Tag Archives: North America

Time’s “What Happens…” Cover

The July 29, 2010, cover of Time Magazine features a portrait of a young woman from Afghanistan, her dark eyes arresting the reader and where her nose would be there is only a terrifying scar encircling a single, fleshy hole. The headline is “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan” and the subheading reads, “Aisha, 18, had her nose and ears cut off last year on orders from the Taliban because she fled abusive in-laws.”

Even without the headline it is a deliberately provocative photograph and one that will surely sell a lot of magazines. Contextualized by its headline the cover is pure propaganda. It makes plain the strange ideology of America’s foreign wars: We are at war with (fill in the blank) for their own good. What happens if we leave Afghanistan? Women will have their noses cut off, willy-nilly. You don’t want that do you? Presumably if we leave Afghanistan then Afghani civilians will no longer be accidently killed or mutilated by drone attacks either… those survivors didn’t get a Time-Life photographer though.

Both are acts of violence, Aisha’s disfigurement at the hands of the Taliban and civilizan casualties at the hands of the American military. But the former graces the cover of a major, mainstream media publication because it resonates powerfully with American traditions of belief about “other” people. The Taliban are barbarians and their violent behavior is symptomatic of their temporal displacement, they are literally living in the past rebelling against modernity. And so it is the duty of Civilization to intervene and save them from themselves by making them more like us. By force if necessary.

In conference papers I have argued that the genesis of this ideology is to be found in the formative conflict of the American nation, the Eastern and Western Indian Wars. Throughout the nineteenth century in political, academic, and journalistic circles American violence against Indians was seldom justified in crude materialist concerns like the acquisition of land. Instead experts created a panopoly of deficiencies inherent in the tribes’ supposed savagery that needed only to be replaced by the Protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism for them all to become productive members of society. “Kill the Indian and save the man,” was one such rallying cry that Americans should keep the “promise” made to all Indians — to save their souls, teach them English, and make them modern. To make them into versions of us.

Two forms of violence, one is disturbing and senseless, the other distressing but necessary. Two forms of violence, the former justifying the later. What are the means by which American people distinguish between the two? What accounts for the absence of Afghani civilian casualties on the cover of Time? For anthropologist Gabriele Marranci the legitimization of Civilization’s violence can be understood through culture, especially Christian eschatology.

In the West, anthropologically, suffering from acts of war or terrorism (terms which, in today’s Afghanistan, are often used to include national resistance, secular insurgency and territorial disputes) seems to be classified into two distinct categories. On the one hand, the western-induced suffering is perceived as ‘ethnical’ and ‘lawful’, superior and enlightened, an act of ‘love’, a bitter medicine for the salvation of the ‘ignorant’ (understood as ‘not knowing’), the ‘sinner’ through the redemption of blood, and as death with a view to societal resurrection and rebirth. On the other hand, however, there is a perception of a need for punishment of the barbaric actions of the ignorant, of the infliction of evil for the evil committed by people who are somehow disgusting for rejecting the ‘Truth’.

That is, violence and suffering are not condemned for the effect they have on human beings, but are condemned and rejected only if they are not the ‘right’ violence, ‘salvific’ in nature and ‘just’ in cause – in other words, a transubstantiational violence. Hence, destruction and suffering, in this case, is a part of redemption, while the Taliban’s violence is merely destructive.

In this light the old theoretical tools of anthropology — myth, ritual, sacrifice, the gift — all seem fresh and relevant again in the context of international violence and geopolitics. Baudrillard’s hyperreality could be useful too as the circulation of signifiers, let loose from their signifieds, flows permiscuously from Central Asia through the great nodes of global capitalism and on into the blogosphere.

So readers, what is your interpretation of the Time Magazine cover? I’m not asking about the content of the article, but the image and it’s headline. Does it suggest to you a realism that offers a way of understanding living Afghani people? Does it offer any insight into the nearly decade long war that has cost so much in American life and treasure? Or does it, as I argue, stand as evidence of an American epistemology of the Other, showing how Americans arrange what it is that they think they know about the people of the world?

