A little over a month ago I uploaded 24 minutes of raw footage of the Palestine/Israel Wall I shot in 2009. This is footage for a documentary I am making about divided cities. I’ve finished the sections on Nicosia, Cyprus and Belfast, North Ireland and I’ve finished shooting but not editing this story on East Jerusalem. Unedited and with its natural sounds I thought it was gritty and evocative enough to stand alone on YouTube. I uploaded it and titled it “Palestine Apartheid Wall Raw Footage.” Last week I got a YouTube message from user WHW680 who kindly informed me that he remixed my footage into the French pro-independent Palestine hip-hop video “the Wall of Zionist Racist Freedom for Palestine.” Shocked and honored I watched the video.

Artistically, WHW680 doesn’t use the shots I would; he doesn’t get the projection ratios right; I wouldn’t quite be so intense with the title; and he cuts the edits too early or too late, making the viewing experience choppy. I am being intentionally superficial here for a reason, as I am trying to express the first round of mental dissonance experienced when remixed. As a cinematographer it is an enlightening if challenging ordeal. It gets deeper, too, when your work is not only remixed in a way that challenges your technical and artistic vision but is used politically in surprising ways.

The footage was used to make a music video for the track “Palestine” by Le Ministère des Affaires Populaires, a popular Arab-French hip-hip group in Paris, off of “Les Bronzés Font du Ch’ti” described as “an album that sounds like a call to rebellion, insurrection and disobedience but also solidarity.” They tour Palestine, including Gaza. The music is fantastic, mixing breaks, good flows, meaningful lyrics, and longing violins. Obviously I can get behind the activism of a liberated Palestine but becoming a tool for propaganda, despite my agreement with it, without my vocal consent, is a creatively dissonant experience.

Political semiotic engineering for the right causes I can dig, but agency denying actions are experienced as a type of cognitive violation nonetheless. The quintessential sign of this is the final few second of the video. After the footage ends and while the music still lingers, the words “Freedom, Return, and Equality,” and “Free Palestine-Boycott Israel,” and www.bdsmovement.net circle a Palestinian flag. This final frame essentially brands this video for the BDS Movement, a civil rights organization focused on “boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights.”

This isn’t “my” footage anymore, WHW680 generously cites me in the description, but the semiotic potential of the footage previously shot by me is mobilized for the BDS Movement. The aesthetic and the political fold into each other in remix activities in which preceding agencies, my own as cameraman, is incorporated or replaced by the technical agencies of the French remixer, WHW680, and reformulated into the political vision of the pro-Palestinian BDS Movement. Which is all good, but it gives me a new look at remix culture.

This experience has forced me to eat some of my words. Remix culture isn’t a myth. I agree with my earlier detractors who stated that it isn’t about the volume of the activity nor the impact of this remixed song or that music video. I would add something more. Being remixed is personally transformative for those being reformatted by values and practices beyond their control. Not only does remix challenge jurisprudence and liberalism, and present new modes of knowledge production, it also modifies the subjective constitution of agency in artistic and political social sphere.

One of the amazing things about the work of each of these artists is how resonant it is with what we do as anthropologists. Like ethnography, their images are not simply about ‘documentation.’ They are about conveying something of lived experience that allows us, provokes us, to ask questions about how some particular lives come to look they way they do. They invite us to linger on the lives of soldiers long enough to think about how they are, and also are not, like others.

It strikes me that in our disciplinary conversations about what various modes of anthropological engagement might look like, we often fail to recognize the possibilities of such resonances. These possibilities are especially promising when the lives we explore are characterized, in one way or another, by war. Here, issues of politics and ethics lie both close to the surface and close to the bone. Tim Hetherington’s work was powerful proof of these possibilities.

For example, he said many times that he hoped Restrepo, his thoroughly ethnographic Afghanistan war documentary, co-directed with Sebastian Junger, would offer a new and more productive starting place for thinking about the war and US military intervention.

As Tim put it in an excellent interview at Guernica where he responds to Leftist criticism of the film:

While moral outrage may motivate me, I think demanding moral outrage is actually counter-productive because people tend to switch off. […] Sure, the face of the U.S. soldier is the “easiest entrée into the Afghan war zone” but it has allowed me to touch many people at home with rare close-up footage of injured and dead Afghan civilians (as well as a young U.S. soldier having a breakdown following the death of his best friend). Perhaps these moments represent the true face of war rather than the facts and figures of political analyses or the black and white newsprint of leaked documents.

In a more personal mode, Tim offered the experimental film Diary, which reflects something of the compulsions, rhythms, and senses of his movement into and out of ‘zones of killing’, as he suggested we might think of such spaces. Here too, we can find resonances with anthropological explorations of the particular vertiginous experiences of being in and out and in such spaces of violence, and of the uneven geographies of deadly violence.

