam, funding opportunities in Brazil are not focused on short-term

wildlife surveys. Brazilian primatologists seek grants (mostly
governmental) for a wide breadth of research subjects, but
there is also an intense competition with the aforementioned
specialists because funding is limited.
Training opportunities in primatology were rare in
Brazil until the early 1980s. Concerned with this situation,
Milton Thiago de Mello (1916–), a Brazilian veterinarian and
professor at the University of Brasilia, organized six special-

ization courses in primatology focusing on several subjects
from 1983 to 1989. A total of 63 young Brazilian primatologists were trained in these courses, which were taught
by Brazilian and foreign scientists. Many of these students
currently play leading roles in primate research and conservation. Thiago de Mello took the 12th Congress of the
International Primatological Society to Bras´ılia in 1988. The
Brazilian Society of Primatology (SBPr, founded in 1979)
also played a critical role in highlighting and consolidating
this specialty by organizing national congresses once every
two years in different regions of the country and publishing a selection of their presentations in 14 volumes of the
book series A Primatologia no Brasil (Primatology in Brazil).
The launching in 1993 of the IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist
Group newsletter Neotropical Primates, which was edited by
Anthony B. Rylands and Ernesto Rodr´ıguez-Luna until 2005,
represented another important new venue in which young
Latin American primatologists could publish the results of
their research.
Prospective young field primatologists during the 1980s
and early 1990s in Brazil were met with a scarcity of graduate programs in ecology, zoology, and animal behavior and
advisors trained in primatology. However, since the mid1990s, there has been a marked increase in the number
of graduate programs and training opportunities in shortand long-term field projects, together with a reinforcement
of national policies supporting PhD studies at home and

abroad. As a result, both the number of Brazilian primate
researchers holding PhDs and the number of publications
by Brazilian researchers in scholarly journals indexed in the
Web of Science have shown a steep increase since the 1990s.
Differing from Vietnam, the new generations of Brazilian
primatologists received mostly in-country formal graduate
training. The number of Brazilian participants at meetings of
the International Primatological Society has also increased
since the early 2000s. The launching by the Brazilian Higher
Education Authority of an online library system (Portal de
Periodicos CAPES) with open access to international journals
in 2000 also represented a significant step toward promoting
high-quality research.
Tha.ch notes that foreign scientists have played an
important, even outsize, role in Vietnamese primatology.
Although a similar situation holds true for Brazilian
primatology, Brazilian scholars have taken the lead in most
research and conservation initiatives developed throughout
the country in the past decades. For instance, the National
Center for Research and Conservation of Brazilian Primates
(CPB, founded in 2001) coordinated the evaluation of the
conservation status of Brazilian primates, the results of which


World Anthropology

were validated and adopted by the International Union for
Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN),
and prepared action plans for the conservation of threatened
species.

In sum, the field of primatology in Brazil shares many
characteristics with that in Vietnam, including its strong
relationship with foreign scientists, its association with
biology rather than anthropology, and a lack of graduate programs devoted exclusively to its teaching. In fact, there are no
graduate programs in primatology in Brazil. Brazil was able to
produce national scholars over the last 30 years by developing

141

training courses, maintaining an active national society, and
supporting graduate training of primatologists in zoology,
ecology, animal behavior, genetics, and other programs.
Therefore, I emphasize that promoting training and creating
post-training job opportunities are critical for empowering
national scholars and advancing the field of primatology
in habitat countries. In this respect, I have no doubt that
incorporating biological anthropology into undergraduate
and graduate anthropology curricula would also significantly help achieve this goal in those countries in which
primatology is almost strictly a specialty of biology.

Comment

Making Primatology Vietnamese
Philip Taylor
Australian National University

Tha.ch Mai Ho`ang’s article (this issue) offers an insightful
contextualization of the challenges facing the discipline of
primatology, and primate conservation in Vietnam. It commences with a brief history of primatology in Vietnam and
follows with a description of some of this field’s unique characteristics and challenges. Finally, it concludes with some

well-posed questions: Is there a demand for primatology in
Vietnam? Is the expertise of Vietnamese primatologists sufficient to the challenge? How would training in this field be
managed and institutionally accommodated? What would a
truly Vietnamese primatology look like?
Vietnam has become a magnet for primatologists. As a
site of remarkable and oft-celebrated diversity in primate
species, Vietnam has over the past decades attracted a great
number of international primate researchers and conservation organizations. Vietnam-based researchers have joined
them in making internationally significant contributions to
taxonomy, documentation, and conservation of endangered
species. However, essential questions remain unanswered:
What unique biological, environmental, and sociohistorical
factors have sustained this diversity, and what interventions
are required in order to ensure that Vietnam is able to maintain it?
Unfortunately, Vietnam has gained notoriety as the site
for the extinction of a number of iconic large mammals and
for the numerous risks posed to biodiversity. Primatologists are being forced by circumstances to understand and
respond to threats to primate survival as diverse as hunting, state-instigated uplands development, deforestation,
and demographic explosion. Tha.ch Mai Ho`ang suggests that
his colleagues might usefully ask questions such as follows:
What values do primates hold for local human populations?
Furthermore, one might query whether opportunities exist
for transforming those values and building more sustainable
human–primate relationships. Of particular danger is the
illegal wildlife trade. By widening their sphere of inquiry

to incorporate the commoditization of the objects of their
study, primatologists in Vietnam are uniquely situated to
shed light on the actors, values, and mechanisms of the
wildlife trade and the opportunities for greatly improving

its regulation. Owing to accessibility to primate populations
and good facilities, most primate research in Vietnam has
occurred in special wildlife reserves within national parks.
Important contextual questions arise here, too: Are national
parks the only mechanism for sustaining primate populations, do they work, and what needs to be modified to make
them function better?
This leads to queries regarding the capacity required
to do the job. Tha.ch Mai Ho`ang points to Vietnam’s low
number of trained and active primatologists, a scarcity of
funding opportunities for long-term research, and a lack of
local educational programs. My own view is that it is essential for any field of studies to have a core of specialists deeply
trained at the PhD level. Such training affords scholars
thorough grounding in the principles of their discipline; they
know how to design and implement original field research,
and they can adequately analyze and contextualize in-depth
case studies. Further, with such training, researchers are
better able to articulate the nature and significance of their
findings, they are up to date with international trends in
their discipline, and they understand the position of their
discipline in a wider interdisciplinary field. The number of
primatologists in Vietnam with these capabilities is far from
optimal.
There would appear to be little danger that significantly increasing the number of Vietnamese PhD holders
in primatology will lead to oversaturation of the field.
The range of species, threats, and conservation strategies
requiring urgent investigation is wide. If higher-degree
research is pursued in the array of disciplines that intersect with primatology—biological anthropology, zoology,
conservation biology, natural resource management, and
landscape ecology—graduates will be able to make contributions to these broader fields as well as to the field of primatology as narrowly defined. Funding for such fundamental

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American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 1 • March 2016

research is available through a number of international scholarship schemes that prioritize development in Vietnam.
Once trained, PhD graduates will be in a far stronger position to design and obtain grant funding for major research
projects, to advocate for primatology and conservation
research, and to take part in graduate training programs
in Vietnam itself.
The author speaks of the current institutional fragmentation of the field of primatology in Vietnam. This
phenomenon is not unique to Vietnam, for primatologists
everywhere frequently find themselves the sole exponent of
the field in their departments, with at best only a cohort of
graduate students at hand who truly understand their specialization. This can be a strength for Vietnam. Primatologists
based in anthropology departments, for instance, bring
exhilarating breadth and historical depth to the comparative
inquiries pursued by anthropologists. Their unique insights
into primate evolution, adaptation, and behavior add resonance to the anthropological question of what it means to
be human. In turn, a primatologist based in a Vietnamese
anthropology department will have access to the insights
of colleagues into the environmental, social, cultural, and
institutional landscapes of the regions in which most primates and nature reserves are located. Vietnam has several
large anthropology departments, and embedding primatology within them has the potential to provoke searching debates about the scope and assumptions of anthropology in that
country, enrich the journey of inquiry available to students,
and greatly increase the scope of collaborative research
projects that a department can undertake. Further, having
a primatologist on staff will link anthropology colleagues to
science disciplines and open up opportunities for anthropologists to engage collaboratively in STEM-related research.1

