It was early morning in the late fall of 2014, my  friend Emily asked me if I wanted coffee, and if so, did I want her maternal or paternal grandmother’s recipe. It was about 6 AM, I had spent the entire previous day and night at a checkpoint trying to get in to Ramallah, and completely unsure of how to answer that question. She looked at my silence with pity and then announced: We will have my maternal grandmother’s coffee. I watched and listened to her as she proceeded to talk to me about how this coffee had to be made to her grandmother’s specifications. She helped me imagine the entire process and the materials used by her grandmother: the coffee grounds, the cardamom, the length of the boil, then the waiting, the number and duration of the re-boils, the bubbles, their color, and the aroma.

Earlier that month my sister snap chat an image of a cappuccino and sent it to my other sister. Waste of digital space, I told her. After 10 seconds it disappears, she retorted. This is ridiculous; I bet no one but my sisters use this silly app, I thought to myself. Turns out, I was wrong: over 60% of US 13-34-year-old smart phone users, use snap chat. Also, now snap chat keeps your image or video for up to 24 hours, allowing you a full day within which you might calibrate your own recollection time. Choosing how to recollect within a 24-hour experience seems to be positioned as a very long time in this 13-34-year-old statistic.

In my experience, how we recollect has never been something we have been able to calibrate. Over 20 years ago in Karachi, I heard a bullet go into a body and the body fall to the ground. I could smell the blood and gunshot residue. I watched as a pool of blood slowly fought its way into focus through the dust and dirt on the surface of the ground next to the car I was hiding behind. I must have been crouched behind that car for less than 10 seconds, looking at the blood pool for what felt like 500 years.  My friend and I went back to the spot less than 24 hours later in an effort to try to understand what had happened; there was a fruit vendor selling fruit at the spot in front of the cafe, and there were no visible traces left of the blood, the body, or the gun residue. We stood outside the cafe feeling slightly uncertain of ourselves, decided to order a Nescafe, got back into the car, and silently drove away.

Mamhoud Darwish starts his prose poem, Memory for Forgetfulness. August, Beirut, 1982, with dreaming and waking up to only be in a nightmare of war. As he tries to push toward dawn, he evokes the desire for coffee:

I want the aroma of coffee. I want nothing more than the aroma of coffee. And I want nothing more from the passing days than the aroma of coffee. The aroma of coffee so I can hold myself together, stand on my feet, and be transformed from something that crawls, into a human being. The aroma of coffee so I can stand my share of this dawn up on its feet. So that we can go together, this day and I, down into the street in search of another place.

How can I diffuse the aroma of coffee into my cells, while shells from the sea rain down on the sea-facing kitchen, spreading the stink of gunpowder and the taste of nothingness? I measure the period between two shells. One second. One second: shorter than the time between breathing in and breathing out, between two heartbeats. One second is not long enough for me to stand before the stove by the glass facade that overlooks the sea. One second is not long enough to open the water bottle or pour the water into the coffee pot. One second is not long enough to light a match. But one second is long enough for me to burn.

As Emily made me coffee that morning, and the mornings that followed, I noticed that every day I felt I was getting to know her family. The making of coffee as a form of hospitality is one that, in its process, builds relationships. Every morning I would hear stories or even just an aside, that linked her to the coffee grounds, to the practice of boiling, to the copper vessel, and to the sensory impact of the aroma of coffee.  I know how significant the everydayness of that exercise was for me in those days in order to ensure some feeling of safety and security. It was as if coffee attested to an insistence of sheer existence – as ephemeral as it may feel in a space of constant violence. Knowing you can have your coffee in the morning makes one feel normal. I began to recognize echoes of particular slivers of time in Karachi, Iraq, and Ramallah during times of violence and how they deposited in layers atop one another in my memory and recollection. I began to understand the experience of a war that I did not witness but gleaned an insight to through prose-poetry.

I want the aroma of coffee. I need five minutes. I want a five-minute truce for the sake of coffee. I have no personal wish other than to make a cup of coffee. With this madness I define my task and my aim. All my senses are on their mark, ready at the call to propel my thirst in the direction of the one and only goal: coffee.  (Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness August, Beirut, 1982)

The link between coffee and poetry in the Middle East is not a light and frothy matter. Quite the contrary: it is the root of statecraft, politics, and links to landscape. In my current work in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), I have been utilizing poetics as a way to encounter unfamiliar landscapes. The use of art, poetry, and literature to learn about a history of a place is not a usual methodology for archaeologists, but my usual training led me towards silent landscapes – and it has only been through art and poetry that the landscape has opened up to me. In Nabati Poetry: The Oral Poetry of Arabia, Saad Abdullah Sowayan discusses the manners in which poets engage themselves in some labor or crafting to aid in composition… or they make coffee. Sowayan goes on to discuss in detail the rituals in composition of both coffee and poetry: “The way a man makes his coffee is his numas, since it reflects his nimbleness, alertness, composure, tact, and taste. A man takes as much pride in his coffee making as he does in his poetic composition.” (1985: 96) This link between masculinity and the making of coffee is something that Darwish reflects upon as well, as he describes the interstitial moments of boiling: Swelling and breaking, they’re thirsty and ready to swallow two spoonfuls of coarse sugar, which no sooner penetrates than the bubbles calm down to a quiet hiss, only to sizzle again in a cry for a substance that is none other than the coffee itself—a flashy rooster of aroma and Eastern masculinity. Masculinity is, of course, far more complicated than coffee, but these claims and links make Emily’s grandmother’s recipes all the more significant and reflective of intersectional politics within the fleeting moment of dawn.

Over 15 years ago, another dawn in a different place and pushed into a different time, I stood with my friends Praveena and Peter on the Iron Age mound at Gilund (Rajasthan, India) and they pointed to various spaces in the trench and spoke of ephemeral layers. They had called me over from my trench to talk through what an approach to excavating ephemerality might be. We stood for a while talking about how we had no idea what to do with these layers. We must have stood there a bit longer than our director liked because he walked over. He took one look at it, looked at us, and then said: document it and keep digging until you find a floor or a wall, then call me. We all nodded at his wisdom and got back to work.

I don’t remember much about what I dug up during that season (I think I was working on a wall), but I do remember the ephemerality of the Iron Age mound. It was not a trench I worked in or on, nor had I experienced its time or the effort to reconstruct human events – but in its ephemerality it left a long lasting image within layers of my memory.

I also still remember the rose in cappuccino foam.

Divestment is an emotional — even explosive — topic for many anthropologists, and especially for Jewish anthropologists. To me, the most valuable contribution this SMOPS makes is not in arguing one side of divestment or the other. Rather, its value comes from the fact that it presents a picture — almost a mini-ethnography — of Israel that varies greatly from what Jewish American anthropologists such as myself were told about our homeland growing up. Regardless of where one stands on the issue of Israel, I believe that we as anthropologists have a professional obligation to see and know the full reality of life in Israel today, including evidence that contradicts many of our taken-for-granted ideas about that country. Challenging preconceptions in the name of truth is, after all, the fundamental duty of anthropological ethnography. As Jewish American anthropologists, we must work through these issues the ethnography presents. An incurious and uninformed support of Israel does not fulfill Jewish American anthropologists’ obligation to anthropology or Israel — and refusing to engage the issue at all is simply to give up on one’s identity altogether.

Why Anthropologists Should Embrace BDS, by Isaiah Silver,  Edited by Alex Golub

I.

