The book under consideration here is Sarah Kendzior’s The View from Flyover Country, which was published in 2015. In case you don’t know, Kendzior is an anthropologist-turned-journalist whose academic work on authoritarianism turned out to be just slightly relevant to the recent turn of events here in the US (and elsewhere).

People ask me all the time what you can do with a degree in anthropology. Now, thanks to Kendzior, I can suggest that students study the intricacies of autocracies and use their analytical skills to warn fellow citizens of the impending erosion of constitutional democracies.[2] Just for starters.

If you follow Kendzior’s work, you know she is willing to speak out. She is not shy. She doesn’t waver. She was willing to talk about issues that many academics—including myself—are hesitant to address. Ever since I first heard of her work, I respected her willingness to take on the kinds of issues that many academics often save for our closed conferences and pay-walled journals (or, perhaps, our Twitter accounts). I’m not sure if she identifies primarily as an anthropologist these days, but in my view she’s one of the few who is doing the kind of “public anthropology” that many of us talk so much about. This is what happens when the analytical perspective of anthropology is unleashed.

The View from Flyover Country is a collection of essays Kendzior wrote for Al Jazeera English between 2012 and 2014. I read most of these essays when they first came out. But readings through them again was a powerful reminder of issues, and voice, that Kendzior brings to the table. The book is arranged in 5 parts: 1) Flyover Country; 2) The Post-Employment Economy; 3) Race and Religion; 4) Higher Ed; and 5) Beyond Flyover Country. There’s also a Coda titled “In Defense of Complaining” that is so poignant to the present moment I’m going to start—and end—there.

Kendzior opens her Coda with a short rumination on a movement called “A complaint Free World,” headed up by the Reverend Will Bowen in 2006. The goal of the moment, as the name suggests, was to push people to stop complaining and attain true happiness. How were they to attain this lofty goal? By purchasing special purple bracelets. Every time a person complained, they had to switch the bracelet to the opposite wrist—but if they are able to go 21 days without complaining, they were “rewarded with a Certificate of Happiness.”

So it goes with our attempts to claim that all is well in the 21^st century. We seek easy, commodified, pre-programmed escape hatches from the ugliness of the world around us. And we’re not supposed to talk about any of it, lest we seem “too political.” We’re supposed to sit back and watch the fire burn, complacently. As Kendzior points out, “In an America built on the reinvention of reality, critical words make people uneasy—and so do those who speak them.” Americans, it seems, don’t want to be brought down by bad news.

Kendzior brings on the bad news, and she brings it relentlessly. If you followed her coverage of the 2016 election cycle in the US, it was not easy reading. But she was one of the few who was on the mark, even if many didn’t want to hear it. In this essay, she reminds us of Alan Greenspan’s warnings about “irrational exuberance”, and how so many Americans ignored all of that uneasy talk about bubble economies (in housing, credit, and higher ed, for example). Americans were told to keep buying those five bedroom houses. Keep signing on the dotted line, despite the $750,000 mortgage. Don’t worry about the “balloon payment” in five years. Then the bubble exploded, the economy crashed, and, as Kendzior tells us, Americans were all told to keep our collective chins up:

Stop complaining—this will not be like this forever. Stop complaining—this is the way things have always been. Complainers suffer the cruel imperatives of optimism: lighten up, suck it up, chin up, buck up. In other words: shut up.

Sound familiar? It should.

“The surest way to keep a problem from being solved,” Kendzior writes, “is to deny that problem exists.” Such words seem pretty prophetic these days. Ironically, Donald Trump’s entire campaign was founded in the loud, visceral complaints of some segments of the American electorate. But now that Trump has won, the media and anyone else is supposed to keep their mouths shut. This is power:

“Telling people not to complain in an act of power, a way of asserting that one’s position is more important than another one’s pain,” Kendzior writes. Such acts of dismissal and erasure are hardly unique to the USA, she argues: “Dictatorships around the world are famous for self-reported statistics of sky-high happiness.”

Don’t worry, and don’t complain. Everything is wonderful. There’s nothing to see here. This was the biggest crowd ever. We’re going to win so much you’re going to be tired of winning. Trust me, I have the best ideas, and I alone will fix everything. Such hubris is not unique in history. And, Kendzior warns, we should be wary of regimes that try to dispel complaint and make blanket pronouncements about national success, infallibility, happiness. She writes:

The absence of complaining should be taken as a sign that something is rotting in a society. Complaining is beautiful. Complaining should be encouraged. Complaining means you have a chance.

Often, those in power don’t want these kinds of alerts to be heard, for obvious reasons. Kendzior explains: “Complaining creates common ground. In complaints, people find that their problems are not so far apart.” The silencing of complaint and dissent dismantles that common ground.

Complaints erode the edges of power, and that’s why so many regimes seek to quash or dispel dissent. This can take many forms, as Kendzior explains. Of course there are overt forms of state repression that include intimidation, harassment, and violence. But there are other, more subtle forms as well. One common tactic is to say that people who complain are all talk and are avoiding actually doing anything productive. This is the kind of critique that’s often levied at protesters who march in the streets. “Get a job!” critics charge, implicitly questioning the value of any efforts that don’t explicitly feed into the national GDP. Another form of dismissal is the “well, it could be worse” line that completely “delegitimizes misery by portraying it as a competition,” Kendzior writes. Educated, unemployed white-collar workers are told to stop complaining because they are privileged and have an education. The poor need to shut it because they are lucky to live in the USA. Exiles should keep a lid on it because, hey, at least they escaped. People who live under dictatorships can’t speak either, because they have food and shelter. Nobody has cause to complain, the powerful say to the powerless. Always look on the bright side of life. You know the drill.

Yet, despite everything, people resist. They refuse to stay silent. They speak out, and they refused to be shamed or intimidated into silence. As Kendzior points out, for marginalized groups, “complaining is the first step in removing the shame from a lifetime of being told one’s problems are unimportant, non-existent, or even a cause for gratitude.” Complaining, she tells us, “alerts the world that the problem is a problem.”

In this book, Sarah Kendzior pushes back against those who seek to stifle dissent. She’s been pushing back, hard, for quite a while now. If you read her work, you’ll see this is a common theme. She is not afraid to call it how it is, even if many Americans don’t want to hear it. Yet, if you come away thinking that it’s always raining in Kendzior-land, and her work is just another “ruthless criticism of everything existing,” you’ve missed the point. Her work is critical, and it is ruthless. Yes. But it also has a message, and it’s certainly not about sitting back and accepting the status quo. Much of her work uses critical analysis as a tool to fight back, and to remind people of the very things they stand to lose. This is why her essay about complaint is so poignant, so powerful. Kendzior writes,

People hate complaining because they do not like to listen. When you listen to someone complaining, you are forced to acknowledge them as a human being instead of a category … You are forced to trust, and you are forced to care. In complaint lies a path to compassion.

The arc of Kendzior’s argument reveals her anthropological roots, which are steeped in critique and ultimately grounded in an advocacy of common humanity and compassion. She provides no easy answers. What Kendzior gives us is one roadmap that helps us understand how we got here, what we have lost, and may yet lose if we remain silent.

[1] I interviewed Sarah here on Savage Minds back in 2013.
[2] Or you can work for a National Park, which, as it turns out, entails a similar mission in life.

On January 20, over one thousand anthropologists came together to read Michel Foucault’s lecture eleven in “Society Must Be Defended.” What began as a simple blog post became a global showing of scholarly solidarity and transnational anthropological community building in the wake of the disastrous presidential election in the United States. Groups in sixteen countries convened to both read aloud and discuss Foucault’s analysis of biopower, racism, and the state. Some of these groups were based in university settings but many were not. We had readers in pubs, museums, living rooms, on a live radio broadcast, and in front of Trump Tower in New York City. After the events on January 20 people contacted us through e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter, to describe the sense of collective scholarly engagement that this event provided. Many said that the feeling of anthropological community in the face of this disastrous political change grounded them.

In the wake of this extraordinary response to the initial Read-In idea, we now propose along with co-sponsors Savage Minds and the journals American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Environment and Society, and Political and Legal Anthropology, and based on hundreds of suggestions from anthropologists, a monthly global Anthropology Read-In.

Here is how it will work: On the third Friday of every month for the next four years (or as short or long as necessary), using the new #AnthReadIn on Twitter and utilizing the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/170068806806067/, we will come together to read and discuss a single text or a few short texts. Anthropologists will curate the monthly reading lists with each curator, or curatorial collective, assuming responsibility for three months’ worth of readings. At the end of their tenure as curators, they will then pass the responsibility on to another individual or group. Hence, we will provide readings for February and March and then pass the responsibility onto someone else who will provide readings for April, May, and June. We are hoping that this method (a kind of snowball sampling method of editorial control) will move the privilege of choosing the readings around through a broad network of anthropologists and through a range of perspectives and expertise.

We initially chose lecture eleven from “Society Must Be Defended” because we had both been trying to think through how the election did and did not alter the United States as a nation-state. In the two months following the election we watched in horror as hate crimes increased in the United States and as it became even clearer than it had been in the months leading up to the election that the new administration was going to focus on representing Black Lives Matter protesters, migrants, and other people of color as enemies of the state. Therefore, we wanted to read Foucault to consider how racism is the dividing practice par excellence of the modern biopolitical state. But we also wanted to remind ourselves that the state itself is grounded in, and literally built on, racism and dispossession. Specifically, it is on the land of indigenous peoples and it was built with and through the labor of slaves.

Sadly, the first week of the Trump administration has proved to be as much of an assault on principles of equality, democracy, and humanism as was feared, if not more so. Because we believe it is important that the #AnthReadIn be primarily about providing an intellectual response to the Trump presidency, we have tried to select readings that directly address that actions of the administration and that challenge us to consider what is actually mandated in terms of a moral response. Therefore, for February 17 we propose to read Hannah Arendt’s “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” which is the ninth chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism as well as Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Personally, we will both be reading, discussing, and sharing our thoughts through social media. We invite you to do the same.

Paige West is Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College and Columbia University

JC Salyer is Term Professor of Practice, Barnard College

Lots of us who teach in the U.S. (and, doubtless, in other places) have been asking dazed questions about how, and if, we should hold classes, what can we do with and for our students, and what responsibilities we have to teach to this event that so many of us are experiencing (in variously positioned and intersecting ways) as a disaster?

This morning, in my Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology Class, I devoted the class to reflecting (with some tears) on the climate of permissible violence targeted at those bodies the Trump campaign singled out for hate and disregard during the election, hearing from students about their concerns, and thinking about what resources different students have to safely respond and to enact civic engagement and community care. Then I gave them a mini-teach in about #cripthevote and the way the block granting of Medicaid and repeal of the ACA could literally kill people.

For those of us who teach, #teachingthedisaster will depend on who our students are, what kind of expertise we can bring to lectern/table/office hour/quad, as well as our own institutional, geographical, and sociopolitical location.

Yesterday, I reached out to colleagues to begin soliciting resources that might help each of us figure out our own approach. I’m grateful for the many rapid responses I got, both for their content and also because they manifested a heartening sense of action, which I think we all need right now. Thanks to everyone who emailed and tweeted their contributions. Below is a roughly organized (and by no means complete) collection, one to which I hope you will add.

Please share your own post-Trump teaching resources (how to teach, as well as what to teach) on twitter at #teachingthedisaster or add them to the comments section to this post.

In addition to work in my own classes, I’m also organizing a teach-in for on inauguration day, Friday January 20th. I’d urge those of you in a position to do so to do the same at your intuitions. Let’s make inauguration day a national higher ed day of action. (I know that should have ended with an exclamation point, but it will take me a few more days to muster the energy)

Why to Teach

• Marshall Sahlin’s reflections from the height of the Iraq war on Teach Ins in The Old Stoned Age
• “The Trump Effect” in schools.
• Seth Holmes reflections on Discussing the Suffering Slot with Migrant Farm Workers reminds us that injustice requires for concepts, as well as for action.
• Paul Stoller argues that, in the face of the failure of forms of quantitative knowledge, “Now is the time for ethnographers to step up.”

How to Teach

• There is a world of teaching literature on the subject of “difficult dialogues.” Here is a helpful primer from Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching.
• Though it’s geared toward k-12 education, Tolerance.Org offers helpful general classroom strategies on teaching the days after the election.
• The African American Intellectual History Society created as set of assignments to go with the Trump 2.0 Syllabus (see below). Some of the most adaptable to Anthropology include:
  • Ask students to select a Trump property (current or former) and write a paper on its history of labor/client/neighborhood relations, from development to operation/sale [David Huyssen]Ask students to construct an idea/intellectual map using one Trump’s speeches, tracing where ideas come from historically and noting connection to other primary/secondary sources assigned in the course. [Brian Goldstein]Analyzing one of Trump’s interviews, ask students to highlight the overlapping dimensions of racism, sexism, and xenophobia. [Jeff Helgeson]
• Disability activist and organizer Stacey Milbern posted a few tools for Social Justice Groups/Classrooms this week, including:

Pass out pen and paper to everyone. Invite people to write a letter about this moment. Ask people to not personalize the letters or provide identifying information, but write them for anyone who may be hurting in this moment. Invite people to bring the letter to you (or a co-facilitator) if they’d like. Redistribute the letters anonymously and give time for people to read them. Invite people to read the letter they received to the group if they’d like to share.