“Please Eat the Gulf” by David Beriss, guest blogger

Please Eat the Gulf

David Beriss

I have never been an especially observant Jew, but when we moved to New Orleans in 1997, we joined a local synagogue.  I was told by a wise Jewish native that good New Orleans Jews observe the Yom Kippur fast and then break the fast with oysters, shrimp or crabs.  Except for the fasting part, I have since subscribed to this rule.  In fact, whenever I have wondered why I am still here, I remind myself that I am unlikely to find such an abundance of affordable seafood anywhere else I might want to live.  I am willing to put up with a great deal when raw oysters can be had for $3/dozen and a pound of fresh shrimp from the Gulf goes for $4 or $5.  I may not be a very observant Jew, but I am having a great time being an observant New Orleanian.

Or I was.  When the BP Gulf oil spew started in April, we all began to worry.  As the oil spread, more and more of the Gulf coast was closed to oyster harvesting and fishing.  Prices at local restaurants rose and some even stopped selling local seafood.  Efforts to stop the flow of oil kept failing and BP, parish, state and federal officials seemed uncertain of the best ways to prevent the spread of destruction.  Scientists suggested that the dispersants being used to prevent the oil from reaching land might be even more dangerous to the environment—and to people working on the cleanup—than the oil itself.  Much of the local seafood economy, from commercial and sport fishing to processors and distributors, ground to a halt.  When P and J Oyster Company, a New Orleans oyster supplier since 1876, announced it would cease shucking operations and lay off workers in early June, it was hard not to think that an era was ending.  Every time I bought shrimp at our local fish market or enjoyed soft shell crabs at a restaurant, I felt lucky.  What would we do without it?

Seafood is a key part of the local cuisine in New Orleans.  It has also been affordable and abundant here, so that crab, oyster, shrimp and fish remain available to people across class lines.  Seafood markets can be found in most neighborhoods and they often accept food stamps.  People know what to do with seafood too.  One of the best ways to start a conversation in New Orleans is to mention that you have some speckled trout or a few pounds of shrimp and you want some ideas about how to prepare them.  The answers you get will be better than anything you can find on epicurious.com.

One of the key complaints of food activists in the U.S. has been that Americans are alienated from the sources of their food.  The burger meat you pick up at the grocery store is hard to trace back to a cow—if, indeed, it actually came from just one cow.  Something like 80% of the seafood you get at your local store is imported.  Much of it is raised or harvested in ways that are not sustainable.  Some of it may not be good for you to eat.

In New Orleans, we generally know where our seafood is from.  Restaurants make a point of serving local seafood.  We can get our shrimp directly from the shrimpers, selling from an ice chest in the back of a pickup at the side of the road.  Or we have a relationship with the folks at the local market and we trust them to know where the seafood comes from.  Often, fish become part of the kinds of informal exchanges that build relationships.  A few days after we first moved to New Orleans, our neighbors showed up at our door with a gift of black drum they had caught.  Since then, we have often benefitted from the fishing success of friends.  From crawfish boils to holiday dressings and gumbos, seafood is not just about food.  We build relationships with seafood.

We have also tried to grow the seafood industry by making it a desirable brand.  Competition from cheap imports has made it increasingly difficult for Louisiana shrimpers, fishers and oyster growers to make a living.  The political environment and fear of pollution and disease—especially the risks associated with raw oysters—have created additional difficulties.  In 2009, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration proposed severely limiting the months when unprocessed oysters from the Gulf could be sold, claiming that oysters posed too much of a health risk to be consumed during warm months (from April to October, in their proposal) even though very few people ever get ill from eating oysters.  Local oystermen suspected lobbyists from West Coast producers were behind this effort, since Louisiana supplies about 40% of all the oysters consumed in the U.S. and West Coast oysters are far more expensive.  Effective lobbying by the state’s congressional delegation succeeded in stopping the FDA’s rule.  One strategy has been to promote the idea that Louisiana seafood is distinctive, a product of terroir, much like a fine wine or an artisanal cheese.  This has been pursued by the White Boot Brigade and by local Slow Food activists, who have taken Louisiana shrimp to New York and Chicago and persuaded famous chefs to put it on their menus.  The BP oil spew makes it much more difficult to suggest that the products of our terroir are especially desirable.

