We get backed into a corner, with no place to turn.  Our choices are cut off–we are stuck with the hassles of lines, rules, and forms.  We wait on phones, we try to find official offices with no address.  You know what I’m talking about.  We become not just fools in this process, but blithering fools.  But there is power in the inefficiency of bureaucracies–Weber knew that, as did many others.  You know that too, don’t you?  If you want to know more about this, please click here for more options.

Apologies for that…there must be some sort of glitch in the system.  I will send out a request for someone to post a note about composing an email to resolve this issue at a later date.  Please wait.  In the mean time, if you haven’t read David Graeber’s “Beyond power/knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity,” well, you should.  Here is your chance.

Let me give you a short example of the hilarity of bureaucracy from some of my recent travel experiences:

Setting: A small taco stand in the middle of a well-known tourism destination in Mexico.  The taco stand is located alongside the street, in a very small space next to a little convenience story that sells things like soda and sabritas. Novelas are on the TV (novelas are, for those of you who don’t know, soap operas).

Cast: Myself, and a few good friends.  The cast also includes the very nice people who own the stand, the unseen phone caller, and the official who shows up to complicate the general plot.  And then there is the big official who is in charge of everything, but that’s not for a bit.

Plot: We are at this taco place because said good friends really, really wanted to go there because this place is the best in town.  Plus, we are hungry and need to get some food before a long drive.

So we arrive, greet the owners who are working hard, and sit down.  We order.  Fish tacos for some, and shrimp tacos for the more daring.  One friend decides to walk down the street and buy two beers to drink with lunch.  He does this because beer is not sold in this small taco stand.

Suddenly, after only a few minutes, an official appears on scene.  He does not look at us, but instead talks grimly with the owner of the taco shop.  Things look serious.  Is this about us?  I see the Spanish word for “alcohol” on the back of his uniform.  Sure enough, it IS about us, and those two beers that we have on the table.  Apparently, it is a BIG PROBLEM to have these two beers here, because the owner of the taco shop does not have authorization to have alcohol on his property.  This is little more than a taco stand, mind you.  A small cart, a shade, and one plastic table with some chairs alongside the street.

There are no signs posted–this is just the law.  This is how things work, even if it doesn’t always work that way for many other shops and businesses all around this taco stand.  Plus, the official tells us, someone called in this complaint so it has to be dealt with.  If he did not deal with it, he could get fired.  The fine?  Two thousand US dollars (which is an exorbitant amount of money all things considered).  Who pays?  The owner of the taco stand, who doesn’t exactly make a ton of money.  The owner categorically refuses to even consider paying any fine.  He looks around the street and tells us that this is about jealousy.

We all feel terrible for this seemingly random–and overly punitive–citation.  People drink beer at taco stands all the time.  Why is this case such a big deal?  The officer responds that this is just the way things are, and there is nothing he can do about it.  Besides, we all should have known better–and there was the caller.  The one who got the bureaucratic machine to awaken.  There’s nothing that can be done.  The process has already been started and now it just has to be seen through.  The process is in charge now.  My friend makes one last attempt: I have been traveling here for 30 years and nothing like this has ever happened!  Tough, says the official.  These are the rules.

He writes up the citation and leaves.  We talk with the owner and agree to go to court with him the following day.

The next day we meet him downtown, where we can talk to the big official who is in charge of all this.  The office is small.  Other people are waiting to pay their fines.  These are not rich people who are here to pay, let me put it that way.  We wait, but not for too long.  We step into the office of the official, which is full of what we assume to be contraband liquor that has been seized.  We state our case, and he listens.  The taco stand owner goes first, but doesn’t make much ground.  Then we give it a try.  First of all, we tell the official that this is not the fault of the taco shop owner–it is our fault.  We should be to blame.  We also argue that this should be a warning, since there were no signs posted, there were no other offenses, and since the law is so ambiguous.

He is done listening and tells us: “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”  He also asks us this pointed question: “If I was in YOUR country and this happened, tell me, what would happen to me?”  One of my friends, who happens to be an attorney AND a restaurant owner, replies: “Well, depending on the situation, you would probably get a warning, especially if this was a first offense.  Besides, while ignorance of the law is no excuse, we also have to take account of intent, no?”

This last line did not please the big official.  It was a good try, though.   But it may have made things worse.  The official  is visibly upset.  He apologizes and says there is little he can do.  The process is what it is, and the law is the law.  He makes a show of punching up some numbers on a calculator.  He reduces the fine substantially, but that was all he could do.  He tells us that we are indeed responsible, along with the owner.  Rules.  Laws.  Regulations.

The fine had to be paid, regardless of all the ambiguity.  He directs us to the other office down the hall where we needed to go to pay the bill.  After we pay, we were to come back and show proof of paying.  There is a thirty dollar fee for the services and time of the big official.  In effect, this is a small toll that must be paid in order to grease the wheels of business and politics.  We all know it.  What choices did we have?  We pay the fine, feeling somewhat victorious because at least it wasn’t two grand.  It’s not really a victory though.  All of this time and money over two beers.  Rules are rules, except when they’re not.  The process controls all.  We are stuck in its tentacles–all of us.  The officials–everyone.  There is power in the nonsense of it all.  It happens here, and everywhere.

End.

*Hilarious Firefox image comes from here.

There are a couple of issues dominating the discussion. The first is whether the protesters who supported Hazare are dupes of right-wing parties — a claim which echoes similar debates about the Tea Party Movement in the US? The second is whether the bill being proposed by Hazare will make India more democratic by cutting down on corruption, or less democratic by creating a government body with too much power over elected representatives of the people? And the third issue is whether or not ridding the nation of corruption will make for a more just society, or whether corruption offers the disenfranchised important wiggle-room in dealing with state power, wiggle-room usually preserved for the elite?

I don’t have much insight into the first two questions, although I’ll admit that my sympathies usually lie with writers like Arundhati Roy who has been very critical of Hazare and his supporters. I do, however, have some small insight into the issue of corruption in India, having recently completed a documentary film in which corruption was one of the central themes. My wife, Shashwati Talukdar, and I have spent the past five years making frequent trips to an urban ghetto in Ahmedabad, in Western India, where we filmed a troupe of young actors who use street theater to protest against police brutality and corruption. I have also published two academic articles about the history and ethnography of the community.

The Chhara are one of 198 communities throughout India, an estimated 60 million people in India today, who were labeled “born criminals” by the British under the “Criminal Tribes Act,” first passed in 1871. Even though the act was abolished, the stigma of criminality still remains, and it is difficult for the Chhara to find legitimate work. As a result, many turn to brewing liquor, which is illegal in the dry state of Gujarat. It is this home-brewed liquor that is the focus of much of the day-to-day corruption which pervades the community. The police turn a blind eye to the strong-smelling alcohol stills bubbling away in nearly two thirds of the homes, while simultaneously taking a cut of the profits in the form of bribes. Costumers come to Chharanagar from all over the city to get a drink.