Similarly, an ethnoprimatologist based in a wildlife sanctuary can design programs to collaborate with the people
of diverse social and ethnic backgrounds who live in and
adjacent to the reserve. A primate biologist or conservation
anthropologist employed in an ecological research institute
can add breadth and rigor to the study of landscapes, biodiversity, species documentation, and sustainable livelihoods
pursued at such an institute. Vietnam’s numerous recently
created national parks and nature reserves for primate conservation will continue to be a major focal point for primatological research. Much research of an interdisciplinary
nature is required to make these institutional endeavors sustainable and to enhance their relationship with community
stakeholders.
In conclusion, Tha.ch Mai Ho`ang’s article convinces me
that primatology has excellent prospects for strong consolidation as a Vietnamese discipline. The discipline faces stiff
challenges in establishing its relevance in the public mind
and finding a place in the institutional landscape. However,
it is the Vietnamese people alone who have the cultural and
institutional knowledge to work effectively in education,
public consciousness raising, and policy advocacy and implementation on behalf of primates and primate research in
their country. Their international colleagues can give them
support in this venture by making educational and research
collaboration with Vietnamese scholars central to their disciplinary practice.
NOTE

1. STEM refers to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, a cluster of disciplines that long have held ascendancy
among the priorities of grant-making agencies in countries such
as Vietnam and Australia.

Preface: On Anthropology in Israel
Virginia R. Dominguez
Associate Editor for World Anthropology

The following subsection includes responses to three questions I formulated and sent to all living past heads of the

Israel Anthropological Association. Marked with asterisks
below are the past and living IAA heads who responded
to my request, but I nonetheless include the full list of
past heads (called chairs until relatively recently but now
called presidents). Nineteen colleagues have served the IAA
in that capacity since the founding of the association in
1973; nine of them responded to my three questions, and
those answers appear in this special World Anthropology
subsection.
Most have been sociocultural anthropologists, but the
IAA was founded by a physical–biological anthropologist,

Marcus Goldstein, then at the Tel Aviv University School of
Medicine. Patricia Smith (1985–87), a forensic anthropologist, was the last physical–biological anthropologist who
served in this role, but several medical anthropologists have
headed the IAA (some of them physical–biological anthropologists and some of them with primary training in sociocultural anthropology): Marcus Goldstein (1973–75), Phyllis Palgi (1975–77), Patricia Smith (1985–87), and Henry
Abramovitch (1993–95). Some do work that overlaps with,
and at times is fully immersed in, medical anthropology as
well. This includes Meira Weiss (2001–03) and Yoram Bilu
(1989–91).
A few comments are warranted about some unusual
presidential terms in more recent years. Andr´e Levy (2003–
07) did two back-to-back terms. Dan Rabinowitz (1998–
2001) and Orit Abuhav (2007–10) both held this post for


World Anthropology

three years each. Amalia Sa’ar held this post for less than
a year (in 2014) because she was also tapped, almost simultaneously, to head the new and autonomous graduatetraining Department of Anthropology at Haifa University,

and she was unable to maintain her presidency of the IAA.
Harvey Goldberg, who had headed the IAA from 1979 to
1981, came back to do an additional term (2014–16) in her
place.
Let me also comment on the questions I asked and the
reasons I asked this group. Rather than choose one anthropologist in Israel to write an essay about anthropology in
Israel (a choice I considered especially difficult and problematic in general, even before the discussion within the
AAA about whether to boycott or otherwise impose sanctions on Israeli universities), I chose instead to approach all
living past heads of the Israel Anthropological Association
and ask them to respond to three questions. I gave them
all a desired maximum length (greater than the comments I
typically include but less than the length of our usual World
Anthropology articles). I thought (and still firmly believe)
that the range of views and accounts in such a grouping had
the best chance of capturing the diversity of views and understandings in the practice of anthropology in Israel (as well
as some constancies and commonalities).
My three questions were fairly straightforward, though I
hoped they would allow our colleagues in Israel some leeway
in interpreting them. My questions were as follows:
(1) What kind of work do you associate with Israeli
anthropology—Now? Twenty to thirty years ago? Fifty
to sixty years ago?
(2) What do you find most challenging in Israeli anthropology or as an anthropologist in Israel?
(3) What do you find most praiseworthy and productive
in (the practice of) anthropology in Israel?
My questions were sent to each IAA past head in
separate e-mails in English (though Phyllis Palgi’s daughter
helped me by downloading and giving her then very elderly
mother, now deceased, a hard copy of the e-mail). I knew
they could all read English, but I told each one that she or

he could answer my questions in whatever language they
wanted to use or felt most comfortable using, whether
it be English, Hebrew, French, or Arabic. All but one
sent me responses in English (not surprisingly quite well
written, though still copyedited as is the work of all
authors appearing in the American Anthropologist, regardless
of location or native-speaker status).
As one looks at the list below (a list of past IAA presidents
plus Harvey Goldberg, who is both a past IAA head and the
current president of the association), several demographic
characteristics are also worth mentioning (and they are, in

143

fact, mentioned by some of the colleagues who responded
to my three questions). All the IAA heads, past and present,
are (and have been) Jewish; nearly all are (and have been)
Ashkenazi (that is, with ancestry in northern and eastern
Europe), and 12 of the 19 are men. Clearly, in recent years
more women have been elected head of the IAA (indeed
five of the past seven IAA heads have been women: Meira
Weiss, Orit Abuhav, Nurit Bird-David, Efrat Ben-Ze’ev,
and Amalia Sa’ar). Also, and until quite recently, IAA heads
have been professionally located at Israel’s major research
universities: Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, Haifa University, and Ben Gurion University of
the Negev. Only one (Sam Cooper, 1991–93) was at Bar
Ilan University, the explicitly religious Jewish university in
Israel that is located in a suburb of greater Tel Aviv. It is
only in the past decade that colleagues in Israel outside the

university system have served the IAA in that role. Orit
Abuhav (2007–10) was the first; Efrat Ben-Ze’ev (2012–
14) is the second. It is probably also worth pointing out that
many anthropologists who migrated to Israel from Englishspeaking countries (primarily the United States) played this
role in the first half of the IAA’s existence and that others
(primarily native-born, Hebrew-dominant colleagues) have
been IAA heads over the past two decades.
I am pleased that colleagues from across several generations responded to my questions and that their words appear
here. That they also served as IAA heads from each of the
decades since the founding of the IAA is a plus. Of course,
they each articulate individual views of anthropology in Israel, the government in Israel, the IAA, their own goals and
desires, and their own hopes for the future. They speak as
individuals here, not as representatives of any organization
or university. I urge readers to read them all—not just one
or two.
Finally, the list below is also interesting because of names
that are not included, and anthropologists outside Israel may
wonder about the list. In some cases, I know that colleagues
were approached to serve as head of the IAA but declined
for a variety of reasons. In other cases, I simply do not know
the reasons for their absence. Especially surprising to many
readers will no doubt be the absence of well-published and
well-known colleagues—from Emanuel Marx (now retired
from Tel Aviv University) to Don Handelman (now retired
from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem). To some who
might have knowledge of anthropology in Israel, the absence from that list of S. N. Eisenstadt (now deceased) will
be interesting. Though not trained as an anthropologist as
such, Eisenstadt often thought of himself—and referred to
himself—as an anthropologist and not just a sociologist, and
for years many members of the Department of Sociology

and Anthropology faculty at the Hebrew University were
former students of his.