And oil complicates things in other ways.  The economy of south Louisiana is deeply tied to the oil industry.  Offshore oil drilling got its start in Louisiana.  In a state with a poor education system, the industry has paid high wages and provided training and education for workers.  It has contributed enormously to the state’s coffers.  We all know people who work in the oil industry as well.  In fact, many people work in both, sometimes trawling for shrimp, while at other times working on offshore rigs or in a wide range of other capacities.  Our world famous annual Jazz and Heritage Festival is officially “presented by Shell” on all of its advertising.  Morgan City, a town on the Gulf coast, has hosted the annual Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival for 75 years.  At the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas in downtown New Orleans, one of the main exhibits is the enormous Gulf of Mexico tank, containing a scale version of an offshore oil rig and dozens of the species that thrive on the artificial reefs created by the rigs.

This puts us in a terrible bind.  The federal moratorium on deep water exploration in the Gulf has been the object of much protest here precisely because it puts thousands of jobs at risk.  Some of those are the very jobs that people might seek when they can no longer make a living in the seafood industry.  In addition, we all know—or we should know—that the oil industry has played a key role in the destruction of the Louisiana coast over the last several decades.  We lose roughly a football field of wetlands to coastal erosion every 30 minutes in Louisiana.  Much of that is a consequence of dredging for thousands of miles of canals and pipelines to service the oil industry since the 1940s.  The long-term threat of coastal erosion is much more significant than the BP oil spew.  There are other environmental threats too, like the massive dead zone created by farm runoff where the Mississippi river flows into the Gulf of Mexico.

Last Thursday, I attended a Gulf seafood “eat in” at the Crescent City Farmer’s Market.  Several local chefs made dishes with local seafood.  Food scientist and advocate Gary Nabhan distributed copies of a pamphlet detailing some of the foods and foodways that are at risk in the Gulf.  The pamphlet contains articles by food activists, fishers, food writers, chefs and others from the region and provides a pointed illustration of some of the ways seafood is tied to the culture and economy of this region.  It shows that the BP spew is only the latest episode in a series of ongoing ecological and economic disasters that threaten one of the last successful American fisheries and one of the great food cultures of the world.  Erosion and wetland loss diminish our ability to survive hurricanes, destroy our fisheries and threaten to destroy communities throughout the region.  At the same time, cheap seafood imports are undermining an industry that supports thousands of people and a culture in which seafood plays a central role.  Ecological activists in New Orleans have been working since well before the spew started to promote restoration of the wetlands.  Food activists have struggled to find ways for the seafood of America’s “third coast” to be recognized as a great national resource.  One of the latest initiatives is have New Orleans declared a “UNESCO City of Gastronomy,” in an effort to earn international recognition for the region’s culinary heritage.  The region needs this to be a wake-up call for the rest of the United States.

On Friday, BP finally shut off the well.  As I write this, the oil seems to have stopped flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, although it is uncertain if this is permanent.  Maybe the fisheries will recover over the next few years.  Maybe the damage is not quite as extensive as we feared—the state reopened some areas to sport fishing over the weekend.  Should we be optimistic about the future or has the oil put a permanent stain on our seafood and culture?  People in south Louisiana are resilient, but this is a culture and an economy that often seems to be on the verge of collapse.   But one thing we ask of you: keep eating seafood from the Gulf of Mexico.  If it is in your stores, it is safe to eat.  As local chef and radio personality Poppy Tooker often reminds us, we have to “eat it to save it.”  We hope you will.

Bible/Darwin: Here Comes The Hair Dryers

According to Fox News, a group of atheists are performing de-baptizing rituals with hair dryers (thanks for the link Tad). This is one of these moments where as an anthropologist you feel a certain smug self-congratulation that human beings are in fact just as culturally creative as you keep on telling people they are. But it also speaks to deeper issues in the so-called atheism/religion debate that flares up periodically in America and England and is increasingly diffusing all over the place.