While this seems like a win-win situation, one which might support the claim by some of the Kafila bloggers that corruption is empowering for the poor, the truth is both darker and more complicated. In fact, both the police and the Chhara are trapped in a vicious circle with no way of getting out. The police refused to be interviewed for the film, so we didn’t get tell their story as fully as we would have liked, but we’ve been able to piece together bits and pieces over the years.

In short, applicants to the police force have to pay bribes to get into the police academy, but they can’t afford the bribes, so they have to borrow the money at exorbitant rates from money-lenders. To pay off the interest on the loans they then need to collect bribes, and because the Chhara community generates a fair amount of illegal revenue, they all wish to be assigned to the local police station which oversees the Chhara community, but getting assigned there requires another hefty bribe… Because the Police depend on the illegal activities of the Chhara for their livelihood they will even resort to force to keep Chhara from “going straight.” They also administer beatings and torture to ensure that the bribes are paid in a regular and timely manner.

Nor did bribery seem to significantly protect the Chhara from arbitrary detention and torture. Instead, what worked for the community was the ability to organize around street theater. While problems persist, the existence of Budhan Theatre (the name of the street theater movement) has helped temper the worst excesses of police violence. On the other hand, in Bhavnagar, a coastal town with a Chhara community that also brews liquor, the situation was much worse. We also saw significant class differences in both communities. It is often the most vulnerable (i.e. poor widows) who were subject to the worst violence.

Having said all that, if corruption were magically eliminated, I’m not sure it would be a good thing for the Chhara – at least not in the short term. While there are new opportunities emerging for the more educated sections of the community, a significant number of Chhara still depend on illegal activities for their income.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta argues that corruption offers wiggle-room to those who fail to easily fit within the four corners of the law:

For the vast majorities who face the glare of documents, the demand for transparency, the imperative to come clean and be visible – corruption offers an occasional patch of friendly shade. Corruption, at least as a certain looseness with the law and with the regulatory power of the legal apparatus, is what keeps this society humane at its deeper, darker recesses.

I’m sympathetic to this argument. Certainly corruption helps the less fortunate Chhara make ends meet when they can’t find more legitimate employment; but the corruption we observed in Chharangar cannot be described as “humane” by any stretch of the imagination. Corruption keeps the Chhara (as well as the police) trapped in a cycle of violence, and the only way out has been the grassroots political organizing of Budhan Theatre. Gramsci said that “between coercion and consent lies corruption and fraud” which I think aptly describes the situation in Chharangar, where “common sense” is very much determined by the logic of corruption which pervades daily life. I worry about those who would romanticize petty corruption as liberating, even as I acknowledge that the absence of corruption may very well be worse…

It goes like this. The federal government’s response to financial crisis ought to mirror those of a typical family experiencing monetary hardship. If the family has bills to pay and can’t afford its current lifestyle then the parents are going to have to work extra hours or get a second job to supplement income (increase taxes and revenues), everyone is going to have to make do without certain luxuries like cable TV and fancy cell phone plans (make spending cuts), and the family ought to hold a garage sale to sell off extra things (privatization of land and natural resources). I’ve heard variations of this trope, in whole or in part, espoused by people of diverse political sympathies, from participants on radio call-in shows, from reporters and pundits. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear an elected official use it.

What does it mean that people are inclined to think of the federal budget in the subjunctive, as if it were like the budget of a typical household? What “work” does it do for the people who espouse it?

Public administrative budgets are odd things. For the past couple of years I’ve served on the Board of Trustees for my city’s public library system. We have four branch libraries and a bookmobile, scores of employees, and thousands of volumes of materials. I volunteered to join the budget committee and was immediately taken aback by how unintuitive the process was. Even though we are under a tremendous budget crunch we can’t save money by turning down the heat in winter or powering down the computers at night. Nor can you save money by closing early or taking Sundays off. Essentially you have to fire someone and/or convert a full-time job to two part-time jobs. It’s all in how the different kinds of money from different sources get allotted for different purposes.

Another example, this time from the state level. My wife works at public university and she’s gotten but one raise in four years. This year was to be different though, much to our relief. When she received her new contract we were astounded by how much her salary went up; way more than the increase that had been negotiated. But our joy was tempered when we learned that the cost of her state retirement plan had increased by exactly the same amount. Why the state unable to meet its obligation to its employees’ retirement when it was able to give them a raise by exactly the same amount? That’s the magic of budgeting!

A third example. Every department at the university is strapped for cash, probably just like yours. State budget crisis, you know. Across the street from campus Hollywood Video went out of business and the administration scooped up the building to use as the new headquarters for campus police. But before the cops could move in they built an entirely new exterior with red bricks and white columns (after all, every other building on campus has red bricks and white columns). But wait, don’t departments need money for toner? Sorry, that’s not how administrative budgets work.

Money isn’t like water flowing downhill to the lowest point, its sequestered in various ponds like Javanese rice terraces. You might not have enough in your pond to hire an assistant for your overworked office manager, but there’s still enough in the God-Awful-Public-Art pond to afford another gargantuan statue of some founding father or to change out the begonias for pansies when high school seniors come to visit.

It’s easy to see the appeal in a home economics metaphor. Plenty of people are struggling to make ends meet or worse, suffering with low incomes and high costs of living. Using their past experiences people frame the distant, seemingly alien mechinations of Congress in terms of what they already know. People think, “If I’ve maxed out my credit card then its time to cut it up.” But the government has not maxed out its credit card. Its not even remotely the same thing. The metaphor of the family at the dinner table paying bills and opting to eat hamburger instead of steak works first as a Goffmanian frame: it makes the world make sense by organizing inputs in terms of that which is already known, ie. experiences rooted in the past.

It also conveys a moral judgement. Really it is an instance of Othering the federal government and as such fits in with a broader social movement in American society for conservative populism. The actions of elected officials are perceived to be an affront to “common sense”: if someone owes you money then you expect them to pay it back. Is it not True? But we anthropologists know that even what a people takes to be patently the case (especially that) is also culturally constructed. What is it saying, this “common sense”, about the ordinary people who would seek to apply metaphors of home economics to the federal budget?

Clifford Geertz in his “Common Sense as a Cultural System” writes:

It is an inherent characteristic of common-sense thought precisely to affirm that its tenets are immediate deliverances of experience, not deliberated reflections upon it… Religion rests its case on revelation, science on method, ideology on moral passion; but common sense rests its on the assertion that it is not a case at all, just life in a nutshell. The world is its authority.
–Local Knowledge (1983:75)

I can’t help but be reminded of the culture wars of the 1990s when the Right marshaled “family values” as a rallying cry against perceived decadence and decay in US society while the economy careened into post-industrialization and the contemporary neoliberal global flow of capital took shape. “Family values” may be a passe term among the political class and media taste-makers, but the convictions that buttressed it (opposition to globalization expressed as pining for patriarchy) are still in place.

For those of who were infants when Pulp Fiction came out: “family values” sought to valorize something that was perceived to be simultaneously normal but vanishing, nuclear families with firm parental discipline established by male authority, and to stigmatize as “disfunctional” (another passe term) all that which went against the above.