Although I was instantly moved by the Palestinian narrative from the moment I learned of it, it would be years before I knew any Palestinians. Nor did I know any Israelis. Yet, in the bohemian subcultures of urban America, you could say that I, in the ironic words of Najla Said, ‘grew up as a Jew.’ Jews were friends, ex-girlfriends, band mates, co-workers, classmates, bosses, and professors. Some broke from the dominant Zionist narrative, while others did not. Usually we didn’t talk about it. There was enough going on with my own coming of age to get into world politics. Somehow I missed the second intifada.

Soon I’d have more to say. Once, in San Francisco, a band I was playing in broke up when the harmonium player stormed out of practice after I debuted a new song about Palestine. A few months later, in 2006, I was traveling in South America when the Second Lebanon War broke out. I was surrounded by herds of Israeli backpackers fresh out of the military. It was difficult for me not to separate the scenes of destruction I read in the news from the aloof and giddy young ex-soldiers let loose on the streets of Cuzco and La Paz. More than a few conversations went late into those nights.

II.

As fate would have it, the Israel/Palestine conflict has since taken a central position in my life. I’ve been living on and off in the region for the past two years, doing ethnographic research with anti-Zionist Jewish Israeli activists, and here again I was initiated into the land through Jewish voices, a nuanced minority though they may be. My research subjects, some of them now close friends, often tease me for ‘having become a Jew.’ How did I get in so deep? Could it be Bourdieu’s concept of illusio, in which the self is autonomous in investing in what makes life meaningful, both emotionally and libidinally?

While conducting my research, I lived in Ramallah in the West Bank and traveled regularly to Tel Aviv, where most of my subjects lived. This was perhaps an impractical arrangement, but I did it mostly for ideological reasons, believing that integrity counts for something. Ramallah is the charming de facto capital of Palestine, soon to be on par with other Arab centers of culture, but living there I quickly hit a wall in developing a repertoire in Arabic beyond the by now scripted dialogues in showering pleasantries, exchanges in restaurants and markets, and answering basic questions about my Indian heritage. Btahab al-flim hindi? ‘Do you like Indian films?’ Palestinians love to ask. My Arabic was still embarrassingly limited for a burgeoning anthropologist, so when I chose to enroll in an Arabic course, the question was not at which level – I chose to start over – but at which kind of institution: Israeli or Palestinian? I chose Israeli.

It’s hardly surprising that my initiation into the Arabic language was no less through Jewish eyes, or, in this case, tongue. I enrolled in an intensive summer course in Arabic at an Israeli institution, mostly for having heard positive things about the program, but also owing to Israel’s overall reputation for having developed a masterful pedagogy for language learning. After all, it was Zionist pedagogy that successfully transformed bodies of native Russian, Farsi, Amharic, Yiddish, French, and – yes, Arabic – speakers into a nation of Hebrews. If I was going to be a Jew, I hoped at least the Israelis could make me an Arab Jew.

I was aware, of course, that studying at an Israeli institution would place me in a precarious and politically minority position. I anticipated sharing a classroom with young American Jews with close family ties to Israel, and perhaps non-Jews interested in learning Arabic for an advantage in military/intelligence careers. I was correct in both assumptions.

The atmosphere in Israel was already tense when the course began. The kidnapping of the three yeshiva students from a West Bank settlement had unleashed the Israeli military’s wrath, leading to over 400 arrests and 9 deaths in a violent and highly sensationalized pogrom in the name of searching for the perpetrators. In regards to this, in an orientation ceremony at the university, we were discouraged by the administrative staff from entering the West Bank, to proceed with caution if visiting the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City – one of the world’s premier tourist destinations – and to generally avoid Palestinian areas of the city in which we were studying. I had never before taken a language course where the prospect of speaking to native speakers was considered anything less than ideal. Nor was I exactly surprised to discover that in our team of five instructors, four would be Jewish Israelis. A few of them mastered Arabic from having studied it in the military. The Hebrew voiceless uvular fricative was to be a recurring phoneme in my Arabic summer.

III.

What I did not expect, however, was that Operation Protective Edge would break out about two weeks into the program. Suddenly politics were unavoidable in conversations with the other students. Suddenly the racism was salient: Muslims don’t value life like Jews/Americans/Westerners do, They’re so backwards, Look at how they treat their women. I left the university daily wondering how these students, all very bright and some from top American universities, were reconciling the Arabic language, as a concept, with themselves. I thought of Amiel Alcalay, the wonderful literary critic whose life’s work has been excavating the integral Arabic component of Jewish history and culture. Judeo-Arabic, Alcalay has pointed out, has a larger literary body than any other Jewish language, including Hebrew and Yiddish, owing mostly to the great Jewish poets of Arab Spain. As recently as the 1950s, Iraqi and Yemenite immigrants to Israel carried on the tradition of Arabic as a Jewish literary language. This tradition, sadly, has become extinct. Shimon Ballas, the Baghdad-born Hebrew novelist once said, ‘I came from the Arab environment and I remain in constant colloquy with the Arab environment.’ But at my Israeli institution, Arabic is confined to the same Otherness as in North America. It is the language of terrorism, misogyny, and religious myopia. It is a language of problems that must be eradicated, but perhaps first understood. In short, it is a language that must be colonized.

On the first day of the operation, as President Netanyahu instructed the military to ‘take their gloves off’ against Hamas, the university called its international students to an emergency security meeting. This was a thinly disguised propaganda session convened to convince us why the bombing of Gaza was necessary, with instructions of what to do in case of a Hamas rocket attack being only a small procedural detail. The same dubious claims regarding Gaza that dominate American media coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict were reiterated here. Again, it was the usual clichés: Hamas is theologically opposed to Israel, Hamas uses human shields, etc. Regardless of however one may view Hamas, most of these claims have been refuted by non-state sources like UNRWA, the Goldstone report, and the hundreds of witness testimonies by Gazans on the blogosphere. For instance, there still remains not a shred of evidence that Hamas has ever used human shields at any point in its history, rendering Israel’s 80% civilian casualty rate in Operation Protective Edge a mystifying and truly grotesque figure. The sole source for Israel’s claims remains the office of the Israeli military spokesperson itself. Why was the university reiterating claims that are, at best, unverified?

A few days later we were invited to a special guest lecture on the operation in Gaza by a former high-ranking official in the Mossad, the notorious national intelligence agency of Israel that is directly involved and invested in state interests. The choice was astounding. Meanwhile, we were receiving daily security emails from the university reassuring us that we were ‘safe,’ and again we were urged not to visit the West Bank or the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City; only this time it was written in the imperative. As someone who has lived in the West Bank, I am deeply saddened whenever I encounter this vilification of Palestinians. Hate crimes against foreigners are unheard of in the Palestinian territories. As an old roommate in Ramallah used to say, the only such crime Palestinians are capable of is ‘kidnapping’ foreigners and then feeding them delicious sweets, pilafs, and coffee. She is an American Jewish woman who has been living in the city for four years. But in Israel and in the Israeli institution where I was studying, Palestinians were fearsome and not to be trusted. They were hazy representations in the mise-en-scène of the Jewish Israeli experience.

IV.