What to Teach

On Blackness and Anti-Black Racism

•  Trump 2.0 Syllabus. This may be the best single resource I’ve come across. Created by N. D. B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain and others at PublicBooks.Org, it is a historical, cultural, and political contextualization of the rise of Trump. The 15 units (each with accompanying Trump epitaph) include secondary sources plus a selection of primary and multimedia sources.
• The Black Lives Matter Syllabus, created by Frank Roberts at NYU. This syllabus focuses specifically on the BLM movement. Like the Trump 2.0 syllabus, it includes lots of primary sources as well as assignments.
• #Blacklivesmattersyllabus project from Anthropoliteia, edited by Sameena Mulla. Less specifically about the BLM movement itself, this series offers readings and assignments as well as pedagogical reflections from anthologists working on and teaching about blackness in the contemporary US.
• Ta-Nehisi Cotes. Both his “Case for Reparations” and Between the World and Me have been cropping up on anthro syllabi on a range of topics, including my own, to foster thinking about race and history in the US and the related the workings of embodiment and dispossession.

US-Mexico:

• Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail by Jason De Leon focuses on the way the necroviolence of the US border policy takes hold of the bodies of those who policy compels to come north across the Sonoran desert. It just won the AAA’s Marget Mead Award.
• Seth Holmes‘ Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farm Workers in the United States  also focuses on bodies, but here, they are the bodies of undocumented migrant agricultural workers whose suffering and precarity is essential to the US economic and gustatory status quo.

Disability: 

• #Cripthevote. If you’re on twitter, this hashtag, created by Alice Wong of the Disability Visibility Project with Andrew Pulrang, and Gregg Beratan,  is an amazing archive of disabled and ally voices.
• #Cripthevote: What’s the Crisis of Liberalism Got to Do with It is Faye Ginsberg and Rayna Rapp’s contribution to the CA Crisis of Liberalism Hotspot (see below), describing the role of disability engagement in the 2016 election.
• Ari Ne’man, co-founder of the Autistic Self-Advocasy Network and member of the National Council on Disability (for as long as it exists…), just wrote a perfect primer about how the repeal of the ACA and proposed block granting of Medicaid will endanger and kill disabled people. This is a must teach.
• Liz Lewis’ blog Disability Fieldnotes is a great resource both for reflective thinking about what an anthropology of disability in the U.S. might do, and also for insight, facts and figures.

How Could This Happen?

• Sarah Kendzior predicted Trump’s triumph last May, giving an account of his exploitation of American pain.
• Paul Stoller offers this on culture as an explanatory force. Though I  bristle at his mobilization of a simplified culture concept in this piece, it might serve one well in the class room with a little deconstruction.
• Lilith Mahmod’s Crisis of Liberalism piece We Have Never Been Liberal, explores the way liberalism contains the conditions of possibility for fascism, both in Europe and the U.S.

The Crisis of Liberalism

• Cultural Anthropology’s Crisis of Liberalism Hotspot  is hot off the press. This collection of short essays from Ulf Hannez, Andrea Mulebach, Doug Holmes and others (including SM’s own Alex Golub), has arrived just in time to help us think critically and comparatively about “our present and recent seasons of political discontent.”
  

The following people contributed resources for this list: Vincanne Adams, Lindsay Bell, Dominic Boyer, Christopher Chan, Seth Holmes, Cymene Howe, Kevin Karpiak, Ashley Lebner, Ken MacLeish, Carol Mcgranahan, Andrea Mulebach, and Jenny Shaw.

Detroit moves quickly; issues of scale and pace in a city of this size pose major challenge to contemporary archaeological practice. I’m not sure what a decolonizing archaeology should look like here, but it’s happening nonetheless. It is grassroots. It connects with communities. It shares the skills we have as social scientists with people, places, and collections. The goals are simple – to tell stories that matter, to empower memory, to increase participation, and, hopefully, to spur action against destructive forces of erasure and exclusion. We don’t have the luxury of time and protracted theoretical deliberation on our side; this work is done in a climate of rapid late capitalist development and privatization, where most of places we encounter are at the mercy of irreversible decay from ruination or demolition by developers.

In the short space of the past century, capitalism conquered Detroit. Lumber barons, Henry Ford’s $5 day, and Motown attracted wealth, migrants, and notoriety to the city. When businesses were done winning they left behind a “traumascape” of blight and conflict (Tumarkin 2010). Right now the city is experiencing a process of reckoning with its emergent post-disaster status through various public, private, and grassroots efforts. A palpable tension exists between neoliberal developers (who are arguably re-colonizing parts of the city) and Detroiters (including a Detroit diaspora). An undergirding battle wages over which stories will be told about the city – its histories of industrial success and innovation on the one hand, or the accounts of inequality, violent racism, and epic systemic failures on the other. In this post I briefly reflect upon the ways in which contemporary urban archaeology is attempting to work both within and against the frameworks of late capitalist development, and I provide a few examples from our work at Wayne State University that link these efforts to the themes of participatory action, unlearning, return, and reclaiming that fall under the umbrella of decolonized practice.

Figure 1.  The Imagination Station in the Corktown neighborhood of Detroit, 2012 (Photo: K. Ryzewski).

Detroit is a city of 139 sq miles – within its boundaries, the cities of New York, Boston and San Francisco can comfortably fit with room to spare. Physically, there exists an expansive blighted landscape within the city limits, which reached epic proportions in the wake of the recent mortgage crisis [upwards of 80,000 abandoned properties].  Socially, there is a stark socio-economic divide between Detroit and the surrounding metro area. Today the city’s population is just shy of 700,000, and it is 82% African American. But a significant Detroit diaspora population of about 3.5 million people live in the Metro suburbs. Many in this population self-identify as Detroiters – a large proportion were born and raised in the city, or their parents were.  What this means, to borrow from the anthropological literature on transnational migration, is that there exists a multiplicity of belongings associated with Detroit, playing out on different levels of engagement that are concurrently “here” and “there” (Bell 2016, Levitt and Waters 2002, and others).

In the current climate of revitalization there are at least a half-dozen well-funded and highly visible development and planning initiatives that are envisioning what a future Detroit might look like (Detroit Future City, Data Driven Detroit, 7.2 SQ MI).  A recurring issue with some of these blueprinting projects is that they are built on cliché sketches of the city as gritty, vacant, a blank slate – a premise that effectively ignores the past and present of the city in its many guises.  Some initiatives have also met with pushback from local residents. As my colleagues Andrew Newman and Sara Safransky (2014) observe, Detroit Future City is poised to perpetuate many of the inequalities that have for so long fueled the city’s underlying socio-economic and racial conflicts. Currently, two billionaires, Mike Ilitch and Dan Gilbert are almost singlehandedly implementing ideas from these blueprints by transforming huge swaths of the downtown neighborhoods in aggressive – and privatized – rebuilding campaigns. Archaeologists have not been included in any of these planning conversations.

Figure 2. The last of the historic district standing in the shadow of the massive Ilitch hockey and entertainment district development, 2016 (the house on the right is now asking almost $4 million)  (Photo: K. Ryzewski).

The response that my colleagues and I have designed to the situation of Detroit today has been to create a program of grassroots archaeology that is structured and guided by local partnerships with stakeholder groups within and beyond the city limits. Some of these are slow multi-year affairs, others just take a weekend. All involve Detroiters, multiple academic fields, and much more than standard archaeological methods.

Here’s a quick summary of a few of these projects:

Ethnic Layers of Detroit is a digital storytelling project (funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities). This project works with a two-dozen member advisory board drawn from local non-profits, institutions, and community organizations to produce – in collaboration with students and residents – short two-to-three minute digital stories about places in Detroit that are linked to layered ethnic histories.  In doing so it foregrounds the existence of the subjects and objects of our studies in the contemporary moment.

We will have 25 stories completed by the end of 2016, and many more student and community stories to add to that repertoire. The recordings preserve some elements of the physical landscape and its absences in ways that cannot and should not survive intact in the future city visions. They also invite either place-based experiences or distant engagements with the featured sites through what Hennessy et al. (2013) have called “digital return”. Examples of our ELD project stories include the Brewster-Douglass homes (the first African American federal housing project in the country), the former Chinatown neighborhood, and an empty house lot where Victor Herman, a Jewish American autoworker who wound up imprisoned in a Soviet-era Siberian Gulag, once lived.

Figure 3. The Brewster-Douglass homes in 2012, two years before they were demolished (Photo: K. Ryzewski).

One of the most fruitful collaborations has been between our Wayne State archaeologists and the Detroit Sound Conservancy. Together, over the past year, we have mapped, excavated, and generated various media about two former places associated with Detroit’s music-making history. One of these sites was at the Blue Bird Inn jazz club – a prominent African American venue that was once home to musicians like Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley. Lorin Brace, Wayne State alum and current PhD student at the University of Maryland, recently completed his Master’s Essay on the archaeology of the club. The archaeology of the Blue Bird Inn, a derelict building, probably won’t lead to any sort of site-specific restoration, but it is generating widespread interest in accounting for the city’s rich musical heritage in visions of future exhibits, city tours, and other plans.

There are several other initiatives, (e.g., Unearthing Detroit, Speakeasy Project, Roosevelt Park), but one final one for now is arguably the most important for the promoting the relevance of archaeology to Detroit – this is the Time Jumpers program – an educational module geared towards elementary school students and customized to the archaeology of the region. We began the program 2014 by hosting the sessions in local schools (15+ sessions so far), but as word spread we’ve expanded into statewide science festivals, the National Parks Service’s “Parks for the People” agenda, and the White House’s “Every Kid in a Park” program.

What do these grassroots initiatives have to do with decolonizing archaeology in Detroit?

Detroit is a city where place-based strategies for growth are neglecting people-based realities of the past, present and future. Archaeology tempers this in some measure by bringing places and people together.

What these archaeological projects do is allow for what I’m calling a “Return to Detroit”, they are people and place-centered re-visions of the city’s past in the present (I borrow the notion of return from Hirsch and Miller 2011). They foster memories that tie and bind to place and people, but also propel the city towards a future that includes them. This notion of embraces different aesthetic modes – photography, music, cultural engagement, activism, and the ways in which they are mobilized to activate memory and reframe experiences with transformed places – in this case, providing, to quote Samuel Collins,  “an anthropology for rather than of the future” (2008:125).

Bibliography

Bell, J., 2016. Migrants: keeping a foot in both worlds or losing the ground beneath them? Transnationalism and integration as experienced in the everyday lives of Polish migrants in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Social Identities, 22(1), pp.80-94.

Collins, S.G., 2008. All tomorrow’s cultures: Anthropological engagements with the future. Berghahn Books.

Hennessy, K., Lyons, N., Loring, S., Arnold, C., Joe, M., Elias, A. and Pokiak, J., 2013. The Inuvialuit Living History Project: digital return as the forging of relationships between institutions, people, and data. Museum Anthropology Review, 7(1-2), pp.44-73.

Hirsch, M. and Miller, N.K. eds., 2011. Rites of return: diaspora poetics and the politics of memory. Columbia University Press.

Levitt, P. and Waters, M.C. eds., 2002. The changing face of home: The transnational lives of the second generation. Russell Sage Foundation.

Newman, A. and Safransky, S., 2014. Remapping the Motor City and the Politics of Austerity. Anthropology Now, 6(3), pp.17-28.

Tumarkin, M.M., 2005. Traumascapes: The power and fate of places transformed by tragedy. Melbourne Univ. Publishing.

BIO

Krysta Ryzewski is a historical archaeologist and an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wayne State University in Detroit, where she co-leads the Anthropology of the City initiative. Her research explores the consequences of disruptive social and environmental pressures on past landscapes, communities and material culture production. She currently conducts major research projects that focus on these relationships in urban North America (Detroit) and in the Caribbean (Montserrat). She also has a background in the materials science subfield of engineering. http://clas.wayne.edu/krysta-ryzewski

Given that we as a discipline seem to feel empowered to develop a foreign policy, I figured I’d offer a few domestic policy ideas, a few resolutions that might take care of some our own local inequities.

The purpose of these resolutions is to suggest some ways out of what most everyone agrees is a generally miserable situation for those currently coming of age or working in academia. More or less, all of us want jobs for scholars and a free education for our students. Repeat that to yourself: jobs for scholars, free education for students. In proposing these, I’m also suggesting that we have some power over our academic, professional and disciplinary destiny and can and should act in concert. I see the decline in tenure-line positions, the specter of academic debt, and even the coercive and jealous guarding of scholarship by publishing cartels, as an invitation to collective action. We already have a communications infrastructure, national and international associations in place, as well as active local chapters across the globe (those hot-beds of activism, academic departments). From this point of view, we’re actually very well organized. All we need to do now is raise some consciousness and come up with a few action items. Should you doubt whether collective action is worthwhile or appropriate, it’s also worth keeping in mind the ways in which activists and unions are making the university a more livable, humane place (one example of each).

