Elections, embedded in cyclical time, are sometimes interpreted as pivotal events that shape longer histories. Such histories can be narrated as slow change, fast change, or stasis; crisis or normalcy; repetitive or linear process; progress or regress. Anthropologists are attuned as well to smaller-scale temporalities. They listen for different personal experiences of time and observe social configurations in which they nest.

Media depictions of the election shape our sense of time. Television news graphics for weeks display the countdown to election day: 25 days…12 days, 11 days, 10 days…! But days are slow markers of election time in an age when tweets can drive news cycles. If we expand the time frame a bit, we have reason to wonder if the U.S. election actually will be over on November 8. Will the outcome be contested? Will one contender fracture democratic tradition by refusing to concede to the winner? Widening the time frame again, what imaginings of America’s past or what politics of memory are evoked in one candidate’s slogan “Make America Great Again”?

Psychologists report that people are experiencing much more anxiety than usual this election season—another critical time signal. “For women,” the New York Times tells us, “particularly those who have been victims of sexual assault, the election has triggered painful memories.” Parents and school officials report a surge in bullying and racialized aggression among children. Their behavior mirrors the rhetoric and actions of a presidential candidate and some of his supporters. While ahistorical frames are common in election commentary, this year’s upsurge in nativism—open displays of anti-immigrant sentiment and scapegoating—echoes nativist outbursts in periods such as the 1850s and 1920s. Today’s iteration of nativism in this nation of immigrants also has counterparts in France, Germany, Britain, and elsewhere. Though the vitriol of this year’s campaign and the 2016 Republican presidential nominee’s popularity, temperament, and rhetoric have historical precedents that extend back much longer than a century, it is the immediate present that fixates public attention.

And yet election time, for many, may also be what Sian Lazar in a different context terms “attritional time”—a period of “constant protest or negotiation, the continuance of the day to day of political life when there is no resolution in sight to a particular conflict or problem, coupled occasionally with a dramatization of what can become quite banal over time.” Disenchantment with formal political parties and institutions or with representative democracy, scholars such as Charles Tilley and Sidney Tarrow argue, contributes to a recent upswing in political activism expressed through protest or social movements. On a scale not seen in decades, participants mobilize for living wages, racial justice, environmental protections, corporate accountability, and immigrants’ rights in struggles that will continue no matter who wins the 2016 election. So too the struggles of those who do not protest in the streets but who strive daily to survive in low-wage jobs or who can find no job at all or who live one health emergency away from bankruptcy. In the late-1960s a minimum wage job “could lift a family of three out of poverty,” but today that same family earns about $15,000 a year, which is $4,000 below the poverty line. These circumstances are not inevitable; they are historically contingent outcomes of political and policy choices.

A final temporal query: why is the U.S. presidential campaign period so much longer than that of many other electoral democracies? And why is the campaign longer today than it was a few decades ago in this country—as in 1952, when Dwight D. Eisenhower only began his run in the spring of that year, and Labor Day was considered the beginning of serious campaigning. Part of the answer lies in changes in the nomination process and state primary system. While longer campaigns allow time for the public to become acquainted with lesser-known candidates, extended campaigns also require contenders to raise more money, and they generate more advertising revenue for news media.

An Internet meme shared by candidates of both major political parties this year is “This Is Fine” dog—“a web comic by K.C. Green, of a dog sitting in a room engulfed in flames, but he says, ‘This is fine.’” Many American voters, Brad Kim observes in the New York Times interview just quoted, feel that in this election “the world is ending.” That experience of time matters for voter turnout, as well for the civility of post-election life. A closing irony: an intense public desire for the 2016 election process to be over slows down our perception of time’s passage.

“America is a shining example of how to hold a free and fair election, right?” asks Bassem Youssef, a comedian and former heart surgeon who is often referred to as “the Egyptian Jon Stewart.” Astute answers to that question about the condition of U.S. democracy often come from foreigners such as satirists, as well as my East African research interlocutors.

Like Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah (The Daily Show), Stephen Colbert (The Colbert Report), and Jon Oliver (Last Week Tonight), Bassem Youssef uses irony and satire to hold a mirror up to society, and to unsettle conventional political and media narratives. State political pressure forced termination of the popular satirical news show Youssef created in Egypt during the Arab Spring. He then moved to the United States, became a fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics in 2015, and in 2016 started a new show in the United States called “Democracy Handbook” on Fusion TV. As foreigners, Youssef, Jon Oliver (British), and Trevor Noah (South African) wittily play off stereotypes of their own home regions as they comment on events in the United States—such as Trevor Noah’s Daily Show segment comparing the 2016 Republican presidential nominee to African dictators.