There were, allegedly, some practical advantages to advocating this as social policy along the lines of what George Yudice explored in his Expediency of Culture. If households were arranged by nuclear families with a strong male in charge who wasn’t afraid to spank his kids then our prisons wouldn’t be so overcrowded and, hence, expensive to maintain. If women would just stay home and take care of the little ones then we wouldn’t have to throw away money on things like Head Start. The state, by this line of reasoning, has grown to fulfill a role abdicated by otherwise responsible men because they have been forced to expend extra effort competing with women for jobs. And stuff.

“Family values” posited the nation, epitomized by male-led nuclear families, against the state, epitomized by expensive social programs that spackle over “disfunctional” female-led families like Bondo on a rusty wheel well. The past and older modes of social relations were to be the model for the future. It was preeminently a call to nationalism because it sought to project a unity and consensus from millions of disparate and seemingly unconnected dots – independent households – a stronger nation for a weaker state.

Home economics can also be seen as a similar nationalist response against the state. In its “common sense” approach it diagnoses the pathology at the heart of government by locating the point at which it diverges from the family. It is a symbolic attack on the state, delegitimizing it, and instead acknowledging the authority of local sources of power. It is a rhetorical transfer of symbolic capital from the state to the rugged individual.

Or as Manuel Castells writes in his essay “A Powerless State?”

Indeed, in a world of acultural, transnational global networks, societies tend… to retrench themselves on the basis of identities, and to construct/ reconstruct institutions as expressions of these identities. This is why we witness, at the same time, the crisis of the nation-state and the explosion of nationalisms.
–The Power of Identity, vol.2 (1997:306)

The affective loop is dizzying as it moves us between distant places and local homes, political upheavals and natural disasters, raging storms and individual stories, the serious and the absurd. Unable to catch my breath between blows or steady myself according to some sense of scale, I feel like so much has happened since the tsunami struck. And yet, I don’t know what to make of any of it.  Are we just bracing ourselves for the next thing?

In an April article entitled “The Half-life of Disaster” Brian Massumi discusses how this media cycle leads us into a perpetual state of foreboding that brings together natural, economic and political threat perception in a configuration that fuels what Naomi Klein termed “disaster capitalism”. The horror is never resolved or replaced; rather, it is archived, infinitely accessible over the Internet.  Cast into the web of other events, the unendurable tragedy of a particular event dissipates, or as Massumi says, “it decays”.  In today’s catastrophic mediashpere, observes Massumi, the half-life of disaster is at most two weeks.

Why have we let the situation in Japan recede into the background of other “big news”?  Massumi and others suggest that this “post-shock pre-posturing” increasingly delegates collective response to the national security apparatus, obscures the structural causes of “natural” disaster (Katrina as well as Fukushima illustrate this point well), and feeds the increasingly centralized global economy which capitalizes on the instability created by the very disasters it helps potentiate.

While I discussed responsibility and resistance in relation to mass-mediated affect in my last post, here I want to offer another mode of response: stepping out of the affective loop.  While feeling with others in the context of suffering is perhaps the only appropriate response when faced with the immediacy of another’s pain, undoing the social causes of suffering requires a continuously engaged critical perspective. I’d like to offer that the ongoing events in Japan are terribly important to us right now in an unfolding global context.

What’s perhaps most important about the aftermath of the disaster was not what happened in the first two weeks, but what is happening twelve weeks out.  Not only does the US public need to step out of the media-driven affective whirlpool, but we need to step back into the global conversation about energy sustainability and the political, social, economic, and environmental disasters brought about in the effort to maintain the current levels of profit.

The meltdowns at Fukushima temporarily unmask the social and environmental dangers always present in nuclear power.  Likewise, the uprisings in the Middle East reveal the grave economic disparities and instability generated in oil-based economies.  We mustn’t let these revelatory and revolutionary moments pass away.

As proposed by Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis in a letter addressed to Japan, the “international capitalist power-structure” is terrified that the disempowered will seize upon the explosive political potential of these moments.  Their letter suggests that if disaster capitalism runs on an ever-present low-level threat perception, its leading industrial sector—energy—runs on the public’s perception that everything is fine and dandy:

Company men and politicians are aware that the disaster at Fukushima is a tremendous blow to the legitimacy of nuclear power and in a way the legitimacy of capitalist production. A tremendous ideological campaign is under way to make sure that it does not become the occasion for a global revolt against nuclear power and more important for a process of revolutionary change. The fact that the nuclear disaster in Japan is taking place in concomitance with the spreading of insurrectional movements throughout the oil regions of North Africa and the Middle East undoubtedly adds to the determination to establish against all evidence that everything is under control.

Claims like these and others (insert link) about “ideological campaigns” in the name “global revolt” may be motivated by a romantic view of political agency. But the history of nuclear power in the US and Japan suggests that Federici and Caffentzis are right to expose the neoliberal interests that inform the framing of recent events.

Historically, the nuclear-friendly PR machine (with Eisenhower and the “Atoms for Peace” campaign at the helm) played a huge role in Japan’s acceptance of nuclear power.  Of course it did.  How in the world, we might ask, would a country like Japan—the only country ever gutted by a nuclear weapon—come to accept nuclear powered energy at the behest of the very country that dropped the bomb??

Historian Peter Kuznick answers precisely this question and explains the process of propaganda and acceptance in a recent essay.  Putting Japan’s nuclear history Pointo perspective, Kuznick writes: “their nuclear program was born not only in the fantasy of clean, safe power, but also in the willful forgetting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the buildup of the US nuclear arsenal.”  While the human scale of suffering and loss initiated in northeastern Japan will always remain incomprehensible, the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown are being fashioned at this very moment into historically comprehensible events. The social, political and economic stakes in these repertoires of fantasy and forgetting are high.

Most blatantly, perhaps, we find these repertoires rehearsed in mainstream media stories about Fukushima.  Last week President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea and Chinese premiere Wen Jiabao visited Japan to speak with Prime Minister Naoto Kan in a tripartite summit in order to discuss Japan’s handling of the nuclear crisis and foster trade relations.  The conservative Yomiuri Shimbun (Japan’s most widely circulated paper, and one with long-held stakes in the nuclear industry…from the time it conspired with the CIA to promote nuclear development in Japan in the 1950s up until the present day) wrote:

Kan was particularly enthusiastic about realizing the visit by the three leaders to a quake-hit area… Some in the government expressed anxiety over security for the leaders. But Kan said: “The sight of us three eating produce from Fukushima Prefecture will definitely be reported overseas. That’d be the best protection we can get against harmful rumors,” and the plan went forward.

