News that Karen McCarthy Brown passed away after years of deteriorating illness reached me earlier this month. I kept it to myself. When more official announcement from Drew University–where she was Professor Emerita of anthropology and sociology of religion—showed up on my Facebook feed this past Sunday, I shared it with the following comment:

Reading Karen’s Mama Lola kept me in grad school. Vodou got a human face from her. A tremendous loss, indeed.

When the first email arrived from UCSB’s Claudine Michel who penned the preface to the third edition of Brown’s award-winning ethnography in 2010, I had a flashback to nearly two decades ago.

I was sitting across from the department chair. We were in his office on the first floor of the LS&A building on S. State Street. I wanted out of the anthropology Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan. In our long conversation, I disclosed more vulnerabilities then I ever would again professionally. Tormented, I grappled with the racist history of a discipline in which I would always be a subject. I did not belong in this white institution and was exhausted from feeling I was desegregating the department all over again. Hang in there, he said. Minority retention at the doctoral level is a huge problem all over this country. It may not get easier but at least it will become more manageable. You can do it. Just don’t give up you will be a pioneer. I broke into sobs. I can’t be a pioneer, it’s not the 1950s. Was there anyone whose work really interested me? Well, there was this book, Mama Lola, about a Vodou priestess in Brooklyn. Did I know the author? No I did not. The subject was close to home. We had inherited responsibilities that have been overstretched by migration. It’s not something that we talk about. Maybe after your dissertation on Jamaica, you’ll write another book on your family’s story. In the meantime was there enough interest in this work to bring her to campus? Mere thoughts of that someday became inspiration enough to help me keep my eyes on the prize.

Karen McCarthy Brown did come to give a talk at UM on Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Between the mainstreaming feminism project led by a group of senior graduate students and supporting faculty, the event occurred a year or so later. Since I don’t do revisionist history—full disclosure—I remember sketchy details of this and my first encounter with Karen.

Mama Lola was published by the University of California Press in 1991. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted over a decade, Brown became an initiate of her subject, as a condition to deeper research and writing her life history. The resulting ethnography with its radical crossings blurred methodological and scriptive lines. Brown took creative liberties fictionalizing various strands of Lola’s familial and spiritual genealogies. The cover illustration of the first edition featured a doll from Lola’s altar representing the spirit Ezili Danto.

The book was hailed as a “new postmodern ethnography,” or “new feminist ethnography” (2001:ix) exemplary of this new genre of ethnographic writing that simultaneously weaved narrative analysis, the autobiographical and critical insights. Brown actually eschewed this connection. As she noted in the book’s second edition, which had a photograph of Lola herself on the cover, “I cannot claim to have self-consciously positioned my book in those niches” (2001:x). To the end, she re-asserted that she considered the work “primarily an exercise in interpretation” as she had done a decade before (2001:x). Brown would become a renowned religion expert and one of the founding members of KOSANBA—The Congress of Santa Barbara, a scholarly association for the study of Haitian Vodou.

A highly recognized work, Mama Lola was awarded the best first book in the History of Religions of the American Academy of Religion (1991) and the Victor Turner Prize of the American Anthropological Association (1992). But it was not without its critics. Chief among them was premier Haitian anthropologist, the late Michel-Rolph Trouillot who rightfully asked a most fundamental question: how much fiction is ethnography? Moreover, he questioned various tensions between Brown’s ethnographic authority and totalizing narrative. To that end, he wrote, “those unfamiliar with Haiti will lack the means by which to evaluate the global assertions of the transcendental narrator” (1994:653). I had not read Trouillot’s review in American Ethnologist until years later after a conversation with him at the AAAs.

Indeed, in many ways, Mama Lola was something of an insider ethnography. In retrospect, I formed an attachment to it precisely because I had some knowledge to discern fact from fiction, to fill in the silences and to decipher practices layered in an opacity that was part of a historically damaging trope. Simultaneously, it expanded my lexicon as I learned so much about religious practices in my birth country that to this day remain trapped in obscurity, familial and otherwise. In that sense, the book had done for me what anthropology is supposed to do, make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. It also sensitized me to the restrictions of genres, fieldwork dynamics and negotiations among so many other things. I knew there would never be an ethnography of my family’s story. Performance, maybe?. Memoir, definitely. Some stories are not mine to tell.

