Tag Archives: Eastern Europe

Vengeance is his: Jared Diamond in the New Yorker

The April 21 number of the New Yorker features a long article by Jared Diamond entitled “Vengeance Is Ours: What Can Tribal Societies Tell Us About Our Need To Get Even”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_diamond. Anthropologists have a tendency — increasingly shrill and kneejerk these days — to be very critical of Jared Diamond. Mostly I think this is because he does what they wish they did: write popular, widely read books. I’m not as affected by this sour grapes syndrome as some, and in the case of this article I’ve already had my druthers because I helped fact check it (this consisted in talking for ten minutes on the phone with a New Yorker employee). However there are still some kvetchable things in the article that deserve a going over.

The basic idea of the article is simple. In it, Diamond contrasts a tribal fight in Nembi distict, Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), and the death of his father in-law’s mother (wife’s father’s mother, or WFM as we say in the kinship biz) in the holocaust. In PNG, Diamond’s friend Daniel undertook a long vendetta to avenge his uncle and was eventually successful. In the holocaust, the killer of Diamond’s WFM was arrested, detained for a year and then freed. Daniel was well-adjusted and emotionally reconciled to his uncle’s death — vengeance satisfied him. Diamond’s father in-law was haunted the rest of his life by the fact that justice was never delivered. The moral of the story, Diamond says, is that procedural justice under a state may not be as obviously superior to vengeance in tribal fighting as we might think. Its a typical anthropological technique: compare The West to The Rest, and open people’s minds by pointing out that They might know something We don’t, and that Our Ways may not be as hot as we imagined.

In its factual reporting, Diamond’s account of tribal fighting in PNG more or less rings true to me, and the things that don’t ring true are most likely simply variants between what is done in Nipa and what is done in west Enga, where I lived. I also appreciate Diamond’s spin on the topic — that tribal fighting is comprehensible and not mere barbarism, and that the people who do it are humans who live normal, albeit culturally distinct, lives.

That said, I do have some issued with what Diamond actually does with his data.
Continue reading →

Lenin in the Basement

How far in time and across space do the shadows of the Cold War reach? Masco persuasively argues that Cold War logics live with us today, not least in the way that US culture continues to constitute itself through fantasies of its own demise. Americans are weirdly obsessed with their own annihilation, whether at the hands of communist revolutionaries or Islamic radicals. But Estonia, a country of 1.3 million, actually was invaded by the Soviets. The country, an hour and half by boat from Helsinki, continues to confront — or bury — that memory. What Masco argues for the US, recent events in Estonia have perhaps also revealed: repression doesn’t work very well.

lenin2.jpgEstonia’s ‘Museum of Occupations‘ sits just outside Tallinn’s famous old town. It is a modern structure (opened in 2003); you enter through a courtyard cleverly enclosed beneath a glass-sheathed reading room and lecture hall. I was excited to visit the Museum a few weeks ago. Estonia had made international headlines for moving a memorial to Soviet soldiers in WWII (soldiers who expelled the Nazi occupiers of Estonia) from central Tallinn to a less visible cemetery outside the city. Riots erupted across the country for reasons I could not fully grasp at the time. When I visited in May I could still see broken glass in many storefronts. I hoped that the Museum would provide context for understanding the rioting.

In fact, throughout Tallinn, there are very few signs of the former Soviet Union. There is one Soviet era theater in the Old Town. But other than that one building, you might never know that Estonia had been a part of the Soviet Union for 50 years. In order to find the Soviet presence, you have to look underground — literally. Continue reading →

Albanian Anthropology

Smoki Musaraj is a graduate student doing research in Albania. I have been fascinated by Albania ever since I read a news story about how, at the end of the cold war, there were signs that Albania was “opening up” because they didn’t execute victims of a shipwreck who washed ashore (as they had done previously).

In a recent post Smoki explains why there are no anthropology departments in Albania.

I asked [the director of the National Albanian State Archive] why there is no Anthropology Department in the Academy given that there are so many ethnographers whom I am starting to discover through various institutes. He explained that while ethnography and ethnology were always part of the History Department, Anthropology as a discipline, according to the Communist academic doctrine was considered as an “American invention. Given that America, he said, was considered as a country without a history, Anthropology [always according to this official interpretation] was invented and fetishized to make up for the lack of culture and ethnos”.

Although there is no clear “about” page or individual author bios, it seems that blog.newanthro.net is another anthropology group blog of some kind, so add it to your bookmarks!