Kan links “security” to “protection … against harmful rumors” and asserts that foreign press coverage will provide the protection. One must assume that these “rumors” consist of statements about the ongoing harm by radioactive materials to people in the area of Fukushima and the hazards of all forms of nuclear energy more broadly.  By using the term “rumor” Kan is delegitimizing these claims, while simultaneously taking them seriously enough to situate their threat within the discourse of national security.  Regarding the stakes at play in controlling this information dissemination, Japanese scholar Yoshihiko Ikegami writes:

The government calls the information shared on the internet “rumors” and repeatedly urges the public not to believe them. In addition, a public advertising organization called Advertising Council Japan is airing a TV commercial asking people not to believe rumors and not to buy-up. (The head of the organization is the president of TEPCO.) The commentators in news programs single-mindedly repeat similar messages.

These widespread attempts to dismiss information circulating in the public sphere as “rumors” has led some anti-nuclear activists to re-appropriate the term in explicit calls for revolution.

The linking of rumor and revolution, however, is probably not the most pertinent point about Kan’s statements.  By shifting the role of “security” from that of protecting individual human bodies (Lee and Wen) to that of protecting the nuclear industry—and by exposing these same bodies to potentially poisonous produce—Kan’s statements foregrounds the devaluation of human life that Federici and Caffentzis attribute to capitalism: “What we are witnessing, most dramatically, in the response to the tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan, especially in the US, is the beginning of an era in which capitalism is dropping any humanitarian pretense and refusing any commitment to the protection of human life.”

If supporting Japan and Fukushima means eating poisoned produce, it is because maintaining current economic trajectories and the continued use of nuclear energy has become more important than the well-being of individual bodies.

At the time of the meeting between the three leaders, the Japanese government had raised acceptable levels of yearly radiation exposure for children from 1 mmSv (the limit set by the WHO) to 20mmSv and was failing to pay for removal of contaminated topsoil at schools.  Children were regularly being exposed to levels of radiation allegedly higher than Chernobyl and traces of radioactive material were being found in the breast milk of women as far away as Chiba and Ibaraki.

Like those displaced by the tsunami, many of the 80,000 evacuees from the 20km radius around Fukushima lacked adequate shelter and provisions.  What’s more, if human life has been undervalued, non-human animal life even more so.   Evacuees were not allowed to take their animal companions with them when they evacuated.  Despite appeals that intensified during the weekend of the summit (and continue thousands of cats and dogs, and ten thousands of farm animals have been starving to death.  Meanwhile, according to prejudices (with historical precedent) about nuclear contamination, people with license plates from Fukushima are being refused service at gas stations and turned away from hotels. Coding discrimination as “reputation damage,” the government is able to claim that supporting the people of Fukushima means ignoring exposure and buying their products rather than worrying over their exposure and accepting them into our communities.  (Japanese Political scientist Chigaya Kinoshita writes about these dual modes of containment in an essay about the uglier aspects of civil society.) In the midst of all this, the three leaders chewed their veggies and posed for the press.

On cue, as if obliging Kan’s earlier statements and this perverse show of solidarity, the first paragraph of the New York Times’ brief coverage of the meeting reads: “The leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea publicly munched on farm produce grown near the stricken Japanese nuclear plant on Saturday in a show of solidarity with Japan’s recovery efforts.”  Nowhere mentioning that this was the fourth in a series of annual meetings since 2008 intended to foster economic relations between the three countries, the article eventually continues, “Before entering the shelter, a converted gymnasium, Mr. Kan steered the group to a table displaying strawberries, cucumbers and other produce grown in Fukushima Prefecture. The leaders, who did not appear to have been surprised by the photo op, smiled and nibbled gamely. “Very delicious,” Mr. Wen said.”

The tone of the Times’ article seems slightly bemused as it acceptingly acknowledges, along with the Chinese and Korean leaders, that this was a highly choreographed theatrical spectacle. What’s troubling in such a tone, however, is the implication that an acknowledgement of posturing somehow exempts the reporting from any responsibility to analyze the scene—both what it stages and obscures.

Why doesn’t the New York Times explain exactly how munching on cucumbers displays solidarity with the people who can’t get the government to clear away debris, rescue their animals, and remove dangerous dirt from children’s playgrounds? Of course these are the very things obscured in the staged scene.  The Times seems to capitulate to the regime of “everything’s fine” that ensures Kan’s “security”.  No matter how ironic the tone, this article portrays solidarity as participating in an anti-panic business-as-usual patriotism, exactly the sort critiqued by Kinoshita in the essay mentioned earlier. While catastrophe and panic were appealing headlines in the initial weeks of the disaster, now in the moment’s fading half-life, they seem to have no place.

Addendum:

Since writing this piece the New York Times has just published an article that exposes the government’s exploitation of poor rural towns and the means through which it makes them financially dependent on nearby reactors.  Although this coverage finally starts uncovering the secrets silence hides, the emphasis on “a lack of widespread grass-roots opposition in the communities around [Japan’s] 54 nuclear reactors” fosters the impression that there isn’t much in the way of anti-nuclear activism taking place in Japan.  Hopefully, the New York Times will start covering the massive demonstrations (of scales rarely seen in contemporary Japan) like the one on April 10^th that brought more that 17,500 people onto the streets of Tokyo.  Cries of protest from the public have brought a halt to development of the Hamaoka Nuclear Plant, and forced the government to revoke the change in acceptable radiation levels for children.  Until these stories earn headlines in mainstream media, I ask you to find projects like Japan – Fissures in the Planetary Apparatus which is translating critical essays by Japanese activists and intellectuals about the ongoing situation in Japan.

As the contours of the disaster accrete into what is undoubtedly a pivotal event, the larger frameworks within which meaning hinges are highly contested.  How the disaster, now officially called the Great East Japan Earthquake, gets spun will depend on which historical and political contexts are acknowledged, and which are ignored.

About a week later, as the scale of suffering in Japan became clearer, I became less concerned with everybody else’s questionable investments in the pain of others and more suspicious of my own hesitancy to engage emotionally.

Although I frowned and cried as solicited upon seeing the unavoidable photos of people staggering through muddy ruins, I wasn’t sure how to feel the rest of the time.  Brian Massumi’s claim that

“power is no longer fundamentally normative, like it was in its disciplinary forms—it’s affective”

suggests that stories and images circulate and infiltrate strategically. Even though, as de Certeau reminds us, readers aren’t fools and we employ tactics with which to play and navigate the web of discourse, we’re still stuck inside of it—and it inside of us.  Our critique of media, savvy avoidance of manipulation, and resistance to being told how to feel are themselves already the threads of discourses that have been woven into us.

Part of me wants to believe that some basic feeling for the suffering of others arises before all of this, that there’s a relational web prior and in excess to the discursive one—and that it’s woven more tightly.

But if the mass mediated means through which we gain access to others is always already shaping how we feel for those others, how can we feel without capitulating to the powers that traffic in affect? In the case of catastrophes, which seem to (fairly regularly) punctuate the passage of ordinary life with significance, how do we resist the meaning-making machines while still engaging meaningfully?