Since I began teaching years ago, I routinely used Mama Lola in my staple Haiti course. Despite my own feminist critiques, it’s an excellent project with which to debunk stereotypes, explore conflicts between researcher and subject and point to other disciplinary shortcomings. What I appreciated then and still do despite its limits is that this book, which kept me in grad school, actually managed to accomplish something that had been quite elusive until its publication. By (re)/constructing the So-Called Life of Marie Thérèse Alourdes Macena Margaux Kowalski, Karen gave Vodou a human face, at least in anthropology and one step beyond. Considering the long history of demonization and stigmatization that marred the religion, this is a Herculean achievement indeed, for which Karen McCarthy Brown should be recognized. Chapo ba!!!!!!!

Karen McCarthy Brown 2001 [1991] Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot. 1994. Review of Mama Lola. American Ethnologist 21(3):653-654.

Paul Farmer was never an orthodox anthropologist. As an undergraduate I remember reading his article, An Anthropology of Structural Violence. It took me by surprise.

Not because I was unaccustomed to scholars arguing that we need to link the ethnographically visible to history and political economy – or, in Farmer’s words, “the interpretive project of modern anthropology to a historical understanding of the large scale social and economic structures in which affliction is embedded”. No, my class had already read Sidney Mintz. It was somewhat fascinating to read an anthropologist who at the same time was a doctor committed to heal the sick in his ethnographic surroundings. But that’s not really what got me, either. 

What startled a young student was Farmer’s unorthodox reply to the comments section of his article. A whole A-Team of academics had come out – Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Linda Green, Didier Fassin and others – giving careful and polite criticisms to the arguably crude concept of “structural violence”. Farmer’s short reply broke the mold. It took no effort to amend the purported weaknesses of his own argument, or to point out inconsistencies among his critics. It made no attempt to elaborate his vision for the discipline. Rather, Farmer remarked that “the concept of structural violence may or may not prove useful, and the criticism offered by my colleagues is instructive and welcome.” He went on to describe how human suffering in Haiti had become increasingly acute since the paper had been published. A recent coup d’état compounded the already stark consequences of a US aid embargo to Haiti. Thus, without excuse, Farmer concluded that

These conditions, which directly affect my clinical work, preclude a more extended consideration of my colleagues’ commentaries but do not lessen my gratitude for both the forum in which to air these views and the clarity of these responses.

Put otherwise: “As a physician, there are times when academic discussion stops being useful. That time has now come. Kind regards, Paul.” When I recently met with Dr. Farmer, he seemed amused that I remembered his response. “Yes, that’s exactly what I said!” he told me with a smile, as we sat down before his guest lecture at the University of Oslo.

Paul Farmer: What I said was that structural violence, it’s just a concept. We’ll get another one. I am not wed to it. “I find it useful, and I find your critique useful. Thank you.” That’s how I feel. I feel that critical thinking is always important as a matter. And if a concept isn’t useful to someone, they should find a new concept. We should all find new concepts.

When you say you were surprised in reading my response, I hope you were somewhat pleased? Because the real fight is against poverty and injustice. And there are lots ways to have a clear analysis of it, and to have a strategy to addressing poverty and injustice in lots of different ways. But you know, to be wed to a concept or an academic theory is dangerous. That’s a 19^th century trap. I wouldn’t recommend it to you as a student.

I hope some of your other teachers are saying that. Because what teachers are usually saying is “I want you to be wed to my theory.” I am saying, “I won’t do that”. It’s a theory! It’s an idea! And it’s important to have ideas. There are a lot of power in ideas and concepts. But that’s not the only thing that we should do. We should also be very concerned with the pragmatic needs of people all around us, and as I have said those are food, food security, basic health services, public safety.

Anthropology of Health Economics

SW: What role do you see for a critical anthropology, or a critical social science, which is able to contribute positively to its surroundings?

PF: Well, my favorite anthropologists are all doing that already – Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Arthur Kleinman, Unni Wikan. That is also what I try to do, to say “what is the big picture here, how do institutions work in ways that lift people from poverty or do not?” That is the overall question I am interested in. So that’s a very constructive role to take.

SW: Are there particular topics which you would like to see more students address?

PF: Yes. What about a critical anthropology of health policy or health economics? I am still waiting for that. For example, there should be a lot of people writing PhDs about how notions of cost-effectiveness are deployed in settings of scarcity, and then they should pick apart the notion of “cost” and the notion of “effectiveness”. But I haven’t seen those studies yet.

How can you say something is cost-effective, if you don’t understand “cost” or “effectiveness”? It is two powerful words hung together by a hyphen. We have to be very careful when we claim that something is cost-effective or cost-ineffective, if we haven’t really even understood the cost of something.