News continues to unfold about the incident in Libya that may have also killed photographer Chris Hondros, and that seriously injured photographers Guy Martin, Michael Christopher, among others. And as we continue to hear more of Tim Hetherington’s death, and more remembrances of his life and work, I’ll also be thinking about what his work, and the work of other artists and journalists, has to offer us anthropologists; the places where our various projects meet, and the possibilities for thinking and acting that might begin from there.

There has been a lot of talk about the importance of social media in recent world events. See for instance, here, here, and here. Some of the more astute commentators have referred to earlier technological revolutions and their impact on television: usenet, fax machines, television, cameras, telegraph, and even the printing press. One technology, however, always seem to get left out, maybe because it seems too “obvious,” and that is literacy.

This is too bad because there is a great literature on the subject. A user named “dinalopez” has put together a wonderful bibliography on WorldCat – a list which contains many of my favorite articles on the subject, as well as many I haven’t read. I wanted to draw upon this critical literacy studies literature to make three points about technology and social change.

The first point comes from a paper F. Niyi Akinnaso (my Ph.D. advisor) wrote for the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History. “Schooling, Language, and Knowledge in Literate and Nonliterate Societies” draws on Akinnaso’s knowledge of Yoruba divination practices to challenge the “over-simplified view of education in nonliterate societies.” This is important because he shows that the social organization of schooling associated with literate societies is not dependent on literacy, and that similar practices can be found in some nonliterate societies. He does not deny that these institutional patterns are more typical of literate societies, but it would be a mistake to attribute too much explanatory force to literacy. The Yoruba case shows that literacy is not a necessary factor in the creation of such social institutions.

The second point comes from Brian Street’s important book Literacy in theory and Practice. In this book Street argues that there is not one universal form of literacy, but multiple “literacies.” In Iran in the 1970s (where he did fieldwork) many people learn to “read” the Koran by wrote memorization. They are literate in the sense that they can look at a page of the Koran and recite the appropriate passages, but not in the sense of being able to use their literacy to read other texts besides the Koran.

Finally, the third point I wanted to make about literacy comes from an article by Terence Turner about how the Kayapo in Brazil have appropriated the use of video cameras. I put this in the context of literacy precisely because one of the important aspects of video use by the Kayapo is to record the promises of politicians. Before video cameras they similarly made audio recordings – both useful methods for a society which (at the time) lacked literacy. It is also worth mentioning a second aspect of their use of video technology, which is their appearance, in native-dress, at political protests carrying video cameras. Here their use of video cameras became the story, one with broad international appeal, allowing them to reach a much larger audience.

So what do these three points teach us about “Twitter Revolutions”? First, the technology itself is not as important as the social conditions in which it is used. In many cases social media is more a means of communicating what is happening on the ground with the outside world, as diasporic populations keep in touch with their friends and family at home via Facebook and Twitter, than it is a means of organizing activity on the ground. If these social networks exist, families will communicate with them however they can, whether by usenet, fax machine, telegraph, or letter. The second point is that the mere existence of these technologies does not imply that people will necessarily make use of them in a particular way. Certainly there is a huge difference in how Twitter is used at the annual anthropology conferences and at an event like SXSW. And the third point is that it isn’t necessarily a bad thing for people to be fascinated by how this technology is being used in Egypt. Certainly it has allows us to voyeuristically participate in world events from afar. Whether this helps or not is hard to say, but I’ll leave you with this quote by Aaron Bady:

I am under no illusions that it will do the people of Egypt any particular good for me to retweet links to articles and images and expressions of the righteous human spirit so gloriously on display in Egypt right now — much as I would like it to — but that’s not really why I’ve been doing it. It’s selfish. It is for me, because it’s what I need to do as a person whose spiritual body has gotten very hungry. I want to be a part of something hopeful because I find that too much hopelessness has crept too deeply into the person I have no choice but to be.

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.

So, when you see this woman with red fingernails, she’s not just risking arrest for holding that sign, she’s risking it for the shade of her nail polish.

It relates to a Juan Cole piece, “Class v. Culture Wars in Iranian Elections” in which he pointed out that “the Iranian women who voted in droves for Khatami haven’t gone anywhere…”

I don’t know enough about class and gender politics in Iran to say much about this. The fact that the women in these pictures often conform to Western notions of glamor, including fair skin, had struck me in the media coverage about the elections, but I hadn’t thought about it beyond that until I read Jezebel and Juan Cole’s posts. What do you think?