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American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 1 • March 2016

Heads (chairs or presidents)
of the IAA

Dates of
their terms

Marcus Goldstein (deceased)

1973–75

Phyllis Palgi (deceased)
Alex Weingrod*
Harvey Goldberg*

1975–77
1977–79
1979–81

Henry Rosenfeld (deceased)
Shlomo Deshen
Patricia Smith
Moshe Shokeid*

Yoram Bilu

1981–83
1983–85
1985–87
1987–89
1989–91

Sam (Shimon) Cooper
Henry Abramovitch*
Eyal Ben-Ari

1991–93
1993–95
1995–98

Dan Rabinowitz*
Meira Weiss*

1998–2001
2001–03

Andr´e Levy*
Orit Abuhav
Nurit Bird-David*
Efrat Ben-Ze’ev
Amalia Sa’ar*
Harvey Goldberg

2003–07

2007–10
2010–12
2012–14
2014
2014–16

Professional affiliation or location
Department of Anatomy and Anthropology, School of Medicine, Tel Aviv
University
Department of Behavioral Sciences, School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University
Department of Behavioral Sciences, Ben Gurion University
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, The Hebrew University of
Jerusalem
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Haifa University
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University
School of Medicine, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, The Hebrew University of
Jerusalem
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bar-Ilan University
Department of Behavioral Sciences, School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, The Hebrew University of
Jerusalem
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, The Hebrew University of
Jerusalem
Department of Behavioral Sciences, Ben Gurion University
Beit Berl College
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Haifa University
Ruppin Academic Center

Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Haifa University
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, The Hebrew University of
Jerusalem

Q&A

Responses
Henry Abramovitch
Tel Aviv University

WHAT KIND OF WORK DO YOU ASSOCIATE WITH
ISRAELI ANTHROPOLOGY—NOW? TWENTY TO
THIRTY YEARS AGO? FIFTY TO SIXTY YEARS
AGO?

In the early years of the state of Israel, the development
of anthropology was impeded by government policy that
viewed the integration of new immigrants from a sociological perspective of desocializing new immigrants from their
traditional culture and resocializing them as “Israelis.” From
this perspective, anthropology that saw value in culture
and tradition was an ideological threat. Until very recently,
there was no Department of Anthropology in any Israeli
university, and the discipline was forced into the role of the

“little sister” of sociology. The initiative of the Bernstein
Trust, and Max Gluckman in particular, gave an enormous
boost to social anthropology in Israel, with a strong bent
toward the functionalist theoretical perspective. Ethnographers using a community focus explored uniquely Israeli
forms of life such as the moshav, the kibbutz, and the development town but also Bedouins, Palestinian villagers, urban
slums, and Jews originating from North Africa, India, and

Ethiopia. Alex Weingrod’s classic study of new arrivals from
Morocco, Reluctant Pioneers (1966), summed up the ethos
of the time.
Victor Turner had an enormous influence and not just
through his books. Few great writers are even more eloquent
in person, but Victor Turner was certainly one of them.
He spent his last sabbatical in Israel, and through the force
of his character he constellated an ethos and cooperative


World Anthropology

enthusiasm among local anthropologists, especially around
the topic of pilgrimages—specifically the mass pilgrimage
to the tomb of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai on Mt. Meron in
the Galilee. Had his untimely death not intervened, I am
certain that Israeli anthropology would be more creative
and collaborative today, with joint field projects, which
were not otherwise part of the local ethnographic tradition.
When I did my early fieldwork in the anthropology of death
and funerals in Jerusalem, I had no local colleagues with
whom to discuss my “dirty work”; indeed, despite the great
importance of the anthropology of death in the formation
of the field, it was seen as a marginal, even stigmatized,
area of thought. For the past few years, I have participated
in an interdisciplinary research working group at Tel Aviv
University’s Minerva Center for Interdisciplinary Studies
of the End of Life, led by Haim Hazan and Shai Lavi, which
has provided a most fruitful forum.
In more recent decades, Israeli anthropology has shifted

away from previous emphases on family, kinship, conflict,
and the peace in the feud (subjects not even taught anymore)
toward postmodernism, the impact of the local on the global,
material culture, Internet culture, gendered identity, cultural hegemony, and so on.
WHAT DO YOU FIND MOST CHALLENGING
IN ISRAELI ANTHROPOLOGY OR AS AN
ANTHROPOLOGIST IN ISRAEL?

I believe the greatest challenges Israelis face are ethical. The
first concern is how to deal with ethical dilemmas in fieldwork. The traditional approach to ethics based on Western
philosophical tradition is to try to formulate abstract principles from the basis of a professional code of ethics. However,
such a rule-based approach is too idealized and does not
anticipate unexpected situations, nor does it provide
practical help in the nitty-gritty of actual ethnographic
reality. I have drawn on the Talmudic approach that begins
with analyzing specific dilemmas and only then trying to
formulate guidelines based on practical experience. I have
led series of workshops in which people share their actual
dilemmas for discussion in a safe environment. I believe this
approach is useful in stimulating ethical awareness, which
then prepares the anthropologist for the unexpected ethical
realities that are inevitable in fieldwork.
A second difficulty concerns doing anthropology at
home, where the field never closes and there is no formal
ending to fieldwork. Obligations can continue indefinitely.
In the age of the Internet, even the most exotic fieldwork now
also has this quality of anthropology at home, because informants and researchers remain interconnected online and thus
mutually obligated. Anthropology at home inevitably does
force the anthropologist to develop cultural self-awareness
in a manner analogous to personal psychoanalysis.

Finally, there is the boycott of Israeli universities, signed
by over 1,000 international colleagues. While I recognize
the right to political protest (and I actively oppose the occupation), I feel the statement is devoid of any anthropological
content and intended not for meaningful change but rather

145

for the delegitimization of Israel. Even if I were to organize a conference with my Palestinian counterparts on the
anthropology of peacemaking and ending the occupation,
these signatories have pledged not to attend. It is especially
disappointing to read that my fellow anthropologists can do
nothing more to change this unjust situation than to sign
a statement. The contrast with the AAA Task Force on
Engagement with Israel/Palestine is striking. The task force
interviewed over 80 people, including Israeli and Palestinian
anthropologists and other academics.
WHAT DO YOU FIND MOST PRAISEWORTHY
AND PRODUCTIVE IN (THE PRACTICE OF)
ANTHROPOLOGY IN ISRAEL?

When I was president, the practice of anthropology was
fragmented. Social anthropologists were in one department;
physical anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists, and folklorists in others, with little professional contact. By establishing a National Seminar in Anthropology, I created a new
space for unusual dialogue across subdisciplines—for example, debate between biological anthropologists and experts
on the culture of contemporary hunter-gatherers. Another
innovative tradition I started was having annual meetings of
the Israel Anthropological Association away from academic
settings and in a place that offered a literal or symbolic fieldwork experience. It provided a significant opportunity to
enter into the fieldwork of colleagues. Another important
event marking the renaissance of the field is the now-annual

Anthropological Film Festival, bringing films and filmmakers from many countries, spearheaded by Professor Tamar
El Or. In recent public recognition of anthropology, Yoram
Bilu was awarded the Israel Prize for his enormous contribution. It was the very first time that the Israel Prize was
awarded in anthropology.
Besides the impressive work of Bilu in psychological
anthropology, there are many other innovative and influential researchers. A small sample of the many includes Haim
Hazan on the anthropology of aging; Moshe Shokeid on fieldwork and Israelis abroad; Don Handelman on bureaucracy
and ritual; Tamar Elor on ultraorthodox women; and the
outstanding work of biological anthropologists such as Yoel
Rak and many others on evolution, Neanderthals, and the
development of agriculture. Not to be forgotten is the grandmother of Israeli anthropology, Phyllis Palgi, student of Margaret Mead, who was an early leader in both applied and medical anthropology. Finally, I should add that Orit Abuhav’s
monograph, In the Company of Others: The Development of Anthropology in Israel (2015), is now available in English.
REFERENCES CITED

Abuhav, Orit
2015 In the Company of Others: The Development of Anthropology in Israel. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Weingrod, Alex
1966 Reluctant Pioneers: Village Development in Israel. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.