In health policy, for example, we seldom hear anyone talking about the cost of inaction. Let us consider how much it costs to do nothing about, say, treating AIDS if it is already the leading infectious killer of young adults in the world, which it was in 1999, when it surpassed tuberculosis. What does it cost not to have a health equity plan? A lot. We need to figure out the cost of inaction – a topic which is much understudied. Action has cost, but so does inaction.

To me it’s urgent that we understand this prevailing ideology of cost-effectiveness, because it has terrifying real-life consequences.

Biosocial complexities

PF: But generally I think some of the critical thinking is not as critical as it thinks it is.

SW: In what sense do you mean that?

PF: Well, to me the only way to have real critical thought is to understand various forms of outcome. Let’s take an example from Russia. In 1998, on the 50^th anniversary of the universal declaration of human rights, I was in Moscow. A debate was going on; there were some Human Rights experts, mostly lawyers, and some people from the prison system, generals in uniforms. And there was a big debate going on between them about why a lot of young people were dying in detention. And the experts who thought they were being critical were saying “these young people are dying of starvation”.  And the people in the prison system were saying “no, they are not.” They weren’t. They were dying of multi drug resistant tuberculosis. The self-defined progressives had no clue what was going on bio-socially. And there is a lack of that multi-disciplinary understanding, unfortunately, in much critical thinking. These analyses are weak, superficial and disciplinarily enclosed. They are unable to understand the biosocial complexities we face today.

Now, to me, any critical analysis in medical anthropology, which tries to understand the real dynamics of suffering and poverty, needs to understand such things as the workings of drug resistant tuberculosis. That to me is real critical anthropology: It understands political economy, it understands how power works, it understands how embodiment happens, it understands how airborne and waterborne diseases and are actually transmitted – it understands all those things, and is sophisticated in a way that could not have happened without many of the tools that are unconventional in today’s anthropology, such as lab data. All of these things are part of what you need to make any reasonable claim to causality.

Exporting Paternalism
A few weeks ago Kerim blogged about David Brooks’ New York Times opinion piece on Haiti, which is squarely in the Harrisonian mold: we need to go in and change their culture so they can develop. He (erroneously, we think) quotes Huntington in his support, but at least, contrary to Huntington’s infamous comparison between South Korea and Ghana (they were at the same level of development in 1960), Brooks’ argument compares Haiti to places like Barbados and the Dominican Republic, which means he operates with more specific cultural categories (which implicitly include political and social history) than Huntington’s “civilizations”.

But what we found remarkable in Brooks’ article was something else:

it’s time to promote locally led paternalism. In this country, we first tried to tackle poverty by throwing money at it, just as we did abroad. Then we tried microcommunity efforts, just as we did abroad. But the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism.

These programs, like the Harlem Children’s Zone and the No Excuses schools, are led by people who figure they don’t understand all the factors that have contributed to poverty, but they don’t care. They are going to replace parts of the local culture with a highly demanding, highly intensive culture of achievement — involving everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to better job performance. It’s time to take that approach abroad, too.

Wait a minute. Sure, Brooks is a conservative commentator, but still – what? A piece in the New York Times advocating promoting locally led paternalism and exporting paternalism abroad?

How is this different from what China is doing in poor countries – for which it gets all kinds of flak, none more than from U.S. conservatives?

China’s emergence in the development/aid field – its Eximbank is now a larger lender than the World Bank – is beginning to impact approaches in the whole field. In China, there is little patience for the kind of participatory development approach that has recently been so popular in the West (but is widely criticised as failed) and endless faith in ‘60s-style, highly interventionist development projects that combine large-scale infrastructural development with instilling a “modern work culture,” bodily discipline and all. (China is often described as differing from the West in its lack of a missionary agenda, but this is hardly true for Chinese investors; they are very like so many Henry Fords.) And this approach has appeal. People, at least some people, in Africa and Southeast Asia feel like the hopes for development that existed in the ‘60s and ‘70s have been given back to them.

So where does that leave “culture” in development? Our hunch is that its place has already shifted since we wrote Seeing Culture Everywhere. On the one hand, there is China and David Brooks. On the other, there is a new trend in “development thinking” around the World Bank and elsewhere (like Narayan. Pritchett and Kapoor’s Moving out of Poverty and Jessica Cohen and William Easterly’s What Works in Development) that seem to abandon the term altogether and focus on micro-scale interventions – rightly, we believe.