Just mentioning people likeRichard Dawkins is likely to draw tons of aggro to this blog, so I will keep it short: most commenters on the cage match between the rabid evolutionist-cum-atheists and the rabid evangelical christians-cum-creationists imagine this conflict to involve two separate groups. The genius of the hair-dryer ritual is that it demonstrates so clearly that what we actually have here is a case of what Simon Harrison calls ‘mimetic conflict’ — two groups competing to occupy a single identity. The opposition is not one of Christian versus non-Christian, but rather a conflict between two different permutations of protestant culture.

Consider: one side believes it possesses an infallible book written by an omnipotent author with a huge beard with completely explains the dynamics all living things on earth. The other side believes in the literal truth of the bible. One side believes it will go to heaven, the other advocates a space program to achieve “Mars in our time” as a mission to direct and shape human aspiration. Atheist parodic appropriation of Christian identity even comes with (according to the article) a ritual officiant who “doned a monk’s robe and said a few mock-Latin phrases” before the drying began — and of course there is nothing more protestant than damning your opponent for their popery.

This de-baptism makes clear in a single ritual what is at the heart of much of this debate: that within American culture, science and religion are two different things but two versions of the same thing, both of which rely in shared, rather intellectualist understandings of human nature and the role of the bible/Darwin: humans attempt to ‘find meaning in the universe’, explain natural phenomenon, and live regenerated lives free of the corrupting influence of earlier, false doctrine. These are notions that are, in general, not shared by members of other religions.

Partially is a way of saying that the anthropological notion of culture often cuts across what other people’s ‘ethnocultural’ notions — we see a single system made of oppositions where others see two discrete ‘cultures’ or groups. But mainly this is just a way to give props to atheists for such a well-designed ritual. I’m not particularly big on running other people’s beliefs down, but setting aside the mean-heartedness that comes across in the interview with the atheists, I have to say as a piece of cultural practice the ritual is superbly imagined.

Illustrated Man, #1 — American Splendor

In this occasional series, Illustrated Man, I will explore the intersection of anthropology and comic books, graphic novels, comic strips, animation, and other manner of popular drawn art.

…

“It’s words and pictures and you can do anything you want with words and pictures.” -Harvey Pekar

American Splendor is not a typical comic book. Over the course of almost 40 years it aspired only to chronicle the life of its author, Harvey Pekar, a file clerk in a Cleveland VA hospital. In small detail with intimate vignettes, anecdotes, and observations Pekar renders stories that have very little action, some are comprised almost entirely of talking or an internal monologue. Originally published and distributed independently by the author before success delivered him to major publishers late in life, American Splendor was one of the first true underground comics and it nurtured a devout cult following that in 2003 culminated in a major motion picture by the same name starring Paul Giamatti. Harvey Pekar died this past Monday, July 12, at the age of 70.

Coinciding with the movie release, Ballantine Books released an anthology of Pekar’s stories that serves as fine introduction to his work of the late 1970s and early 1980s. I would make the case that American Splendor realizes the greatest potential of postmodern navel-gazing autoethnography.

Here’s Paul Giamatti as Pekar.

I feel an affection for American Splendor because at times I write this way too, but mostly I don’t care to read what other anthropologists have written in this mode, the exception being Robert Leonard’s peerless, Yellow Cab. But American Splendor is compulsively readable and rereadable. In fact it might find a more appreciative audience in non-comic book fans.

More than anything American Splendor is marked by its depiction of mundane subject matter. In perhaps my favorite short of the book Pekar wakes up next to his girlfriend. He brushes his teeth and eats breakfast. He walks to the grocery store to do some shopping and on the way home runs into a friend. They talk and then he’s on his way. He sees the mailman and collects a package. He comes home and talks to his girlfriend, obsessing over his lackluster efforts to establish himself as a published jazz critic. When she discovers he forgot to buy coffee they have a fight and he leaves to buy the coffee.

That’s it. The end. Once upon a time there was this guy and some things happened. Here they are.