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American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 1 • March 2016

Q&A

Responses
Nurit Bird-David
University of Haifa

WHAT KIND OF WORK DO YOU ASSOCIATE WITH
ISRAELI ANTHROPOLOGY—NOW? TWENTY TO
THIRTY YEARS AGO? FIFTY TO SIXTY YEARS
AGO?

“Israeli anthropology,” “anthropology in Israel,” and “Israeli
anthropologists” are designations with different meanings for
me, each one implying something distinctive in the context
of the three questions posed by Virginia Dominguez, associate editor for the World Anthropology section of AA. Yet
a common assumption informs them, an assumption that
contemporary anthropologists might regard as ontological
(or cosmological). At this particular historical moment, the
“nation” and the “nation-state” are normally viewed as prime
sources of an individual’s identity and key modes of social
identification; indeed, it is practically impossible to envision
a world that is not constituted by nations as the determinant
grid. However, a “nation” is just one mode of perceiving
plural life, one mode of looking at plural entities and identities. Anthropologists more than others recognize this; my
own long-term study of hunter-gatherers has led me to be
particularly conscious of alternative options. Characterizing
“Israeli” (or any other nationally defined) anthropology is as
important as it is problematic if we are to progress beyond
a Euro-American-centered anthropology.
More so than “anthropology in Israel” (the field as practiced in the Israeli state) or “Israeli anthropologists” (anthropologists working in Israel or Israeli citizens working elsewhere as anthropologists), “Israeli anthropology,” for me,
presumes two collective bodies: “anthropology” and “Israel.”
Each, however, is the historical product of a great diversity
of creative contributions and semiotic-political claims. In
replying to the questions that have been posed, I ask myself
whether “Israeli anthropology” constitutes a distinct school

or style of doing anthropology and whether it has a range
of distinct key topics responding to the state’s history and
predicaments. Certainly, some anthropologists working in
Israel deal with “Israeli” issues, among them, the absorption
and settlement of migrants; Holocaust trauma and heritage;
Jewish folklore, tradition, and religion; Zionism; the military; the Palestinian communities in Israel; and the Israeli–
Palestinian conflict. However, what I find most striking as
I reflect on the research my colleagues and I conduct is the
great diversity in our work. One reason for this diversity is
relational-structural in nature, and it is something that Israeli anthropology shares with some other nationally defined
anthropologies outside the United States.
Israeli anthropology constitutes a small field of practice
compared with U.S. anthropology, a fact that deserves elab-

oration because it easily falls through the sieve of scale-blind
national terms. Anthropology began in Israel with students
of sociology who, in the 1960s, did Ph.D. work in the
Department of Anthropology at the University of Manchester under the auspices of Max Gluckman’s project on immigrants’ absorption and social development in Israel (see
Shokeid 2004). As part of the project, they did fieldwork
at ten sites in Israel. Several of those students became the
first tenured anthropologists in Israeli universities (leading to
departments changing their names from “sociology” to “sociology and anthropology”). Other anthropologists from U.S.
and European universities joined these departments, and
some of their students pursued their Ph.D. studies abroad
(a recommended course for one who wants to obtain an
academic job in Israel and a reasonable one given the small
size of the local professional community).
WHAT DO YOU FIND MOST CHALLENGING
IN ISRAELI ANTHROPOLOGY OR AS AN
ANTHROPOLOGIST IN ISRAEL?

Although not unique in this respect, national anthropologies
of this scale generate and are affected by particular conditions of growth and development. Particularly significant
in this respect is their inextricable link to Euro-American
anthropology. Not only are our faculty for the most part
professionally trained abroad, but also they publish in international journals to secure jobs and promotions, are evaluated by Euro-American anthropologists, attend conferences
abroad, and belong to international professional communities of interest. In one popular joke (triggered by the growth
of Israeli backpack tourism to India), an Indian asks an Israeli,
“How many Israelis are there?” The Israeli replies, “Seven
million.” “Not in India,” the Indian hurriedly clarifies, “I mean
in Israel.” The presence of Israeli anthropologists at conferences abroad—necessary for their own careers at the same
time that it supports large-scale North American and European associations financially as well as intellectually—might
suggest that they are numerous, especially to observers who
are used to and who implicitly assume large organizational
memberships in the hundreds or even thousands. Membership in the Israeli Anthropological Association (IAA) has in
recent years surpassed 100 (including students and interested persons); members with jobs that support continuous
engagement in research number several dozen. The community is small yet heterogeneous.
The diversity of anthropologists in Israel is spectacular
given their small number, and it is also a product of their
fewness. Their diversity is something they themselves are
well aware of given that each can personally know most of
the others; recognition of this diversity makes it difficult to
semiotically and politically claim one field and style as “Israeli


World Anthropology

anthropology.” For example, in my own department at the
University of Haifa (one of five universities teaching anthropology and the only one with an autonomous anthropology
department), three of our four full-time faculty conduct

fieldwork both in and outside Israel (external research topics include pregnancy in Japan, genocide in Cambodia, and
forager forest people in India). From the start, then, Israeli
anthropology has been diverse, and it has only grown more
diverse, despite and perhaps because of its small scale and
its scale-determined relation to world anthropology.
WHAT DO YOU FIND MOST PRAISEWORTHY
AND PRODUCTIVE IN (THE PRACTICE OF)
ANTHROPOLOGY IN ISRAEL?

My reply to all three questions for the World Anthropology
section of AA—a timely project, the importance of which,
in my view, cannot be overstated—derives from the above
perspective on Israeli anthropology as unfolding within
a global field as much as, if not more than, it has been
shaped by a national-cultural character. As I reflect on the
work of anthropologists in Israel, it is, above all, diversity
that I most associate with that work. Its creativity at the
margins and, yet, as part of international anthropology is
what I find most praiseworthy and productive. Our work as

147

part of, yet far from, our respective communities of interest
is what I find most challenging—this and the worsening
political context in which we work and that no comment
on Israeli anthropology can afford to ignore. I do so here,
on a personal note as well as past president of the IAA
and a current member of the advisory board of the World
Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA). It
simply cannot be overstated that “Israeli anthropology” is

a reified construct that conceals a very small number of
scholars. Anthropologists of all scholars should recognize
the complexity of plural identities in Israel as elsewhere
(for example, in my university, more than 25 percent of
the students are Israelis of Palestinian/Arab origin, and in
some of my anthropology classes nearly 50 percent are).
Contrary to the cobbler going barefoot, ethnographers
of all scholars could help reveal the subtle cultural
roots of political conflicts including divergent senses of
key symbols (if not ontologies) of “nation,” “land,” and
“home.”
REFERENCE CITED

Shokeid, Moshe
2004 Max Gluckman and the Making of Israeli Anthropology.
Ethnos 69(3):387–410.

Q&A

Responses
Harvey E. Goldberg
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Emeritus

WHAT KIND OF WORK DO YOU ASSOCIATE WITH
ISRAELI ANTHROPOLOGY—NOW? TWENTY TO
THIRTY YEARS AGO? FIFTY TO SIXTY YEARS
AGO?

