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.

First, throughout this article, as in his other work, Diamond fails to think anthropologically even if the people he discusses are stereotypically anthropological subjects. Anthropologists insist that culture is a force which has its own unique power to shape people’s lives and cannot be reduced to an effect of an underlying, deeper cause. So when Diamond remarks that pigs are valuable to highlanders because they (the highlanders) are ‘protein starved’ an anthropologist is not satisfied. This has probably been true of different places in different times in the highlands (Nembi being a good candidate), and nutritional needs obviously effect human behavior, but so does culture.

Pigs are always valuable in culturally specific ways. When highlanders in PNG give pigs do they exchange live pigs or pork? Who gets the piglets from the live pigs, and who gets the pork when it is eaten? These questions are deeply tied up in issues of nutrition, but they are also culturally structured. Equally, Diamond writes that in Nipa fighters exhibit ‘unchecked’ aggression and then goes on to describe in detail the culturally specific ways in which they fight: rules regarding engagement (or nonengagement if you have relatives on the other side of the fight) and so forth. So in fact while the human desire may be universal (and that’s a big ‘may’), so is the fact that it is always shaped and channeled in culturally specific forms. The more you know about people’s lives, the less easy it is to explain them wholly in terms of protein, geography, genetics and what have you.

There is also a more serious problem with the article which is also the most obvious thing about it: it contrasts ‘tribal societies’ with ‘modern state societies’. On the surface, there is nothing wrong with contrasting Nipa in 1992 with Poland in 1944 — in fact its quite a fascinating exercise. But describing this as an example of a ‘state’ society versus a ‘tribal’ one is kinda loopy. But what makes us think that Nipa is a ‘tribal’ society since it had experienced decades of contact before the events described in the article? And Eastern Europe was a lot of things during World War II, but its not exactly clear to me that ‘state run’ quite fits the description of a warzone superimposed on an ethnic mosaic of Poles, Jews, Russians, and Germans.

Diamond hedges and says that state presence is weak in the highlands, and so we can see fighting in Nipa as an as-yet-barely-touched remnant of a pre-state way of life. I don’t think this ‘historic preservation’ approach to tribal fighting in PNG holds much water, however, and I think I can safely say that most experts agree with me on this. Consider, for instance, the following facts: These events started in 1992, under the Namaliu administration, during which PNG experienced its first major law and order crisis. The feud ended so that the two clans involved could oppose an ethnic Huli in elections. Diamond’s friend was actually hundreds of miles away on the north coast and had to be recalled to his home area in order to avenge his uncle. And of course, Diamond actually met his friend Daniel at an Oil extraction project which has profoundly changed life in Southern Highlands Province.

What Diamond’s article is really about is the transformation of clan politics and tribal fighting in the context of Papua New Guinea’s rise to independence as a nation. These transformations are no less complex for the fact that PNG’s police force and justice system don’t work like our own (or how we imagine our own work). But this doesn’t mean we can simply assume that there’s been no change at all. What Diamond’s article tells us is not ‘how people used to live 5,000 years ago before states developed, as preserved in Highlands PNG, compared to us, The Latest Word In Social Complexity’.

At root, the problem — and it is not a fatal flaw, just a problem — with Diamond’s article is that it teaches us that Other Ways Of Life Have Something To Offer Us, but the only way it can do so is by making Papua New Guineans appear more Other to us than they really are. What it tells us is that we modern Americans have something to learn from modern Papua New Guineans about our shared modern condition. But, ironically, this is a broad-mindedness that rests on the back of a deep divisiveness: we moderns only find their ways of life interesting if they are ‘primitive’. Anthropologists have argued for decades that this tendency to exoticize other people – ‘deny them coevalness’ is how some put it – is ultimately morally pernicious even if it leads to a shallow relativism which has a surface appeal.

And even if anthropology’s ethical hang-ups are not your own, the fact of the matter is that this sort of thing is just bad science. Treating contemporary violence in the PNG highlands as an example of ‘life without the state’ rather than ‘life with a particular kind of state’ would be like asking what Saddam Hussein’s rule can tell us about Assyrian domination of the fertile crescent. There’s nothing wrong with comparing the two cases, it is just that doing so in this way simply misses most of what could make the comparison interesting. Can PNG tell us about vengeance? Of course. But we will only get the message if we listen carefully, and are willing to realize that familiar models of ‘tribal’ versus ‘modern’ societies may not, however comforting and familiar they are to some, actually be telling us the whole story.