I’ll explore these questions here and in a series of posts to follow by looking into the ways various media structure our experiences of disaster and construe “eventfulness.” Considering the political and social interests at stake in Japan and the US, I’m curious about how this particular disaster is being positioned in historical time, and what such placements obscure, or displace.  But mostly, as I meditate on my own relationship with Japan and reaction to the unfolding news, I wonder how to engage responsibly with media and the “real” event.   Helpful to this project is Diana Taylor’s model of the witness who, reflecting Louis Althusser’s model of dialectic spectatorship and Augusto Boal’s “spect-actor”, serves as a

“guarantor of the link between the I and the you, the inside and the outside”and “accepts the dangers and responsibilities of seeing and of acting on what one has seen.”

This task is not easy considering how often we are bombarded with images and news of disaster.  People tell me that they either feel distant and numb to the repeating images, or else they connect to the images through identification: imagining the people in the images are one’s own mother, brother, etc.  The problem with the latter approach is that it brings the other into one’s own ideological universe and blinds one to the political, cultural, and other factors that structure the experience of the event.

These modes of spectatorship are not unlike those of hegemony and identification criticized by Althusser in relationship to theater.  However, when we are dealing with the theater of the real, and its tendency towards catastrophe, the ideological agendas organizing devastation into spectacle elicit modes of relating, as well as detaching, that register in the body.

Quoting the work of Hal Foster regarding shock and subjectivity in America, anthropologist Allen Feldman points to the double nature of the subject’s pleasure:

“in its guise as witness the mass subject reveals its sadomasochistic aspect, for this subject is split in relation to a disaster; even as he or she may mourn the victims, even identify with them masochistically, he or she may also be thrilled sadistically by the victims of whom he or she is not one.”

Feldman raises the stakes when he explicitly links the creation of the “mass subject” in modernity to catastrophe and the visual technologies through which the catastrophic is ideologically produced and distributed.  Developing a theory of the “actuarial gaze,” which he describes as

“the visual organization and institutionalization of threat perception and prophylaxis,” Feldman asserts that “the visual culture of risk reportage circulates catastrophic images as a psychosocial and, ultimately, political desire and currency.”

The visceral intensities ignited and snuffed in these visual images constitute the subjectivity from which we establish ourselves as a public, and how we, as a public, are going to relate or not.

I’d like to say that my reluctance to participate in the disaster drama stemmed solely from a refusal to let this awful thing give me any sort pleasure, masochistic or otherwise.  Or that I harbored sophisticated political suspicions of risk reportage.

But I was primarily loathe to identify with the community of spectators I imagined excitedly rallying their concern on the receiving end of the mediated image.  It was the thrill of the social—the heightened sense of occasion—that I couldn’t stand.  Nothing, it seemed, would make me feel so far away, so alienated from the thing in itself than positioning myself from this A-frame cottage in Iowa somewhere inside the Big Deal Event.  As for approaching the thing in itself, I knew of no other means than those used by the community of spectators themselves: disaster footage.  But did I really want to go there?  As elaborated by Zizek, the “passion for penetrating the Real Thing” spirals into an increasingly violent pursuit of the Real within the images that structure our reality.  I did not want to experience the tsunami as the “thrill of the Real,” the ultimate special effect.

An internet search brought me to a video of the tsunami swallowing the coastal town of Kuji where I had stayed with a family nearly 10 years ago.   The dreadful thrill of the footage did indeed flood my body darkly, excessively, like the tsunami itself.  Feeling my own footing give way, despite sitting down, I braced myself.  Had someone been next to me, however, I would have reached out to them, without thinking, to steady myself.

I wonder now about that instinct.  Why, when something awful or awesome is about to happen, or has just happened, do we tend to grab on to the people next to us?  Surely, the support sought by such a gesture isn’t merely that of balance, but of affiliation.   I hadn’t wanted to get on the drama bandwagon, but here I was: wanting to connect.

The public I imagined gaping from a safe distance was probably not the public into which my friend had been calling me when she sent me that facebook message.   Rather than use the event to elevate the drama in our lives, she may have been reaching out to me in order to ground the drama in a shared reality. This is not to say she was trying to reduce the significance of the event; the ordinary world has its own sort of eventfulness.  As Kathleen Stewart describes it,

“modes of attending to scenes and events spawn socialities, identities, dream worlds, bodily states and public feelings of all kinds.”

The everyday eventfulness “resonating in bodies, scenes, and forms of sociality,” spreads in whispers and flourishes in indeterminacy.  Something is happening, is going to happen, to us.  The mode is one of suspension that fastens potential significance onto the tiniest of things.  The effect isn’t of elevating reality into ungraspable proportions, but of charging reality with limitless points of connection.

While the looming risk perception propagated in the “actuarial gaze” may make and mask the ways in which we always feel vulnerable to invisible, ever-present and threatening powers, maybe it fails to displace the ways we feel vulnerable to each other.   The witness, unlike the spectator, creates a zone of proximity in the “link between the I and the you”.   Amidst the spectacular scenes of ruin, my old friend took the risk of writing me after all this time, took the risk of hearing bad news and having to respond, and took the risk of being criticized or blogged about.  In doing so she offered me the first clue for thinking about mediated models for responsible action.

Unsurprisingly, and as is true of any ethnographic project, my direct access to different groups and individuals involved in the Bloomberg administration and in the debates over the development of the far west side ultimately proved to be highly uneven. This unevenness was a result of two factors–my own preexisting networks and difficulty of gaining access to certain powerful people.

Having attended graduate school in planning in NYC, I knew people involved in many different aspects of development politics in NYC. For instance, one good friend worked for the Community Board that represented the far west side, and through him I was able to gain access to and contacts within the various organizations and groups that opposed the administration’s plans for the far west side. I also knew several relatively junior planners working for the city government, who over beers and in the backs of hearing chambers and community halls were able to give me their appraisal of what was happening. While they were occasionally guarded, they tended to be pretty open, a product of both their relatively junior status–they didn’t have a huge amount at stake–and our previous relationship. And as with my friend in the opposition, they were able to make introductions to higher level policy makers and officials.

I also got access to city officials and elites of various sorts in the most typical of ethnographic fashions–by hanging around enough that I became another of the usual crowd that showed up at events related to the Hudson Yards plan (i.e.,the administration’s plans for the far west side). Once I was an established presence, starting up an informal conversation or asking for a more formal interview, even with relatively high-level officials, was not so difficult.

My own social and cultural characteristics played a role as well. As a relatively clean-cut white man from a relatively privileged background, I had enough familiarity with the trappings of power and enough exposure to wealthy and powerful people to feel relatively comfortable conversing with them and to adjust my self-presentation as the situation demanded. Again, there’s nothing particularly unique about this; anthropologists’ identities (and their manipulation) have always had a crucial impact on the shape of their fieldwork.

There was a point at which direct access became a major problem, and that was with the people at the very top levels of the administration. For example, I never was able to interview Mayor Bloomberg or the Deputy Mayor in charge of redevelopment, Daniel Doctoroff. I sent numerous letters, tried to exploit all the channels I could to get at  these two, and to other high level officials, but ultimately I was only able to get a sit-down interview with one very high-level official in the administration, and that only after he had left the administration and after I was no longer a graduate student but a professor.