UPDATE: Thanks to Gregory Starrett for mentioning Pardis Mahdavi’s new book, Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution. Here is an interview with her:

Local brands of sildenafil available in Egypt, including: Viagra, Virecta, Erec, Kemagra, Vigorama, Vigoran, Phragra, and Vigorex. Photo by Lisa Wynn

First, Americans might think of erectile dysfunction drugs (EDDs) as somewhat shameful (think about mocking attitudes towards Bob Dole’s decision to do Viagra ads), but they have a more positive connotation in Egypt. Two reasons:

1. As I’ve written elsewhere, in Egypt these drugs seem to be associated as much with the promise of exuberant, excessive sexuality rather than a shameful lack of erection. Maybe it would be more accurate to call them erection enhancement drugs rather than erectile dysfunction drugs.
2. Even though both EDDs and ECPs can be equally used in normative and non-normative sexual relationships, EDDs are seen by some as being less morally suspect. As my colleague, Dr Hosam Moustafa pointed out to me in an e-mail exchange,

“When we talk about marriage, which is the only state that makes sexual relations halal [religiously acceptable], we ask: What are the original aims of sexual relations? Answer: pleasure and getting kids. This what all humans have deep in their minds, whatever cultural background they come from. About the two drugs, how do they related with these two aims of sexual relations? Answer: erectile dysfunction drugs are associated with both positive sides of a sexual relation, i.e. both giving pleasure and ensuring having kids. EC and all contraceptives are associated with a negative outcome of sexual relations, i.e. not having kids.”

A pharmacy door in Cairo with ads for Cialis (top) and Viagra (bottom) on the front door. Photo by Hosam Moustafa.

Second: EDDs have a historical association with the black market / gift economy. When Viagra was first introduced and before lots of generic varieties were available, it was hard to get and expensive (it still is the most expensive brand on the market). People smuggled it into the country. It was given as gifts from one man to another. It is even used to grease the wheels of bureaucracy, being offered as a small bribe. Relationships with physicians are cultivated in order to access drugs that are hard to get. Even though sildenafil is now widely available in a range of prices, other drugs said to produce the same effect (Cialis and Tramadol are two such examples) still circulate semi-illicitly, in the category of a commodity that is thought to require both connections and expertise to obtain, and this is part of their appeal: they’re more than just commodities, they have a special aura.

So in asking why don’t ECPs have the same aura and circulate amongst women in the same way, maybe it’s partly because they’ve never been part of the black market. Packs of contraceptive pills, the kind you could cut up to equal a dose of emergency contraception, are government subsidized, widely available, and really cheap.

This sign at a Cairo restaurant stall advertises “Viagra soup.” The starred text on the bottom left reads, “For adults only.” Photo by Hosam Moustafa.

Finally: there are key continuities between modern pharmaceutical products for erectile dysfunction drugs and more “traditional” treatments, so the appeal of drugs like Viagra and Cialis is partly that they tie in with pre-existing ideas about how you can ingest certain substance to increase your virility. I’ve already written about Viagra sandwiches, and there’s also Viagra soup, dates, and who knows what else? This takes the notoriety of a global pharmaceutical product and maps it out over pre-existing notions about the virility-enhancing power of seafood. Using drug brand names to label food is not just a phenomenon in popular (sha`bi, as they say in Egypt) restaurants, either; a famous restaurant in an expensive mall in Alexandria offers the same soup (but wouldn’t let us photograph their menu!).It’s not just seafood that has this reputation. In the picture below is a wall of oils at a local apothecary, or `attar, which includes gargeer seeds or oil (that’s arugula to North Americans, rocket to Australians), about which there is a popular saying, “If women knew what gargeer could do for their men, they would grow it under the bed” (rhyming gargeer, arugula, with sareer, bed).

Salad = virility! It’s not exactly the American imagination of how food is gendered.

(Above) Apothecary wall with herbs, spices, and oils, including, on top, gargeer (rocket/arugula) oil. Photo by Hosam Moustafa.

Also I can’t resist including a picture of Cow Jam from the same pharmacy. A kind of vitamin supplement, the product contains neither cows nor jam. Photo by Hosam Moustafa.

But I put “traditional” in problematizing quotations above because it’s not like there’s a clear line between “traditional” remedies for erectile dysfunction and modern pharmaceutical products. Below is a picture of several products that Dr Moustafa and I bought in Cairo apothecaries. It’s not just oils and herbs. There are mysterious packaged products imported from all over the place, as well as local, “traditional” products. In the latter category, in the bottom right hand corner you can see shards of a resin — sold by the gram and very expensive — that is dissolved in hot water and then applied to the penis. It has a strong numbing effect and is supposed to make it possible for a man to perform longer.

Apothecary products purchased in Cairo. Photo: Lisa Wynn.

