For both Jews and Muslims, circumcision is a religious and cultural practice. Within the last few weeks, Germany outlawed the practice of male circumcision for any but the strictest medical reasons. An atypical alliance of Jews and Muslims successfully challenged the German court's ruling and Chancellor Angela Merkel has promised to make religious circumcision practices (on males, but not females) legal once again.

Read more from William M. O'Barr at huffingtonpost.com

Is Infant Circumcision a Violation of Human Rights?

William M. O'Barr 

The New York Times Sunday Book Review discusses the books of Noah Coburn and Thomas Barfield,  two Boston University anthropologists who conducted fieldwork at Afghanistan:

Ten years after the Taliban’s leaders fled their country in apparent defeat, the war in Afghanistan has become what one observer calls “a perpetually escalating stalemate.” As in Iraq, the United States military has responded to bad news with counterinsurgency: eliminate troublemakers in the dark of night, with the most lethal arts, and befriend tribal elders by day, with cultural sensitivity and expertise. The Army has gone so far as to embed credentialed social scientists with front-line troops in “Human Terrain Teams” that engage in “rapid ethnographic assessment” — conducting interviews and administering surveys, learning about land disputes, social networks and how to “operationalize” the Pashtun tribal code. The military, in short, demands local knowledge.

Read the rest here:

Afghanistan: What the Anthropologists Say
By ALEXANDER STAR
Published: November 18, 2011

The appropriation of anthropology for political, economic or religious means is far from being a new phenomena. What is interesting in this case is the construction of an Islamic myth of anthropological antiquity which is framed in opposition to the contemporariness of Anthropology as a Western form of knowledge.

The Iran Book News Agency announced the publication of a new anthropological book: “The Philosophy of Anthropology” released by the Religious Press. According to the author, Dr.Yahya Kabir, “Islamic revelation in particular and the religion of Islam in general have a lot to say in six branches of anthropology…Subjects like Levi-Straus’s method of anthropological criticism, Hegel’s historical anthropology, social anthropology of Marx and Schleiermacher’s religious anthropology are all discussed in this work in comparison with superior theories of Islamic thinkers…” Referring to the seven hundred years of history of anthropology among Muslim philosophers, he said: “This is while western thinkers have only proposed these ideas in the late two-hundred years.”

In rediscovering anthropology as a Muslim form of knowledge, anthropology is used to glorify the wisdom of Islam, an act which also venerates anthropology for its truthful insights!

Gabriele Marranci, an anthropologist based at the National University of Singapore, writes  at his blog on the revolts in Arab Countries and on how anthropologists have helped to perpetuate the myth of a fundamentalist Arab-Muslim mind:

Although we need to acknowledge that each revolt finds its raison d’être in local contexts and issues, we have also to recognize that Arab youth in the region want a change: they wish to end the long post-colonial period of time marked by dictators at the service of western economic and geopolitical interests…

…What is happening in the Middle East today, and even taking into consideration the local aspects of the revolt, the tribal interests and the economic factors, shows a very different reality from a monolithic Muslim mind controlled by the symbolic dimension of theology. Muslim Arabs are not, in other words, homo theologicus. The revolts–marked by the young age of those whom started it–show that many Arab Muslim youths, after losing faith in the US in the 1980s, have also lost their hope in the traditional Islamic movements.  Moreover, the violent methodology of Al-Qaeda has totally alienated the majority of Muslims.

Press here to read  From anthropology to politics: the myth of the fundamentalist Arab Muslim mind