However, that interview was very instructive. This official was exteremely frank with me. An ex-financier, he was completely dismissive of politicians and politics in general. He spoke openly and unselfconsciously about the need for city government to both act like a business and provide support for businesses. He made it clear that he thought that people like him were essential to both the city’s economic future and its proper governance.

In short, he made it clear to me that the conclusion I was reaching from analyzing the public actions and speech of these elites was basically a differently worded version of same story these elites were telling about themselves, albeit in a different vocabulary and with an (obviously) very different political interpretation than my own. I was beginning to see that the Bloomberg administration’s approach to governance, far from being the product of one eclectic businessman’s personal predilections and experience, was a class project, a claim to hegemony on the part of what I call in the book the city’s “postindustrial elite.” Now a member of that elite was frankly telling me that it was absolutely necssary that business elites run the city government, for it was their skills and talents that best fit the situation faced by a post-9/11 NYC faced with budget problems and fierce interurban competition. “The city needed us,” he told me. What was to me (to use crude terms) a play for capitalist hegemony in the city was to him a new commitment to public service and an effort to give back. What from my critical perspective seemed majorly problematic if not downright objectionable, from his perspective seemed an absolute and obvious necessity.

There is a sense–which I shared at the beginning of my research–that as people who share some important cultural and social characteristics with (professionalized, highly educated, relatively well-off) anthropologists, powerful and wealthy people in a place like NYC might be expected to have some some degree of reflexivity, if not self-doubt about what it is they are up to. This is not what I found. While the elites I spoke with were intelligent, thoughtful, and truly committed to what they saw as the best interests of NYC, they displayed very little doubt that they were doing the right thing, and that their critics were motivated primarily by personal/psychological factors–fear of the future, small-mindedness, greed, NIMBYism, etc–rather than by legitimate differences in political ideology, economic interest, urban identity, and so on. While there were efforts to dissemble, to obscure, to and distort the details of policy (would that piece of the project require public funding? Had there never been a plan for an alternative site for the west side Olympic stadium?) when it came to the big picture, elites were open, clear, and certain about what it was they were doing.

I think that there’s a also sense that the powerful are hiding something–that studying up is an opportunity to sweep away the curtain obscuring the working of power and see what’s really going on. But in fact, in my experience, power generally operates in plain sight. This is because the powerful operate in a world that is almost completely self-justified, thus rendering obscuration and dishonesty unnecessary. What is crucial to the ethnographic and anthropological study of power is not gaining access to its secret workings, but to understand the terms and production of its self-justification. In a sense this renders what is commonly held to be a central task of ethnography–”to undercover the hidden principles of a way of life,” to paraphrase an undergraduate text I recently taught–moot. It also makes studying up a far less difficult task than you might think.

First a brief backstory: from 1998-2000, I attended urban planning graduate school. Halfway through, I realized I was far more interested in analyzing cities than planning them, especially because (at that point anyway) in NYC “planning” often meant little more than manufacturing windfall profits for developers. So I headed off to the CUNY Graduate Center to work with their flock of urbanists.

Flashing forward to 2003: my dissertation research begins. The idea is for me to investigate the process by which the “business agenda” comes to be. Basically, what I am trying to do here is use ethnography to explore what happens in the gap between the functional requirements of capitalist urbanization (as laid out by Harvey, Castells, Molotch and Logan, etc. etc.) and the construction of an actual elite agenda in a specific historical, cultural, and geographical context. My focus is on the public spaces of development policy formation, such as conferences and other professional meetings, city council hearings, etc., but also on more informal mechanisms. For the latter, I draw on the network of contacts I began developing in graduate school, and I soon find out that the development policy world in NYC is pretty small and interlinked (I had an excel spreadsheet with just a couple of hundred names on it). I begin talking to people, attending those conferences, interviewing, and so on.

As I do so, I quickly realize three things. First, the Bloomberg administration is up to something different than I expect, given the standard shape of neoliberal urban governance in NYC or elsewhere. The administration is engaging in citywide urban planning, moving away from the use of indiscriminate tax subsidies, and perhaps most interestingly pulling a lot of new people into City Hall. Not surprisingly, given the new Mayor’s background in business, this includes several people from finance and other private sector industries. Less expected is the hiring of a number of very well-respected planning and policy professionals to staff the top levels of the Bloomberg administration’s development and planning agencies. Such people had largely been excluded from previous administration in favor of folks drawn from the real estate industry or from the murky world of NYC’s public-private development agencies (which basically amounts to the same thing). Bloomberg’s City Hall is becoming a hotbed corporate and professional technocracy.

Second, the Mayor’s business background (along with that of the other private sector people he was bringing into government) actually seems to matter in substantive ways. Economic development officials are telling the city council about the thorough rebranding campaign underway; city officials are referring to companies as “clients”; City Hall was being physically remodeled along the lines the Mayor had used in his private company, Bloomberg LLP; and perhaps most remarkably, the Mayor is referring to NYC as a “luxury product.” Importing private-sector logic into government is nothing new, in NYC or elsewhere, but now it is being done by people who can (and do!) credibly claim to be running the city like a private company.

Third, everybody in the development and policy world is focused on the far west side of Manhattan. Everybody. Nobody wants to talk about the business agenda formation; they want to talk about the Hudson Yards (the plan proposed for the area). The Bloomberg administration is joining NYC2012 (the city’s private Olympic bid organization), the Group of 35 (an elite commission charged with stimulating office development in NYC), the New York Jets, and a number of other planning and development groups in targeting the area to the west of Times Square and Penn Station for redevelopment. And as it turned out, graduate school classmates of mine are involved in the growing conflict over far west side redevelopment in a number of ways–some working for city agencies, others working for community organizations that oppose the plan as currently formulated.

This was a key point in my research; suddenly focusing on the process of business agenda formulation seemed a bit boring, especially since I had a full-scale development battle emerging in front of me! I also had this interesting phenomenon of the ex-CEO mayor actually running the city as a business (rather than just for business), which seemed to have some unpredictable consequences (like a willingness to raise taxes and hire egghead professors and policy professionals and respect their expertise). Finally, I had all these professionals–city planners, professors, public health experts, markets, educational experts, former management consultants, etc.–talking about the new spirit of professionalism and competence in City Hall, and the new excitement about public service that they and their peers were feeling.

Realizing all this, I began to split my research onto two tracks. First, I began investigating the early years of the Bloomberg administration, i.e. late 2001 to mid-2003, using interviews with officials, government documents, transcripts of administration testimony to the city council, and various secondary sources. Second, I threw myself into the conflict over the far west side of Manhattan, attending every community meeting, rally, city council hearing, conference, and official planning meeting I could find, and redirecting my interviewing towards those engaged in the conflict. I’ll write a bit more about the second, more ethnographic of these two tracks next time.