When I was in Kenya during the July 2016 Republican National Convention, a farmer asked me about news reports that the Republican presidential nominee’s wife had plagiarized Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech to the Democratic National Convention. That story–widely reported in Kenyan and other international news media–was soon eclipsed by a cascade of new campaign controversies that sent puzzling signals to the rest of the world. In their Savage Minds post last week, Daniel Goldstein and Raúl Rodriguez Arancibia offered a Bolivian’s perspective on the U.S. presidential contest. I asked Kenyan scientist Dr. Nyaga Kinyua (a pseudonym) for his thoughts on the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Dr. Kinyua lives in Nairobi and he recently spent a few years studying for an advanced degree in the United States. In mid-2016, Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the United States would assist Kenya with its 2017 national election preparations by providing over $25 million (22 million euros) this year “in order to support [Kenya’s]…electoral process into next year…we want to strengthen your election operations,” said Kerry. (Daniel Branch provides one of many fine accounts of Kenya’s political history.)

Dr. Kinyua’s response to Kerry’s announcement was skeptical: “The U.S. does not even have the best machines for elections!” His comment addresses a core weakness of the U.S. electoral system (and one that gets little attention from dominant U.S. news media): much voting technology is outdated and many electronic voting machines are vulnerable to tampering or hacking and lack paper verification systems. The problem is not new. The Daily Show spoofed U.S. voting machines in 2004 (when Jon Stewart was host) and again in 2015 (with Trevor Noah as host). More than a decade ago, Los Angeles musician Clifford J. Tasner wrote a satirical song called “Voting Machine”–with lyrics such as “We’re rigging the election with our new voting machine!”

In addition to voting machine problems, many states have eliminated a number of polling stations, shortened early voting and registration periods, passed new voter identification laws, and purged voter rolls (as the ACLU and other organizations have documented). Such measures especially disadvantage likely Democratic voters by depressing turnout by Latino, African-American, and Asian-American voters. The Brennan Center for Justice states that “in 2016, 14 states will have new voting restrictions in place for the first time in a presidential election.” After the disputed Florida vote count in the 2000 presidential election, when the Supreme Court determined the outcome, African political scientists joked about sending election observers from Africa to the United States. The reverse scenario of course is well institutionalized.

Voter suppression and other flaws in the electoral process such as gerrymandering are obscured by daily news cycles focused on the political “horse race” (i.e., who said or tweeted what, or who is up or down in opinion polls today). Bassem Youssef, however, focuses on these under-reported electoral issues as he travels across the United States and interviews people for his Democracy Handbook show. With empathy and comedic deftness, he asks as well about topics such as neglected infrastructure, immigration, religion in politics, gun rights, and the Flint water crisis.

In a non-comedic register, Dr. Kinyua too is keenly attuned to ironies in the contemporary geopolitics of democracy talk. “It seems like there is something we are not told,” he said as he continued his comments on Secretary John Kerry’s mid-2016 announcement of U.S. election aid to Kenya. He wonders what conditions were attached to the aid, noting that not long after Kerry’s visit, new talks began on the conflict in South Sudan and Kenya altered its position in ways that are not yet fully known. He wonders if the government of that oil-rich country will be toppled with outside help, thereby destabilizing it for years. Taking a cue from Trump’s pronouncement that the United States should have taken control of Iraq’s oil, Dr. Kinyua remarks that when Trump says America is not winning anymore, he means the country is not grabbing whatever it should get out of foreign escapades such as overthrowing dictators. Africans “are being manipulated,” Dr. Kinyua says, and he contrasts a widespread sense of hidden agendas in foreign policy with Trump’s “bravado” and “reckless” talk that might actually reveal “underhanded deals” and hidden assumptions in foreign policy to which citizens of other countries would like to be alerted. His concern is not Trump, he adds, but rather standard foreign policy practices by rich countries such as the United States.

Since the United States and some European nations often criticize Africa for not being sufficiently democratic, and they routinely send delegations to monitor African elections, what might people on that continent think of a U.S. presidential candidate who tells his opponent during a televised debate that he will jail her if he becomes president? Shortly after the October 9 debate in St. Louis, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff (who frequently visits Africa) tweeted, “I’ve spent lots of time reporting in countries where winners do imprison losing candidates. Believe me, we don’t want to go there.” Political scientist Brendan Nyhan tweeted (the same night) that Trump’s comment about jailing Hillary Clinton is an “existential threat to democracy,” and he was not the only commentator to term that the debate’s “most important story.”