American Splendor is a record of a life lived. Arguably it embodies many of the same qualities that the late novelist and poet Roberto Bolano called “infrarealism,” a term the Guardian, in its obituary of Bolano, pigeonholed through his novel The Savage Detectives, “a challenging mixture of thriller, philosophical and literary reflections, pastiche and autobiography.” This definition works well for American Splendor too, save the bit about being a thriller. Unless you’re riveted by the spectacle of talking on the phone, taking a bath, just lying in bed, talking about sports, checking the mailbox, or walking around the streets of Cleveland thinking.

In some of these stories we are like guests in Pekar’s head. For example one is nothing more than him taking a walk, coming home and reading, then writing, then reading some more and talking to himself. This aspect of his existence is not unlike mine, living a life of the mind and looking to the printed word for comfort and wisdom. Pekar writes a lot about writing. We follow his trials as he fights to publish and distribute his comic book independently, takes promising phone calls that lead nowhere, sees his career as a jazz critic and political essayist stall, gets jerked around by the Village Voice, and meets celebrities. Anyone struggling to get published and establish themselves in the field will find something familiar here.

At most Pekar’s plots do not advance beyond swiping his neighbor’s newspaper, shooting the shit with co-workers on break, helping friends move, and serving jury duty. Like anthropologies that claim a history of the present American Splendor preserves for future generations what it was like to be lonely man working a dead-end job in a mid-western city in the late twentieth century. Even Pekar’s meager diet of rice, Corn Flakes, peanut butter, and Pepsi manages to make its way to illustration.

While most of American Splendor is taken up with Pekar telling the story of himself, he occasionally veers into oral history to tell other people’s stories. Pekar is an American Jew and he seeks out the company of older, European immigrant Jews. Borrowing their voices he regales us with tales of unionized workers getting beat on the picket line, Jewish street hustlers, and concentration camp survivors. Pekar also relates to his Black co-workers and finds it important to tell us about their musical tastes, folk wisdom, and opinions on pickled okra.

It must be said that a great deal of what makes the series so strong is the way that Pekar’s introspection is reflected creatively by his artists. One vignette features a full page spread of Pekar walking on top of another image of him just standing around, below his feet are studies of his profile, all layered on top of an oversized image of his forehead, eyes looking down. Lettering fills every available space as he thinks to himself and reflects. The reader’s eyes are drawn down the page in this cascade, but there is no action. Cleveland is a star in these stories as well. The reader is treated to realistic illustration that mirrors Pekar’s own realism through detailed renderings of industrial buildings, trains, streets, storefronts, and cars. Traffic lights, wires, and poles. Even the cracks in sidewalks.

For anthropologies that seeks to tell it like it is, to represent people’s lives in a way that they can recognize, American Splendor stands as a subtly complicated role model.

…

What follows are some of Harvey Pekar’s infamous David Letterman appearances (you may need headphones to hear these, folks have ripped these from their VHS collections and the audio can be weak):

Whiteness as Ethnicity in Arizona’s New Racial Order

Along with other recent wackiness, Arizona’s state legislature passed a law, HB 2281, which aims to prevent or limit the teaching of ethnic studies.

HB 2281:

Prohibits a school district or charter school from including in its program of instruction any courses or classes that:

  • Promote the overthrow of the United States government.
  • Promote resentment toward a race or class of people.
  • Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.
  • Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.

This is not a new development — I first wrote about this on Savage Minds almost a year ago, although I figured it was the kind of right-wing looniness that makes great theater but never gets through the legislative process. Continue reading →

Ethnic Studies Under Attack in Arizona High Schools

November 21: Mayflower.

Image via Wikipedia

Legislation that will end ethnic studies programs in Arizona high schools looks set to be signed into law by the state’s governor. Promoted by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Horne, the law will deprive public schools that do not eliminate ethnic studies courses of 10% of their state funding.