Estonia’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.

The museum is really just one big exhibition room. You enter the display area through a large ‘gate’ comprised of two figurative locomotives emblazoned with totalitarian insignia, the Nazi swastika and the Soviet hammer and sickle. Display cases collect paraphernalia of occupation: bureaucratic documents, old family photos, suitcases, prison doors. The main substance of the exhibits however comes from videos that play on flat screens mounted from the top of the cases. Unfortunately, because the museum is small, many of these displays are packed close together. So although the main point appears to be to watch videos on these screens, it is hard to focus on them because they are too close to each other. Making matters worse, you also have to crane your neck upwards to watch the videos. Plus, each one is about 30 minutes long… so it would literally take hours and hours to figure out what the museum has to say about the experience of occupation. Fortunately, however, you can watch the very same videos online here.

Most of the videos decry the mismanagement of the Soviet command economy. The exhibition room also has on display a tiny old car, a barber’s chair, a cludgy computer, this and that. And the message seems clear enough. The mix of the video narration decrying the unproductive command economy with the visible display of the anemic material cultural artifacts seems to say: Look how inept the Soviets were! Still, the actual effect on this viewer was more complex. There is almost no interpretive material presented that attempts to understand or present what the Soviets thought they were doing or what the whole Soviet Union was about. So there are multiple occupations on display: both the Nazi and the Soviet occupations in the past, and the psychic occupation that repressing that past performs in the present.

Gregory Feldman writes that…

…between 1939 and 1945, Estonia lost roughly 250,000 out of 1.1 million people, largely through emigration, deportation, and execution and other war-related deaths. Deportations continued until the early 1950s, with as many as 83,000 more Estonians sent to the interior of Soviet Russia.

Clearly, the memory of these losses lives today in Estonian public life in the form of a dramatic repudiation of the Soviet and of all things Russian. Those losses are visible in acts of public purification, such as moving the statue out of the public square and into the margins. But does putting the Soviet era out of sight mean that it has been put out of mind?

You go down a staircase walled with plush red velvet into the basement of the Occupation Museum. And it is there that you find the signs and symbols of the Soviet era: busts and other statuary cast in the instantly recognizable sculptural language of socialist realism. You also find the plumbing down there. Lenin’s head sits directly next to the toilets.

The Soviets carried out a systematic Russification of Estonia; transmigration programs reduced the percentage make up of the country from 88% ethnic Estonian in 1934 to 65% at ‘reindependence’ in 1991. Today, roughly a third of the country is ‘ethnic Russian.’ As Feldman details, post-1991, Estonia used a legal theory pertaining to a 1930s treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union to incorporate itself as a sovereign and independent nation again in the 1990s. This created a legal situation in which the transmigrated Russian-speaking population was not granted citizenship in the new Estonia. Thus, hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking Estonians found themselves stateless in the 1990s, a situation that continues to today, according to Robert Kaiser. Over 140,000 Russian-speaking Estonians are now stateless.

Thus, the background to the May riots in Tallinn includes histories of conflict, oppression, and repression, histories that reverberate unabated into contemporary circumstance. Kaiser suggests that Cold War logic in fact underwrites both the Estonian effort to erase the Soviet past (as when Soviet era memorials are removed from the city square) and the attempt to understand the problems that Estonia presently faces in terms of the ‘threat’ that Russia poses to it. In this regard, Kaiser is in accord with Feldman, who shows how the Cold War logic of international security is applied to actual, regular people (Russian speakers) in ways that renders them stateless. Feldman carefully relates the marginalization of stateless Russian-speaking Estonians to the national-cultural logic of sovereignty and to the ‘security’ logic governing accession to the European Union, where cultural complexity (‘minority populations’) is understood as internationally destabilizing. As I understand them, both Kaiser and Feldman want to tamp down East/West divisions in understanding the current state of affairs in Estonia, and both call for careful attention to the legal premises through which Estonia is today governed. They ostensibly align their critiques with the large body of people in Estonia who find themselves with no citizenship.

Lenin’s head in the basement invites us to consider the ethical, moral, and cultural quandaries of reconciliation and historical memory in post-colonial situations of all kinds, including those in Europe.

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!