Dr. Kinyua remarks that Trump’s stated intention to jail Clinton “means that Trump has no faith in the investigation done earlier by the world’s most powerful investigation agency, the FBI. It also insinuates that an American president can influence the outcome of an investigation process, which is ironic for a country that has strong rule-of-law credentials and that is the moral bodyguard of the world.”

Egyptian news satirist and cardiologist Bassem Youssef said in July 2016: “well, my conclusion is that you still have a great democratic process here [in the United States]. My show…can serve as a warning to tell you that…there are certain practices that are happening here that are not far off of what I’ve seen in my part of the world…it’s scary. It’s kind of like I’m telling people, ‘Guys, we’re the prequel. Don’t do that.’”

Originally posted on the Guava Anthropology Blog 28 September 2014

Author: Hsiu-Hsin Lin
Translators: Renée Salmonsen & Chuan-Wen Chen

Translator’s note: Contemporary youth and amateur politicians are taking an increasingly active interest and role in Asian politics. We feel it is important to translate this article because the result of Taipei’s mayoral election last year was a significant milestone for Taiwan. This article was written in the month leading up to the election. Many people view the result, independent candidate Wen-je Ko winning the capital city mayoral election, as a reflection of voters seeking change and expressing their dislike for both major political parties, the Kuomintang party (KMT) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). The election was held on November 29th, 2014. The two most popular candidates were Wen-je Ko and Sheng-wen Lien. Neither of the leading candidates had previous significant administrative or management experience in government institutions. Ko, a former surgeon, won the election with 57.16% of votes. Sheng-wen Lien, a.k.a. Sean Lien, is the son of Lien Chan, the former Chairman of the KMT and the Vice President of Taiwan. Sean Lien won the KMT mayoral primary, but lost the 2014 Taipei City mayoral election with 40.82% of votes.

The idea for this article stems from a class discussion. Taipei’s mayoral election has been the hot topic for weeks now. Anything seemingly unrelated to the election is now related. Due to recent circumstances, I haven’t logged-on to Facebook or watched TV lately which has enabled conversations with my students to skip over the hot, trending topics of the election and return to the greater issue of the “Sheng-wen phenomenon”. In other words, whether Sheng-wen is elected or not the emergence of a figure like Sean Lien is a very important phenomenon for the social sciences.

Two or three years ago Sheng-wen put out a book titled My Life’s Adversity or My Life’s Struggle, something or other. I teased my Taipei friends that Sheng-wen is trying to coerce his way into becoming their mayor. My friends thought I was joking, the idea of his book gaining any clout in political circles seemed ridiculously funny. The joke was funny until early September 2014 when the punchline became reality. After Sheng-wen publicly announced his candidacy, I repeatedly asked my students why they thought he was being portrayed as a political figure in the media when he had no previous experience as one. Too often the media links together situations like Sheng-wen’s out of nowhere, creating a figure worth discussing. As the election approaches, whenever I hear that the gap between the two sides isn’t too wide, I begin to understand what’s happening less and less. Opinion polls have Sheng-wen ahead by 30% which further decreases my understanding: How is Sheng-wen even in the running to be Taipei mayor?

As world elections become increasingly open, there are hardly any candidates whose family net value is over 100 billion National Taiwan Dollars (NTD) and who lack any professional experience (excluding of course the inner-circle of political connections). This pampered youth has surfaced occasionally during his father’s public appearances, with plenty of photos to prove it. And then suddenly he is in the running to become mayor of the capital?! This in itself is odd. Out of nowhere Sheng-wen received a 30% public approval rating? Makes me wonder, what is really going on in Taiwan?

My colleagues, students, and I tried to figure it out: why is Sheng-wen even in the Taipei City mayoral election? Students offered several answers, “pretty wife, wealthy, political connections, power struggles within the political party…,” and then a student said, “financial capital!”

My focus abruptly shifted to the themes of TV talk shows. A hollow candidate reflects a likewise frighteningly hollow image of Taiwan ── the spirits of Taiwan’s empty valleys were summoned by Sheng-wen.