The target of the bill appears to be Tucson Unified School District, whose Raza Studies program serves some 1,200 Latino students. Interestingly, students involved in this program show a marked improvement over the state average on the state’s standardized testing (which goes well with other evidence that students involved in bilingual education, as well as students given access to electives like art, photography, and creative writing perform better on standardized tests – they tend to be more focused on and more engaged with school overall than students who are deprived of these “optional” courses). Continue reading →

Human Terrain in Oaxaca

Con Oaxaca, por Brad Will

Image by Libertinus via Flickr

For the past several years, my research has led me further and further into the world of counterinsurgency, military anthropology, human terrain, and other aspects of a military regime of knowledge. What concerns me, most of all, is the way that knowledge generated by social scientists can be used (and, if the past is any indication, will be used) to the disadvantage of the people on, from, and with whom anthropologists and other social scientists generate that knowledge.

This issue is hardly limited to anthropologists, though we have traditionally held a kind of loose monopoly on the world’s most vulnerable peoples. Nowadays, social scientists of every stripe traipse through the same terrain anthropologists once considered their own – and we, of course, have no problem returning the favor.

So when a friend forwarded me a story about geographers in Oaxaca mapping the “cultural terrain”, my disciplinary ears perked up. At issue are many of the same issues at play in debates over anthropologists’ and others’ involvement with HTS in Iraq and Afghanistan, although in many ways I find the situation I’m about to describe more frightening still, as it presages wars or conflicts as yet unfought – even counterinsurgencies to insurgencies yet to surge. Continue reading →

Resource in US History and Culture: The Government Comics Collection

Screenshot from "Duck and Cover" fil...

Image via Wikipedia

The library at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln has posted a collection of digitized government comics and related material. There are about 180 freely-downloadable PDFs available, on topics ranging from health and human services to military training and recruitment.

Among my favorite is a 1951 AIr Force publication explaining psychological warfare entitled “Bullets? Or Words?” and illustrated by Milton Caniff, a comic-strip artist who gave us the syndicated comic strips “Terry and the Pirates” and “Steve Canyon”.

In fashioning new psychological weapons, it is necessary to base them on sound scientific principles and an understanding of psychology, cultural anthropology, sociology and other allied fields of knowledge.

Indeed.

I’m also a fan of "Bert the Turtle Says Duck and Cover", which offers immensely useful and reassuring advice on what to do in case of a nuclear bomb explosion. “There is always something to shelter you – indoors, a schol desk, a chair, a table.” Funny how they left out lead-lined iceboxes, but perhaps the authors felt that went without saying.

Related material includes briefs for the artists and authors, as well as government reports on the impact of comics, such as the US Senate’s 1955 “Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency: Interim Report”. If you remember your history (or have read Michael Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay) you’ll remember that the mid-‘50s saw a witch-hunt launched against comic book publishers and authors every bit as intense as the one launched against Hollywood, with comic books accused of promoting delinquent and violent behavior as well as homosexuality and anti-Americanism.

Although my interest is more sparked by the Cold War-era material, the collection dates up to the last decade, offering an interesting lens through which to view the last 6 decades or so of US culture and of the US government’s relations with its subjects.

The bilateral kindred in contemporary suburban America

I just finished teaching descent and alliance in my intro class using My Usual Tricks and thought I’d share the standard bilateral kindred that I use to elicit Eskimo-style kinship terms from my students. This year was particularly great because I started with male ego ‘Bart’ and asked ‘what is the name of the woman who bore him?’ when someone in the class wondered aloud if there was a reason a woman couldn’t be ego in our diagram — so our exercise in constructing the only bilateral kindred that everyone in my class knows started with Lisa instead. Here’s the finished diagram, which includes semi-canonical relatives as well.

Simpsons kinship diagram

AAVE is Tangible and Irrefutable Evidence of Difference

Tomorrow I’m teaching my Taiwanese students about Black English, also known as African American Vernacular English (AAVE), or Ebonics. For this I’m using Chapter 9 of Lippi-Green’s book, English with an Accent, which contains her essay, “The Real Trouble with Black English.”