In the former category, notice on the right the package of Lina Sex, a gum which is supposed to increase the female libido, and which claims to be manufactured by “Astra zencesa group pharmaceuticals.” (As Dr Hosam Moustafa explains it, “All these drugs for women are used to treat decreased libido of women. It’s a main complaint here from most men that their women have decreased libido which I can explain as a kind ofself defense from men — I mean trying to say ‘the problem is not only me, my wife also has troubles’.”) The boxes with a crocodile and rhinoceros on them are made by the same local Egyptian company.

The delightfully mysterious “Flower Jel” claims to be “Made in U.S.A.” and reads on the back of the package,

“For the Past Si years, Ben Huczek Has Suffered From impotered and, despitence and, despoint the cause fortuntcly, Ben of the First Britis men to take FLOWER JEL after being referred to aconsultant urolgist who w conducting clinical conducting clinical Trials of the sex pill.”

Somewhat less delightfully mysterious is “Germany Black widows Powder Fever (Ms. special Super Night)”, which seems to be marketing itself as a date rape drug, because it says on the side of the box:

“Powdery white, tasteless, can quickly dissolve in various beverages without being found, after a few minutes after drinking, quick wins, after taking Chunxindangyang, fast exciting, noodles dinner, shortness of breath, hot air, eager to head shot, body heat, impatient with the rest of your love, this time of women, warm and flowing.”

Germany Black widows Powder Fever. Photo by Lisa Wynn

Incidentally, despite the claims on the side of the box, the contents are a clump of brown sludge with a powerful odor (and hence, I presume, taste, but I haven’t tried it).

The point is that when you go to apothecaries to find “traditional” remedies, what you find is a range of products that circulate transnationally (lots have Chinese characters on them but claim to be manufactured in Germany, Japan, or the US because of the prestige associated with products from these countries), that make reference to international pharmaceutical companies and clinical trials and German pornography, and that borrow on globally circulating (and ancient) notions of what constitutes an aphrodisiac (such as the Egyptian product with the rhinoceros picture on the box, even though rhinoceroses disappeared from Egypt during the Pharaonic era). Even local remedies and herbal formulations are now taught in the Khedr El-Attar apothecary training school, mimicking modern university education formats.

– L.L. Wynn and Hosam Moustafa

These days it’s not that hard to do websites in Arabic, but six years ago, it was a real puzzle. I couldn’t find any Arabic language plug-ins for DreamWeaver or FrontPage, so as I cut and pasted the Arabic text into the HTML programs, it wouldn’t display the Arabic properly, so it was really hard to do the links on specific words. The Arabic phrase for emergency contraception, which looks like this in Arabic:

منع الحمل الطارئ

looks like this in HTML code:

منع الحمل الطارئ

So I just had to muck around, highlighting different phrases, counting off letters or doing searches for strings of HTML code like that above, putting in links and then seeing where the links showed up in the Arabic texts, and then shifting the links around accordingly. It was a stupidly slow process. There was probably a better way to do it, but I wasn’t able to figure it out, so I slogged through the slow way.

Translation vs adaptation
I’m getting off the topic. Angel had decided that we couldn’t simply translate the existing website into Arabic. It had to be adapted to fit the social and cultural context of the Arabic speaking world and meet users’ needs. So, for example, she decided to include specific questions in the FAQs section on the interpretation and acceptability of EC in Orthodox Christianity and in Islamic jurisprudence. We hunted around for any fatwas on EC, both in published compendia of fatawa as well as in online databases, but we couldn’t find any. In fact, in the past 5 years, I have only found 1 fatwa on EC in an one of the many online fatwa databases.

That’s where interest in this Egypt research project came from. What did it mean that there were no fatwas on EC? Either it meant that EC wasn’t on anyone’s radar screen and was so totally unknown that nobody was asking about its status in Islam – hard to believe since there were dedicated products available in several Middle Eastern countries (including Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon) – OR it meant that EC was just wholly uncontroversial and subsumed under jurisprudential discussions about pre-coital hormonal contraceptives.

Well I thought that was a really interesting possibility, considering how in the U.S., as I previously described, EC’s status as a contraceptive vs. abortifacient has been contested, and debate often hinges on the mechanism of action.

Angel and I developed a working hypothesis, which we published in a little paper for Harvard Health Policy Review along with colleagues James Trussell and Aida Rouhana: that debate over EC in the Arab world was likely to hinge around the social and moral contexts of the sex that precedes EC use, rather than focusing on mechanism of action. We hypothesized this partly based on existing debates in Islamic jurisprudence about contraception, but also based on interpretations of abortion in Islamic law, where the acceptability of abortion is partly considered in light of when life begins. (Also considered is the relative value of the mother’s life versus the life of a fetus: in contrast to some extreme Christian interpretations, in Islamic law the woman’s life is always considered more valuable than the fetus’s life, because the woman is already embedded within existing kinship networks of sociality and obligation, whereas the fetus is not.)