Previous mayoral candidates showed some personality at least. Even good ol’ President Ma Ying-jeou showed some personality by offering a range of opinions on executive legal proceedings to the Senkaku Islands (that he gets bad marks in my book is not the point here, he’s more of a classical political thinker anyways). On the contrary, the emergence of Sean Lien is very postmodern. Hollow as a ghost. Empty and naive like a videogame character. You would never guess that the “newness” Lien exhibits is a new phenomenon of globalization. The globalization of Taiwan is embedded in Taiwan’s relationship with China.

EasyCard is Lien’s sole “political achievement” worth mentioning. Whether he exaggerated that he single-handedly turned the company from loss to profit or not, at least he successfully imitated Hong Kong’s Octopus card and brought it to Taiwan. According to Lien, he was the first to introduce the value of plastic money to the members of Parliament and encouraged its great success in Taiwan. It seems however that his “achievement” was accomplished by again riding his father’s coattails. The persistence of these sorts of actions reflects two characteristics of globalization.

First of all, the financial sector practically exceeds the manufacturing sector. Second, the Taiwanese financial sector heavily relies on networks of influence (similarly fine-tuning globalization in any country). When Sean Lien first emerged onto the political scene he proudly announced the legitimacy of (a kind of) financial industry under the guise of globalization. The fact that he still received a 30% public approval rating explains the public’s desire to find a solution to the anxiety and insecurity Taiwan holds facing globalization. The unrest results in Taiwan’s support for hollow, nameless symbols, which also happen to be characteristics of globalization. These define the “spirits” summoned up by Sheng-wen.

Globalization has made the public very anxious. Taipei’s mayoral election is presented in the media like a presidential election. Economic growth is the crux of Lien’s campaign. Terry Guo, recognized as one of the richest businessmen in Taiwan, commented on the election as if he was a political expert. This is clearly an election for administrative territory. The Kuomintang has tried its best to spread economic panic. I often say in my sociology classes that mafia bosses are just another kind of sociologist as they most genuinely express the human desire for power. Old gang bosses surrounded by young gangsters. They drive luxury cars like Mercedes-Benz and BMW. The Kuomintang is the most sensitive monitor of the public, all too aware of our fears and our anxieties.

Let’s consider the public’s sentiment with an anthropologist’s tone. Gellner has clearly stated that the former economic imagination visualized the “nation.” When the nation “brings up” it’s citizens with compulsory education, there is an implied mobility and maximization of nationals in different industries within the nation. According to Gellner, thanks to the industrial revolution, a uniformity within the nation has been reached by methods of convenience. Nations have become interactive communities. To put it in another way, the nation exists because of the wave of nation-states, (I believe that the community is the premise of existence — what can I say, I’m a helpless follower of Durkheim), like a family but on a larger scale. From social security to the welfare system, education to the national defense, people can find support during these turbulent times from within the community. This is why the economic transition has been seen as a “progress of economic history in Taiwan,” as seen in export processing zones in 1950s and science parks in the 1980s. Take note though: although the Hsinchu Science Park mostly relied on subcontract work in the 80s, blending in with the international division of labor at the time, the nation is still seen as a collective system of individuals within any division of labor system.

Yet in this post-90s globalized world, the boundaries of nation states are weakened and production is challenged. Here are a few of the resulting issues:

The complexity of the global labor division

As the chain of marketing and production increases and we do our best to curtail the gap between them, the processes of facilitating materials and labor power deserve greater consideration. How can one master their personal niche? The challenges differ by industry. For instance, subcontractors and conventional machine operators adapt their work to change very differently. This is a rather grim challenge for all sectors of Taiwan manufacturing. Every aspect in the chain of production is about racking one’s brain to pinpoint how we are vital to the process. Whether or not everyone’s wishes are fulfilled, usually everything does not turn out how you plan. Even so, your initial position within the chain will determine the future weight of your bargaining chips. Ultimately proving that you are a necessity is unlikely.

The spirit of finance and gutter oil permeate everything

Thanks to the strained circumstances of the manufacturing industry, the financial sector is quickly and conveniently being tidied up becoming an unrivaled apparition among global industries. Among other recent revelations, the manufacturing industry is a cover-up for the financial sector. Like when the “government” covers up a construction site or aeronautics center (as if they are really making something?!) they are actually engaging in a kind of speculation. Manufacturing is an excuse, stock and land speculation are facts. The spirits linger in the financial figures (100 million as a unit of measurement) as a new coded method of transaction in the official merchant community.