Here follow three resolutions. They are drafts. I accept and apologize for their limitations and shortcomings. They don’t talk about all that’s worth fixing (how could they?). I offer them to imagine what collective action on our problems might look like. Interested academic associations should consider them for debate, improvement, and vote.

NB: The preamble portion of these resolutions are going to be much shorter than they might be. There is a tremendous amount of research on precarity in academia and the conditions that creates. I suspect readers of Savage Minds are relatively familiar with this stuff. Moreover, were these to actually go live, they would be worked over, edited, revised, and most importantly, gilded with citations. The most certainly would not be the work of one person.

Resolution on Accreditation Standards and Adjunct Labor

Whereas universities in the United States are accredited by self-governing non-governmental associations and thereby receive legitimacy to generate knowledge and offer degrees;

Whereas universities in the United States are chartered by the states in which they reside and thereby receive the benefits of non-profit and or educative incorporation, and are thereby allowed by their state government to offer degrees and enjoy a variety of favorable tax statuses and state aid;

Whereas there has been a historic shift towards a reliance on poorly-paid, short-term, contract appointments, with no tenure protections to satisfy the research and teaching aims of the Academy;

Whereas these conditions have led to the destroyed lives, thwarted dreams, and unfulfilled potential of thousands of competently trained scholars, our disciplinary children;

Whereas this is no way to treat your children;

Whereas society deserves to benefit from the broadest field of scholarly inquiry possible; and

Whereas students deserve to learn from permanently employed scholars with guaranteed freedom of inquiry.

Now therefore:

We resolve that all states and organizations that offer accreditation or incorporation shall deny accreditation and incorporation to any university, college, and or institution of higher learning that, except in cases of emergency or unanticipated vacancy, and in cases in which a professional practitioner who is gainfully and currently employed in his or her area of expertise would be required for a particular course offering, makes use of any part-time and or non-tenure track faculty to offer courses or conduct research;

We resolve that no university, college, or institution of higher learning shall, however accredited and legitimized, except in cases of emergency and or unanticipated vacancy, and in cases in which a professional practitioner who is gainfully and currently employed in his or her area of expertise would be required to make a course offering, make use of any part-time and or non-tenure track faculty to offer courses or conduct research;

We resolve that no academic shall work in such an institution that has not made such changes, above enumerated; and

We resolve that all academics who are members of and represented by the below-signed academic associations shall immediately cease research and teaching duties, thereby going on strike until such time as the above resolutions on incorporation and accreditation are met.

Resolution on University Governance

Whereas universities in the United States are accredited by self-governing non-governmental associations and thereby receive legitimacy to generate knowledge and offer degrees;

Whereas universities in the United States are chartered by the states in which they reside and thereby receive the benefits of non-profit and or educative incorporation, and are thereby allowed by their state government to offer degrees and enjoy a variety of favorable tax statuses and state aid;

Whereas the standards of accreditation, incorporation, as well as the general norms of university governance expect that trustees or their equivalent shall stand outside of the university community and thereby be “unconflicted”;

Whereas this reliance on outside governance for ultimate budgetary and executive authority in the University has led to a situation in which boards are often made up of people whose professional and personal experience has left them seemingly unfamiliar with the norms of scholarship and university teaching; and

Whereas, due to the nature of university board structures, universities in the United States have increasingly adopted the norms of governance that typify for-profit business enterprises, often referred to as the “corporatization” of the university, or one more manifestation of “neoliberal” ways of running something that is of great public benefit. Such norms include but are not limited to :

Exorbitant executive pay;

Bureaucratic bloat;

An embrace of audit culture;

An efflorescence of debt financing;

An over concern with PR and Marketing;

Prioritizing resort-like amenities over the academic mission;

Prioritizing athletic performance over the academic mission;

A reliance on poorly conceived yet bureaucratically appealing metrics;

A growth of institutes and centers, outside of departmental control, offering instruction;

A disregard for the debt and life possibilities of students, often referred to as “customers”; and

A general degradation of the professoriate.

Now therefore:

We resolve that all states and organizations that offer accreditation or incorporation shall amend their accreditation and incorporation standards to require:

1. That all boards be composed of equal portions faculty, students, alumni, non-academic staff, and community members;

2. That all universities, colleges, or other institutions of higher education shall have democratic processes by which such boards are constituted, and may be challenged and changed;

3. Students shall have a veto over all tuition related decisions;

4. Faculty shall have a veto over all research, academic employment, and tenure related decisions;

We resolve that no academic shall work in such an institution that has not made such changes, above enumerated;

We resolve that all academics who are members of and represented by the below-signed academic associations shall immediately cease research and teaching duties, thereby going on strike until such time as the above resolutions on university governance are met.

Resolution on Student Debt

Whereas many measures of income, for the vast majority of people working in the United States have remained stagnant or declined over the last several decades;

Whereas universities, colleges, and other institutions of higher learning in the United States have become increasingly and relatively expensive;

Whereas American society has increasingly relied on debt and loans to pay for higher education, thereby placing the financial burden of provisioning for an education squarely on the shoulders of students and their families ;

Whereas we feel that it is society’s general and no person’s individual responsibility to provide for education and scholarship;

Whereas education and open scholarship are best conceived of as public goods or public commons;

Whereas student debt unreasonably constrains an individual’s life opportunities, and unacceptably commodifies education,  thereby denying the expression of human potential and flourishing that is one of the aims of higher education;

Whereas numerous public and private universities have historically had far lower, inflation adjusted tuition;

Whereas numerous public and private universities have offered an education at no cost to the individual;

Whereas a measure of the worth of a society is how it treats following generations; and

Whereas by this measure of worth we come up wanting.

Now Therefore:

We resolve that all universities, colleges, or institutions of higher learning shall offer education free of charge to all comers;

We resolve that all universities, colleges, or institutions of higher learning shall develop a plan to go tuition free;

We resolve that all universities, college, or institutions of higher learning shall develop a plan to go student-debt free;

We resolve that all state and private sponsors of universities, college, or institutions of higher learning shall create the conditions under which universities, colleges, and institutions of higher learning shall be able to go tuition and student-debt free;

We resolve that no academic shall work in such an institution that has not made such changes, above enumerated; and

We resolve that all academics who are members of and represented by the below-signed academic associations shall immediately cease research and teaching duties,
thereby going on strike, until such time as the above resolutions on student debt are met.

Sometime towards the end of graduate school, I got it into my head that students should be able to veto tuition hikes. It’s pretty widely known that university tuition in the United States, at both public and private universities has increased far faster than inflation or wages over the last few decades . So, as a graduate student, I and a few of my colleagues had done some research into our own particular situation and found, as you might expect, that tuition had gone up a lot. Our college’s budget in 2013 included a 4.5 percent tuition increase, raising the cost per credit hour to $1,344. One comparison ultimately stood out to us: in this same year, the Graduate Center at the City University of New York’s tuition per credit hour was $465 for in-state students, and $795 per credit hour for out of state students. Now, of course, we might expect a public university to be more affordable than a private university. But we didn’t have just one year of data. We had credit-hour prices going back to 1915 ($6.00 per credit hour, or $138.94 per credit hour in 2013 dollars, in case you were wondering, all this according to the bureau of labor statistics inflation calculator). With this historical data, and with this nifty inflation calculator, we were able to see that tuition was at or below $500 per credit unit for most of the 1970s and 1980s. Prior to 1967 or so, tuition was well below $400 per credit hour, in 2013 dollars. So, I and my colleagues stumbled into the fact that for most of our private college’s history, tuition was cheaper than it currently is at CUNY, even for an in-state student.

Now, there are lots of clever ways to explain the rise in price of college tuition, or the drop in wages to be able to afford college tuition. But that was cold comfort to us. We were mad. We had demonstrable proof that our university had been much more affordable for most of its life. And we figured this was a political problem more than a problem of management or accounting. Simply put, we felt that if students could say no, tuition would not have
gone up the way it did. Full stop ¹. So we asked for a student veto over the Board of Trustees budget. And at first our trustees heard us out. Feigned interest. Ignored us. And finally, perhaps inevitably, dismissed us out of hand. Still, I want to stand by this political diagnosis. Tuition would not have been where it was if students could say no. We had no power, and were treated as such.

What is more, I don’t think this inability to say no just applies to students. I think this is a faculty problem as well. The university at which I currently work has enriched executives at the expense of students and faculty in fairly dramatic fashion over the last decade. First, in the wake of the 2007/2008 crisis, the university suspended its contribution to faculty retirement accounts for a year. At the time, it was projected that this would make up $7.4 million of a projected $8.9 million shortfall. At the time an executive vice president and chief operating officer of the university said that this was, “the most equitable and least bad of the options” that the university had. Five years later, on January 2, 2014, the University paid its former president $4.9 million, $4.1 million in deferred compensation and $811,000 for untaken sabbatical. Moreover, the compensation agreement with this president seemed to have been signed shortly after the university stopped paying into faculty retirement accounts. While the University has since revised it’s compensation policies as well as added faculty to the compensation committee, a few weeks ago the faculty senate passed a resolution of “broken trust” with the university administration.

What, then, do we make of this? These are admittedly extreme and particular examples. Yet, I suppose without too much imagining, we could all come up with a number of ways universities would be different if students and faculty had vetoes over spending. Would we pay football coaches as much as we do? Or university presidents, for that matter ? Would we have had the decline in tenure track faculty and the rise of adjuncts ? Would we have a debt-financed, unsustainable tuition model? Students and faculty, the heart and soul of the university, generally have no say over how much money the university demands for an education, or the basic policies of hiring and firing the administration.

I suspect we could wax lyrical about the routinization of charisma, the growth of the bureaucracy, audit culture, and so on. But this has all been said, by folks more competent than I. What I want to illustrate, though, is one way in which this sort of power structure gets perpetuated and identify a potential place where we could change things. I want to look at university accreditation. Specifically I want to look at the New England Association of Schools and Colleges’ (NEASC)Commission of Institutions of Higher Education (CIHE) university accreditation standards, as effective July 1, 2016. These are the accreditation standards that apply to my current employer as well as most other universities in the region.

Who and What are these People?

In the United States university accreditation happens via independent organizations that are self-organized by the universities seeking accreditation. They are not government agencies. Each state has its own separate process for the founding of universities as corporate entities, with all the tax and property benefits that goes with incorporation, that, insofar as I understand things, has little to do with accreditation. In the NEASC’s own words, from the preamble to its accreditation standards:

NEASC is a voluntary, non-profit, self-governing organization having as its primary purpose the accreditation of educational institutions. Through its evaluation activities the Commission provides public assurance about the educational quality of degree-granting institutions that seek or wish to maintain accreditation.

Institutions of higher learning achieve accreditation from CIHE by demonstrating they meet the Commission’s Standards for Accreditation and comply with its policies.

Indeed the public as well was invited to participate in this process in recognition of the importance of higher education to the individual and  collective well being of our citizenry and for our economy. Thus, the Standards represent the accrued wisdom of over 200 colleges and universities and interested others about the essential elements of institutional quality, and they offer a perspective that stresses the public purposes of higher education.

That last paragraph is key. The NEASC claims to carry the “accrued wisdom of over 200 colleges and universities.” Their policies and procedures are portrayed as common sense, and that which is necessary to gain the trust of the public, whoever that is. And so the NEASC goes on, though nine standards (Mission and Purpose; Planning and Evaluation; Organization and Governance; The Academic Program; Students; Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship; Institutional Resources; Educational Effectiveness; Integrity, Transparency, and Public Disclosure). And while there are point after point after point about evaluation,
standards, auditing, and accountability (a veritable recipe for audit culture), the educational standards are notable, too, for a few absences. Despite claiming to emphasize the “public purpose of higher education,” the NEASC remains agnostic as to whether a university need be for- or non-profit (see standard 9.19). Moreover, despite several pretty paeans to academic freedom:

6.12 The institution protects and fosters academic freedom for all faculty regardless of rank or term of appointment.

9.3 The institution is committed to the free pursuit and dissemination of knowledge. It assures faculty and students the freedom to teach and study, to examine all pertinent data, to question assumptions, and to be guided by the evidence of scholarly research.

the accreditation standards remain silent as to the necessity of tenure, or the violence a reliance on adjunct and part time faculty does to academic freedom and free inquiry (to say nothing about the lives of aspiring scholars, or the intellectual choices debt-burdened students make).

What Do These Accreditors Do?