In most of the interpretations of the four Sunni schools of Islamic jurisprudence, ensoulment, the joining of the soul with the developing fetus, is not believed to occur right at the moment of fertilization or implantation. Some jurists think ensoulment occurs at 40 days, while others opine that it does not occur until 4 months, the time when the pregnant woman can usually start to feel the movements on the fetus inside her. This, we speculated, would predict a lack of debate about EC’s mechanism of action in the Muslim world.

By the way, I’ve repeatedly submitted questions to several online fatwa websites, requesting a fatwa on EC. Nobody has ever responded! Next year we plan to submit a request directly to Dar al-Ifta in Egypt (the main body for issuing fatawa in Egypt) to get a formal ruling. But my colleague, Dr Hosam Moustafa, has carefully searched the Dar al-Ifta archives and not found a single existing ruling.

Egyptian archetypes of EC users
I’ve described the archetypes of EC users that appeared in US debates. What archetypes are there in Egypt? First, I should note that there really hasn’t been much public debate about the topic. A dedicated product is available in Egypt and since most non-narcotic pharmaceutical products are, in practice, available from pharmacists without prescription, there was no situation where Egyptians publicly debated the appropriateness of EC being available without the mediation of a physician, as there was in the U.S. and many other countries.

Nevertheless, there seems to be a widespread assumption that emergency contraception will be used by women who are engaging in illicit, premarital sex. In short, EC has “the reputation of being used by teenagers and prostitutes,” as one informant put it. Why? As the same informant said,

“Pregnancy? Is this emergency? It is just a normal result. When will it be an emergency? When it is really negative with the sexual relation. This happens only when the sexual relation is not an accepted one, I mean haram [i.e. forbidden, illicit].”

The assumption is also that people who are having sex within a proper marital relationship will be able to plan their contraceptive use properly, so there won’t be accidents and emergencies – and if they accidentally get pregnant, well then that’s a gift from God, not a disaster.

The advertising used to promote Contraplan II (the dedicated brand of EC available in Egypt) works hard to dispel this association between EC use and illicit sex. The promotional materials published in major Egyptian newspapers in the last year suggests a list of likely EC users:

- People who are regularly using contraceptives but they missed a dose, a condom tore, or they had a problem with their IUD;
- People who had sexual intercourse without protection and the husband and wife don’t currently want to get pregnant;
- The husband suddenly returns from travel or from work abroad and there was no time to get started on a regular contraceptive method before they had sex; and finally,
- In case of rape.

The language makes it clear that most users will be married couples, with the rare exception of sexual assault.

But the marketing strategy of the company belies this portrait of the respectable married EC user. The radio ads promoting the product aired on Nogoom FM (“Stars FM”), a radio station that is directed towards teens and young adults – who are not likely to be married. The strategy seems to be to publicly put a respectable face on EC use, but to simultaneously make sure that info circulates amongst the community where need for EC is most acute: unmarried people who have sex.

OK that’s enough info on EC in Egypt. Next up, Viagra soup – but I’ll come back to EC in a later post when I write about our methods and the different kinds of info that a team of a female American anthropologist and a male Egyptian small-town physician are able to get…

References:

Foster A, Wynn L, Rouhana A, Polis C, Trussell J. Disseminating on-line reproductive health information in Arabic: Results from a survey of users of an emergency contraception website. CyberOrient: Online journal of the virtual Middle East. April 2006

Wynn L, Foster A, Rouhana A, Trussell J. The politics of emergency contraception in the Arab world: Reflections on Western assumptions and the potential influence of religious and social factors. Harvard Health Policy Review. Spring 2005; 6(1):38-47.

Foster A, Wynn L, Rouhana A, Polis C, Trussell J. Reproductive health, the Arab world and the internet: usage patterns of an Arabic-language emergency contraception website. Contraception. Spring 2005; 72;130-137.

Some interesting paradoxes to contemplate:

• Why are there at least a dozen local brands of sildenafil available from Egyptian pharmacies, and “Viagra sandwiches” or “Viagra soup” is on the menu at almost every restaurant that specializes in seafood, but there is only one brand of emergency contraceptive pill in Egypt, which is sold by an NGO because it’s not considered commercially viable enough for the mainstream pharmaceutical companies to bother with it?

The tap in the bathroom of the apartment where I stay when I’m doing research in Egypt. My roommate and I have often wondered where these came from. Was it a marketing campaign by Pfizer during the era when they weren’t allowed to engage in direct-to-consumer advertising for their product? Or did some sink manufacturer just think it would be cool to put Viagra on the handles?