Around the 1950s, anthropology was taking its first steps
in Israel. A few anthropologists immigrated from abroad,

and a few came to do fieldwork here. A sociology department had been established in the late 1940s that included some researchers who had studied social anthropology in England, but the department did not recognize
anthropology in its own right. Both anthropologists and Israeli sociologists gathered data through fieldwork in local
settings. In the early days of Israeli anthropology, the kibbutzim were widely researched, and the work of Mel Spiro
became known abroad. A second research direction concerned Jewish immigrants from post–World War II Europe
and the Middle East, especially those settling in agricultural communities. A third looked at Arab communities,
emphasizing villagers and Bedouin. Israeli anthropology was
“traditional” in the sense of being centered in defined locales
but also attended to the state and other broader factors.
For instance, anthropologists approached the study of kib-

butz ideology as one evolved from a European socialist milieu; immigrant cooperative agricultural villages were seen
to be outcomes of central planning; and, as highlighted by
Henry Rosenfeld, Arab villagers were found to be contending with new economic and political pressures in the Israeli
state.
Twenty to thirty years later, new emphases emerged.
Anthropology had gained official standing in 1963 in Tel
Aviv University’s new Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and other institutions soon followed this example.
Additional immigrant populations arrived, from the Soviet
Union beginning in the late 1960s and from Ethiopia starting
in the 1980s. The concept of ethnicity emerged as an important lens after it was recognized that many immigrants did
not become “Israeli” rapidly. Some research themes, such as
the role of bureaucracies, continued, while others evolved,
like the study of religion and ritual events. Anthropologists
in Israel delved into feminist issues, began paying attention
to the middle class, developed modes of research in urban
settings, interrogated major institutions such as the military, and asked probing cultural questions on issues ranging
from the style and content of everyday interactions to the
role of the Holocaust in national narratives. The trend of an
expanding scope and increasing diversification in anthropological research continues today.

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While the total number of full-time anthropologists
in Israel’s universities has not grown in the past couple
decades—it is somewhat over twenty—the discipline has
gained a foothold and has made some impact. In my own
department, in the 1970s, some of the sociologists began
calling aspects of their work anthropological, which I took
to mean they thought the field worthy of emulation. At the
same time, there emerged a strand of critical sociology in
Israel that challenged the existing sociological school for too
closely reflecting hegemonic forces and thinking. It depicted
early anthropological work in these terms as well, an account
not borne out by close examination. From the beginning,
Israeli anthropologists described processes from the ground
up in ways that differed from reigning sociological notions,
bureaucratic categories, or ideological rhetoric. Ethnographers who came after them absorbed some insights from
the local critical sociology but did not express a need to
construct an oppositional critical anthropology.
WHAT DO YOU FIND MOST CHALLENGING
IN ISRAELI ANTHROPOLOGY OR AS AN
ANTHROPOLOGIST IN ISRAEL?

While I have addressed some of the challenges that Israeli
anthropology has met in my answer to your first question,
the 2013–15 discussion within the American Anthropological Association of a possible boycott of Israeli academic
institutions that would affect anthropology here comes to

mind. That anthropology has had to struggle for a place
in higher education in Israel leads me to feel that such a
boycott would be deeply ironic and misguided. Anthropologists here—a very small group—have striven to insert our
discipline into the local cacophony of discourse and academic presence, and now there are colleagues in the AAA
who seek to silence us. Three members of the AAA Task
Force on Engagement with Israel/Palestine visited Israel in
May 2015. At an opening gathering, I asked one of them
how many Israeli anthropologists there were (i.e., members
of the Israeli Anthropological Association). The immediate
answer was, “I don’t know,” and then an estimation of “over
200” was offered.
We informed the AAA representative that the thencurrent membership was just over 60 (this figure was down

from previous years and rose again in 2015). To me, this
indicated that the whole idea of a task force targeting anthropology was based on a misunderstanding of what broader
influence our association might possibly have. The idea that
boycotting us would be helpful to Palestinian society is quite
far fetched, if not counterproductive.
WHAT DO YOU FIND MOST PRAISEWORTHY
AND PRODUCTIVE IN (THE PRACTICE OF)
ANTHROPOLOGY IN ISRAEL?

Your final question is what I consider praiseworthy in anthropology in Israel. There is a Hebrew saying that the
baker should not testify regarding his own dough, which
I consider sound advice. To me it is an accomplishment
that anthropology, against resistance, was able to stake
out a claim within the academic landscape and to maintain it. By now, my first doctoral student has mentored
students who are active and productive in the field. Outside the research universities, some Israeli anthropologists
teach in BA-level colleges. Sometimes these are part-time
positions, and often they are in interdisciplinary departments or departments in other disciplines. But an impact has

been made that occasionally resonates beyond the academy.
Recently, together with a colleague, Chen Bram, I coordinated a workshop on the relevance of anthropology. Participants included both anthropologists and professionals from
other fields who found that anthropology contributed to
their work.
Here are three examples: four people dealing with the
material world (two architects and two instructors of design); two anthropologists trying to find a meeting point between government policies regarding the dispersed Bedouin
in Israel’s Negev region and the demands of the Bedouin
themselves; and a lawyer who was brought up in an ultraOrthodox Jewish family and, while no longer identifying
with that way of life, works with these communities, encouraging them to introduce secular studies (math and
English) into their basic curriculum by articulating an approach in which taking that educational step makes sense
in terms of their own internal values. I will let history assess whether these anthropologically informed efforts are
praiseworthy and productive.


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149

Q&A

Responses
Andre´ Levy
Ben-Gurion University
(Translated from Hebrew by Amit Habib)

WHAT KIND OF WORK DO YOU ASSOCIATE WITH
ISRAELI ANTHROPOLOGY—NOW? TWENTY TO
THIRTY YEARS AGO? FIFTY TO SIXTY YEARS
AGO?

Over its nearly 70 years, Israeli anthropology has undergone
significant changes. In the early years, most anthropologists
worked on two population groups, asking basically separate
questions of them. This split was fundamentally derived
from two key historical occurrences connected with the
establishment of Israel as a state and its definition as Jewish:
the expulsion and departure of a large proportion of the
Palestinian population from the places where they lived
and the arrival of waves of immigrant Jews. Following
the anthropological inclination at the time to underscore
cultural differences, researchers (who were all of European
or North American origins) focused on groups they deemed
relevant in their cultural otherness: the Palestinians who
stayed in Israel (who were called Israeli Arabs) and the
migrants from Arab and Muslim countries (who were
eventually called Mizrahim).
Research questions about Palestinians reflected the
exclusion of Palestinians, even if implicitly. In contrast,
Jewish migrants from Arab and Muslim countries were
mainly tested for their ability to fit into, and adapt to, a
modern society. In other words, just as Palestinians were
seen from the start as completely separated from the Jewish
state, Jews from Muslim countries were seen as having the
potential to integrate. Therefore, it is not surprising that
anthropological research failed to examine the “Arabness”
(or Muslim influence) that could potentially connect Jews
from Muslim countries with Palestinians in Israel. It
was ideologically imperative to establish the difference
between the two groups, and this difference received
special attention in the flourishing research on ethnicity: use

of a unique Hebrew concept, adatiyout (Jewish ethnicity),
enabled research on and about Jews themselves and at the
same time excluded Palestinians from such a discussion.
Indeed, the languages that anthropologists use are critical. At first, the acceptance of English as the “natural”
language reflected the influence of British colonialism, but
soon after it has been due to a general dependence on the
United States. For Israel (including Israeli anthropology),
globalization has really been a one-sided process that almost
exclusively entails U.S. influence.
As a result, changes in Israeli anthropology over the
last three decades have tended to follow changes in U.S.
anthropology. This includes changes in the selection of

research topics, theoretical approaches, the positionality of
anthropologists, and their choices of field site. Hence, the
discipline in Israel is becoming more varied as it focuses
more on topics such as gender, the environment, queer
studies, and whiteness studies. Theoretical emphases have
expanded, too. We now find poststructural, postcolonial,
and postmodernist approaches in Israeli anthropology. Colleagues have not neglected those subjects and populations
of past interest to anthropologists, but the attitude toward
them has become more critical.
But the positioning of researchers has not changed
enough. The percentage of women in the discipline is rising,
but the ethnic profile of the researchers has changed little.
There are still practically no representatives of Palestinians
and Jews from Arab and Muslim countries—the groups that
were traditionally researched. Members of groups newer
to Israel, such as Ethiopians, have not joined the discipline
either.