Now that we have a sense of how the NEASC explains itself and understands the work that it does, we can ask, how does it maintain a political setup that allows trustees to loot professors retirement to give multi-million dollar golden parachutes to administrators, or more prosaically, put current grad-students in the future poor house? Most simply, it prevents us from running our institutions. Remember, faculty and students can’t say no. Boards are responsible for the hiring and firing of the chief executive officer of the institution, future planning, and approving budgeting and financing. Moreover, boards and the power they wield, must be external.

3.4 The board demonstrates sufficient independence to ensure it can act in the institution’s best interest. The board assures representation of the public interest in its composition and reflects the areas of competence needed to fulfill its responsibilities. Two-thirds or more of the board members, including the chair, are free of any personal or immediate familial financial interest in the institution, including as employee, stockholder or shareholder, corporate director, or contractor.

So, first off, some kind of independence from day to day governance is necessary so that we might, “assure representation of the public interest.” Put another way, have you seen the faculty and the students? You can’t trust the inmates to run the asylum, now can you? This reasoning is patronizing, in the common sense as well as the etymological sense. Universities need patrons. We need aristocrats. We need statesmen and philanthropists. How else are you going to assure representation of the “public” interest and keep things free of conflicts of interest? We can trust you to run your little classes, and lead your little research projects, but leave the money and the job stuff to us. We know better. This insistence on this type of outside leadership starts to explain the board composition
I’ve seen across a number of institutions.

My own graduate university is a great example of what this sort of board looks like in practice. There are 24 members, 7 MBAs, 7 JDs, and only 2 PhDs. The PhDs, too, are in finance and biochemistry and molecular biophysics and are held by individuals whose careers happened largely outside of the university. In terms of occupations, there are 4 lawyers and judges, 2 journalists, a few entrepreneurs, real estate investors, one school administrator, and one physician. But, of course, the majority work in finance–just about half of the board. MBAs, JDs, and careers in finance make up the bulk of the trustees of the University. There are no university-housed, practicing-academics serving on the board of a major research University. And of course, this is ideal at least from the point of view of accreditation.

Students get even shorter shrift:

3.16 The system of governance makes provisions for consideration of student views and judgments in those matters in which students have a direct and reasonable
interest.

We clearly didn’t have “direct or reasonable interest” in setting the level of tuition or in university budgeting. Oh well.

I suspect this may all seem an odd thing to get worked up about. I’m sure most students have no awareness of accreditation standards and the like. I’m also sure that a committed faculty member could all but ignore accreditation, save for periodic pro forma reviews and audits, and the odd syllabus proviso about credit hours and the like. Yet accreditation and the academic institution that it valorizes strangles our politics as students and faculty. What is more, we can’t leave and start our own universities, governed by our own lights. If you want accreditation, that is, to be a real university in the eyes of the “public,” you need to accept outside governance for accreditation. Practically, this has meant that we must accept the reign of the business people, the adjunctification of the academy, and the death by debt of our students.

Much of my research has to do with financiers. I conduct a lot of interviews. In the course of my student activism, I often had sense of deja vu. I was hearing similar sorts of explanations for why tuition was the way it was, the necessity for marketing the university brand, and so on, to those that I was hearing justifying a leveraged buyout of an investment company. Perhaps the master’s tools will never do damage to the university we all work in, and this fixation on accreditation is just a distraction from a larger exodus that we might need to consider. Still, it seems like it should be easier for us to leave a university that doesn’t keep with out values and start our own. Just imagine: only full-time faculty positions, reasonable or no tuition, and all on the backs of adjunct-presidents and -football coaches.

Therefore, I would like the reader to be aware of the tentative nature of the thoughts expressed in this post, and the assumptions that guide them, and the delicate nature of the interventions that I make.

I began to think of margins more concertedly after I attended a lecture by Pnina Werbner recently, where she spoke about political revolution in the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements in 2011, and the aesthetics of effervescence and despair. She spoke of how such movements needed to be backed by politics so as to materialize the changes that guide them in the first place. Despite apparent failures, she argued that such movements do have an impression on the world: narratives, strategies, and so forth, which steer and shape protest politics in the world. While I am in agreement with her argument, I do think one element that was left relatively under-theorized – and one I think is crucial – is that of the margins of such politics.

I use the term ‘margin’ in a very specific sense in this post. In the first sense, I use margins to denote a space created by social and political forces, but with an important caveat that the social forces I am talking about can be broadly characterized as counter-hegemonic forces. Margins, while hierarchized, are not simply peripheries to an imagined center (I am also skeptical of ascribing a direct spatial link, which I explain below).

To return to the case that was central in Werbner’s lecture, the Arab Spring, one such margin I could think of was how the voices and actions of women protestors and activists were met with hostility and exclusion in some countries. The most notable case I can think of, for instance, is Aliaa Elmahdy in Egypt. More broadly, one can also think of the exclusion and neglect of queer, black and women of color in western feminism; or the exclusion of indigenous movements and narratives in anti-capitalist struggles; or the absence of the voices of migrants and refugees in some no border movements, as operating in such margins.

In the above cases, the margins I wish to outline are not only marginal in relation to an antagonist force, like brutal political regimes or a corrupt postcolonial state (which they are, no doubt). Rather, I want to point out how the political force of such counter movements exacerbates (or in some cases, creates) its own margins. In other words, every politics creates its own margins.

The second sense in which I use the term margins, is concerned with the kind of politics that is engendered in the margins – which is also why I think it is erroneous to conflate margins with marginalization. I feel compelled to reflect on margins in this sense following the rise in student protests in India at the moment, and particularly the question of caste. I want to highlight the tension between the recent and ongoing student protests at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) Delhi, and at Hyderabad Central University (HCU).

In HCU, students have been protesting against the university administration and the government following the death of Rohith Vemula, a Dalit student and PhD scholar, who committed suicide in January after being persecuted by the university administration and ministers from the Hindu nationalist party, BJP, for his anti-caste politics on campus. Vemula’s suicide – or more accurately, institutional murder – also reflects the continuing caste discrimination and caste violence prevalent in Indian universities (and in Indian society at large). JNU, on the other hand, saw massive protests against the arrests of several student leaders (who were accused of sedition under colonial-era laws, for shouting ‘anti-national’ slogans). Not only did JNU occupy a more prominent role in the public imagination – for both, bad and good reasons, like hostile media coverage but also international solidarity, and participation of left political parties – some even argue that the JNU protests sidelined the HCU protests. This is especially so since HCU student protests were met with unprecedented police violence which saw very little media coverage, despite being widely shared on social media.

However, when I say the HCU movement – where anti-caste narratives and Dalit politics figure more prominently than critique of nationalism – inhabits a margin, I mean it is in a position that refuses to be appropriated by the larger leftist/liberal narratives guiding the JNU protests. This goes back to how the critique of caste precludes leftist politics in India, since most communist leaders were, and are, in fact upper-caste and privileged Hindus, for whom class struggle was historically more important than anti-caste struggle. This was reflected both in electoral politics, and also in epistemology – from the virtual absence of caste in postcolonial and Subaltern Studies, to an academic division of labor between theoretical Brahmins (the highest caste), and the empirical Shudras (the lower castes).

In this sense, the margin is a space of strong and relentless critique against political movements and epistemologies that occupy a center (along with right-wing and Hindu nationalist politics, of course). Far from being peripheral – and I strongly resist that conception – they are spaces of creating knowledge in its own right; a margin that is central in producing political and social critique; one that does not need the validation of the learned Brahmins of high academia or high politics. In that sense, the HCU protests are situated within the Dalit-Bahujan political milieu (the term ‘bahujan’ denotes the majority of people who are oppressed, Dalits, adivasis, minorities) that critiques caste violence, and the appropriation of Dalit politics by upper-castes, most notably, of B. R. Ambedkar (Ambedkar was one of the leading figures of the anti-caste movement in pre- and post-independence India. He was a rationalist, modernist, feminist, and played a vital role in drafting India’s Constitution. His scathing critiques against Hinduism and the Hindu Right, however, have been recently appropriated by both upper-caste progressive writers, and the Hindu Right, which dilutes the critical edge of his thinking, to say the least).[1] Following Walter Mignolo, conceived in this sense, the margin is a space that is challenging dominant, caste-blind narratives by forcing them to change the terms of the conversation and not merely the contents.

As I watched the JNU and HCU protests unfold on my timeline, I realized how marginal I was, and I am, to them; deeply invested as I may be politically and philosophically, but nonetheless, marginal in the sense that I am not materially invested in them (the physical distance being just one). This is how I use the term margin in the third and final sense.

As an upper-caste, I feel a deep sense of ambivalence and unease writing about caste, and expressing ‘solidarity,’ which more often than not risks becoming mere tokenism (or appropriation). Despite my claims to denounce my caste markers, caste has an undeniable materiality that sticks to you: in your name; your habitus; what you read; what you consume; who your friends are; what life possibilities you have; and the limits of your political engagement.

While it is possible to imagine what an anthropology-at-the-margin would look like in the first and second instances, with the question of caste, however, I have difficulty wondering what my anthropological engagement can look like – which is why I have now consciously decided to not engage in researching and writing academically on caste. Of course, I am not suggesting that we become mere bystanders (the conversation should continue, but not on the terms of vaunted academics. I nonetheless continue to discuss caste in personal and public conversations, like this one). By all means, anthropologists, scholars and activists continue to produce fascinating and relevant accounts of caste and caste politics in modern India that challenge the assumptions of how politics and political movements work, and challenge the assumptions, positions of privileged academics invested in the status quo. At some point, however, I sense that despite being an anthropologist, I am somehow still a part of this privileged group of theoretical Brahmins (perhaps this position of inhabiting a privileged margin is something anthropologists face in different political contexts – I would certainly like to hear more from the readers).

What, then, are the possibilities of engagements from such margins of the political? More importantly, what are the limits of such engagements? How can we think of anthropology, public engagement and cultural critique, when we come to be part of structures of power like caste (or perhaps, race or gender) that sticks to us? In my first post, I wrote of the need to get our feet muddied in the ground to do ethnography. It would seem almost contrary that I now advocate for a distance of sorts. Perhaps, in such moments, being at the margins can be about observing a distance (not observing from a distance), and yet somehow finding a way to speak truth to power.

[1] In 2014, Arundhati Roy published an introduction to an annotated edition of Ambedkar’s famous and critical text, Annihilation of Caste (AoC), which was widely criticized by Dalit scholars and activists as an appropriation of Ambedkar (since AoC is already a widely circulated and translated text anyway. Read the critiques of Roy published on the Ambedkarite forum Round Table India, here and here). Hindu right-wing parties like the BJP, on the other hand, ironically claim Ambedkar as a Hindu icon, although he was staunchly critical of the Hindu right.

A week before historic elections which swept Taiwan’s ruling Nationalist Party (KMT) out of power, KMT candidate Lin Yu-fang (林郁方) asked voters not vote for Freddy Lim (林昶佐, pictured above), asserting that he has “hair that is longer than a woman’s and is mentally abnormal.”¹

Short hair for men in Taiwan was heavily regulated during the Martial Law era which ran from shortly after the KMT took over Taiwan after World War II until 1987.

During the martial law period in Taiwan, hair length for males was controlled and long hair could get you in trouble if you walked down the street sporting it. Naturally, control of hair length in the schools was an important component of shaping the students, and disciplining them to accept authoritarian control.

It was only in 2005 that schools finally eased restrictions on hair length for boys.

Barely a month before the Election the Taiwan Police Union had issued a statement in support of a police officer who was fired for having long hair. The union supported the officer’s claim that their firing violated the Gender Equality in Employment Act. The officer said that “although he is biologically male, he does not identify with either gender and firing him for not meeting the male-specific grooming standard is discriminatory.”

Of course, such battles over long hair for men are not unique to Taiwan. When he was 17 David Bowie was interviewed for the BBC about the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men:

Its possible that the whole thing was a publicity stunt for a young singer, but the musical Hair came out a few years later, reflecting the strong association of long hair with counterculture. Despite some surface similarities, however, the symbolism of long hair on men in Taiwan has to be understood in light of Taiwan’s unique post-war history. (One could perhaps look back even further – to the queue worn by men during the Qing dynasty – but I’m not sure how relevant that is for understanding the present situation.)

During the Martial Law era, the KMT (whose leadership was made up of recent migrants who had arrived in Taiwan from China after the end of the Civil War) sought to legitimate their rule over Taiwan by promoting Chinese nationalism, claiming that the government in Taipei was the true government of all of China. In promoting this nationalist vision the KMT kept Taiwan on war footing, with military advisors in the schools and mandatory military training for male students. As such, military style haircuts were part of maintaining strict military discipline.

We can perhaps also find the importance of maintaining short hair in Confucianism which was promoted by the government as a kind of state religion. The birthday of Confucius is still an important state holiday (also known as Teacher’s Day), during which the president attends ceremonies at the Confucius temple in Taipei. Confucian patriarchy served the KMT by treating the nation as a family unit and each institution within the nation as a synecdoche of the national family. This can still be seen in Taiwanese schools where students refer to classmates as younger or elder brothers and sisters. The state had a vested interest in preserving the national patriarchal family structure and thus sees gender-bending long hair as a threat.