That’s because I investigate issues–urban governance and urban political economy in the contemporary United States–that have generally been addressed in interdisciplinary urban studies. However, the way I investigate them–using ethnographic methods and analysis, paying close attention to my informants’ words and to detail and particularity, and by taking seriously the impact of what I will gloss here as “cultural” matters in the context of urban governance–are very “anthropological,” or at least seem so to me.

Adding to this, the people I have for the most part studied–urban planners, city officials, economic development experts, developers and so on–are generally not studied in any real depth by anthropologists or by people in urban studies. Most urban anthropologists (not all, of course) tend to focus on relatively poor, or ethnic, or working class neighborhoods; when my “people” do show up, its usually only when City Hall and developers are trying to perpetrate some kind of nefarious development scheme. In urban studies, the folks I study typically are either subsumed into the application of some larger structuralist theory of urban governance (the urban growth machine, the capitalist urban state, urban neoliberalism, etc.), or (more common now that Marxist thought has been, if not displaced as dominant in critical urban studies, then theoretically hybridized, ethnographized, and made more flexible) incorporated into nicely context-sensitive empirical accounts in a relatively one-dimensional way, as inhabitants of government positions or as avatars of commodification, rather than as three dimensional individuals with class, race, gender, educational, and other biographical/social/cultural characteristics (that is to say, in the manner that anthropologists typically portray their informants).

Urban anthropology and critical urban studies do a lot of things really well–think of how much we know about the dynamics, complexities, and social organization of poor urban neighborhoods, or about why it is that developers so often get what they want from city government–but one thing they aren’t particularly good at is providing well-rounded and robust accounts of the formation, makeup, development, history, and internal tensions of urban elites. I think this is important to do for both analytical and political reasons.

So that’s what I am up to. Hopefully it begins to explain why an anthropologist would do something like study the administration of New York’s ex-billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Exactly one year ago this week, my first book, Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution was published. The book, based on fieldwork conducted between 2000 and 2007 with Tehrani youth, looked at ways in which the discourse on sexuality was changing and how these changes in sexuality were linked to a larger social movement as articulated by the Iranian youth themselves. When I began reading the reviews of my book (not recommended for the thin-skinned first time author), my stomach churned. “Is sexuality really political?” some reviewers asked, “do the sartorial changes in youth fashion or behavior have deeper reaching impact?” others wrote, “how deeply do these sexual behaviors penetrate Iranian society?”, “could sex unseat the Mullahs?”  while still others asked (on Savage Minds in fact) “is ‘pretty’ the new protest?”. When I talked about my research with my students, some of the same questions came up. At first, I was frustrated, angry even. What part of my clarifications and caveats had readers and students missed? Then I realized, my mistakes were twofold: 1) I had conflated the idea of a sexual revolution (think sexual revolution a-la 1960s Greenwich Village) with the social movement that was inspiring young people to lobby for social change, and 2) I was describing only a few appendages of a larger “body that was then searching for a head” (as Robin Wright has said) – which it found this past summer in presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mussavi. But let us start with the first problem.

The phrase “sexual revolution” or enqelab-i-jensi (in Persian) was one that came organically from my interlocutors, and was not one that was placed on them by me or any other academic or journalist. Young people and their parents would talk about a change in the discourse around sexuality and heterosexual and heterosocial relations. This was referred to as their sexual revolution. Thus, when talking about “Iran’s Sexual Revolution” the focus must remain on the phrase ‘sexual revolution’ without detaching the words to ask “is sex revolutionary?” Sex, in itself, is not leading to a revolution. Neither I, nor my interlocutors were trying to claim this, however, a “sexual revolution” refers to a revolution, or perhaps more accurately put, a change, in the way in which we think, act, or talk about sex. To that end, young people and many others in Tehran had achieved their goals in that sex was talked about and thought about in different ways than it had been in the decades before. What is important to note, however, is that this sexual revolution was just one part of a larger movement that my interviewees referred to as a sociocultural revolution or enqelab-i-farhangi. This social movement encompassed behaviors such as pushing the envelope on Islamic dress, sexual behaviors, heterosocializing, driving around in cars playing loud illegal music, partying, drinking, dancing, the list goes on to include basically, young people doing what they aren’t supposed to do under Islamic law. But, many people ask, don’t youth everywhere do these things? What sets youth in Iran apart from their counterparts say in Texas? The answer is this: 1) the stakes are much higher – in Iran, you could get arrested for engaging in these behaviors and the consequences could include long term imprisonment, lashings and other abuse, 2) engaging in these behaviors are often a step for many to becoming politically active. Everything in Iran is political and politicized. The regime in power has politicized Islamic dress, certain types of music, even certain websites. Those violating its rules are harassed, punished, sometimes forced to leave the country. Many young people in Iran have become inspired to engage in political activism through their involvement in these social movements.

This leads us to the second problem, the body looking for the head. During the time I conducted my fieldwork in Iran, a generational shift was taking place. The momentum was building for something, but none of us could quite put our finger on what. Young people seemed to be coming together, deploying 21st century tools around them such as the internet, facebok, Twitter, and seeking to organize through networks around the world. But no one knew exactly what they were organizing for, and what kind of social/political movement they were constructing. What we knew was this: the majority of Iran’s population – urban, educated youth – was disenchanted with the regime. Whether they came to this sentiment through their frustration at not being able to wear what they want, socialize with who they want, prey how they want, or engage in civic society the way they want, they had all come to the conclusion that the current regime was: 1) not representative of them, and 2) was not always acting in their interest. “Why don’t they work on solving this horrible unemployment problem instead of cracking down on what we wear?” asked one of my interlocutors, articulating a sentiment shared by many young Tehranis with whom I spoke. People were frustrated. Educated, restless, youth began turning to the tools they had around them, honing their skills, looking to communicate their sentiments to each other and the world around them through blogs, music, films and a presence in cyberspace. Those of us writing about this large body of Iranian youth focused on different appendages. Some wrote about Iranian bloggers and the blogosphere (Alavi 2005), some looked at music (Levine 2008), some, astutely, tried to look at larger social change amongst the youth (Molavi 2005, Khosravi 2007) For me, I wrote about the sexual revolution, just one part of a larger movement for social and political change.

This past summer, in June of 2009, the body of social change that had been searching for a head finally found one: the fraudulent election of Ahmadinejad, and the figurehead of Mir Hossein Moussavi. Young people (the same ones that spoke of sexual and social revolution a few years ago) began organizing, pouring into the streets in an organized fashion, using their bodies and strategically deploying technology such as camera phones, twitter and facebook to both organize and to speak to the Iranian regime and the rest of the world. Earlier today thousands of protesters marched the streets of Tehran, pumping their fists into the air and chanting “Coup! Government resignation”. Some wore green (to indicate their allegiance to Mir Hossein Moussavi) many did not. Up until now, much of the recent media depictions of the situation in Iran paint a picture of a stolen election, and a discontented public demanding a recount at least, and the installation of their preferred candidate. While the election has presented frustrated Iranians with a catalyst and a reason to protest, what we are witnessing in Iran is not a simple protest over election fraud. Rather, disenchantment with the regime, and the desire to mobilize a civil rights type movement in Iran has been building for many years, encompassing, but not limited to movements such as the sexual revolution, internet revolution and . This election, the overt nature of repression and fraudulent behavior has given many people the window they were looking for to mobilize a movement that goes beyond election politics. While some protesters are in fact expressing frustration at the election fallout, many are asking for an entire overhauling of the system. Would they be happy if Moussavi were installed? Perhaps. But many want more than this, they want to change the system of Islamic jurisprudence, and fundamentally, they want their rights back. While some might see the protests as “calming down” or “dying down”, the reality is that people have tasted the sweetness of voicing their discontent, and they have no plans of backing down easily. We need to listen to the calls made by the chanting protesters, “Coup! Government resignation”.