However, field sites have changed significantly. In
the past, most of the research focused only on happenings
within Israel. As in many small countries, there simply has
not been a budget, or even the will, to finance research
beyond the borders of the state. Hence, until my own work
in Morocco in the early 1990s, not one Israeli university anthropology student had conducted fieldwork outside Israel’s
borders. Yet, in the last two decades, many more Israeli
anthropologists have chosen to conduct fieldwork outside
Israel. Despite the colonial roots of this practice, I assume
there is no need to stress the importance of going abroad in
order to revitalize one’s theoretical and practical thinking.
As for the future, I sadly do not foresee positive
change. The wider political contexts seem unchanging. The
dependence on U.S. anthropology and the potential threat
of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement
might make Israeli anthropology even less relevant. After
all, domestically, Israeli anthropology operates under the
complete domination of sociology. Sociologists have
actively promoted the weakening of the discipline or at
least the weakening of its distinctiveness. I am, therefore,
pessimistic. The number of positions for anthropologists is
small, and it is not going to grow.
WHAT DO YOU FIND MOST CHALLENGING
IN ISRAELI ANTHROPOLOGY OR AS AN
ANTHROPOLOGIST IN ISRAEL?

The academic-institutional vulnerability of anthropology
does not necessarily lead to a total collapse. Change
from within is paramount. We could, for example, use
anthropological understandings to retool Israeli anthropology in relation to the practices of different ethnic and

political minorities. I think about this in terms of my own


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American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 1 • March 2016

research on Jews in Morocco (who are at the margin of
marginalized minorities there). Clearly marginality can be
a source of creative solutions, strengthening the existence
of any small group. If we anthropologists were to use our
own theoretical insights, we could turn our institutional
weaknesses into strengths. The marginality of anthropology
could be interpreted as a critical practice. Anthropology in Israel could pursue what Victor Turner named
“the mystical powers of the weak” (Turner 1969:109)
or, to use the approach advocated by Daniel Boyarin
and Jonathan Boyarin (2002) with respect to diasporas, it
could turn its imminent weakness into a moral force—sure
of itself and strong in its values. But creativity has its limits,
and as long as anthropology works within the bureaucratic
makeup of universities, those limits will loom large. For
example, the fact that the promotion of university faculty
requires letters of evaluation from outside Israel prohibits
personal and collective advancement in the context of the
BDS Movement.
WHAT DO YOU FIND MOST PRAISEWORTHY
AND PRODUCTIVE IN (THE PRACTICE OF)
ANTHROPOLOGY IN ISRAEL?

Despite everything I have said so far, it is important

to stress that Israeli anthropology has strengths worth
mentioning. The fields in which Israeli anthropologists work
bring about meaningful local understandings. Because most
of the fieldwork is done within Israel, the work is unarguably
interesting. The place is loaded with conflicts and paradoxes,
including tensions among and between Jews, as well as with

Palestinians, and cultural and political storms that challenge
the researcher. It is, therefore, an especially rich location
for research.
This matters because most of the research that anthropologists in Israel do today is done within the Green Line,
meaning within Israel’s pre–1967 war borders. The place
makes it necessary to ask questions about politics, gender,
ethnicity, borders, movement, center and periphery, war
and peace, religion, and history. The small size of the
profession in Israel obliges anthropologists to grapple with
epistemic questions that concern the viability of theory
and knowledge. Israeli anthropologists grapple with (1) the
extent to which our anthropology provides universal tools,
(2) the distance between the desire to transcend localism
and the tendency to protect local knowledge, and (3) how
to interest the non-Israeli reader in our work. The vigilance
of Israeli anthropologists participating in international
arenas and the extent of our publications—or, even more,
our ability to publish our papers in international (mostly in
English and mostly U.S.-based) journals—attest to the fact
that we have succeeded in finding a good balance . . . for the
meantime.
REFERENCES CITED

Boyarin, Jonathan, and Daniel Boyarin
2002 Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish
Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Turner, Victor
1969 The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Piscataway: Aldine.

Q&A

Responses
Dan Rabinowitz
Tel-Aviv University

WHAT KIND OF WORK DO YOU ASSOCIATE WITH
ISRAELI ANTHROPOLOGY—NOW? TWENTY TO
THIRTY YEARS AGO? FIFTY TO SIXTY YEARS
AGO?

“Israeli anthropology” is as awkward—and as stubborn—a
notion as any other “anthropology” prefixed by an adjective
denoting a name of a place or a state or even a culture.
For me anthropology is, first and foremost, an individual
endeavor. It is a passion that grows in solitude, sometimes
idiosyncratically, from preoccupations, curiosities, and
capabilities coming from within. My academic career,
like that of every other Israeli anthropologist, is spent in
joint sociology and anthropology departments in which
sociologists tend to outnumber anthropologists. They, like
us, write and publish primarily in English, treating their few
articles and books in Hebrew as appendixes and footnotes

rather than the mainstay of their professional and intellectual
efforts.
The conventional truth about Israeli anthropologists is
that they tend to do their ethnographic work in communities
within Israel itself. I certainly do, having been interested for
many years in Bedouins and Palestinian citizens of Israel and,
more recently, in environmental justice. But Shmuel BenDor (now deceased), Eric Cohen, Moshe Shokeid, Nurit
Bird-David, and a host of younger Israeli anthropologists—
including Fran Markowitz, Andre Levy, Jackie Feldman,
Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni, Nir Avieli, and Julia Lerner, among
others—have traveled far and wide across the globe in search
of field locations.
Are we all part of “Israeli” anthropology then? Yes,
inasmuch as we all live in an area smaller than Rhode Island,
with distances between our respective places of residence
that are never over a hundred miles; yes, inasmuch as we
share a language; yes, inasmuch as we have various degrees
of identification with, belief in, and hope for the clumsy,


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vibrant, self-obsessed project called Israel; and yes, inasmuch
as all of us, like most people everywhere, manage most of
the time to overlook the weaknesses, discrepancies, and
contradictions inherent in our own society and culture.
No, in my case at least, if being part of “Israeli
anthropology” slots me into a category I am hardly convinced exists. No, if accepting that problematic label might
mean that Khaled Furani, a colleague at the Department
of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University and

a friend, born within a mile from where I was, a citizen
of Israel but someone who otherwise would never see
himself as “Israeli,” let alone consider his work as part
of “Israeli anthropology,” might feel excluded from the
professional and intellectual community in which he lives
and works.
WHAT DO YOU FIND MOST CHALLENGING IN
ISRAELI ANTHROPOLOGY OR AS AN
ANTHROPOLOGIST IN ISRAEL?

Using “challenge” in its literal meaning—a test, an obstacle
with which to be contended (rather than a deficiency, as
it is often euphemistically deployed)—I can identify three
issues that anthropologists in Israel have yet to coherently
unlock.
One is the relationship between the Israeli project and
what, for want of better words, I label “Jewish life” or
“Jewish culture.” The Jewish diaspora is an extraordinary
phenomenon in world history. A powerhouse of intellectual
energy, often a harbinger of groundbreaking ideas that had an
impact on science, philosophy, morality, technology, economy, and politics, it has been largely absent from Israeli life
so far. In this regard, Israeli anthropologists reflect that very
blind spot: their impact on the quest to better understand
the relationship between Israel and the Jewish diaspora and
to place modern Israel in a Jewish historical context is yet to
be felt.
Second is the Palestinian experience, not least of those
Palestinians who in the wake of 1948 were trapped within
Israel—a state they never wanted or anticipated (Furani and
Rabinowitz 2011; Rabinowitz 2001). The founding generation of Israeli anthropologists, researchers who were active

since the 1960s (some of them still are), looked at Palestinians and at Bedouins with empathy, using “culture” to
forge a liberal framework of analysis. But few, if any, Israeli
anthropologists from that generation but also from subsequent ones have successfully unpacked the power hold in
which the Palestinians have found themselves in Israel since
1948.
The third issue is that concerning Arab Jews, known
also as Mizrahim. While many ethnographic projects since
the 1950s took Jewish immigrants from Arab countries,
particularly from the Maghreb, Kurdistan, and Yemen, as
their object of inquiry, few, if any—Pnina Motzafi-Haller
is an exception here, perhaps—were able to use ethnography as a means for radical new insights yielding meaningful
theoretical and political traction.