After the lifting of Martial Law in 1987 much of this changed. The state shifted strategy, and many of these practices were no longer essential to the maintenance of legitimacy, which became grounded more in Taiwan’s vision of itself as a multicultural and tolerant democracy. At the same time, as a result of stagnant wages and a increased sense of precarity among Taiwan’s middle classes, there is still a faction of Taiwanese society nostalgic for the law and order of the Martial Law era. These generational differences came to a head in the Sunflower Student Movement two years ago, and Taiwanese campaign ads played up these differences in the run-up to the elections.²

The first, by the KMT, captures the sentiments of those who long for the rapid economic growth and strong Confucian values of the 1960s [Note: turn on CC for English subtitles]:

The second, by the Democratic Progressive Party (民主進步黨 DPP), tries to capture the spirit of the Sunflower Movement.

As the lead singer of Chthonic, “arguably the biggest death metal band in Asia,”³ Freddy embodied many of the generational tensions represented by these videos. Here he is with his stage makeup:

Importantly, Freddy did not run as a DPP candidate. Instead, he helped create the New Power Party (時代力量 NPP). The NPP calls itself a “third force” and aims to attract new political voices, such as those mobilized during the Sunflower Student movement, many of which have felt alienated from traditional party politics.

Because Freddy ran in the Taipei district where I live the following anti-Freddy flier was placed in my mailbox the week before the election:

It attempts to link Freddy to ending the death penalty and legalized drugs and prostitution. The evidence for Freddy’s support of these policies presented in the flier is rather tenuous, largely relying on statements from friends and known associates. Nonetheless, the moral panic associated with a long haired rock musician is risible, especially when compared with emerging norms in Northern Europe and parts of North America. But Freddy’s alt-culture identity was a central part of his appeal to younger voters and so it will be interesting to see how the NPP is able to hold on to its renegade status as it assumes its new role as junior member in Taiwan’s new ruling coalition.

The NGOs and Nonprofits Special Interest Group held its second biennial conference before the AAAs last week. It’s designed to give anthropologists and practitioners working in and with NGOs a chance to engage with each other in a more intimate, focused way before diving into the chaos of the AAAs. Entitled “NGOgraphies,” this year’s conference explored the dual meaning of the term, coined by Steven Sampson and Julie Hemment in 2001, which refers both to critical ethnography of NGOs in general and to analysis of the human geography of NGOs in particular. The conference attracted 112 attendees from 13 countries, and session organizers were encouraged to use alternate formats to engage participants, ranging from workshops to roundtables. Rather than a general report on the conference, this post is a reflection on some of the specific conversations and lines of thought the conference generated for me.

When I circulated the call for papers for my roundtable panel “What Is This ‘Local Knowledge’ that Development Organizations Fetishize?” to the NGOs and Nonprofits Interest Group listserv in May, I got the following email in reply:

Dear All,

I might have been interested in participating, but will likely be traveling overseas for humanitarian work at the time. I have worked for international NGOs and aid agencies for 30 years, as I do now. However, I must say that the title of the session troubles me. As a long-time member and leader of such organizations, I have never known our community to “fetishize” local knowledge. I think the term is disrespectful to my colleagues and their work and insights. This seems like some sort of construct or perception of research-based academics.

Others replied, agreeing that the term “fetishize” had judgmental connotations and suggesting that the phrase “local knowledge” is a neutral, technical term that refers to practically-oriented understandings of phenomena prevalent at the community level: “Nothing more. No denigrating overtones. No ‘elevation’ of the local understandings. Just plain knowledge from a likely different, local point of view.” Dozens of people applied to join the panel and some just as quickly withdrew, saying that they “weren’t prepared” for those kinds of conversations.

With the panel already touched by controversy, I was excited to see if the conversation this last Tuesday would bring fireworks. While the discussion was animated, it was ultimately made up of solely academic voices, and the participants shared the viewpoint that “fetishization” can be a legitimate, non-accusatory term for the ways that organizations handle their relationship to their host communities.

The speakers addressed questions of ontology (what is the nature of this object, “local knowledge”? or knowledge of what?), epistemology (how do we know what we know? Or whose knowledge?), and positionality (who can know “local knowledge”?).

The discussion ranged across a variety of examples from public health projects and gender-based violence organizations to economic empowerment projects that showed that the fetishization and devaluation of the local can be two sides of the same coin. Some of the points established were relatively obvious but worth reinforcing: the local is not homogenous. Representatives may not be so “representative.” According to Laura Jung, in international health clinics in Honduras, any Honduran and even second-generation immigrants were considered to possess knowledge of the local, even if they had never visited the particular area where the project was taking place.

Another theme that emerged was that “the local” can be temporal rather than merely spatial. Ivana Topalovic reported that post-conflict Bosnia experienced a record-breaking surge in NGO activity that has since subsided, and the post-NGO period has left residual NGO models of development in place with “local knowledge” as the default operating system. The trauma experienced by Bosnian communities has divided NGOs between those with legitimacy based in the experience of violence and those that arrived on the scene after the fact.

Several speakers in my roundtable, most particularly Kristina Baines and Kevin Ritt, pointed to the ways in which anthropologists become entangled with NGO practice. Many anthropologists who may not (initially) be focused on the anthropological study of NGOs themselves use NGOs for access to the communities they serve and work with NGOs to gather information and evaluate their programs. The similar spaces of knowledge production that ethnographers and organizational practitioners occupy can lead to conflicts, which was apparent as several speakers mentioned moments of tension or conflict as their critiques were sought but not welcomed or their input was ignored.

My personal brush with scandal in the naming of my roundtable brought home one of the main points discussed throughout the conference as a whole: that anthropologists have a complicated relationship with NGO practitioners. Work with NGOs seems to intensify the already fraught and messy task of navigating a path through fieldwork and publishing. The conversation also brought home the importance of setting the boundaries of engagement, defining limits, and setting realistic expectations for collaborations on the part of both researchers and organizations. Some researchers suggested using a formal contract to establish terms, citing the potential for a disjuncture between what we want to know and how NGOs would use us. NGOs have agendas that may not align with our agendas as researchers.

Engagement with NGOs may entail “entanglement” (with states, consultants, donors, markets, competing NGOs, social movements, civil society, and other anthropologists). Several participants noted concerns about becoming too deeply engaged with institutions, which may provide richer data but also increases the possibility of conflict and push-back from informants. Where researchers may see themselves as helpfully providing general critique to practitioners, beyond evaluation or assessment of projects, practitioners can interpret such commentary as criticism. Working with NGOs means considering the real likelihood that our research subjects will read and publicly respond to our publications. As anthropologists, we write differently for different publics, contextualizing information and providing rich nuance for other scholars and breaking down concepts and providing concrete conclusions for NGOS and the public. Presenting the same data to different audiences can force scholars to add nuance or consider our work from new angles. According to some researchers who had consulted with NGOS, the perfect report would be concise, snappy, and tell the story they want told, but anthropologists can’t always in good conscience produce the “perfect report.” Speakers questioned whether anthropologists can effectively critique NGOs that hosted them and provided them with access. They discussed their inclinations to censor themselves rather than damage relationships with NGO workers, who might also be censoring themselves in their commentary on their organizations. Anthropologists clearly need to be reflexive about our engagement with NGOs and our roles in relation to them.

The particular anxieties about NGO research arise from the overlap between our roles. As knowledge producers, anthropologists and NGOs compete for discursive space. It occurs to me that Pierre Bourdieu’s (1993) notion of the “field of cultural production,” the social space in which agents struggle for the power to give meaning and value to cultural products, may be helpful in understanding how this plays out. Bourdieu theorized that objects gain social and economic value in a “field of cultural production,” in which agents struggle for the power to decide which material and symbolic products are legitimate. Agents and institutions constitute the shape of the field by staking claims to the cultural capital to create and interpret meaning. As agents of cultural production, NGOs and anthropologists are similarly concerned with creating relationships with communities and undertake agendas of “doing good.” While engaged anthropologists may seek to “do good,” at a certain point it may be imperative to upset NGOs’ received moral categories, questioning who defines what it means to “do good.” Judgements about the success of organizational or anthropological projects are tied up in moral economies. Rather than feeling betrayed, we need to ask what values are being expressed when the people we work with accept or reject our conclusions, just as we hope they approach our publications with an open mind rather than a spirit of defensiveness. The response to my use of the term “fetishize” showed me my own naïveté in assuming that anthropologists’ idiosyncratic understandings of terms and tendency to auto-criticism are universal, and taking for granted my own position of authority as a knowledge generator and word herder.

My thanks go out to everyone who participated in the email conversation, roundtable, and conference. If you didn’t get a chance to participate in this year’s conference, keep a lookout for information on the next conference in 2017!

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

“Going through the Brazilian Portal. Hold on! We are heading into Porto Frade, a gated community of the rich and wealthy! Everything functions here!” These are the words of my Brazilian research co-pilot, Nelson Novaes Pedroso Junior, during our recent field excursion to Angra dos Reis to explore perceptions of risk and the role of the nuclear energy plants in the region. Together with doctoral candidate Meryleen Mena, our research team entered Porto Frade, a securitized community not far from the Angra I and II nuclear complex in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is a gated community and a world of yachts, million dollar homes, mostly empty streets (in March of 2015, at least), and security apparati just within the five-kilometer mark of the emergency evacuation plan of the nuclear plant.

This is not only a less well-known Monaco or Sausalito, but also a community of second homes that are underutilized by their wealthy Brazilian owners. The homes are perfect, the gardens well-kept, and the yachts are supersized. In Porto Frade you can find restaurants with French names and menus that would please the most discerning cosmopolitan foodie. If I had no social conscience at all, I could probably have enjoyed my late Saturday lunch that much more. But knowing a tiny bit more about the broader context made enjoyment somewhat difficult. One needs a good sense of humor and sense of the absurd to work in Brazil and to write about its contradictions.

Right next door to Porto Frade is the other side of Brazilian reality, the other side of the portal. There lies the neighborhood or village of Frade, a small tropical town with approximately twelve thousand residents according to the 2010 Census, but probably closer to twenty thousand by now. Residents in Frade have come and settled there from other distant and less privileged parts of Brazil in order to offer their labor for building Brazil’s Angra nuclear plants. After Angra I and Angra II were completed in the 1980s and 1990s, Frade’s residents remained. Now, new residents have been coming in a similar wave to an area known as Parque Mambucaba to offer their labor for the construction of Angra III. In a manner familiar to observers of large construction projects around the world, these towns are built in reverse. The laborers and then their families come, and the infrastructure—proper sewage, electricity, water, telecommunications, health care, schools—arrives later. Before long, these makeshift areas acquire the look of migrant towns, complete with the smell of raw sewage, of quickly constructed buildings, and of a certain kind of kitschy but lovable tropical decadence. One cannot blame these laborers for having migrated for employment opportunity, but the lack of foresight by the large construction project planners is stunning.

The rapid and unplanned development in Frade and Parque Mambucaba is familiar, but still a disaster in many respects. This is also true of the better-planned wealthy gated communities next door that have the feel of a Truman Show set. Yet, when Brazilian environmental activists speak of the ecological disaster of Angra, they tend to be speaking of the thousands of migrant laborers who come quickly for work on the construction of Angra III, and point to the stresses Frade and Mambucaba place on the environment. These communities are established in areas without infrastructure, and end up putting the costs back onto already underserved local communities. Environmentalists also speak about the hidden costs of building the nuclear plants in this beautiful tropical paradise and of how these costs are shifted onto already burdened and impoverished local populations. The Porto Frade community is harder for them to critique. While it is built with excess wealth that comes from elsewhere, the odd thoughtfulness and planning of the community give it the appearance of having arrived from some future universe. Porto Frade is a sort of science fiction “portal” that blasts the visitor into Brazil’s modern and wealthy future where structures are built properly, money is free-flowing, and first world amenities are plentiful. Who wouldn’t want to eat oysters and fresh fish at a place called Le Bistro Chez Dominique on the banks of the Brazilian Riviera? Barely part of the nuclear energy conversation is the fact that the side-by-side growth and expansion of Porto Frade and Frade has displaced local populations of fishermen who lived in the region for generations, and has had negative effects on indigenous and quilombo populations living nearby.

How to protest? What to protest? We could probably all agree that the era of nuclear activism appears to be over. When I asked my introductory anthropology students at the University of Colorado what they think of nuclear energy as a future energy source, they don’t really have a well-formed opinion. When I taught about Fukushima and Chernobyl (using Adriana Petryna’s Life Exposed), and students learned that elderly workers at Fukushima volunteered for the toxic clean-up work, they found that outcome to be a good solution. Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island have all been successfully framed as exceptional events to this new generation, and risk, according to nuclear energy proponents and modernity’s logic, is involved in all technological projects.