In re-reading the following passage I found myself thinking about the whole Reverend Jeremiah Wright kerfuffle.

in spite of many years of empirical study which is established AAVE as a normally functioning spoken human language, its very existence is often doubted and denied by African and European-Americans alike. The real trouble with black English is not the verbal aspect system which distinguishes it from other varieties of US English, or the rhetorical strategies which draw such a vivid contrast, it is simply this: AAVE is tangible and irrefutable evidence that there is a distinct, healthy, functioning African-American culture which is not white and which does not want to be white. This is a state of affairs which is unacceptable to many. James Baldwin who wrote and spoke so eloquently on the issues at the heart of the racial divide in this country, put it quite simply: “the value [of] a black man is proven by one thing only – his devotion to white people”

Protestant Stereotypes

Jay’s “Around the Web column”:/2008/05/04/around-the-web-11/ that featured the “Missions for Dummies post about how Latin Americans ‘are touchy feely'”:http://missionsfordummies.blogspot.com/2008/05/touch.html has been rolling around in my head for some time. Mostly this is because I have spent a lot of time reading cultural history of America as background for my new research project on World of Warcraft and have been thinking a lot about American theories of selfhood, markets and commodification, what constitutes human flourishing, and so forth.

I was struck by Irwin’s (the Missions for Dummies guy) insight that ‘Latins’ are ‘touchy feely’ since, in much of the United States, this is a stereotype that ‘white ethnics’ (Italian American, Irish American, Jewish, etc.) have of themselves — that they hug, kiss, and touch each other with a frequency and gusto that is a bit unseemly. The other stereotypes that I’ve heard from my friends in these communities is that ‘their people’ are 1) too loud and 2) prone to serve Too Much Food at family functions – or any functions really.

Now, an anthropologist you always want to ferret out the unexamined side of the contrast — the ‘what is taken for granted in my assumptions’ that goes unsaid. In this case I think what these stereotypes point to is not some distinctive way that white ethnics act, but an implicit contrast with the anglo-protestant norm, which appears to be that anglo-protestants prefer to sit together without touching, silent and hungry. Which is, actually, not a bad way of summing up a certain interactional style which I must admit I have witnessed in certain areas of rural Wisconsin and Minnesota during my time with local church parishioners there.
Continue reading →

Lakota Sovereignty

Lakota Sioux Indian representatives declared sovereign nation status today [12/19] in Washington D.C. following Monday’s withdrawal from all previously signed treaties with the United States Government.

… Property ownership in the five state area of Lakota now takes center stage. Parts of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana have been illegally homesteaded for years despite knowledge of Lakota as predecessor sovereign [historic owner]. Lakota representatives say if the United States does not enter into immediate diplomatic negotiations, liens will be filed on real estate transactions in the five state region, clouding title over literally thousands of square miles of land and property.

Young added, “The actions of Lakota are not intended to embarrass the United States but to simply save the lives of our people”.

Following Monday’s withdrawal at the State Department, the four Lakota Itacan representatives have been meeting with foreign embassy officials in order to hasten their official return to the Family of Nations.

… The Lakota reservations are among the most impoverished areas in North America, a shameful legacy of broken treaties and apartheid policies. Lakota has the highest death rate in the United States and Lakota men have the lowest life expectancy of any nation on earth, excluding AIDS, at approximately 44 years. Lakota infant mortality rate is five times the United States average and teen suicide rates 150% more than national average . 97% of Lakota people live below the poverty line and unemployment hovers near 85%.

More info on the official webpage of the sovereign nation of Lakota.

UPDATE: More thorough coverage over at Culture Matters.

New Research on Death Rates of Overweight People

A report published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association and reported on by the NY Times adds weight to my “thin hypothesis” of well over a year ago: death rates for overweight people in 2004 were lower — 100,000 lower — than for “normal” people.

Linking, for the first time, causes of death to specific weights, they report that overweight people have a lower death rate because they are much less likely to die from a grab bag of diseases that includes Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, infections and lung disease. And that lower risk is not counteracted by increased risks of dying from any other disease, including cancer, diabetes or heart disease.

As a consequence, the group from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute reports, there were more than 100,000 fewer deaths among the overweight in 2004, the most recent year for which data were available, than would have expected if those people had been of normal weight.