So, reflecting on the questions “is pretty the new protest?” or “could sex unseat the Mullahs?” some might say no, but a macro look at the situation reveals that this is all part of a process. It is unclear what the future will hold for Iran. What I do know is that these avenues of pushing for social change are roads that lead to networks pushing for political change. I don’t know what the outcome of this post-election aftermath will be, but what I do know is that I need to look more at the big picture, and I need to learn to ask bigger and better questions.

Why Janice Harper? Largely, I think, because she is a woman who happened to believe in real gender equality in an especially backward university setting. But, Lesley Sharp also implicitly predicted what would happen when she wrote, in her review, that “Harper pulls no punches.” The critical research that Janice has done on unpopular subjects is the hallmark of her intellectual integrity, of what we need most from academics.

Read the whole thing at The Porcupine – and while you’re there, check out the rest of the material on offer from Eric and his stable of radical-leaning writers.

Image by monsieur paradis via Flickr

The University of Chicago has posted some of the audio from the “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency” conference held there last spring (2008). Some of the speakers are not included, whether because they opted out or there were copyright issues or what, I don’t know. But among the speakers included are:

• David Price’s great plenary keynote, “Soft Power, Hard Power and the Anthropological “Leveraging” of Cultural “Assets”: Distilling the Theory, Politics and Ethics of Anthropological Counterinsurgency”
• Jeremy Walton’s discussion of Turkish pulp fiction and action flicks, “Inclement Storms, Hungry Wolves: Consuming the War on Terror in Contemporary Turkey”
• Hugh Gusterson on the Pentagon’s penchant for simplistic, technologized solutions to human problems – with a discussion of the Phrase-a-lator, a handheld device that translates spoken Arabic to English (apparently the fish-in0the-ear scenario isn’t panning out) – in “The Cultural Turn in the War on Terror”
• Roberto Gonzalez on the theoretical implications of the concept of Human Terrain, “’Human Terrain’ and Indirect Rule: Theoretical, Practical, and Ethical Concerns
• My own historical contextualization of the failures of anthropological counterinsurgency and the incompatabilities between anthropology and military action, “The Uses of Anthropology in the Insurgent Age”
• And lots more great stuff!

The full-length papers will be collected in the University of Chicago Press’ forthcoming book Anthropology and Counterinsurgency, due out in February 2010 (to the best of my knowledge).

The more recent conference “Reconsidering American Power” was also recorded, and I hope that audio will be available from that quicker than the year it took to get audio up from last year’s conference. I’ll let you know when that’s available.

First, Roberto Gonzalez sent me this link to a BBC Radio 4 show on the embedding of anthropologists in military units in Iraq and Afghanistan. The show features Gonzalez, Michael Gilsenan, Hugh Gusterson, Montgomery McFate, Marcus Griffin, and others. Listen quickly, as it appears to only be posted until the end of April.

Next up, Laura Nader speaks about her recent book (with Ugo Mattei) Plunder: When the Rule of Law is Illegal. Any opportunity to hear Nader bring her tremendous mind to bear on the issues that define our lives is not to be missed!

Finally, from the Wired Danger Room comes this odd report about the military’s efforts to reproduce anthropological analysis using computer modeling. Now, I’ve been pretty dismissive of the military’s ability to grapple with the implications of anthropology – there is, I firmly believe (and find borne out over and over in the historical record) a fundamental disconnect between the logic of military action and the logic of anthropological practice. But even I’m a little shocked (and a little amused…) by the justification given for looking into the use of computerized behavioral modeling:

More intriguing about this proposal, however, is the reasoning for why virtual anthros may be better than the real thing: “Today in DoD, this analysis is conducted by anthropological experts, known to carry their own bias, which often leads to faulty recommendations and inaccurate behavioral forecasting.”

Let me know how that works out for ya, guys.

I’ll be presenting a paper during Friday’s panel session, “Uses and Abuses of Social Sciences: Disciplines of and for What?” Entitled “Are We Ready Yet for Action Anthropology?”, my paper is intended to counter arguments that anthropologists’ refusal to cooperate with military and intelligence efforts like HTS, PRISP, and the Minerva Consortium necessarily condemns anthropology to irrelevance. My hope is that by examining the model of action anthropology, which has gained little traction in academic anthropology in the 50 years since Sol Tax and his students proposed it, a way of meaningfully engaging contemporary issues might emerge that avoids the troubling issues raised by direct subordination to military and intelligence agencies.

Other participants include David Price, Catherine Lutz, Hugh Gusterson, Jeff Bennett, Robert Vitalis, Matthew Sparke, Sean Mitchell, Kevin Caffrey, Amahl Bishara, Rochelle Davis, Roberto Gonzalez, Keith Brown, Chris Nelson, and a variety of U of Chicago folks from anthropology and the other social sciences, including honorary Savage Mindster Marshall Sahlins. (Note: I’m listed as “editor” of Savage Minds, a title I neither asked for nor knew was being ascribed to me! I’m also listed as an “independent researcher”, despite my 6 years affiliation with the College of Southern Nevada…)

On a related note, the paper I presented last year will be out early 2010 from University of Chicago Press in a collected volume of essays from the conference. (Can we talk some time about academic publishers demanding all copyrights? For free?) As far as I know, the book will be titled following the conference, that is Anthropology and Counterinsurgency. Look for it in an academic bookstore near you!

Despite the fact that a foreign policy organization chaired by Mr. McCain gave more than $850,000 to Khalidi’s Center for Palestine Research and Studies. Despite the fact that Khalidi is himself a semite, born in NY, with a “moral commitment to peace and justice in the Middle East.” Despite all this, the McCain campaign seems intent on pursuing this new McCarthyism.

For this reason I am endorsing supporting an idea I read about on Crooked Timber: that academics should show their support of Khalidi by buying his book, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. As Henry Farrell says:

It doesn’t take much in the way of prophetic insight to predict that we are going to be seeing a lot more of this kind of innuendo from disgusting slime-purveyors like Daniel Pipes if Obama wins – one of the lessons of the Clinton years is that when the nastier elements of the right are losing elections, they start trying to turn the culture war back up to 11. It would be nice to get a head start on the pushback.

Now if only I can get Mike Goldfarb to call me an anti-semite to sell my book! (Hmmm, I guess I need to write a book first …)