The lack of politicization on nuclear issues is not unique to my students’ youth or class position. One of the long-term Brazilian anti-nuclear activists we recently interviewed in Brazil mused about the current political sensibilities about nuclear energy. “Anyone not in favor is mute. . . In terms of how things are in Brazil, there isn’t the historical difference that used to characterize the left and right anymore. It’s all the same. . . It was the Worker’s Party (PT) that approved Angra III, after all.” He was referring to the sensibility that positions just about everyone with no opinion to be in support of the nuclear energy project, not just in Angra dos Reis where the two existing nuclear plants in Brazil have been functional since the 1980s and 1990s, but also for the potential nuclear energy expansion throughout Brazil. This muted support for nuclear energy exists in spite of the awareness of the infrastructural precarities that still characterize so much of daily life, particularly in Frade, Parque Mambucaba, and the city of Angra itself. But the real source of muted de-politicization on the nuclear issue exists in the major cities.

Our research with engineers within the Angra dos Reis nuclear plant who are charged with different aspects of safety and security within the nuclear complex offers an eye-opening perspective on how we have all arrived here. “You get on a plane, don’t you? All industrialization and technology involves risk,” the engineers remind us. I hear this provocation so often I start to doubt my own deep feelings that question the security and safety of Angra. I see a two-lane highway predisposed to landslides, internet access that in a very nice hotel in Angra is prone to failure, and the more obvious precarities of infrastructure visible in places like Frade. But then I realize that Porto Frade (the portal) exists in order to allay those fears.

Twenty years ago, in 1996, a group of Brazilian political theatre satirists inspired by the renowned founder of the Theatre of the Oppressed Augusto Boal planned a “simulation within a simulation” evacuation exercise in the city of Angra dos Reis. Anti-nuclear activists positioned themselves inside of the official simulation, partially, it seems, to point to the problematic aspects of the evacuation scenario. One person we spoke with who participated in this exercise enacting the role of a woman from a psychiatric facility; another participant played the part of an indigenous man not fluent in Portuguese. In this “scene within a scene” a participant actually had a heart attack and could not obtain proper treatment, thus truly disrupting both the official simulation and its counterpart. The performance of the activists within the simulation was carried out to bring awareness to the potential panic and chaos that they believed would characterize the population in the event of a real nuclear accident.

Today some of those same activists note that if the sirens suggesting evacuation blow in 2015, people would probably hardly pay attention. One activist suggested that nobody would bother to evacuate. An administrator high in the evacuation command hierarchy expressed concern that present-day youth are more interested in video games and smart phones than in the serious nature of an emergency plan. This official explained that the city of Angra dos Reis would most likely not evacuate because it falls past the ZPE-10 (Emergency Plan Zone) radius, and thus outside the boundary of the plan of evacuation in the case of a nuclear emergency.

I am not sure if the response of the 170,000 residents of Angra would be panic or malaise, but both potential responses worry me. Anthropologists who find themselves in projects critical of the prevailing drive to self-destruct must listen to distinct voices and attempt to find a grain of sanity within the contemporary logic of risk. We must have a sense of humor about what we are observing around us, or we are doomed. During our fieldwork our team survived our collective fears by highlighting some of the absurdities we witnessed. Now that I am back home in Colorado, I am still trying to find the humor in the present we currently inhabit, but it escapes me.

Charles Fogelman is a Research Fellow with the Cultures of Law in Global Contexts Project and a Ph.D. candidate with the Department of Geography and GIS at the University of Illinois. He tweets at @charlesfogelman.

The title of this piece comes from a conversation I had with a senior unelected official for the city of Maseru, the capital of Lesotho. As he described the planned sprawling 18-hole golf course in a village on the outskirts of town, I asked him what would happen to the poor people who currently used the land for small-scale agriculture. “The city is no place for poor people!” he told me. His perspective, in direct conflict with discourses of international development, demonstrates a key tension between the objectives of poverty reduction and economic growth.

My dissertation project investigates that tension via the logics and impacts of a major land reform project in Lesotho. My presentation at the AAG meeting in Chicago will focus specifically on the uses of mapping and other technologies in Lesotho’s land reform, while other elements of my work focus on gender and authority. For this piece, however, I want to talk about my project more broadly to investigate what “development” means in the context of Lesotho’s land.

Land Act 2010 is the centerpiece of legislation that sets the rules for land reform in Lesotho. Together with several other laws, the Land Act set out to make land a more legible and exchangeable resource. The biggest element of the law was that it eliminated customary tenure in urban areas and instead mandated leaseholds (de facto titles). As the government minister responsible for the execution of the law phrased it, “The current land reform program in Lesotho is driven by the desire to achieve social growth and development on the one hand and economic growth and development on the other” (Sekatle 2010). The text of Land Act 2010 is nearly identical to its predecessor, but Land Act 1979 failed to successfully disempower customary authorities in land matters.

The reason Land Act 2010 has been successfully implemented is that a $363 million grant from the U.S.’s new development wing, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), provided the funding to measure, map, adjudicate and deliver the leaseholds that the law requires. In 1979 these expensive logistics were left to individual landholders. Together with wording that removes land allocation power from unelected local chiefs, who were seen as potentially capricious and unsanctionable by their constituents, Land Act 2010 successfully moved urban land tenure to the hands of the market. The goal of making Lesotho’s land an engine of economic growth is consistent with other MCC projects and with the MCC motto – “Poverty reduction through economic growth.” How this market-led land reform works toward economic growth is clear. However, its work toward the goal of poverty reduction is murkier.

The questions I have asked about this reform are rooted in a framework of access. In short, vulnerable people have been granted the right to benefit from their land, but have they been granted the ability to benefit? (Ribot & Peluso 2003). What my work demonstrates is that legal frameworks are necessary but insufficient to provide true land access to vulnerable land users. It is the institutions that govern the execution and application of the laws that are most important. They are the ones who can determine who truly benefits. In Lesotho, the beneficiaries of land reform do not appear to be the poor and vulnerable people said to be targeted by the MCC’s development plans.

That leads to a final point: who are the true beneficiaries of Lesotho’s Land Act 2010 if not the vulnerable people ostensibly targeted? In my research village, two real estate developers are reaping the benefits of secure and exchangeable land tenure. One is building the aforementioned par-71 golf course on half of the village’s former agricultural fields, the other is building a 700-home suburban development on the other half of the fields. Two things are notable about this. First, these developers are empowered by bureaucrats, who are able to influence the votes of the elected officials who are supposed to determine land allocation. The bureaucrats are, like the chiefs before them, unelected officials who can be capricious or corrupt with little ability for public sanction. Second, discourses of “development” that privilege economic growth as the driver of poverty reduction need to be more explicit in how poverty reduction will happen. All the good intentions in the world have not kept economic growth at my research site from trampling on the land access of the poor.

If a development project is to be truly pro-poor, the poor need to truly be at the forefront of planning and execution. These concerns are hardly academic: the MCC is planning a second grant for Lesotho, and their initial plan identifies “Poor land management and allocation systems” as a “binding constraint to economic growth” in Lesotho. A further U.S.-led redefinition of the social relations that govern land access may lie ahead. Poverty reduction and economic growth are very different things. To truly reduce poverty, institutions and development agencies must target reforms and projects that directly help poor people rather than waiting for the fruits of trickle down to accrue to the poor. Trickle down development like Lesotho’s can create a situation where security of land tenure is for golf courses, not the vulnerable, and the city is truly not a place for poor people.

Because the operations of this technology work in part by denying their own existence, it is important for those who feel its harm to call it out and bring attention to it. In doing so they are not trying to reduce everything to race (or gender), nor are they trying to say it is necessarily the most important aspect of a discussion, but often quite simply to make the invisible visible so it can be discussed openly.

This is why it is so frustrating for those who seek to make this discussion possible to then have their efforts attacked from the so-called “left” who claim that moralizing about racism (or sexism) is hurting the movement. I won’t deny that such moralizing doesn’t happen, but I think it is largely besides the point. The utility of racism (and sexism) as concepts does not lie in their ability to assign moral blame, but in their ability to expose invisible technologies of power so that their effects can be part of the discussion. To then silence these discussions by conveniently finding some moralists to excoriate thus perpetuates the problem.

Another mode of silencing is to accuse those attempting to highlight these technologies of reductionism, or of ignoring the “root” economic causes which underly all our social ills. Again, it is always possible to find some examples of such reductionism in order to dismiss the whole project. After all, what political project doesn’t have its share of fools who can be conveniently held up for mockery by opponents? But shouldn’t we look to those who best articulate the ideas underlying a project to evaluate its worth? When we do this (look to the best arguments, not the worst) I think such charges of reductionism evaporate, leaving behind only the residue of the very racism (and sexism) which sought to silence these voices in the first place.

Almost five months into the epidemic, on August 8, 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Ebola outbreak in West Africa a “public health emergency of international concern.” Military and police responses — both international and national — played a crucial role in responses to the epidemic. A few weeks later, on August 20th, the Liberian military quarantined residents of West Point in the capital city of Monrovia without advance warning, essentially cutting them off from food and supplies and causing thousands of residents to clash with troops and riot police. Images surfaced of troops firing live rounds and tear gas and viciously beating back residents who challenged the lockdown. Military-enforced quarantines around entire districts of Sierra Leone and the shift of power from the ministry of health to the ministry of defense were key features of its Ebola response.

Across the Atlantic, on August 9, 2014, 18-year old unarmed Michael Brown was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Peaceful protests and civil disorder ensued in the following weeks, prompting the governor to declare a “state of emergency” and call on local police and the National Guard to control protests and maintain curfews. Greater public attention was placed on the increasing militarization of local police forces as the grand jury, which was convened to hear evidence of the circumstances surrounding the death of Michael Brown, reached a decision not to indict Officer Wilson.

Despite public discourse about the increasing militarization of the police and the political frame of ‘crisis,’ the most notable recent incidents of police brutality in Ferguson, Staten Island, Saratoga Springs, Los Angeles and the subsequent deaths of Black Americans like Tanisha Anderson, Ezell Ford, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, Aiyanna Jones, Roshad McIntosh, Dante Parker, and Kajieme Powell, are rather ordinary and predictable events in America. These incidents and precious lives lost represent the enduring legacy of American white supremacy and pervasive racism that structures the US criminal justice system and our broader society.

For the region most affected by the West African Ebola outbreak, fragmented and slowly rebuilding health systems, coupled with a delayed response by international agencies have precipitated a serious public health crisis and humanitarian emergency. But, as in the US case, this crisis must also be understood in historical context — and in particular, in relation to empire-building and racial projects. Legacies of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, European (and US) colonialism, post-colonial aid dependency, and civil wars have contributed not only to patterns of the disease’s spread, but also to earlier failures of government and international actors to mount a coordinated response.

This year seemed especially difficult for those of us trying to make sense of these events from afar and for those of us who have deep and intimate connections to these places. During the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in early December 2014, therefore, the theme “Producing Anthropology” took on a distinctly activist and political charge. Anthropologists organized protests, drafted resolutions, and put together ‘breaking’ panels to discuss the most pressing issues facing us in the moment: the West African Ebola outbreak; Ferguson and police violence in black communities in the US; divestment from Israel and other progressive social movements with which anthropologists currently align themselves.

There was, however, a stark contrast in the support extended to these issues by the association-at-large, subsections and interest groups, and individual members. And this contrast is at the root of our sense that mainstream anthropology — and its practitioners — reproduces injustices it claims to expose and, at best, the ones it seeks to correct. This contrast is at the root of the discipline’s failure to recognize divisions between minority and non-minority anthropologists as a crisis within its ranks and to misrecognize enduring systemic failures as discrete time-framed crises for the sake of justifying anthropology’s relevance.

Two weeks before the annual meetings, just a couple of miles away, the AAA co-sponsored a two-day emergency meeting at the George Washington University, in which it convened more than 25 social scientists — specialists of the region and/or in infectious diseases — to provide concrete recommendations to aid international responders to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. While the impact of this intervention remains to be seen, the financial and logistical support from AAA and Wenner-Gren was notable; the executive director presented this meeting as a way for the association to appear “relevant.” Anthropologists were asked to “take critique off the table” as a condition of their participation; for it was to be the primary means by which anthropologists could effectively engage with policymakers and front-line responders.

Whereas initiatives related to Ebola were generously supported (and funded) by our main anthropological institutions, “minority” interest groups like the Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA) were told that they were expected to pursue an agenda on Ferguson, racism, and violence on their own and with little support from executive leadership. The ABA’s statement brilliantly and explicitly calls out this marginalization and what it represents — global and national anti-black racism and anthropology’s complicity with racializing and colonizing projects, including the production of particular black and brown subjects. (AAA president Monica Heller later released a statement on police violence on December 19).

