Zimbabwe is to start circulating a new 200,000 Zimbabwe dollar note, in a bid to tackle the country’s inflation, the highest in the world. The new note, issued by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe from Wednesday, can buy 1kg (2.2lb) of sugar. Food and fuel shortages have become common as the government relies more heavily on imports, pushing prices to new heights. The official annual rate of inflation in Zimbabwe is nearing 5,000%. In practice, this means the price of a loaf of bread costs 50 times more in cash than it did a year ago.
This is a video shot in Wedza communal lands, Zimbabwe, which are south of the Nyanga district that Moore writes about. Wedza is at a lower elevation than Nyanga. The video is narrated by two charming children, Colm and Nora Hand, who have relatives in Wedza. There is great footage of agricultural practices (the milling of maize, the tilling of fields), and I think the video beautifully captures the conviviality of home and hearth. It therefore complements some of the scenes that Moore writes about.
The last time I taught the course Indigenous Images it was a two hour class which meant that there was no time to show movies. This time around I got a four hour slot, so there will be plenty of time to show a film every week and still have some good discussion. But that means I need to pick films and find good readings to go with them, so I was really happy to find this excellent resource: The UC Berkeley Media Resources Center has put up an extensive set of bibliographies and videographies relating to Movies, Race, and Ethnicity. For my course, I’m particularly interested in the material on Native Americans (books, videos), which has already given me some great ideas for my course.
The first chapter of the book should draw a familiar contrast with the introduction—little of the analytical language or conceptual erection (can I say that?) of the Intro is explicitly present in the first chapter of Part 1: “Governing Space”. I’m tempted to discipline Dr. Moore for his bad puns and subtitles, but that would involve pots and kettles and accusations, and I should refrain. This chapter by contrast is a great introductions to what is, as promised a complex tangle of people, places, histories, governments, sovereignties and disciplining. The frustration of trying to capture the social complexity of this place and time in an ethnography has already emerged in discussion… let me just reiterate some things. “Complexity is not its own virtue,” as Strong put it, gnarly or knot. And there is a double challenge here: first, to render the details, affect, experience and sense of a place using the relatively narrow tools of the ethnographic trade, i.e. the tools of the writer; second, to make the conceptual armature that is familiar to a broad range of scholars order and clarify the details that are otherwise available only to a narrow band of Zimbabwe specialists. Two kinds of complexity: the complexity of the novelist’s craft with rendering complex social life sensible and the complexity of the philosopher/social theorists craft of rendering conceptual schemes and empirical facts intelligible. In this respect, I think there is still a great deal to be said about “experimental” ethnography and the craft of writing one after the critiques of the 1980s—but only if this question is not divorced from the related goal of making conceptual schemes(Kerim implanted this term in my head—are you reading too much Davidson or something?) articulate with empirical description.
Chapter 1 almost achieves both, but I wouldn’t call it a complete success. It has a clever general structure and a lot of great detail (perhaps too much, indulging in places in obviously interesting but marginally relevant details of things like witchcraft or the rhetorical stylings of incompetent lesser headmen). There are two ways into the chapter, at least. One is through the author’s own “ethnographic emplacement”—- the fact that as an anthropologist he had to find a (good) place to live, secure permission to live there, build his own hut and then, at the end of it all, found himself threatened with expulsion from that hut by the District Administrator—- which in turn is the second way in, through the event of the District Administrator’s letter threatening residents with expulsion from Nyamatsupa if they do not conform to the plans for “villagization.” These two entry points—the author’s own experience with wattle, and the event of the DA’s disciplining letter—are explored in great detail, and are used to great effect as occasions to start laying out the complexity ethnographically. They do not explain, but they do start to map out settings, characters, events in history, and other crucial components of the story. Yet to emerge is a sense of how inquiry into this story has proceeded (what problems animate Moore’s search, other than his threatened hut) and a conceptual clarity (of the sort we hope will be provided via articulated assemblages and sovereignty-discipline-government).
(more…)
Columbia University Press has posted an online .mp3 interview with Talal Asad to promote his new book, On Suicide Bombing. The introduction to the book is also available online. A brief excerpt:
I look critically at a range of current explanations of suicide terrorism that are now being put forward, and I question the preoccupation by writers on the subject with attributing distinctive motives (as opposed to the manifest intention to kill) to perpetrators of suicide bombing. I say that motives in general are more complicated than is popularly supposed and that the assumption that they are truths to be accessed is mistaken: the motives of suicide bombers in particular are inevitably fictions that justify our responses but that we cannot verify. I then move away from writers attempting to explain the phenomenon of suicide bombings who address larger questions of killing and dying in relation to politics. Drawing on the history of ideas, I emphasize that although liberal thought separates the idea of violence from the idea of politics, mortal violence is integral to liberalism as a political formation.