151

WHAT DO YOU FIND MOST PRAISEWORTHY AND
PRODUCTIVE IN (THE PRACTICE OF)
ANTHROPOLOGY IN ISRAEL?

I hesitate on this question for two reasons. One is that
anthropology in particular and intellectual work in general
are at their best when they assume a critical perspective.
Offering praise, particularly for a milieu of which one is an
active part, defeats that purpose a priori. The other is that
the praise I offer next is qualified: it refers to efforts that are
far from adequate and nowhere near completion.
Anthropology in Israel has been and still remains the
only professional and academic association to formally and
publicly come out with declarations, actions, and positions
that critique erstwhile government policies and challenge

public consensus on the most controversial and painful issue faced by Israel since its inception: the conflict with the
Palestinians.
A few instances over the last 25 years are worth mentioning here. In 1988, when the first Palestinian Intifada broke
out, the Israeli Defense Forces responded with massive, indiscriminate force against Palestinian teenagers armed with
stones, killing and maiming dozens. This policy was backed
by a consensus in the Israeli mainstream that the crisis in the
West Bank and in Gaza was a matter of “unrest” and “public disorder” and that the government, through its military
forces, had a right and a duty to restore law and order. The
Israeli Anthropological Association (IAA), in an unorthodox
move, passed a formal resolution later that year that not only
condemned excessive use of force against civilians but also,
more significantly, identified the conflict as one between two
competing, equally legitimate, national movements.
In 1999, as president of the IAA, I invited Edward Said, a
personal friend, to be the keynote speaker at the association’s
annual meeting, held in Nazareth. That was the first time the
IAA’s annual meeting took place in a Palestinian community.
It was also the first time in which the keynote speaker of
the annual meeting was not an anthropologist. Not least,
Edward’s address, appropriately titled “The Consequences
of 1948,” remains the only public appearance that Said, one
of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century, ever
held in front of a formal Israeli association. It was also the
best-attended session in IAA history.
On June 11, 2015, the business meeting of the IAA
passed a formal resolution, worded and proposed by Yehuda
Goodman, Amalia Sa’ar, Nir Avieli, Michele Rivkin-Fish,
and myself, which called on the Israeli government to (1)
withdraw from all the territories Israel captured in 1967;
(2) secure the right of Palestinian and Bedouin citizens of

Israel to full equality; (3) seek a spectrum of just, honorable,
and viable solutions to the tragedy of Palestinian refugees;
and (4) do its share in the reconstruction of Gaza, following
the destruction it inflicted there during the armed conflict
with Hamas in 2014. A separate part of the resolution called
anthropologists around the world to resist the call to boycott
Israeli universities and to mobilize their capabilities, prestige,
and resources in the complex effort to attain peace and justice


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American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 1 • March 2016

in the Middle East. The resolution had 75 percent of the votes
for it and 15 percent against; 10 percent abstained.
The 1988, 1999, and 2015 moves by the IAA did not
change the violent reality of the Middle East. Some might
trivialize them, claiming they came too late and are too little.
But seen as they are—singular signals from a small group of
researchers (the IAA, currently at one of its highest peaks
ever, has 106 members) who oppose the political and social
zeitgeist—they can at least remain sources of hope. If nothing
else, anthropologists in Israel emerge as worthy members of
an international community that maintains a steadfast sense
of morality, encouraging its members to operate outside

their comfort zones, even as neoliberalism, neocolonialism,
and neoconservatism tighten their strongholds on world
affairs.

REFERENCES CITED

Furani, Khaled, and Rabinowitz, Dan
2011 The Ethnographic Arriving of Palestine. Annual Review of
Anthropology 40:474–491.
Rabinowitz, Dan
2001 The Palestinian Citizens of Israel, the Concept of Trapped
Minority and the Discourse of Transnationalism in Anthropology. Ethnic and Racial Studies 24(1):64–85.

Q&A

Responses
Amalia Sa’ar
Department of Anthropology (in the making), University of Haifa

WHAT KIND OF WORK DO YOU ASSOCIATE WITH
ISRAELI ANTHROPOLOGY—NOW? TWENTY TO
THIRTY YEARS AGO? FIFTY TO SIXTY YEARS
AGO?

Over the course of the past sixty-odd years, Israeli anthropology has undergone intense growth and diversification. In
the first decades of the state, Israeli anthropologists were
by and large Jews, primarily Anglophones, who identified
with the Zionist project. Typically trained at the interface
of social anthropology and sociology and firmly grounded in
the modernization paradigm, most of them sought to study
groups that were marked as traditional. They usually had a
dual agenda. As agents of the nation-building project, they
aimed to help the new state absorb the massive waves of immigrants. They considered it their mission to educate state
officials in cultural relativism while acting as mediators and

cultural translators on behalf of the immigrants. As scholars,
they aspired to contribute to the English-speaking anthropological community, of which they were part, ethnographic
knowledge about the challenges of a modern society in
formation.
Closer to the turn of the millennium, the discourse
in the discipline changed dramatically. Already part of
the academic establishment—by the 1980s, all five research universities had joint sociology and anthropology
departments—anthropologists became increasingly reflexive regarding their positionality and political agency. The
topics of study diversified. Alongside marked groups, who
came to be explored through the lenses of marginality and
racialization rather than traditionalism, local anthropologists
shifted their gaze also to bearers of cultural hegemony, including the state, and to the structure of ethnic inequalities.
Israeli anthropologists today are primarily native Hebrew
speakers, including a handful of Palestinians, and their dis-

course is typically very critical; in fact, anthropology has
become a hub of critical research in Israeli social sciences. In
contrast to the loneliness of Henry Rosenfeld’s Marxist anthropology during the early decades (e.g., Rosenfeld 1964),
from the 1990s onward, political economy, feminism, and
postcolonialism have become integral components in syllabuses and scholarly production.
WHAT DO YOU FIND MOST CHALLENGING IN
ISRAELI ANTHROPOLOGY OR AS AN
ANTHROPOLOGIST IN ISRAEL?

I see three main challenges. First among them is the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. While many Israeli
anthropologists, an overwhelming majority in my estimate,
are part of the anti-occupation camp, for years the Israeli
Anthropological Association (IAA) avoided taking an official
stand on the matter. Since 1999, which is when I started
attending the IAA conferences, I recall political discussions

at almost every annual meeting, repeatedly ending in a decision to avoid an official political declaration. I personally
supported this position, albeit with great ambivalence, for
the following reasons. Because I was well aware that not all
Israeli anthropologists are on the political left, I felt that using
the majority to impose a pro-Palestinian declaration would
have created a rupture in the association, which would have
impaired its capacity to function as a platform for professional exchange for a community that is initially small and
institutionally vulnerable. Also, despite my personal antioccupation stance and my growing despair at Israel’s human
rights violations and ravaging institutional racism, I worried
that an official anti-occupation declaration would antagonize
not only some fellow anthropologists but also many of those
within Israel with whom I wish to engage as part of doing
anthropology. Recently, however, I changed my position.
At the June 2015 IAA annual meeting, I joined other members in voting for a resolution against the occupation—and
also against the boycott of universities in Israel—because I


World Anthropology

realized that the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
(BDS) Movement against the Israeli occupation and the dramatic escalation of the racist policies of the state have rendered the wish for a politically neutral association obsolete.
A second main challenge is the impact of economic liberalization on the academic system. With the spread of what
Marilyn Strathern (2000) has called audit culture, departments are now required to show that they have “enough”
students and that their faculty have “enough” grants and
“enough” academic publications of one particular type—
articles in refereed journals in English. While this is not
new, the aggression with which such rules are imposed has
escalated exponentially. In the particular case of anthropologists, the emphasis on journal articles creates pressure
to avoid writing ethnographies; it also entails disregard of
texts written for popular readership in Hebrew or Arabic.