AAA leadership’s disparate focus on these two issues of concern raises questions about where anthropology locates its “objects” of inquiry, its impetus for protest, and its ideological commitments to social justice and critical analysis of power. It had the two of us — medical anthropologists who engage in global health research in the US and West Africa — wondering which black lives matter for the ‘production of anthropology’ and how such deliberations are a function of anthropology’s fraught history with colonial projects; and its alignment with institutions that sometimes indirectly, sometimes quite perniciously, devalue black and brown lives in the discipline and our society at large.

Taken together, the two official responses by executive leadership mirror the two types of misrecognition that facilitate and embolden endemic racism within the discipline. The ordinariness of these events — the possibility that we are not witnessing discrete events but, rather, spectacular instantiations of enduring injustice — forms the basis of two types of misrecognition. One is forced misrecognition, in which anthropologists are asked to put aside their critical faculties to assist in an epidemic crisis, willfully ignoring or tabling questions of health systems, international political economy, and local governance, while also, paradoxically, engaging with them as something anthropologists (alone) know best and can change. The other form of misrecognition is unconscious, ideological: one in which an African crisis is a ‘natural’ node for anthropological intervention and insights, but a North American normal requires no global comment, no provision of financial resources, no gathering of “great minds.” Both kinds of misrecognition are functions of how anthropology positions itself vis-à-vis “the other” but fails to acknowledge and is complicit with anti-black racism in its ranks and in its professional practice.

This time next year, we will again gather at the 2015 AAA annual meeting in Denver, giving and attending talks centered on the theme of “Familiar/Strange.” Perhaps this thematic focus will prompt wholescale reflection, discussion, and plans for action around questions of our collective misrecognition and the racial politics of crises. Meanwhile, global anti-black racism lives on as an ordinary defining fact of life for many of us.

Wisconsin and the Amazon

RG: Thanks so much for agreeing to talk. I really enjoyed How Forests Think. When I started it I was a little on the skeptical side, but I ended up thinking it was a mind-blowing book. I thought we could begin by discussing the background for the book and your training. I see the book as mixing biology, science studies (especially Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour), and then some sort of semiotics. It seems like there are a lot of influences there. You got your PhD at Wisconsin, so how did that work out? Can you tell me a little about your background?

EK: The way I got into anthropology was through research, by which I mean fieldwork.  And I was always trying to find ways to do more fieldwork. I saw Wisconsin as an extension of this. When I was in college I did some field research in the Ecuadorian Amazon, I had a Fulbright to go back and do research after college, and only then did I go to grad school.   Although How Forests Think aims to make a conceptual intervention in anthropology, I think of our field as a special vehicle for engaging intensely with a place in ways that make us over and help us think differently. The preparation I got at Wisconsin was geared toward that. It immersed me in area studies in the broadest and most positive sense of the term. My advisor Frank Salomon is well versed in many facets of Andean history, prehistory, and ethnography, as well as in the Quechua languages including those spoken in Ecuador (where they are known as Quichua). I worked with, among others, the tropical botanist Hugh Iltis, the Latin Americanist geographers Bill Denevan, and Karl Zimmerer, the Latin American historian Steve Stern, and I studied Ecuadorian Quichua with Carmen Chuquín. There was a real sense that I was preparing myself intensely for an engagement with the field in terms of a multifaceted project which was going to include ecology, anthropology, history, and a serious appreciation for local languages. Of course I had graduate training in social theory and the history of anthropological thought, but I wasn’t trying to get training in a particular body of theory, it was more that I was trying to engage with a place.

I was also inspired by the way my advisor approached scholarship –particularly his sensibility to language; his sensibility to writing; how one can find ways to see the world afresh and capture that in writing. For example, he is very conscious not to adopt rhetorical styles, theories, or jargon from other people and he consciously tries to use writing as a way to create his own sort of engagement.  He’s a poet. I was very much influenced by this.

RG: I had no idea that Wisconsin had such a specialty in your area. Could you tell me more about your advisor’s work?

EK: Frank Salomon is a historical anthropologist with a broad specialty in Native Andean worlds and their relation to the colonial encounter. I knew him through his archival and ethnographic work in Ecuador (I had actually met him in Ecuador when I was a child and he was a PhD student!). Most of his work is now in Peru on khipus (knotted cords) and other non-written forms of representation.

RG: I thought perhaps there was some influence on your work there, in his work on unfamiliar forms of representation and your work on semiotics?

EK: There is, but when I was at Wisconsin in the early 90s, one of the big turns was historical anthropology and I was working with a historical anthropologist. Marshall Sahlins’ Islands of Histories had just come out. This was the thing to do, and I was doing it. I ended up having to choose between two field sites: one was in a cloud forest area that had a tremendously interesting colonial history, a history that was visible in oral traditions (and I was fascinated by the connections between those stories and the past). The other was an ecological project in the village where I ended up doing the work that became How Forests Think. It was Frank Salomon who said “Look, your heart is in this ecological stuff.” Frank is an historical anthropologist, you’d think he’d want to train his students in his thing. But he recognized that my real passion was for the forest and he allowed me to see that that’s where I really wanted to go.

RG: I’m not sure that every advisor would be so generous to a student.

EK: It was a real gift. He allowed me to do my thing, and ultimately this is what I try to give to my students. We’re motivated in the work we do by passions we don’t fully understand, and part of what we need to do as advisors is to allow our students to tap into that without losing a sense of what others around them are doing and thinking.  Frank got what I was into, and he saw that even in my historical work I was trying to answer the same fundamental question: I’ve always been dissatisfied with the culture concept, broadly defined, and I’m always trying to find ways to get beyond it without losing a sense for the reality of culture. All my projects have had that as their focus, and this concern has just been growing more explicit, which has forced me to be much more precise conceptually about what I’m doing.

The problem with culture

RG: I have to say, How Forests Think is theoretical and abstract at times, but there’s a clear awareness of history and of colonialism in the book, which is not necessarily what you would expect from high Francophone theory. It was refreshing to see you foregrounding colonial processes, especially towards the end of the book, where they became central to your argument. Could you tell me a little bit more about that critique of culture? How does that work? What makes you unhappy about culture?

EK: Some of my French colleagues think that they’re beyond culture and have never had to deal with the problems that the American culture concept has created; they feel that they can sidestep it completely. But what I mean by “culture” is a much broader thing and it applies to just about every approach in the social sciences. The social sciences as we know them are based on what I would call a “linguistic turn” (though it isn’t always explicitly phrased as such).

Think of Durkheim (who wasn’t especially oriented towards language).  Society for him was a relational system: One institution can only be understood in terms of another; social facts are to be understood only in terms of other social facts; you can’t, for example, explain social reality psychologically. The Boasian approach of course is much more overtly linguistic. But in both you get a system with the same kinds of properties. Certain things can only be understood in terms of their contexts.

I was just rereading Boas’s famous article “On Alternating Sounds,” which was published in American Anthropologist in 1889.  It’s a brilliant essay in which he says, “look, philologists think Native American languages are primitive because their speakers use different sounds when pronouncing the same words.” And he was able to go back and say, “You can see that this is actually the effect of a lack of training in specific Amerindian languages.  The philologists are perceiving the sounds not based on the native phonemic context, but in terms of the languages they already know.”  Boas is making a profound argument about context.  We only “hear” those sounds that fit the phonemic contexts we know.

The goal of linguistic anthropology for Boas was to learn to get these contexts that are not necessarily our own.  And of course you can extend this argument to cultural and historical context as well.   And then, if you think about Saussure and the influence he had on structuralism and post-structuralism, and combine that with Durkheim and Boas, you get just about everybody who’s doing social theory in some way or other informed by concepts that have to do with how language works. The special realities that we’re dealing with in anthropology and related fields are relational ones, they’d say, and you can only understand them in terms of the complex networks that make them what they are. So any kind of relatum, whether we are talking about a social fact or cultural meaning –or even an actor in Actor Network Theory– is the product of the relationships that make it.

RG: Right. In the case of sounds, phonemic contrast is the result of the phonemic structure of the whole language, and it is internal to those structures. In Saussure, each sign has its meaning in relation to other signs, rather than anything outside the system.

EK: Yes. All of these approaches hold that the fundamental human reality is symbolic thinking, it structures our world, and it’s different from all the other things that one might study. It requires its own kind of science, a human science. This is not biology, and it’s not chemistry.

This is all good.  But the problem is that there’s no way to understand how these kinds of relational systems connect up to things that are not like them. That’s the big question: how are these open to the world? My engagement with culture is about addressing this problem. The STS literature, the animal studies literature and multispecies ethnography are all wonderful and profound, and are obviously finding ways to get outside of culture. But they often fall back analytically on something that I would still call “culture” in a formal sense. That’s clearest in Actor Network Theory. The relata may happen to be material things, but the formal system that’s mapped out, the network and the ways in which entities are made through the relationships that emerge there – well, no surprise, it exhibits the relational properties of human language.

My goal is to try to leave the human, to try to get beyond that kind of thing. So when I say “culture” I refer not only to the traditional anthropological concept but also to the sets of assumptions about relationships that inform Foucault, so much of Science Studies, as well as other posthumanist approaches.  They all explore the properties of what I would call culture in this formal sense even when they aren’t dealing explicitly with humans or the culture concept.

RG: It’s interesting you should mention Boas. I would just note that for some Boasians, culture is a unique object, which requires a unique science. That’s Kroeber’s argument. But that’s not the argument of Sapir, and it’s not the argument of Boas. I think it’d be interesting if we focused a little bit more on the Sapirian alternative, which is to understand science as defined by its level of particularity, rather than its object of study. Boas also takes this line in The Study of Geography: He doesn’t think that there’s something called “culture,” and we have a unique science, which must study it. He’s doing something much weirder. I feel like we should take a look at this again.

EK: You’re absolutely right. I didn’t get into the technical semiotic stuff until my post doc. Before that one of the major sources for me to get outside language (along with the work of the anthropological linguist Janis Nuckolls) was Sapir. He’s got these beautiful essays on sound iconism. He would interview children about invented words and ask “which of these refers to the big table and which refers to the little table?” And words that have very elongated vowels would invariably be linked to the larger object.  And of course Sapir was interested in poetics. Boas, on the other hand, took evolution very seriously. I remember in grad school I wrote an essay about Boas as an evolutionary anthropologist, and one of my teachers criticized me: “How can you say that! He was fighting against scientific racism!” But Boas clearly was in profound ways dealing with humans as biological organisms, and I appreciate that tradition.

But the Boasian legacy as it’s been taken up has ended up moving from a focus on a context that includes the environment to studying contexts that are much more restricted to humans, like meaning systems.  And then you get Margaret Mead’s concept of culture, which we still adopt, even when we reject her approach, or when we bring in historical process.

RG: I think that’s really true, and it speaks to the kind of fieldwork that gets done. Maureen Molloy points out that Mead was one of the first problem-based fieldworkers. Her ethnographies were not appreciated by Kroeber because they weren’t particularistic. She would go into a place, do the ethnography, move somewhere else. You kind of wonder, maybe if she’d hung around a little bit longer she would have started asking “what are these bugs?”

Anyway, you were just now talking about how you got interested in biology. Was that as a post-doc?

EK: I’ve been apprenticing myself to tropical biologists since I was in college. I did a tropical ecology graduate course in Costa Rica as part of my graduate training. I took plant systematics classes and forestry statistics. I was always interested in finding ways to get into forest ecology without necessarily going through humans.

RG: Your book doesn’t speak the language of evolutionary biology, but it seems informed by a deep awareness of the forest that comes both from doing fieldwork with Runa people and having that science background. It’s necessary for your project.

EK: And different projects require different kinds of skills, but yes, that’s what I needed for this project.

Terrence Deacon and Charles Sanders Peirce

RG: The work of Terrence Deacon is a major influence on your book. How did you come across him? Was that during your post-doc?

EK: Basically, I’d done this research in the Amazon. I wrote a dissertation, got thinking about articles, and was formulating an article that was to stake out what I would be doing in the book.   This was “How Dogs Dream,” which came out in American Ethnologist in 2007. I was working on that at Berkeley, and the year that I came there Terry arrived from the Boston area and we had offices right next to each other. We started talking. I would go into his office at four in the afternoon and come out at nine at night…

Terry’s life project has been to understand the origins of mind. His first book was about the evolution of symbolic capacities in humans and his most recent book Incomplete Nature is about the emergence of mind from matter.  So when I was at Berkeley I got very much involved with that, and it was the most intellectually exhilarating thing I’ve ever done.   Academically, that is.  Of course doing fieldwork in the tropical world was exhilarating in its own right.  But in terms of the academic world, I’d never been exposed to such an interesting set of ideas that was so new to me but that fit so completely with what I was already doing. I don’t get to California that much, but he has an ongoing seminar and whenever I can, I try to participate in it and it’s still very exciting to me.

RG: Peirce is a major part of your book. I think of Peirce as someone who informs semiotic anthropology, for instance the circle that includes Michael Silverstein and others. But you don’t let Silverstein own Peirce, you’re drawing on… Deacon talking about Peirce? Is that where you got him? Or do you read Peirce alongside Deacon?