For anthropologists interested in the intersection of place and power, I highly recommend the blog Architectures of Control, by Dan Lockton. Take, for instance, this great post about how airport cafés ensured that customers wouldn’t sit for too long by removing the flight monitors: “This made people worry about missing their flights, which led to them looking for monitors that worked, thus leaving empty tables.” Or this post about anti-user seating in Oxford. (Examples from NY City at the anti-sit archive.) And this one on architecture and security about buildings designed to prevent threats which no longer concern those who use the buildings.
This interview with Marshall Sahlins has been noted by other Minds before. All of the Foucault-talk in our summer reading circle reminded me of it, as well as other quasi-notorious Sahlins commentaries. I quote a particularly lively provocation, just for fun:
...there has been too much appropriation of inappropriate stuff. When Foucault writes about discipline and capillary power in early modern Western history, anthropologists pick it up and use it to think the institutions of every and any society. In the event, this poststructuralism becomes a paranoid style neofunctionalism: everything-family, kinship, second-person Vietnamese pronouns, Brazilian workers’ housing, Korean shamanism-is reduced to a power function. For myself, I think that anthropologists who have had the experience of cultural-ontological differences should not give a Foucault.
Alton Thompson has an interesting blog post about dropout rates in Ph.D. programs. It seems that while most faculty (and, I would add, many students) assume that people drop out because they aren’t up to snuff, it may in fact be that the best students are finding that it is graduate school which isn’t up to snuff. Especially women. Thompson quotes a report by Barbara Lovitts and Cary Nelson:
Everything about the way students depart reinforces this conviction. Most leave silently; they simply disappear, without communicating any reservations about the program to faculty or administrators. Exit interviews or follow-up contacts with departing students are rare. Moreover, students are effectively discouraged from voicing complaints while they are still actively enrolled. The ‘successful’ student is ‘happy’ and compliant; such a student is more likely to receive financial support, good teaching assignments, and strong letters of recommendation. A student who criticizes the program is a problem. Of course this reasoning is circular and self-fulfilling, since complaining students may well be turned into problem students by neglect or discrimination. Meanwhile, the accumulated silence of previous ‘dropouts’ reinforces the view faculty prefer to hold: the problem is with the student, not the program.
Many faculty thus conclude that the way to improve student success is to admit better students. Yet our evidence and that from other studies suggest that students who persist and students who leave are equally well qualified. The Lovitts survey found no meaningful difference between the undergraduate grade point averages of the students who did complete the Ph.D. and those who did not. The only notable difference in grade point averages surfaces when the students are separated by gender: female-completer, 3.57; noncompleter, 3.62; male-completer, 3.52; noncompleter, 3.49. In other words, women who abandoned graduate study had a somewhat higher undergraduate grade point average than those who stayed. What’s more, women leave in higher numbers, thus suggesting once again that attrition is due to something other than ability.
This is certainly true of what I observed among my cohort at Temple, where a large number of very talented women never finished. Its true that if the 50% of people who seem to drop out of Ph.D. programs all decided to stay, the already glutted job market would be twice as bad as it is, but if there is something about graduate student culture which is driving women out at a higher rate then men it needs to be investigated. Thompson also links to this piece in Inside Higher Education about the Council of Graduate Schools’ Ph.D. Completion Project, which emphases the importance of funding for allowing students to complete their degrees. Unfortunately, this data isn’t yet broken down by gender, so we can’t see if financial support is disproportionately affecting female students.
For those of you who haven’t yet picked up, or received, your copy of Suffering for Territory, here’s some sources for learning about current affairs in Zimbabwe. Inflation is currently somewhere around 4500%. I think that basically means that the price goes up before you can dig for change in your pocket. Or would that be your wheelbarrow of cash. The US has apparently offered food aid. The Times of London has an article about starvation and the “silent genocide” with the startling claim that no one seems to know what the population of Zimbabwe is anymore. Also (via boingboing) a series of Internet-related laws allowing monitoring of all phone and data traffic.
A few good blogs (1| 2| 3) seem to be out there as well… please post others if you know of them.
The Guardian today features an article on University of Sussex anthropologist Melissa Leach and her advocacy of ethnographic research methods for helping to understand contemporary problems, including especially those involving science and society in developing nations.
Since it seems all the cool academic blogs have their own Facebook group, I felt Savage Minds need one as well. If you have a Facebook account feel free to become a member and help make this work.
UPDATE: Wow. In less than 24 hours we have 38 members! Now what? Please post your ideas to the group’s discussion page!
Even though I live in Taiwan, I don’t get the relatively new indigenous TV station because it is only on cable, but I was happy to see that it got covered in the International Herald Tribute. One of my colleagues, Janubark 高德義, was interviewed for the piece:
Other than the language lessons and weekly news broadcasts in the major tribes’ languages, most of TITV’s programs, including the daily news, are in Chinese.