A state doesn’t look like a state

As new forms of speculation poison and humiliate Taiwan, our overseas investments, and the Chinese-South Korean free trade areas, they are also used as tools of intimidation. These occurrences originate from a double-sided contradiction ── states remain plagued with expectations of “nationalities,” yet these dramas act as holy gatekeepers for financial players. Our past feelings about the state are manipulated as grounds on which to stake land and financial claims. Instead the state needs to penetrate those areas reliant upon expert knowledge.

In contemporary society we live like parasites off of the state. We gradually lose the feeling of belonging to a whole. From these positions of removal, multi-faceted dilemmas, and moments of coercion, already places of hope cannot be seen. Even though Taiwanese flaunt a “winning through togetherness” attitude, they have lost the “subject” and “object:” What is ‘togetherness’? What are we ‘winning’? Although people have only faint expectations of the state, they are endlessly disappointed. These turbulent and perplex situations are conduits to pleasure seeking and joy, laid before populations as an exit strategy.

Then, suddenly, from the realm of fear and complexity emerges Sean Lien. From out of the blue he forcefully and illegally occupies the heavens. He, with his hulking stature and his family’s enormous wealth, is obviously famous, though not so-obviously well known is why. His all-around uselessness, lack of brainpower, inability to perform even unimportant investigations, and overall lack of any sense of security in these times of uncertainty only contribute to this era of financial domination. Am I right? What is it that you like about Sheng-wen? What is it that you mock? You don’t even know how to hate him! Sheng-wen has a sort of airy cheeriness about him, not unlike the abundant emptiness of a numerical figure. The significance of Sheng-wen’s complexity is that even Sheng-wen doesn’t know how to win this election!

Thus, regardless of the election results this fight isn’t just between Ke, Lian, and Feng (and no I didn’t forget Guang Yuan). The battle is being waged globally, nationally, and among the citizens on both sides of the battlefield. Its only just beginning! But only within our government are there endless threats and intimidation. A condition-less openness is used as an antidote to serve the idiots-who-need-amusement era. No matter if Sheng-wen is happy or not, I fear our near future is incapable of giving rise to happiness.

End note: I would strongly like to open an interdisciplinary course on reducing student’s anxieties. This would include globalization’s attack on Taiwan’s industries, legal deformations, boundary maintenance, failing nation-states, new production phenomenas, new cultural networks, new communities….

Link to original article: http://guavanthropology.tw/article/6249

Chuan-Wen Chen is taking a break from being a graduate student in the Institute of Anthropology at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. Her research focuses on elderly care coordination in a multicultural urban environment. Her latest projects are learning about interior design and surviving in China

If you put Ghani’s name into Amazon you’ll most likely get his 2008 book Fixing Failed States, and Google results focus on the TED talk summary of his book or his campaign website. Ghani’s book is blurbed by Francis Fukuyama and Hernando de Soto, thinkers anthropologists usually consider The Enemy. But anyone who looks back to his scholarly writing and intellectual influences will recognize him as a powerful anthropological thinker whose work exemplifies the best our discipline has to offer.

Ghani received his Ph.D. at Columbia in 1982 (it’s a little unclear — I think he ended up depositing in 1984). There’s a PDF of the dissertation here  At that time the department was at the end of an era. For the past thirty years professors such as Morton Fried, Robert Murphy, and Marvin Harris created a department that was, by varying degrees, of leftist, ecologicaly determinisic, and focused political economy. All of these people worked with Ghani, as well as Joan Vincent, Richard Lee, Gerald Sider, and even Conrad “applied anthropology in a shoe factory” Arensberg.

Ghani’s Ph.D. was written about the same time as Eric Wolf’s Europe And The People Without History and takes a similar approach: it is a historical account of “production and domination in Afghanistan”, one that draws on the Annales school of history as well as materialist approaches to understand how geography, culture, and power came together to give Afghanistan the shape it did in the nineteenth century.

Ghani published a good deal about Afghanistan over the course of his career, which I can’t really assess here since that’s not my speciality. My favorite work of  Ghani’s has been his work on Eric Wolf, including a great interview with Wolf  (apparently online as a PDF) and an introductory chapter in the 1995 festschrift Articulating Hidden Histories.

Ghani’s scholarly work and political career seem a world away from life here in Honolulu. But it’s clear that his loyalty to his commitment to both studying and changing the world are as central to the discipline of anthropology as is his theoretically-informed and empirically rich ethnography. Its worth remembering that anthropology can be a place where remarkable people can get their start, and we should be proud when they leave academia to pursue their goals.