EK: Deacon has been thinking about Peirce for a long time. When anthropologists use Peirce they tend to collapse certain things and not deal with certain elements of Peirce, like his interest in evolution, and they tend to frame a lot of his work in terms of something you can think of as culture.

RG: For people who aren’t super familiar with Peirce’s biography, he was a favored son of Boston Brahmins and then ended up going off on his own way, and I think at one point had to earn a living by drawing mazes for people to do in the back of newspapers. He had a very strange life. His work is really a whole philosophy of the universe, it’s not just about language, it’s very philosophical and I guess bizarre in some sense.

EK: It’s an architecture of the universe. It’s a huge opus.  He’s got 80,000 manuscript pages out there. But there are some really consistent questions that come up over and over again. He has a “continuist” framework, so he thinks that everything in the universe is related to everything else and philosophical frameworks that posit radical breaks are problematic. Dualisms of all kinds are problematic. So any attempt to understand humans without relating humans to other entities that aren’t human is a problem for Peirce. He’s worked out all sorts of ways to move across those kinds of boundaries.

The other thing that’s really important is that his philosophy is directional. By which I mean that he sees certain processes as nested within other more basic processes.  And this is very problematic for us as anthropologists because we want to see complexity and freedom and indeterminacy. Peirce also makes space for spontaneity, but he’s very much interested in the formal qualities of things. One of the places to see the nested nature of his approach is in his semiotics. You can have indexical reference without symbolic reference (as is manifest in the biological world) but you can’t have a symbolic system without indices. Symbols are nested within indices, and a Peircean framework can allow you to see that. These are the kinds of things that are unpopular. In fact, they get collapsed in a lot of the ways in which Peirce is used in anthropology. Anthropologists tend to think about icons and indices within the context of cultural systems.  Now, of course you do get iconic and indexical processes that are framed within historically contingent systems, but what’s interesting to me are the things that can move in and out of symbolic systems, and how outsides connect to insides.

So when I was at Berkeley I was reading a lot of Peirce, and I was talking about it with Terry but also with Bill Hanks, Lawrence Cohen, and others. The standard way to domesticate Peirce is: “Peirce, he’s your theoretician, you apply him to your field site.” Or you say, “Oh yeah, Peirce, he had his own social context just like everybody else.” Both of these statements are true, but Peirce is also in some ways more like a mathematician. He is extracting things from properties in the world and he’s predicting formal properties that the world will exhibit. If he’s correct you will see these properties in the world. And in fact what happened is that I realized that the ethnographic problems I had isolated were already semiotic problems and they were also about the connections we humans have with processes that are not fully circumscribed by humans. The Runa were dealing with other kinds of communicative worlds, the worlds of spirits and animals.  This is a problem for them as it was for Peirce. The material I was dealing with was semiotic. The reason why Peirce and the Runa meet is because they’re being made over by the same world.

RG: So you’re doing explanatory work in two directions: first, you’re using Peirce to explain the Runa. But you also use Runa ethnography to help explain Peirce as a thinker. One of the things you’re doing in the ethnography is saying: “All of that stuff in Peirce that we had to ignore in order to make him a linguistic theorist, it makes sense and can be used.” The book helps us see Peirce as a complete figure and makes sense of him intellectually rather than just having a massive part of him that we ignore or that we don’t find interesting or think it’s too weird to deal with.  You give us a more complete picture of him.

EK: That’s right. In fact, one of our colleagues at the University of Toronto, Alejandro Paz, calls this other part, “the weird Peirce.”

The other thing that’s interesting is how concepts can acquire lives of their own.  For example, go back to Darwin. Darwin had profound insights about how you get designs without a designer. It doesn’t matter whether or not he believed in God. It doesn’t matter if he didn’t understand genetics or got some things wrong. It doesn’t matter because he discovered a property of evolutionary dynamics that has a life of its own.

You can say the same thing about Peirce. Somebody can say, “you see, Peirce thought that crystals think’” or whatever. And he may have said that. But I can show you in Peircean terms and on Peircean grounds how that doesn’t necessarily make sense. He’s no longer the owner of these concepts. I don’t want to out-Peirce Peirce. There’s a lot of stuff about him that I don’t understand, and there are many experts on him, and I’m not necessarily one of them. But there’s a way in which there’s a fundamental logic about certain things I can get because the world is doing it, and Peirce was able to tap into that and I’m also able to tap into that. What we’re tapping into exceeds both of us.

RG: Right, and the animals tap into that as well, and plants tap into it too. I was so surprised at the end of the book to find that you were critical of the culture concept. I thought: “This is it! This book provides a scaffold to understand how culture articulates with biology and biological science, and it provides an argument about the reality of cultural phenomena even though they’re immaterial.” So much of our idea of reality is tied up in materiality, right? There are things that are real and emergent (for instance form, or what Sahlins would call structure) even though they don’t have physical bodies. That is a powerful way to talk about culture as a force without reifiying it as a substance.

EK: I am not anti-culture. I think culture is a real thing. But there are two problems with how we deal with culture. First, it’s very difficult to see how culture relates to the non-cultural. Second, we tend to make culture the only domain where generality and abstraction occur. What I’m trying to show is that there are other areas where generalities are produced. This is an anti-nominalist book. Humans are not the only producers of generals in the world. It doesn’t mean that culture isn’t a unique phenomenon that creates unique realities and unique kinds of structures and categories. But I don’t think that, for example, these spirits of the forest who I discuss in chapter six are necessarily only cultural phenomena. In some ways they’re a product of culture, but they’re an emergent product of other things, including the semiosis of the forest, which is not fully subsumed by a cultural or symbolic framework.

RG: And you have a way to understand culture as real without having to fall back on some weird 19th-century spiritualist position. You connect it with the framework of modern biology.

EK: I lay this out in the first chapter. It’s called “the open whole,” in contrast to the traditional Tylorian definition of culture as a “complex whole.” I want to say, yes, it’s a complex whole, but it’s also an open one. That opening is what’s so interesting to me. Culture has the real effect and property of closure, but it’s also open, and how this works is one of the things I’m trying to write about in the book.

RG: You mentioned the masters of the forest in chapter six. I would gloss them as a structure of the longue durée that exists at the conjuncture of a bunch of different causal forces that include things like the natural environment –the stuff colonialism just kind of gets sucked into. Since, you know, colonialism is only 400 years old.

Theory, fieldwork, and ethnography

One of the things that strikes me about you in the course of this interview is that you’ve really learned and grown and developed throughout your intellectual career. You’ve taken on new influences at times when some other people would say, “I have my framework and I’m done.” Do you have any tips for students about how to stay active intellectually and remain able to embrace new ideas when the ideas that you already have might seem good enough for you?

EK: I think one of the things that helped, and this was a real luxury and it’s difficult for me now because I can’t do the kind of fieldwork I used to do, is to have ethnographic problems that are interesting to you, that you can’t fully resolve, that force you to ask questions.

That’s the beauty of our field that somehow it’s the ethnographic work that is making us over, and we then develop theories that might help us. We have problems that trouble us, and we don’t know how to talk about them, but we know that they’re important. I was interested in the human-animal relationships in the forest and all of a sudden I was then involved in this multi-species turn and having conversations with people like Donna Haraway. But I wasn’t a savvy graduate student, I didn’t even know who Donna Haraway was when I was in the field! I didn’t know what the trends were.  It was the world that eventually led me to Donna Haraway, not the other way around.

It’s the same with the “ontological turn.” It’s my work that leads me to pose questions ontologically (at a moment when people happen to be doing this) rather than a current trend driving my work. This is the advantage that we have as anthropologists. We are thinking with the world. That’s what’s going to keep our thinking fresh. What’s difficult for me now is that I need to go back and think with the world myself.

RG: I think there is something strange about the structure of our anthropological careers: there’s a period of intense immersive research, and then teaching and family, and then never going back to the field again. Sometimes, it feels like no matter how hard you try, that’s the sort of political economy of the professoriate. I think it has a tremendous effect on how anthropological theory works. When you can’t get back to the field, suddenly you’re interested in elaborating coherent theoretical frameworks from the top down, since you don’t have fresh data to lead you from the bottom up, like you were saying.

Is How Forests Think an ethnography? Is that the genre?

EK: That’s a great question. It’s not the standard ethnographic monograph –it’s not bounded by the Runa.  It’s not about getting their context.  So, it’s not an ethnography in that sense. Although after reading it I hope you do get some sense of having had an ethnographic immersion. But it doesn’t have that kind of boundedness in the sense that my concerns are not necessarily their concerns. My analytical framework is not restricted to their analytical framework. It’s not that mine is bigger, but just that my project only partially intersects with theirs. In that sense it’s not an ethnography.  Although it is a form of thinking that grows from ethnography.  And so it is empirical, or experiential.  So in this sense it is extremely ethnographic.

RG: I’m just trying to understand whether you’re using the ethnography to elaborate the theory, or using the theory to elaborate the ethnography. What’s the relationship between the theoretical intervention and the descriptive material?

EK: In the actual writing there’s a lot of back and forth. If one were to look at my dissertation, which has none of the theory, no engagement with semiotics, no engagement with multispecies ethnography or any of that stuff, one would find many of the same examples that I’m dealing with in the book as conundrums that allow me to explore the larger question of how to situate the human in some sort of larger non-human domain.

It really is driven by ethnography in that sense.  Ethnographic problems suggest a certain kind of conceptual thinking. But there were also moments in writing the book when I had an idea that grew out of a non-ethnographic settings, and I was like, “let me find an ethnographic example to illustrate that.” So there is a certain amount of artifice in crafting something like this, where you tack back and forth. But the general movement of this book is that the ethnography is demanding a certain kind of conceptual framework, and the ethnography and conceptual frameworks are coming together because they’re drawing on a shared world.

Is theory political?

RG: A lot of anthropologists in the States would insist that there has to be a political intervention in ethnography. You close the book making the argument that Michael Scott and other thinkers, like Latour, would make: that it’s politically important to think outside of our established frameworks. I just imagine there are anthropologists out there who would say, “that’s the lousiest definition of politics that I’ve ever heard!” How would you respond to that kind of position?

EK: There’s a passage in Marilyn Strathern’s The Gender of the Gift where she says that radical politics is always linked to intellectual conservatism because to act radically you have to have agreement on what you’re taking a stand on, and radical intellectual thought creates a certain kind of political conservatism because once you’re taking all sorts of things apart, it’s very hard to act based on shared established categories.

It’s a real problem. On the one hand I feel I can isolate ways of thinking about political agency that are different. I can contribute to conversations about things like resistance, and I can think about problems of environmental politics in different ways, but ultimately, I’m not necessarily doing a kind of political work like….

RG: …Terry Turner?

EK:  Yes. Or some form of witnessing a kind of injustice to which I have to find some way to attend. I’m not doing that.  Yet, the question for me politically is, how are we going to create an ethical practice in the Anthropocene, this time of ours in which futures, of human and nonhuman kinds, are increasingly entangled, and interdependent in their mutual uncertainty? This is where I’m headed.  And in the book I begin to think about this political problem.  But how does that articulate with what’s happening on the ground in terms of environmental politics? Who might be doing something like this? I don’t know. It’s very abstract right now, but that’s where the political part of this would go.

RG: It’s funny, I can’t remember who said this; I think it was June Jordan? She said that the way that it works is that you do the activism first, and then the theory comes afterward –that the theoretical work comes out of the concrete political work of activism and social change. That position sounds Peircean to me, Eduardo Kohnian to me, because it emphasizes the process of being in the world, and is committed to the idea that praxis leads to theoretical innovation. That claim, I think, may run counter to the idea that there’s something intellectually conservative about radical politics.

EK: I like your formulation. There is some way in which I share affinities with activism, in the sense that I’m being made over first by the world and then finding ways to account for that, but it doesn’t necessarily fall into the category of politics in terms of addressing oneself to social injustices, per se, as the central focus.

RG: What are your future projects?

EK:  Well, thinking about an ethical practice in the Anthropocene through the logic of thinking forests is one. I plan to work with Amazonians but also with environmentalists, lawyers and biologists in Ecuador, and I don’t know where that will go. We all share this problem of how to live in the Anthropocene, how to reorient our lives with respect to this. But I don’t know what that means on the ground.

The other project I’ve been working on –and this is with Lisa Stevenson– is also related to thinking forests. Well, for me at least.  Lisa is coming to it from a different place and she’s been working on it for much longer than I have.   But in terms of my work on thinking forests I’m interested in forms of representation that are non-language-like and non-symbolic. One of the areas where this crops up is in forms of ethnographic representation that are non-language like.  I’ve always been interested in photography (you can see a bit of this through the images in the book) and I’ve become increasingly interested in ethnographic film.  We’ve been working together on a few films that are trying to bring out some of this non-discursive representational logic and this is one of the directions I find the most inspiring at the moment.

RG: Right, Eduardo. Thanks very much for this interview!

EK:  Thank you!