Janubark, an aboriginal ethnic relations scholar at National Dong Hwa University, said tribes would benefit more if each had its own station in its own language. “That would be more helpful in preserving our languages and cultures, which is what Taiwan’s aborigines need most,” said Janubark, who uses only one name.
The point is driven home by this music video on the station’s website, with Aborigine singers taking turns singing a very typical mandopop melody.
In similar news, Kim Christen reports that Australia is getting its “first national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander television service,” NITV. Two of the leading figures in the anthropology of indigenous media, Eric Michaels and Faye Ginsburg, both expressed tremendous skepticism about the future of indigenous media in Australia, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
UPDATE: In the comments, Influxus links to this post on Propagating Media:
The only trouble is that in order to give NITV spectrum on the satellite, they will be switching off the existing, bottom-up network of community television stations: ICTV.
... It is a pity that NITV – a fantastic idea – needs to be launched over the dead body of its existing ‘proof-of-concept’ pilot. More importantly, it is a pity that no-one in government seems to be ‘joining the dots’ in relation to Aboriginal creativity. NITV, ICTV, NIRS – and other initiatives – need investment and strategic direction if they are to become what they claim to be – a ‘national’ resource with both economic and representational clout for an emergent Indigenous polity.
Thanks to wiseguy I discovered a great resource for media anthropology:
Since 2004 the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Media Anthropology Network is discussing working papers about socio-cultural aspects of media technology uses within the scope of e-seminars via the Network’s mailing list.
... The website of the Network also provides annotated bibliographies, information about media anthropology events, and selected discussions from the mailing list as PDF documents.
“I elaborate entanglements with their gnarly knots that defy orderly undoing.” (Donald Moore, Suffering for Territory, p. 9)
The first thing I noticed about Donald Moore’s Suffering for Territory is that the preface and the flap-copy both describe events in Zimbabwe since 2000—the globally significant displacement of white landowners by the Mugabe government—but the research conducted in the book occurred in the early 1990s. At first sight this looks like a way to sell the book (it’s not out of date, it’s background!), but in reality I think there is something much more complex about this book that isn’t articulated until one gets well into the intro: that this is a book for understanding why the events of the last few years make sense. Whereas the news media and the fast-paced world of journalism are excellent at covering and tracking unfolding events, especially in places with dramatic political conditions like Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, ethnography is after something that journalists (insofar as they are not really participating in what they observe) cannot articulate.
Unfortunately, that same sense-making skill that anthropologists develop is also the reason why it is so often hard for people (including authors themselves) to say what an ethnography is “about.” Certainly Donald Moore’s book is “about” Zimbabwe, and in particular, a little district in the north east called Kaerezi, and in particular a little village in that district. But to relegate the book to being merely about this village would miss the fact that it is actually (also?) about how power, sovereignty and discipline make space and place look, and happen, the way they do. But to say that it is merely a theorization of governmentality would miss the fact that it (also?) is about race, colonialism, African histories of liberation, resistance, genocide and suffering… and so on.
Fortunately for Moore, and for me, one of the perquisites of anthropology is that one can address novice and expert at the same time. I, for instance, had to look at a map to know where Zimbabwe is exactly, so I am very much a novice when it comes to one thing the book is about. But when it comes to the parade of familiar theorists (Foucault, Gramsci, Dolce and Gabanna, Appadurai, Lefbvre, James C. Scott, Chakrabarty, etc), I’m an expert whose own classes, syllabi and work have struggled to makes sense of things like governmentality, sovereignty, assemblages, articulations, situated ethnographies, space and place. The real challenge, for Moore’s book, is to integrate novice and expert—to make sense of something that is inevitably highly specific and particular, in terms that make it make sense at a global and historical level (and not only in terms of “governmentality”, but generally, as an ethnographic explanation of a situation, not just a particular place or set of people).
Of course, if you are looking for that elusive thing called fieldwork or ethnography (you know what I’m talking about, that thing that you can’t name but that when it is missing makes people say “where’s the ethnography”) then Moore’s book promises to be as rich a monograph of a specific locale as one could want: during fieldwork, Moore was detained by government officials at the airport, subjected to ruthless and pointless bureaucracy, had successive meetings with people in power overseeing his ability to work, was the subject of a public meeting deciding his fate, lived in a tent in the village, built his own mud and wattle hut, worked the fields, visited the archives, and spent on the order of ten years thinking through the experience. If this isn’t ethnography, then I’d be hard-pressed to say what is. More important however, might be trying to precisely articulate what this ethnography does that others (or other accounts that do not employ this kind of fieldwork) cannot do.