• A number of studies show that induced abortion (as opposed to “spontaneous abortion” aka miscarriages) is quite common in Egypt; one carefully designed study showed that there are probably as many per capita abortions in Egypt (where abortion is prohibited unless two doctors certify that it’s necessary to protect the health of the mother) as there are abortions in the United States (where it is constitutionally protected but often restricted). Misoprostol, a medication used to treat ulcers, can be used very effectively to induce early abortion, and it’s readily available without prescription from pharmacies in Egypt. Yet preliminary research suggests that its abortifacient properties are virtually unknown to Egyptians. It’s super cheap, and a lot safer than illegal surgical abortions. Women could induce abortions themselves for a few dollars, but instead they risk their future fertility, their health and their lives having unsafe abortions, or they pay huge sums of money to have illegal surgical abortions performed by qualified doctors outside of regular office hours. Why?
  .
• A recent fatwa (a ruling of Islamic jurisprudence) by a leading Egyptian jurist holds that, under certain circumstances, it’s OK for a woman to have surgery to repair her hymen before getting married, to hide the evidence of premarital sex. This fatwa is somewhat controversial, but the person who pronounced the fatwa is no rogue; he’s a highly respected cleric. So if one Islamic authority says it’s OK, why is hymenoplasty not taught in Egyptian medical schools, and why do physicians get nervous or angry when you ask them about it?

I think these are really interesting questions. I’m especially interested in the links between religion and medicine: Like how does the interpretation of a technology by Islamic jurists influence whether something appears on the medical curricula? And when experts in Islamic jurisprudence are asked to provide a ruling on a new technology that they know nothing about, how do they educate themselves about that technology in order to be able to make a ruling about its permissibility in Islam? Who do they go to for answers? Do they go online (like I do)? Do they consult local doctors? International experts?

Beyond the scope of expertise, it’s important to consider what people actually do, sexually and contraceptively, and what extent they are influenced by expert opinion. What about people whose sexual and reproductive lives defy religious codes and cultural norms? What about Christian Egyptians? How do they use these technologies, and do they care about formal religious opinions about these technologies? What about unmarried women who are sexually active? What do they think about expert opinion, how do they navigate fatawa (plural of fatwa) and medical bureaucracies to prevent a pregnancy, or terminate one, or hide evidence that they aren’t virgins when they marry? Things like emergency contraception, medical abortion, and hymenoplasty are technologies that can be used to disguise evidence of non-normative sexuality, and the stakes are particularly high for women, as it is primarily women who bear the consequences of extramarital sex in Egypt – as elsewhere in the world.

But I’m still struggling with the *why* of this research. Why is this important to study? I was at a dinner party a few months ago with some physicists and I was talking to Professor Ewa Goldys who asked me about my research. Ewa is a big grant-getter in the Physics Department at Macquarie. She listened politely while I talked all about these titillating topics – sex and drugs and abortion and fatwas – and then she said, “But why does this matter? Why is the research important?” I was like, “Because it’s interesting. Duh!”

Unfortunately I have to provide a better answer than “it’s interesting” to get a grant for this research (right now I have a small grant from my university but I’m angling for a big national research grant). So I’ve been thinking about how to frame this as Really Important Research. Maybe someone can help me? Obviously there’s a public health case to be made about women’s health, fertility, and morbidity. And yes, the subject matter is inherently interesting, because it’s fundamentally a story about sex, science, and religion.

But what’s theoretically interesting about this? Yes, religion and medicine mutually influence each other, but that’s hardly a cutting edge insight for medical anthropology. I can say that the project hasn’t been much done before. There’s no work on EC in Egypt, very little written about erectile dysfunction drugs, and not much on hymenoplasty. There have been some fantastic anthropological studies of reproductive health technologies (RHTs) surrounding normative sexualities in Egypt, like Marcia Inhorn’s work on IVF for married couples, but very little work on RHTs that are popularly associated with non-normative sexualities, i.e. for people having extramarital sex. But just saying that “I’m writing about something new” doesn’t get you grant funding.

This is an ongoing project, so any suggestions or criticism are most welcome. You don’t have to know much at all about Islamic jurisprudence or reproductive health medicine to have anything interesting to say about the topic, because the technologies I’m researching are all over the news in the U.S. and elsewhere, and I’m particularly interested in comparative perspectives. Is anyone out there looking at these technologies in other parts of the world?