One expert, a Dr. JoAnn Manson from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, comments critically that “Health extends far beyond mortality rates… [The public needs to look at] the big picture in terms of health outcomes.” However, that’s what Health at Any Size advocates ave been advocating for year, rather than the simple-minded focus on BMI sorting people into “overweight” and “underweight” categories and automatically assuming these were “unhealthy” — and that the “normals” were “healthier”.

This new report gnaws at the seams of this construction, calling into question the meaning of normalcy and healthiness; although Dr. Manson and her “fat is bad” family are correct that some people experience quality of life issues (another huge construction), many don’t other than people — including doctors — pointing at them and yelling “fat bad, skinny good, you ugly and lazy and nasty”! Meanwhile, I think most people would rather not die this year, and would consider dying to be a sign of poor health (and something that also has some quality of life issues…).

Radical Hope by Jonathan Lear

On the face of it, “Radical Hope: Ethics In The Face of Cultural Devastation”:http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LEARAD.html is an impossible book to write and write well. What are the odds that a psychoanalytic take on Aristotle will tell us anything at all worthwhile about the collapse of the Crow lifeworld in the American west in the late nineteenth century? And yet despite the odd choice Jonathan Lear had managed to write a book that will appeal to anthropologists despite the fact that it infringes on what many of us would consider ‘our turf’.

There are three major challenges that Lear has to overcome in Radical Hope. First, Lear has got to actually learn about the Crow. This means learning about history, anthropology, the writing of Crow scholars, and others — a tall order for someone whose previous books have been much more philosophical. Second, the cultural politics of writing about the fate of the Crow are complex, and in this book Lear must strike a respectful and informed (see #1) tone about life on the reservation and the history of the Crow people. Learning just enough about the Crow in order to riff on their history would make Lear the last of a long line of white men who use Indians for their own ends. This is a job that anthropologists are particularly concerned be done well, because we have so often done it badly. Finally, Lear must try to say something new and intelligent about culture change, innovation in tradition, and the crushing psychological aspects of colonization — no easy task given the amount of ink spilled on the topics, and especially given how much of it has been spilled on the American west.

At just under 140 pages, Lear has clearly chosen what I call the ‘Imagined Communities’ route — when writing on a topic that deserves 1,000 pages it is sometimes easier simply to write 100 and make sure they are suggestive. While I know nothing about the Crow, it seems to me that Lear has done an admirable job catching up on the literature, including that of Crow authors, and in being fair to the thoughts and beliefs of Crow people. And he manages to do this despite the fact that, at a basic level, he is after bigger philosophical game than “just” Crow history. Even at points where he drifts off into the philosophical stratosphere to inquire what sort of human soul is suggested by his interpretation of one possible meaning of one report of a nineteenth century Crow autobiography, you do feel that Lear has managed to tether himself as much as possible ‘in the ethnography’ given that his analytic framework is sky-high.

In the end I think Lear has also managed to say something of value. At a certain level anthropologists are used to the idea that radical cultural innovation can still be ‘traditional’ even if its surface forms seem quite different from what has come before provided that the process, rather than the content, of change be ‘traditional’. What is valuable in his account is the way that he describes the ‘radical hope’ that can — must? — be central to this process and how it might be fitted in a larger philosophical anthropology which combines psychoanalysis and Aristotelean virtue ethics. It is this hook up to larger social-theoretic or political-philosophical trends that I found interesting since this sort of material is not usually dealt with by those streams of thought.

The risks of failure for a book like Lear’s were quite high, and I must admit I feel a bit ambivalent recommending the volume whole-heartedly — turning a project that could have been disastrous into a book that is very good is, after all, a different sort of thing from writing a book that is truly great! But this book has many advantages: effortlessly clear prose, its unusual juxtaposition of topics, the speed at which it goes down, and the way it foregrounds the fate of the Crow in a world that is too ready to forget our frontier history. It is good to teach with — perfect for a ‘deep thought’ undergrad honors course, and is great for social sciences who want something a little soulful to ponder. While I have not yet heard the reaction from Crow people themselves, I’d recommend Lear’s book to any anthropologist who wants to read an elegant, thoughtful piece — I’m glad to see that Jonathan Lear has decided to encroach on ‘our’ turf.