By now socializing with my classmates was unbearable. Wait, why did you come to Israel? Why not go study in Egypt or Syria? The death toll had already passed a thousand. Soon the fundraisers to aid Israeli troops fighting in the operation began. I think I noticed the donation boxes on campus the morning after the Shujaiyah massacre, in which over seventy Palestinian civilians were killed in a single operation. Not a word about this was mentioned on campus or in the emails. Flags were everywhere. Patriotic fervor had gripped Israel. I heard from a friend that another Israeli institution, where she studies, sent an email to students expressing the university’s solidarity with the operation, promising a tuition discount to reserve soldiers serving in Gaza for the following academic year, and condemning students who voice ‘extreme opinions’ regarding the operation on social media. This ambiguous reference to extremity, in Israel, is not exactly ambiguous.

I began finding it difficult to go to class. I holed myself up for days in a friend’s apartment. We were two miserable peas in a miserable pod: He, a Jewish Israeli heartbroken by his own society’s madness, and me, an anthropologist for whom the field is increasingly becoming home. The war had exhausted us. Three days before finishing the course and taking the final exam, I couldn’t bring myself to continue. I dropped out.

V.

All of this brings me to the topic of academic boycott of Israel. While I obviously do not conceal my positionality regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict, I am nonetheless ambivalent about endorsing the academic boycott for a number of reasons. Why arbitrarily punish one of the few social spheres in Israel where an individual critique of Zionism is at all possible? Why encourage the few professors sympathetic to the Palestinian narrative to leave Israel and seek positions in Europe and North America, thus risking faculties at Israeli universities being fully transformed into a state propaganda arm?

I remain ambivalent about the boycott, but witnessing the response to the Gaza operation by Israeli universities, I can’t say that singling out the academy is arbitrary. It’s true that many professors in Israeli universities divert from the national narrative on an individual basis, but the Israeli academy, as an institution, has made no attempt to distance itself from the Gaza massacres. My experience confirms this. I have been following the debate in anthropology circles in North America regarding the academic boycott, and the issue was also raised this past week at the European Association of Social Anthropology’s biennial meeting in Tallinn, where a motion to condemn the Israeli operation in Gaza narrowly failed. This discourse usually revolves around the appropriateness of academics engaging politically with our peers, as if we should be careful about flouting some chivalrous sacrament of the discipline.

I acknowledge that my experience of wartime Israel might be seen as an exceptional circumstance, but I suspect that it isn’t. Social tendencies do not develop in moments of conflict; they merely surface. The traumatic kernel was always there. The daily propaganda emails, the implicit vilification of Palestinians, the transparently biased choice of speakers invited to explain the situation to the international students, the expressly stated support for the Gaza operation, and the coercive censorship of anti-state perspectives on social media, in my view, should be enough to shift the dialogue regarding the boycott away from questions of appropriateness to questions of complicity. Ilan Pappé has long maintained that Israeli academia ‘deserves to be boycotted,’ referring to shoddy work done by early Israeli historians to appease state interests. Similarly, Nadia Abu El-Haj has famously exposed the ethically questionable practices of Israeli archaeology in her excellent book on the subject. When I was considering studying for a graduate degree in Israel, I was surprised to find that Middle East/Islamic Studies departments at Israeli institutions are overwhelmingly staffed by professors with military/intelligence backgrounds. I advocate that there should be a debate on the academic boycott of Israel, but there is no debating that Israeli academia is a colonial institution.

VI.

As a student of anthropology with area interest in Israel/Palestine, I see the need for an Israeli anthropology as critical. By this I don’t mean anthropologists from Israeli institutions researching Israel/Palestine, but anthropologists from everywhere, including Israel, researching Israel/Palestine. For this we need collaboration and support from anthropology departments in Israeli universities. We should also see Israeli anthropologists as potential though as yet unrealized allies in the fight against apartheid and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. One lesson I’ve learned doing fieldwork in Israel is that no one is fully immune from the irrationality of political emotion, but possibilities are always present. Is a boycott really the best way to engage with possibility? I don’t have an answer, but a dialogue of engagement/disengagement is crucially missing from the current discourse. I am ambivalent about the academic boycott not because it’s inappropriate, antisemitic, or heavy-handed – it’s none of these – but rather because a more effective strategy might be possible.

I am not so naïve as to believe that anthropologists can reform Israeli academia, the inextricability of which with state interests should be evident from my experience, but I do see anthropologists as occupying a special role within academia. We, along with a handful of others, are the Davids against the Goliaths of medicine, finance, engineering, law, etc. In many ways, we are the dispossessed of the academy. We should, as Ghassan Hage has argued, via Bourdieu, ‘through a process of affective homology, show solidarity with the dominated and oppressed peoples of the world.’ Our support for the Palestinian people should be urgent and uncompromised. How to show it, and with whom, is another matter.

But scholars also believe that certain questions are not worth asking. Sometimes, its for the same reasons that I’ve listed above — after all, academics are people too. But there is another reason that scholars and scientists roll their eyes when certain questions get asked, or certain answers are proposed: history.

People have been asking questions for a long time, and have been coming up with good answers for just as long. Specialists in a field remember this history: we were taught it as students, and we make it as researchers. We’ve seen answers to questions come and go — often after the real answers are more or less established.

Consider, for instance, the settlement of Polynesia. How did all of those islands in the Pacific get populated when they were in the middle of the ocean? Polynesian voyaging is one of the great triumphs of our species, and the prehistory of the Pacific is now relatively well understood. But that doesn’t stop people from asking the question afresh. A few years ago I was talking to someone about their recent trip to Morocco, where they noted that Berber languages sounded suspiciously like Hawai‘ian. Could Polynesians have migrated from the old world?

Sure they could have. Or they could have migrated from the Americas — Thor Heyerdahl proved that the voyage was possible. In fact, it was once a going theory that they migrated from Egypt. So if you are a non-academic and google for Polynesian origins in the Middle East, you will in fact find books on this subject.

It’s just that those books are out of date and wrong. Polynesians could have come from Egypt or Morocco. However, they did not. And as for similarities in language, well, with a little ingenuity, and given languages with reasonably compatible phonologies, you can find a ‘cognate’ between two unrelated languages about once out of every two words you try.

Isn’t the earth obviously flat? Couldn’t vaccines be dangerous? Why do people ignore the clear evidence the Bible gives us about the creation of the world? People ask these questions all the time, and feel slighted when professors respond by rolling their eyes and assigning remedial reading rather than taking them seriously.

Sure, we could be wrong. Our explanations could be mistaken, and it takes people being mavericky to shake us up from time to time. But — let’s face it — most of the time when people start demanding new answers to settled questions, this demand only seem reasonable to them because they don’t know how good our established answer is. When we dismiss new answers to old questions, we are not abandoning the fundamental tenet of open inquiry. We just want to get back to doing research on problems without good answers. Is complacence and self-certainty a danger? Yes. Is reinventing the wheel in the name of open mindedness a scientific virtue? No.

Lawrence of Arabia (LoA, henceforth) does this because it is a great film. It is huge in every sense of the word, telling a long story that stretches across vast amounts of space without losing the audience. It is also startlingly beautiful, even when viewed on a television screen (as most people see it these days). I had a chance to attend a screening once in the original format and aspect ration — larger than a normal movie, iirc — and it is even more amazing in that form. Its sounds silly, but I walked out of the theater thinking: “you could really see the camels.”  The film is monumental.