Next post my Egyptian colleague Dr Hosam Moustafa will join me and we’ll write more about emergency contraception, aka the “morning after pill,” in Egypt. Then we’ll cover erectile dysfunction drugs, medication abortion, and hymen reconstruction surgery. Stay tuned…

I think this is a shame, because the book really could be an authoritative one, and I don’t really understand why everyone (including Abu El Haj herself) just sort of wilts and defends, not the book, but the right for academics to decide tenure amongst themselves (which I completely agree with, of course, I have to). But this instead of coming out with a forceful statement of the content and substance of the book? I think there must be something interesting to say about the inability anthropology has of defending itself against the contemporary blog-mediated, 72-hour news cycle, personal-attack media ecology we live in. Note the total absence of the AAA in this article, save a mention of our president-elect, Virginia Dominguez, who was Abu El-Haj’s advisor. Why shouldn’t the AAA step in and fight this fight on behalf of Abu El-Haj? Is there as choice other than responding to idiotic, personlized, ideological attacks and sticking one’s head in the sand? Clearly institutions like Columbia are too economically and politically captured to do it for their faculty, should our professional society be helping?

link…

“The Art of War”:http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/the_art_of_war/

I asked Naveh why Deleuze and Guattari were so popular with the Israeli military. He replied that ‘several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaux became instrumental for us […] allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not have otherwise.’

True, for anti-imperialist commie pinkos like myself, it initially seems as if its an open-and-shut case. Anthropologists shouldn’t be working with the military. Period. However, even if that’s how some of us feel deep-down, I think we have a moral obligation to articulate the ethical basis for our objections. Since it seems as if Anthropologists in the military are going to be a fact of life for some time to come, we also owe it to our colleagues to begin to articulate our objections as clearly as possible so that we can all work towards finding common ground.

First of all, I agree with several readers who have argued that the “They will think we are all spies” argument is specious. Think about the role of the church in the military. Mexicans still go to confession even though Catholic priests work with the military. A much bigger problem, in my mind, is that most people (even in America) simply don’t know what Anthropologists do for a living. It worries me that this news story is the single biggest anthropology-related news story of the year, when there are so many interesting things being done by anthropologists all over the world. The AAA needs to take a pro-active stance towards educating the world about our discipline, and not let the military’s PR machine do it for us. As it stands now, every anthropologist has to work pretty damn hard to gain the trust and confidence of her informants. I doubt that a few news stories about anthropologists in the military will make that much of a difference either way.

Unlike priests and psychologists, both of whom have long been a part of military operations (or at least that’s my understanding from eleven years of watching M*A*S*H), the role anthropologists are being asked to play is not oriented towards the soldiers (although as scholars like Catherine Lutz point out, anthropologists should be studying the grunts), but towards the local population. Accordingly, the real question is the one raised by David Price in the Boston Globe story:

“I am not sure that adequate consent [from the research subjects] is going on,” said Price. He said he believes it will be difficult to know how the military and intelligence agencies will use the population studies.

We shouldn’t be asking whether anthropologists should be in the military, but whether anthropologists in the military able to abide by the ethical guidelines of the discipline with respect to their informants. I think there needs to be a much greater degree of transparency about this. Personally, I suspect that it may be impossible for them to follow the standard guidelines our discipline has adopted, but I’m willing to discuss this more if the military anthropologists are willing to do so openly.

Finally, another question I find compelling is regarding the way the military makes use of this information. We can’t, of course, control how the government uses anthropological knowledge – its all available in the library anyway. However, I don’t think anthropologists should be working as PR for the military. I worry that the anthropologists serve to make it seem that the military cares about “culture” when numerous other examples show the opposite to be the case. When they routinely fire Arab linguists for being gay, are we supposed to believe that they really care about local knowledge? Moreover, most of what I’ve read about the supposed benefits of this program is common-sense and doesn’t require the presence of trained anthropologists. Anyone willing to spend a few hours talking to the local population in their own languages would come to the same conclusions. A properly trained military should be able to navigate the human terrain as well as the physical one.

The simple truth is that Bush turned his nose down at “nation-building” before the war even began, and everyone is now suffering as a result of these foolish policies. There are numerous non-anthropologists at the State Department and even in the military who think carefully about what nation-building (and winning “hearts and minds”) requires. I personally think it is too late for these policies to have much of an impact, and it isn’t clear to me that the Bush administration has actually changed its views towards nation-building. Under such circumstances it seems foolish to talk about the presence of anthropologists as “saving lives.”

Having said all that, I’m not sure that we as a discipline need new pledges or executive committee rulings to serve as a prophylactic against the taint of imperialism. I think the burden of proof should be on those engaged in these endeavors to show that they have complied with existing ethical guidelines. If they feel those guidelines need to be changed in some way, then again the burden of proof is on them to justify those changes to the satisfaction of the rest of the academic community.