Anthropologists within the academic system are unabashedly
pressured to minimize the time dedicated to such writings or
forego them entirely, lest they aggravate their initial stigma
of not being properly scientific. Many subsequently publish
very little in local languages, thus effectively not speaking to
Israeli society. Many also postpone publishing ethnographies
until they are tenured. Ironically, though, privatization also
yields a counterpressure to attract students, and to do this
anthropologists need to increase their visibility by producing
accessible texts and by giving popular interviews.
Third, and directly connected to the former challenge,
is the dilemma of doing applied anthropology. For years,
anthropologists in Israeli academia have been very precise
in prioritizing their international connections by developing proficiency in theoretical English jargon. The IAA has
no section of applied anthropology. Such a group exists but
receives no institutional embrace from the association. Yet
with privatization, the spread of anthropology to community
colleges in the periphery, and students’ growing concerns
with the relevance of their education, pressures are mounting to cultivate the applied aspects of anthropology. Some
young PhDs who have not found a place in academia are
creating new niches in institutional spheres such as education, healthcare, town planning, or marketing, and they are
demanding acknowledgment from and participation in the
circles of academic anthropology. A parallel development has
been the growing engagement of anthropologists in action
research with social change organizations. My department at
the University of Haifa has already announced the launching
of two semi-applied masters programs in the anthropology
of medicine and mental health and in engaged anthropology.
These developments have instigated debates—for example,
at the 2015 IAA annual meeting—about the desirability of

153

institutionalizing applied anthropology and the implications
of such a move on retaining the high academic level of
anthropological research.
WHAT DO YOU FIND MOST PRAISEWORTHY AND
PRODUCTIVE IN THE PRACTICE OF
ANTHROPOLOGY IN ISRAEL?

This is probably not unique to Israel; nevertheless, what I
find praiseworthy and productive in practicing anthropology
in Israel is the ongoing opportunity to discover complexity
and cultivate tolerance in the midst of social and political antagonism. Admittedly, there is a price attached: I
feel that anthropology has somehow toned down my political passion. When I participate in demonstrations, I lift
signs with clear, unambiguous slogans and engage in directly
confrontational politics. When I write action-oriented reports, I stress injustices and resistance. Yet when I practice
anthropology, the commitment to consider people as historically embedded subjects invariably shifts my attention
away from clear truths and directs it, instead, to contradictions, odd juxtapositions, and the humoristic side of imperfect lives. Moreover, the commitment to suspend judgment creates within me emotional room for a wide range
of attitudes and opinions, including ones that I would normally deem grossly intolerable. Emphatically, my reading
of the Israeli–Palestinian military-patriarchal-capitalist complex has not become less critical—quite the contrary. In
my new book (Sa’ar in press), I dwell on the detrimental
effects of this complex on the lives of women in Israel’s periphery. Yet producing political texts now feels completely
futile to me. Ethnographic texts, by contrast, allow me to
explore the concrete and ultimately inconclusive ways in
which power and structural violence affect the lives of actual people and the myriad tiny channels through which
actual people manage to forge meaningful lives within such
constraints.
REFERENCES CITED

Rosenfeld, Henry
1964 From Peasantry to Wage Labour and Residual Peasantry:
The Transformation of an Arab Village. In Process and Pattern
in Culture: Essays in Honor of Julian H. Steward. Robert A.
Manners, ed. Pp. 211–234. Chicago: Aldine.
Sa’ar, Amalia
In press Economic Citizenship: Neoliberal Paradoxes of Empowerment. New York: Berghahn Books.
Strathern, Marilyn
2000 Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability,
Ethics, and the Academy. London: Routledge


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Q&A

Responses
Moshe Shokeid
Tel Aviv University

WHAT KIND OF WORK DO YOU ASSOCIATE WITH
ISRAELI ANTHROPOLOGY—NOW? TWENTY TO
THIRTY YEARS AGO? FIFTY TO SIXTY YEARS
AGO?

Israeli anthropology owes both its beginning and its major
impetus to the recruitment of a cohort of young students,
mostly Israeli and North American, who were enticed to

conduct ethnographic research in Israel following the historical phenomenon of the post-1948 mass immigration of Jews
from Europe and the Middle East to the newly founded state
of Israel. Following the 1948 war, the emergence of an Arab
minority within the borders of Israel also attracted ethnographic research. These pioneers conducted their research
in a variety of Jewish immigrant and Arab communities as
members of a team (e.g., the Manchester Project) or as individuals. Their ethnographies, published from the mid-1960s
through the 1970s, introduced a new field site—Israel—
outside the classical anthropological destinations (Africa,
India, the Far East, etc.) and represented a massive trove
of scholarly work that has left its mark on world anthropology. They thus also pioneered in the emerging trend of
“anthropology at home.”
Only a few among the veteran and the younger Israeli
anthropologists left Israel to conduct ethnographic research
elsewhere, in the United States, Thailand, and Japan in particular. Two gradually expanding constituencies in Israeli
society remained outside the framework of ethnographic
work among both the veteran and the younger members
of the profession as well, although for different reasons:
the Haredim, the growing ultra-Orthodox enclaves concentrated in major urban sites (in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak in
particular), and the Mitnahlim, the settlers’ communities
continually spreading out in rural and urban sites in the
West Bank—the territories that Israel has occupied since
the 1967 war. The Haredim were left out mostly because
of the assumed difficulty of penetrating these extremely religious and isolated groups. The settlers, however, were
left out because of leftist political convictions that held
back the majority of anthropologists from any association
with the project of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. These post-1967 settlements founded under the
Messianic agenda of the “Promised Land” seem to obliterate the prospects of a consensual peace agreement with the
Palestinians.
The majority of the first cohort stayed in Israel and
joined the departments of sociology that were renamed as

joint departments of sociology and anthropology. However,
anthropologists remained the minority in these departments,

and there are presently only about 35 positions for anthropologists in all Israeli academic institutions.
The work of that founding generation and their students, who later extended their research to other groups and
institutions in Israeli society, was distinguished for its commitment to the classical Malinowskian methodology of longterm participant-observation. Israeli anthropologists during
the 1950s, 60s, and 70s conducted mostly community studies, staying one to two years at their field sites. However,
beginning around the late 1980s, the postmodern orientation in U.S. anthropology seemed to influence the choice of
subjects and the research methods among a younger generation, encouraging a greater investment in theoretical complexity and textual refinement. The more varied research
questions and methodologies of recent years are reminiscent
of the emerging “cultural studies” in U.S. academia. Not
many among the younger cohort of practitioners have undertaken long-term participant-observation projects in one
fieldwork site. Also, the early drive to study and document
the processes of immigrant absorption and social and national
integration lost its momentum (except for interest in these
processes spurred by the Ethiopian Jews’ later arrival) to a
search for more “neutral” contemporary sociocultural subjects. However, a few among the veteran generation developed new interests and adopted novel genres of research for
their later work, such as observing urban organizations or
engaging in multisited fieldwork projects.
WHAT DO YOU FIND MOST CHALLENGING IN
ISRAELI ANTHROPOLOGY OR AS AN
ANTHROPOLOGIST IN ISRAEL?

In retrospect, I regret the unwritten taboo against research
among the West Bank settlements. Descriptive and analytical reports about the Haredim society (that in Israel as well
as similar communities in the U.S.) by religious sociologists
and other writers are plentiful. But the personal and social
roots as well as the communal life of the settlers—whose
impact on the lives, present and future, of both Israelis and
Palestinians is of the utmost socioeconomic and political

consequence—remain unexplored entities in sociological
and anthropological terms. Naturally, one confronts an old
anthropological ethical dilemma: Can the anthropologist
study people she or he deeply resents?
As an Israeli anthropologist, coming from the periphery
of the professional international map and its major stages
in Europe and the U.S., one had always to withstand the
difficulty of playing a significant role in the central forums and
academic records of world anthropology. But more recently,
that notion of marginality has been glaringly accentuated by
the BDS agenda and the pending AAA decision to boycott
Israeli academic institutions as punishment for the continuing