But beyond the quality of the production itself, the movie works because it draws on a deep orientalist strain in the culture that produced it. LoA is just one in a long time of products ranging From Burton’s Book of a Thousand Nights and One Night to The Desert Song that white people have used as fantasy material. Indeed, LoA is about the many people who have attempted to perform those fantasies by ‘becoming one’ with The Arab. At times the relations between fiction and reality become vertiginous: Omar Sharif plays the noble Sharif Ali in LoA, whereas 15 years earlier he was the Head Boy at Victoria College, where his abuse of Edward Said no doubt played its part in the life experiences that would cause Said to write Orientalism. 

A well-executed production with deep cultural roots, LoA also refused to tell the story about Lawrence that Lawrence himself tried so hard to live. In the film, Lawrence’s ability to immerse himself in Arab culture seems premised on his own deep alienation from those around him. He dreams of intimacy with his newfound hosts, and also of the power to shape their destiny. At first, they are willing to indulge him, and perhaps even grow a bit credulous. But in the end, Lawrence ends up being a pawn on a chessboard controlled by much larger imperial players (I give props to David Lean for making Prince Feisal one of them, but  then immediately withdraw props for having him portrayed by in brownface, even by someone as excellent in the role as Alec Guinness).

It’s not a typical fieldwork story (I mean, its typical for my fieldwork but that’s just me). Not all anthropologists are white people from the center who study brown people in the periphery. But a lot of them are, and even the ones who aren’t constantly fight a disciplinary narrative which tells them that all anthropology is a version of  Seven Pillars of Wisdom, or ought to be. The genius of LoA is the way it shows the messy political and emotional dynamics that come with the process of fieldwork. Every anthropologist should see this movie and imagine themselves as Lawrence. Because in some ways, they already are.

That’s all for now. Tune in next week, when I discuss the lessons “The Lion in Winter” can teach faculty about choosing a new department chair.

A little over a month ago I uploaded 24 minutes of raw footage of the Palestine/Israel Wall I shot in 2009. This is footage for a documentary I am making about divided cities. I’ve finished the sections on Nicosia, Cyprus and Belfast, North Ireland and I’ve finished shooting but not editing this story on East Jerusalem. Unedited and with its natural sounds I thought it was gritty and evocative enough to stand alone on YouTube. I uploaded it and titled it “Palestine Apartheid Wall Raw Footage.” Last week I got a YouTube message from user WHW680 who kindly informed me that he remixed my footage into the French pro-independent Palestine hip-hop video “the Wall of Zionist Racist Freedom for Palestine.” Shocked and honored I watched the video.

Artistically, WHW680 doesn’t use the shots I would; he doesn’t get the projection ratios right; I wouldn’t quite be so intense with the title; and he cuts the edits too early or too late, making the viewing experience choppy. I am being intentionally superficial here for a reason, as I am trying to express the first round of mental dissonance experienced when remixed. As a cinematographer it is an enlightening if challenging ordeal. It gets deeper, too, when your work is not only remixed in a way that challenges your technical and artistic vision but is used politically in surprising ways.

The footage was used to make a music video for the track “Palestine” by Le Ministère des Affaires Populaires, a popular Arab-French hip-hip group in Paris, off of “Les Bronzés Font du Ch’ti” described as “an album that sounds like a call to rebellion, insurrection and disobedience but also solidarity.” They tour Palestine, including Gaza. The music is fantastic, mixing breaks, good flows, meaningful lyrics, and longing violins. Obviously I can get behind the activism of a liberated Palestine but becoming a tool for propaganda, despite my agreement with it, without my vocal consent, is a creatively dissonant experience.

Political semiotic engineering for the right causes I can dig, but agency denying actions are experienced as a type of cognitive violation nonetheless. The quintessential sign of this is the final few second of the video. After the footage ends and while the music still lingers, the words “Freedom, Return, and Equality,” and “Free Palestine-Boycott Israel,” and www.bdsmovement.net circle a Palestinian flag. This final frame essentially brands this video for the BDS Movement, a civil rights organization focused on “boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights.”

This isn’t “my” footage anymore, WHW680 generously cites me in the description, but the semiotic potential of the footage previously shot by me is mobilized for the BDS Movement. The aesthetic and the political fold into each other in remix activities in which preceding agencies, my own as cameraman, is incorporated or replaced by the technical agencies of the French remixer, WHW680, and reformulated into the political vision of the pro-Palestinian BDS Movement. Which is all good, but it gives me a new look at remix culture.

This experience has forced me to eat some of my words. Remix culture isn’t a myth. I agree with my earlier detractors who stated that it isn’t about the volume of the activity nor the impact of this remixed song or that music video. I would add something more. Being remixed is personally transformative for those being reformatted by values and practices beyond their control. Not only does remix challenge jurisprudence and liberalism, and present new modes of knowledge production, it also modifies the subjective constitution of agency in artistic and political social sphere.

One of the amazing things about the work of each of these artists is how resonant it is with what we do as anthropologists. Like ethnography, their images are not simply about ‘documentation.’ They are about conveying something of lived experience that allows us, provokes us, to ask questions about how some particular lives come to look they way they do. They invite us to linger on the lives of soldiers long enough to think about how they are, and also are not, like others.

It strikes me that in our disciplinary conversations about what various modes of anthropological engagement might look like, we often fail to recognize the possibilities of such resonances. These possibilities are especially promising when the lives we explore are characterized, in one way or another, by war. Here, issues of politics and ethics lie both close to the surface and close to the bone. Tim Hetherington’s work was powerful proof of these possibilities.

For example, he said many times that he hoped Restrepo, his thoroughly ethnographic Afghanistan war documentary, co-directed with Sebastian Junger, would offer a new and more productive starting place for thinking about the war and US military intervention.

As Tim put it in an excellent interview at Guernica where he responds to Leftist criticism of the film:

While moral outrage may motivate me, I think demanding moral outrage is actually counter-productive because people tend to switch off. […] Sure, the face of the U.S. soldier is the “easiest entrée into the Afghan war zone” but it has allowed me to touch many people at home with rare close-up footage of injured and dead Afghan civilians (as well as a young U.S. soldier having a breakdown following the death of his best friend). Perhaps these moments represent the true face of war rather than the facts and figures of political analyses or the black and white newsprint of leaked documents.

In a more personal mode, Tim offered the experimental film Diary, which reflects something of the compulsions, rhythms, and senses of his movement into and out of ‘zones of killing’, as he suggested we might think of such spaces. Here too, we can find resonances with anthropological explorations of the particular vertiginous experiences of being in and out and in such spaces of violence, and of the uneven geographies of deadly violence.

News continues to unfold about the incident in Libya that may have also killed photographer Chris Hondros, and that seriously injured photographers Guy Martin, Michael Christopher, among others. And as we continue to hear more of Tim Hetherington’s death, and more remembrances of his life and work, I’ll also be thinking about what his work, and the work of other artists and journalists, has to offer us anthropologists; the places where our various projects meet, and the possibilities for thinking and acting that might begin from there.

There has been a lot of talk about the importance of social media in recent world events. See for instance, here, here, and here. Some of the more astute commentators have referred to earlier technological revolutions and their impact on television: usenet, fax machines, television, cameras, telegraph, and even the printing press. One technology, however, always seem to get left out, maybe because it seems too “obvious,” and that is literacy.

This is too bad because there is a great literature on the subject. A user named “dinalopez” has put together a wonderful bibliography on WorldCat – a list which contains many of my favorite articles on the subject, as well as many I haven’t read. I wanted to draw upon this critical literacy studies literature to make three points about technology and social change.

The first point comes from a paper F. Niyi Akinnaso (my Ph.D. advisor) wrote for the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History. “Schooling, Language, and Knowledge in Literate and Nonliterate Societies” draws on Akinnaso’s knowledge of Yoruba divination practices to challenge the “over-simplified view of education in nonliterate societies.” This is important because he shows that the social organization of schooling associated with literate societies is not dependent on literacy, and that similar practices can be found in some nonliterate societies. He does not deny that these institutional patterns are more typical of literate societies, but it would be a mistake to attribute too much explanatory force to literacy. The Yoruba case shows that literacy is not a necessary factor in the creation of such social institutions.

The second point comes from Brian Street’s important book Literacy in theory and Practice. In this book Street argues that there is not one universal form of literacy, but multiple “literacies.” In Iran in the 1970s (where he did fieldwork) many people learn to “read” the Koran by wrote memorization. They are literate in the sense that they can look at a page of the Koran and recite the appropriate passages, but not in the sense of being able to use their literacy to read other texts besides the Koran.

Finally, the third point I wanted to make about literacy comes from an article by Terence Turner about how the Kayapo in Brazil have appropriated the use of video cameras. I put this in the context of literacy precisely because one of the important aspects of video use by the Kayapo is to record the promises of politicians. Before video cameras they similarly made audio recordings – both useful methods for a society which (at the time) lacked literacy. It is also worth mentioning a second aspect of their use of video technology, which is their appearance, in native-dress, at political protests carrying video cameras. Here their use of video cameras became the story, one with broad international appeal, allowing them to reach a much larger audience.

So what do these three points teach us about “Twitter Revolutions”? First, the technology itself is not as important as the social conditions in which it is used. In many cases social media is more a means of communicating what is happening on the ground with the outside world, as diasporic populations keep in touch with their friends and family at home via Facebook and Twitter, than it is a means of organizing activity on the ground. If these social networks exist, families will communicate with them however they can, whether by usenet, fax machine, telegraph, or letter. The second point is that the mere existence of these technologies does not imply that people will necessarily make use of them in a particular way. Certainly there is a huge difference in how Twitter is used at the annual anthropology conferences and at an event like SXSW. And the third point is that it isn’t necessarily a bad thing for people to be fascinated by how this technology is being used in Egypt. Certainly it has allows us to voyeuristically participate in world events from afar. Whether this helps or not is hard to say, but I’ll leave you with this quote by Aaron Bady:

I am under no illusions that it will do the people of Egypt any particular good for me to retweet links to articles and images and expressions of the righteous human spirit so gloriously on display in Egypt right now — much as I would like it to — but that’s not really why I’ve been doing it. It’s selfish. It is for me, because it’s what I need to do as a person whose spiritual body has gotten very hungry. I want to be a part of something hopeful because I find that too much hopelessness has crept too deeply into the person I have no choice but to be.

Exactly one year ago this week, my first book, Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution was published. The book, based on fieldwork conducted between 2000 and 2007 with Tehrani youth, looked at ways in which the discourse on sexuality was changing and how these changes in sexuality were linked to a larger social movement as articulated by the Iranian youth themselves. When I began reading the reviews of my book (not recommended for the thin-skinned first time author), my stomach churned. “Is sexuality really political?” some reviewers asked, “do the sartorial changes in youth fashion or behavior have deeper reaching impact?” others wrote, “how deeply do these sexual behaviors penetrate Iranian society?”, “could sex unseat the Mullahs?”  while still others asked (on Savage Minds in fact) “is ‘pretty’ the new protest?”. When I talked about my research with my students, some of the same questions came up. At first, I was frustrated, angry even. What part of my clarifications and caveats had readers and students missed? Then I realized, my mistakes were twofold: 1) I had conflated the idea of a sexual revolution (think sexual revolution a-la 1960s Greenwich Village) with the social movement that was inspiring young people to lobby for social change, and 2) I was describing only a few appendages of a larger “body that was then searching for a head” (as Robin Wright has said) – which it found this past summer in presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mussavi. But let us start with the first problem.

The phrase “sexual revolution” or enqelab-i-jensi (in Persian) was one that came organically from my interlocutors, and was not one that was placed on them by me or any other academic or journalist. Young people and their parents would talk about a change in the discourse around sexuality and heterosexual and heterosocial relations. This was referred to as their sexual revolution. Thus, when talking about “Iran’s Sexual Revolution” the focus must remain on the phrase ‘sexual revolution’ without detaching the words to ask “is sex revolutionary?” Sex, in itself, is not leading to a revolution. Neither I, nor my interlocutors were trying to claim this, however, a “sexual revolution” refers to a revolution, or perhaps more accurately put, a change, in the way in which we think, act, or talk about sex. To that end, young people and many others in Tehran had achieved their goals in that sex was talked about and thought about in different ways than it had been in the decades before. What is important to note, however, is that this sexual revolution was just one part of a larger movement that my interviewees referred to as a sociocultural revolution or enqelab-i-farhangi. This social movement encompassed behaviors such as pushing the envelope on Islamic dress, sexual behaviors, heterosocializing, driving around in cars playing loud illegal music, partying, drinking, dancing, the list goes on to include basically, young people doing what they aren’t supposed to do under Islamic law. But, many people ask, don’t youth everywhere do these things? What sets youth in Iran apart from their counterparts say in Texas? The answer is this: 1) the stakes are much higher – in Iran, you could get arrested for engaging in these behaviors and the consequences could include long term imprisonment, lashings and other abuse, 2) engaging in these behaviors are often a step for many to becoming politically active. Everything in Iran is political and politicized. The regime in power has politicized Islamic dress, certain types of music, even certain websites. Those violating its rules are harassed, punished, sometimes forced to leave the country. Many young people in Iran have become inspired to engage in political activism through their involvement in these social movements.

This leads us to the second problem, the body looking for the head. During the time I conducted my fieldwork in Iran, a generational shift was taking place. The momentum was building for something, but none of us could quite put our finger on what. Young people seemed to be coming together, deploying 21st century tools around them such as the internet, facebok, Twitter, and seeking to organize through networks around the world. But no one knew exactly what they were organizing for, and what kind of social/political movement they were constructing. What we knew was this: the majority of Iran’s population – urban, educated youth – was disenchanted with the regime. Whether they came to this sentiment through their frustration at not being able to wear what they want, socialize with who they want, prey how they want, or engage in civic society the way they want, they had all come to the conclusion that the current regime was: 1) not representative of them, and 2) was not always acting in their interest. “Why don’t they work on solving this horrible unemployment problem instead of cracking down on what we wear?” asked one of my interlocutors, articulating a sentiment shared by many young Tehranis with whom I spoke. People were frustrated. Educated, restless, youth began turning to the tools they had around them, honing their skills, looking to communicate their sentiments to each other and the world around them through blogs, music, films and a presence in cyberspace. Those of us writing about this large body of Iranian youth focused on different appendages. Some wrote about Iranian bloggers and the blogosphere (Alavi 2005), some looked at music (Levine 2008), some, astutely, tried to look at larger social change amongst the youth (Molavi 2005, Khosravi 2007) For me, I wrote about the sexual revolution, just one part of a larger movement for social and political change.

This past summer, in June of 2009, the body of social change that had been searching for a head finally found one: the fraudulent election of Ahmadinejad, and the figurehead of Mir Hossein Moussavi. Young people (the same ones that spoke of sexual and social revolution a few years ago) began organizing, pouring into the streets in an organized fashion, using their bodies and strategically deploying technology such as camera phones, twitter and facebook to both organize and to speak to the Iranian regime and the rest of the world. Earlier today thousands of protesters marched the streets of Tehran, pumping their fists into the air and chanting “Coup! Government resignation”. Some wore green (to indicate their allegiance to Mir Hossein Moussavi) many did not. Up until now, much of the recent media depictions of the situation in Iran paint a picture of a stolen election, and a discontented public demanding a recount at least, and the installation of their preferred candidate. While the election has presented frustrated Iranians with a catalyst and a reason to protest, what we are witnessing in Iran is not a simple protest over election fraud. Rather, disenchantment with the regime, and the desire to mobilize a civil rights type movement in Iran has been building for many years, encompassing, but not limited to movements such as the sexual revolution, internet revolution and . This election, the overt nature of repression and fraudulent behavior has given many people the window they were looking for to mobilize a movement that goes beyond election politics. While some protesters are in fact expressing frustration at the election fallout, many are asking for an entire overhauling of the system. Would they be happy if Moussavi were installed? Perhaps. But many want more than this, they want to change the system of Islamic jurisprudence, and fundamentally, they want their rights back. While some might see the protests as “calming down” or “dying down”, the reality is that people have tasted the sweetness of voicing their discontent, and they have no plans of backing down easily. We need to listen to the calls made by the chanting protesters, “Coup! Government resignation”.

So, reflecting on the questions “is pretty the new protest?” or “could sex unseat the Mullahs?” some might say no, but a macro look at the situation reveals that this is all part of a process. It is unclear what the future will hold for Iran. What I do know is that these avenues of pushing for social change are roads that lead to networks pushing for political change. I don’t know what the outcome of this post-election aftermath will be, but what I do know is that I need to look more at the big picture, and I need to learn to ask bigger and better questions.

So, when you see this woman with red fingernails, she’s not just risking arrest for holding that sign, she’s risking it for the shade of her nail polish.

It relates to a Juan Cole piece, “Class v. Culture Wars in Iranian Elections” in which he pointed out that “the Iranian women who voted in droves for Khatami haven’t gone anywhere…”

I don’t know enough about class and gender politics in Iran to say much about this. The fact that the women in these pictures often conform to Western notions of glamor, including fair skin, had struck me in the media coverage about the elections, but I hadn’t thought about it beyond that until I read Jezebel and Juan Cole’s posts. What do you think?

UPDATE: Thanks to Gregory Starrett for mentioning Pardis Mahdavi’s new book, Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution. Here is an interview with her:

Local brands of sildenafil available in Egypt, including: Viagra, Virecta, Erec, Kemagra, Vigorama, Vigoran, Phragra, and Vigorex. Photo by Lisa Wynn

First, Americans might think of erectile dysfunction drugs (EDDs) as somewhat shameful (think about mocking attitudes towards Bob Dole’s decision to do Viagra ads), but they have a more positive connotation in Egypt. Two reasons:

1. As I’ve written elsewhere, in Egypt these drugs seem to be associated as much with the promise of exuberant, excessive sexuality rather than a shameful lack of erection. Maybe it would be more accurate to call them erection enhancement drugs rather than erectile dysfunction drugs.
2. Even though both EDDs and ECPs can be equally used in normative and non-normative sexual relationships, EDDs are seen by some as being less morally suspect. As my colleague, Dr Hosam Moustafa pointed out to me in an e-mail exchange,

“When we talk about marriage, which is the only state that makes sexual relations halal [religiously acceptable], we ask: What are the original aims of sexual relations? Answer: pleasure and getting kids. This what all humans have deep in their minds, whatever cultural background they come from. About the two drugs, how do they related with these two aims of sexual relations? Answer: erectile dysfunction drugs are associated with both positive sides of a sexual relation, i.e. both giving pleasure and ensuring having kids. EC and all contraceptives are associated with a negative outcome of sexual relations, i.e. not having kids.”

A pharmacy door in Cairo with ads for Cialis (top) and Viagra (bottom) on the front door. Photo by Hosam Moustafa.

Second: EDDs have a historical association with the black market / gift economy. When Viagra was first introduced and before lots of generic varieties were available, it was hard to get and expensive (it still is the most expensive brand on the market). People smuggled it into the country. It was given as gifts from one man to another. It is even used to grease the wheels of bureaucracy, being offered as a small bribe. Relationships with physicians are cultivated in order to access drugs that are hard to get. Even though sildenafil is now widely available in a range of prices, other drugs said to produce the same effect (Cialis and Tramadol are two such examples) still circulate semi-illicitly, in the category of a commodity that is thought to require both connections and expertise to obtain, and this is part of their appeal: they’re more than just commodities, they have a special aura.

So in asking why don’t ECPs have the same aura and circulate amongst women in the same way, maybe it’s partly because they’ve never been part of the black market. Packs of contraceptive pills, the kind you could cut up to equal a dose of emergency contraception, are government subsidized, widely available, and really cheap.

This sign at a Cairo restaurant stall advertises “Viagra soup.” The starred text on the bottom left reads, “For adults only.” Photo by Hosam Moustafa.

Finally: there are key continuities between modern pharmaceutical products for erectile dysfunction drugs and more “traditional” treatments, so the appeal of drugs like Viagra and Cialis is partly that they tie in with pre-existing ideas about how you can ingest certain substance to increase your virility. I’ve already written about Viagra sandwiches, and there’s also Viagra soup, dates, and who knows what else? This takes the notoriety of a global pharmaceutical product and maps it out over pre-existing notions about the virility-enhancing power of seafood. Using drug brand names to label food is not just a phenomenon in popular (shabi, as they say in Egypt) restaurants, either; a famous restaurant in an expensive mall in Alexandria offers the same soup (but wouldn't let us photograph their menu!).It's not just seafood that has this reputation. In the picture below is a wall of oils at a local apothecary, or <em>attar, which includes gargeer seeds or oil (that’s arugula to North Americans, rocket to Australians), about which there is a popular saying, “If women knew what gargeer could do for their men, they would grow it under the bed” (rhyming gargeer, arugula, with sareer, bed).

Salad = virility! It’s not exactly the American imagination of how food is gendered.

(Above) Apothecary wall with herbs, spices, and oils, including, on top, gargeer (rocket/arugula) oil. Photo by Hosam Moustafa.

Also I can’t resist including a picture of Cow Jam from the same pharmacy. A kind of vitamin supplement, the product contains neither cows nor jam. Photo by Hosam Moustafa.

But I put “traditional” in problematizing quotations above because it’s not like there’s a clear line between “traditional” remedies for erectile dysfunction and modern pharmaceutical products. Below is a picture of several products that Dr Moustafa and I bought in Cairo apothecaries. It’s not just oils and herbs. There are mysterious packaged products imported from all over the place, as well as local, “traditional” products. In the latter category, in the bottom right hand corner you can see shards of a resin — sold by the gram and very expensive — that is dissolved in hot water and then applied to the penis. It has a strong numbing effect and is supposed to make it possible for a man to perform longer.

Apothecary products purchased in Cairo. Photo: Lisa Wynn.

In the former category, notice on the right the package of Lina Sex, a gum which is supposed to increase the female libido, and which claims to be manufactured by “Astra zencesa group pharmaceuticals.” (As Dr Hosam Moustafa explains it, “All these drugs for women are used to treat decreased libido of women. It’s a main complaint here from most men that their women have decreased libido which I can explain as a kind ofself defense from men — I mean trying to say ‘the problem is not only me, my wife also has troubles’.”) The boxes with a crocodile and rhinoceros on them are made by the same local Egyptian company.

The delightfully mysterious “Flower Jel” claims to be “Made in U.S.A.” and reads on the back of the package,

“For the Past Si years, Ben Huczek Has Suffered From impotered and, despitence and, despoint the cause fortuntcly, Ben of the First Britis men to take FLOWER JEL after being referred to aconsultant urolgist who w conducting clinical conducting clinical Trials of the sex pill.”

Somewhat less delightfully mysterious is “Germany Black widows Powder Fever (Ms. special Super Night)”, which seems to be marketing itself as a date rape drug, because it says on the side of the box:

“Powdery white, tasteless, can quickly dissolve in various beverages without being found, after a few minutes after drinking, quick wins, after taking Chunxindangyang, fast exciting, noodles dinner, shortness of breath, hot air, eager to head shot, body heat, impatient with the rest of your love, this time of women, warm and flowing.”

Germany Black widows Powder Fever. Photo by Lisa Wynn

Incidentally, despite the claims on the side of the box, the contents are a clump of brown sludge with a powerful odor (and hence, I presume, taste, but I haven’t tried it).

The point is that when you go to apothecaries to find “traditional” remedies, what you find is a range of products that circulate transnationally (lots have Chinese characters on them but claim to be manufactured in Germany, Japan, or the US because of the prestige associated with products from these countries), that make reference to international pharmaceutical companies and clinical trials and German pornography, and that borrow on globally circulating (and ancient) notions of what constitutes an aphrodisiac (such as the Egyptian product with the rhinoceros picture on the box, even though rhinoceroses disappeared from Egypt during the Pharaonic era). Even local remedies and herbal formulations are now taught in the Khedr El-Attar apothecary training school, mimicking modern university education formats.

— L.L. Wynn and Hosam Moustafa

These days it’s not that hard to do websites in Arabic, but six years ago, it was a real puzzle. I couldn’t find any Arabic language plug-ins for DreamWeaver or FrontPage, so as I cut and pasted the Arabic text into the HTML programs, it wouldn’t display the Arabic properly, so it was really hard to do the links on specific words. The Arabic phrase for emergency contraception, which looks like this in Arabic:

منع الحمل الطارئ

looks like this in HTML code:

منع الحمل الطارئ

So I just had to muck around, highlighting different phrases, counting off letters or doing searches for strings of HTML code like that above, putting in links and then seeing where the links showed up in the Arabic texts, and then shifting the links around accordingly. It was a stupidly slow process. There was probably a better way to do it, but I wasn’t able to figure it out, so I slogged through the slow way.

Translation vs adaptation
I’m getting off the topic. Angel had decided that we couldn’t simply translate the existing website into Arabic. It had to be adapted to fit the social and cultural context of the Arabic speaking world and meet users’ needs. So, for example, she decided to include specific questions in the FAQs section on the interpretation and acceptability of EC in Orthodox Christianity and in Islamic jurisprudence. We hunted around for any fatwas on EC, both in published compendia of fatawa as well as in online databases, but we couldn’t find any. In fact, in the past 5 years, I have only found 1 fatwa on EC in an one of the many online fatwa databases.

That’s where interest in this Egypt research project came from. What did it mean that there were no fatwas on EC? Either it meant that EC wasn’t on anyone’s radar screen and was so totally unknown that nobody was asking about its status in Islam – hard to believe since there were dedicated products available in several Middle Eastern countries (including Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon) – OR it meant that EC was just wholly uncontroversial and subsumed under jurisprudential discussions about pre-coital hormonal contraceptives.

Well I thought that was a really interesting possibility, considering how in the U.S., as I previously described, EC’s status as a contraceptive vs. abortifacient has been contested, and debate often hinges on the mechanism of action.

Angel and I developed a working hypothesis, which we published in a little paper for Harvard Health Policy Review along with colleagues James Trussell and Aida Rouhana: that debate over EC in the Arab world was likely to hinge around the social and moral contexts of the sex that precedes EC use, rather than focusing on mechanism of action. We hypothesized this partly based on existing debates in Islamic jurisprudence about contraception, but also based on interpretations of abortion in Islamic law, where the acceptability of abortion is partly considered in light of when life begins. (Also considered is the relative value of the mother’s life versus the life of a fetus: in contrast to some extreme Christian interpretations, in Islamic law the woman’s life is always considered more valuable than the fetus’s life, because the woman is already embedded within existing kinship networks of sociality and obligation, whereas the fetus is not.)

In most of the interpretations of the four Sunni schools of Islamic jurisprudence, ensoulment, the joining of the soul with the developing fetus, is not believed to occur right at the moment of fertilization or implantation. Some jurists think ensoulment occurs at 40 days, while others opine that it does not occur until 4 months, the time when the pregnant woman can usually start to feel the movements on the fetus inside her. This, we speculated, would predict a lack of debate about EC’s mechanism of action in the Muslim world.

By the way, I’ve repeatedly submitted questions to several online fatwa websites, requesting a fatwa on EC. Nobody has ever responded! Next year we plan to submit a request directly to Dar al-Ifta in Egypt (the main body for issuing fatawa in Egypt) to get a formal ruling. But my colleague, Dr Hosam Moustafa, has carefully searched the Dar al-Ifta archives and not found a single existing ruling.

Egyptian archetypes of EC users
I’ve described the archetypes of EC users that appeared in US debates. What archetypes are there in Egypt? First, I should note that there really hasn’t been much public debate about the topic. A dedicated product is available in Egypt and since most non-narcotic pharmaceutical products are, in practice, available from pharmacists without prescription, there was no situation where Egyptians publicly debated the appropriateness of EC being available without the mediation of a physician, as there was in the U.S. and many other countries.

Nevertheless, there seems to be a widespread assumption that emergency contraception will be used by women who are engaging in illicit, premarital sex. In short, EC has “the reputation of being used by teenagers and prostitutes,” as one informant put it. Why? As the same informant said,

“Pregnancy? Is this emergency? It is just a normal result. When will it be an emergency? When it is really negative with the sexual relation. This happens only when the sexual relation is not an accepted one, I mean haram [i.e. forbidden, illicit].”

The assumption is also that people who are having sex within a proper marital relationship will be able to plan their contraceptive use properly, so there won’t be accidents and emergencies – and if they accidentally get pregnant, well then that’s a gift from God, not a disaster.

The advertising used to promote Contraplan II (the dedicated brand of EC available in Egypt) works hard to dispel this association between EC use and illicit sex. The promotional materials published in major Egyptian newspapers in the last year suggests a list of likely EC users:

• People who are regularly using contraceptives but they missed a dose, a condom tore, or they had a problem with their IUD;
• People who had sexual intercourse without protection and the husband and wife don’t currently want to get pregnant;
• The husband suddenly returns from travel or from work abroad and there was no time to get started on a regular contraceptive method before they had sex; and finally,
• In case of rape.

The language makes it clear that most users will be married couples, with the rare exception of sexual assault.

But the marketing strategy of the company belies this portrait of the respectable married EC user. The radio ads promoting the product aired on Nogoom FM (“Stars FM”), a radio station that is directed towards teens and young adults – who are not likely to be married. The strategy seems to be to publicly put a respectable face on EC use, but to simultaneously make sure that info circulates amongst the community where need for EC is most acute: unmarried people who have sex.

OK that’s enough info on EC in Egypt. Next up, Viagra soup – but I’ll come back to EC in a later post when I write about our methods and the different kinds of info that a team of a female American anthropologist and a male Egyptian small-town physician are able to get…

References:

Foster A, Wynn L, Rouhana A, Polis C, Trussell J. Disseminating on-line reproductive health information in Arabic: Results from a survey of users of an emergency contraception website. CyberOrient: Online journal of the virtual Middle East. April 2006

Wynn L, Foster A, Rouhana A, Trussell J. The politics of emergency contraception in the Arab world: Reflections on Western assumptions and the potential influence of religious and social factors. Harvard Health Policy Review. Spring 2005; 6(1):38-47.

Foster A, Wynn L, Rouhana A, Polis C, Trussell J. Reproductive health, the Arab world and the internet: usage patterns of an Arabic-language emergency contraception website. Contraception. Spring 2005; 72;130-137.

Some interesting paradoxes to contemplate:

• Why are there at least a dozen local brands of sildenafil available from Egyptian pharmacies, and “Viagra sandwiches” or “Viagra soup” is on the menu at almost every restaurant that specializes in seafood, but there is only one brand of emergency contraceptive pill in Egypt, which is sold by an NGO because it’s not considered commercially viable enough for the mainstream pharmaceutical companies to bother with it?

The tap in the bathroom of the apartment where I stay when I’m doing research in Egypt. My roommate and I have often wondered where these came from. Was it a marketing campaign by Pfizer during the era when they weren’t allowed to engage in direct-to-consumer advertising for their product? Or did some sink manufacturer just think it would be cool to put Viagra on the handles?

• A number of studies show that induced abortion (as opposed to “spontaneous abortion” aka miscarriages) is quite common in Egypt; one carefully designed study showed that there are probably as many per capita abortions in Egypt (where abortion is prohibited unless two doctors certify that it’s necessary to protect the health of the mother) as there are abortions in the United States (where it is constitutionally protected but often restricted). Misoprostol, a medication used to treat ulcers, can be used very effectively to induce early abortion, and it’s readily available without prescription from pharmacies in Egypt. Yet preliminary research suggests that its abortifacient properties are virtually unknown to Egyptians. It’s super cheap, and a lot safer than illegal surgical abortions. Women could induce abortions themselves for a few dollars, but instead they risk their future fertility, their health and their lives having unsafe abortions, or they pay huge sums of money to have illegal surgical abortions performed by qualified doctors outside of regular office hours. Why?
  .
• A recent fatwa (a ruling of Islamic jurisprudence) by a leading Egyptian jurist holds that, under certain circumstances, it’s OK for a woman to have surgery to repair her hymen before getting married, to hide the evidence of premarital sex. This fatwa is somewhat controversial, but the person who pronounced the fatwa is no rogue; he’s a highly respected cleric. So if one Islamic authority says it’s OK, why is hymenoplasty not taught in Egyptian medical schools, and why do physicians get nervous or angry when you ask them about it?

I think these are really interesting questions. I’m especially interested in the links between religion and medicine: Like how does the interpretation of a technology by Islamic jurists influence whether something appears on the medical curricula? And when experts in Islamic jurisprudence are asked to provide a ruling on a new technology that they know nothing about, how do they educate themselves about that technology in order to be able to make a ruling about its permissibility in Islam? Who do they go to for answers? Do they go online (like I do)? Do they consult local doctors? International experts?

Beyond the scope of expertise, it’s important to consider what people actually do, sexually and contraceptively, and what extent they are influenced by expert opinion. What about people whose sexual and reproductive lives defy religious codes and cultural norms? What about Christian Egyptians? How do they use these technologies, and do they care about formal religious opinions about these technologies? What about unmarried women who are sexually active? What do they think about expert opinion, how do they navigate fatawa (plural of fatwa) and medical bureaucracies to prevent a pregnancy, or terminate one, or hide evidence that they aren’t virgins when they marry? Things like emergency contraception, medical abortion, and hymenoplasty are technologies that can be used to disguise evidence of non-normative sexuality, and the stakes are particularly high for women, as it is primarily women who bear the consequences of extramarital sex in Egypt – as elsewhere in the world.

But I’m still struggling with the why of this research. Why is this important to study? I was at a dinner party a few months ago with some physicists and I was talking to Professor Ewa Goldys who asked me about my research. Ewa is a big grant-getter in the Physics Department at Macquarie. She listened politely while I talked all about these titillating topics – sex and drugs and abortion and fatwas – and then she said, “But why does this matter? Why is the research important?” I was like, “Because it’s interesting. Duh!”

Unfortunately I have to provide a better answer than “it’s interesting” to get a grant for this research (right now I have a small grant from my university but I’m angling for a big national research grant). So I’ve been thinking about how to frame this as Really Important Research. Maybe someone can help me? Obviously there’s a public health case to be made about women’s health, fertility, and morbidity. And yes, the subject matter is inherently interesting, because it’s fundamentally a story about sex, science, and religion.

But what’s theoretically interesting about this? Yes, religion and medicine mutually influence each other, but that’s hardly a cutting edge insight for medical anthropology. I can say that the project hasn’t been much done before. There’s no work on EC in Egypt, very little written about erectile dysfunction drugs, and not much on hymenoplasty. There have been some fantastic anthropological studies of reproductive health technologies (RHTs) surrounding normative sexualities in Egypt, like Marcia Inhorn’s work on IVF for married couples, but very little work on RHTs that are popularly associated with non-normative sexualities, i.e. for people having extramarital sex. But just saying that “I’m writing about something new” doesn’t get you grant funding.

This is an ongoing project, so any suggestions or criticism are most welcome. You don’t have to know much at all about Islamic jurisprudence or reproductive health medicine to have anything interesting to say about the topic, because the technologies I’m researching are all over the news in the U.S. and elsewhere, and I’m particularly interested in comparative perspectives. Is anyone out there looking at these technologies in other parts of the world?

Next post my Egyptian colleague Dr Hosam Moustafa will join me and we’ll write more about emergency contraception, aka the “morning after pill,” in Egypt. Then we’ll cover erectile dysfunction drugs, medication abortion, and hymen reconstruction surgery. Stay tuned…

I think this is a shame, because the book really could be an authoritative one, and I don’t really understand why everyone (including Abu El Haj herself) just sort of wilts and defends, not the book, but the right for academics to decide tenure amongst themselves (which I completely agree with, of course, I have to). But this instead of coming out with a forceful statement of the content and substance of the book? I think there must be something interesting to say about the inability anthropology has of defending itself against the contemporary blog-mediated, 72-hour news cycle, personal-attack media ecology we live in. Note the total absence of the AAA in this article, save a mention of our president-elect, Virginia Dominguez, who was Abu El-Haj’s advisor. Why shouldn’t the AAA step in and fight this fight on behalf of Abu El-Haj? Is there as choice other than responding to idiotic, personlized, ideological attacks and sticking one’s head in the sand? Clearly institutions like Columbia are too economically and politically captured to do it for their faculty, should our professional society be helping?

link…