The piece is relevant to Laura’s posts in that the use of music is based on the Army’s own cultural theories about Muslims:

the music that was picked was picked partially because it was aggressive and loud, and it was also meant to be insulting to a Muslim. A lot of very devout Muslims don’t believe they, you know, are allowed to listen to music at all, let alone sort of Western music.

The broadcast, together with a followup piece, also touched on how musicians have reacted to the use of their music in interrogations. This includes efforts to sue the US Government for royalty payments as a kind of protest. The different attitudes of the two bands discussed by David Peisner is interesting. The bassist for Drowning Pool said:

kids in America pay to listen to music. You know, if the worst thing that happens to these guys who are detained that, you know, that they get blasted with loud music for a few hours, I don’t see what the harm is, especially if we might be able to prevent a future terrorist attack.

While the members of Rage Against the Machine “sent letters to the State Department and the Armed Forces to try and stop this from happening.”

I wonder how current debates on this blog would be recast if discussed in terms of music. Would signing a petition against the use of music in interrogation somehow restrict the artistic freedom of musicians? Would failure to sign such a petition meant that artists whose work was used by the military were somehow complicit? Is the really interesting anthropological question the theory of culture in which loud music is considered fun for American youth but torture for Muslims? These are complex issues and I thought it might be interesting to look at them from another angle.

The thing that I like about Rosen’s review is that it charts a middle course between Said and Irwin. It is tempting to diss and dismiss both of thee authors since there seems to be so little middle ground between not only their arguments, but their more general sensibilities. I like Rosen’s willingness to point out the way that Said’s shortcomings can be understood as part of a larger ‘unfinished’ project rather than as errors that doom the enterprise from the start. Above all, it ends by shifting the discussion away from the narcissistic examination of the careers of Western scholars and back to the issue at hand — what must be done for Standard Average European scholars to understand the Standard Average Muslim?

I see a lot of pundits and politicians saying that Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq have been fighting for a millennium. We need better history than that. The Shiite tribes of the south probably only converted to Shiism in the past 200 years. And, Sunni-Shiite riots per se were rare in 20th century Iraq. Sunnis and Shiites cooperated in the 1920 rebellion against the British. If you read the newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s, you don’t see anything about Sunni-Shiite riots. There were peasant/landlord struggles or communists versus Baathists. The kind of sectarian fighting we’re seeing now in Iraq is new in its scale and ferocity, and it was the Americans who unleashed it.

It is tempting to see battles we can’t solve as intractable divisions rooted in tradition, despite their modernity, but doing so often obscures more than it clarifies.

However, I was intrigued by a very different culturalist argument about Iraq from today’s Christian Science Monitor, this one grounded in some very interesting data.

One central element of the Iraqi social fabric that most Americans know little about is its astonishing rate of cousin marriage. Indeed, half of all marriages in Iraq are between first or second cousins. Among countries with recorded figures, only Pakistan and Nigeria rate as high. For an eye-opening perspective about rates of consanguinity (roughly equivalent to cousin marriage) around the world, click on the “Global Prevalence” map at www.consang.net.

Indeed, whether or not consanguinity explains anything about Iraq, the consanguinity web site is itself worthy of mention on Savage Minds. You can see their global consanguinity map at the bottom of this post. I’m less sure what to make of Anne Bobroff-Hajal’s argument regarding the explanatory power of cousin marriage in Iraq:

Cousin marriage occurs because a woman who marries into another clan potentially threatens its unity. If a husband’s bond to his wife trumped his solidarity with his brothers, the couple might take their property and leave the larger group, weakening the clan. This potential threat is avoided by cousin marriage: instead of marrying a woman from another lineage, a man marries the daughter of his father’s brother – his cousin. In this scenario, his wife is not an alien, but a trusted member of his own kin group.

Therefore, according to Bobroff-Hajal, we can use cousin marriage to explain Iraqi resistance to modernity since modern government and business practices threaten these traditional kinship networks.

I think Bobroff-Hajal overstates her case when she presents this as a conflict between modernity and traditional culture, since one has to explain the persistence of clan-based social networks in terms of Iraqi modernity. How did Saddam Hussein manipulate clan relations to secure his power? Moreover, just because there is a correlation doesn’t mean that there is causality. In fact, the causality might be the reverse: the failure of modernity might explain the continued strength of the clan system.

Still, I do think that the importance of Iraqi kinship networks is something that has been overlooked in most analysis of the war. It is something I have heard from other people I know who have spent a lot of time in Iraq. In fact, it is a point that Juan Cole himself has made on several occasions, such as this post where he critiques the U.S. military’s rules of engagement on the grounds that they were likely to incur “large numbers of clan feuds with Sunni Arab families.”

But more than anything else, I really just wanted to share this cool consanguinity map: