Tag Archives: North America

Disaster Anthropology

I’ve been keeping my Katrina coverage, which has been more political than anthropological, restricted to my own blog, but I see that antropologi.info has a good post about the anthropology of disaster, and other Katrina-related anthropology reports.

This isn’t a subject I know anything about, but if you have suggestions for a disaster anthropology reading list please leave them in the comments. (Ragout already suggested one such article in the comments to a previous post.)

I did begin collecting some articles about the impact of race and class on both the disaster and the media coverage afterwards. I think this is another area where anthropologists can offer some insights, as geographer Craig E. Colten did on NPR.

UPDATE: Here is Craig Colten’s web page, and his new book: An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature. From Amazon.com:

Colten shows how every manipulation of the environment made an impact on the city’s social geography as well—often with unequal, adverse consequences for minorities—and how each still requires maintenance and improvement today.

UPDATE: Here is a web site from the SSRC titled, “Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences.” (Vis Anthropologi.info, where more links can be found.)

Indian Groupies, Authenticity, and Ethnic Anxiety

In the past I’ve been critical of Jack Hitt’s writing for the NY Times about language and culture, but his recent magazine article about recently recognized Native American tribes is quite good:

Ethnicity is a tricky thing because it is commonly understood as something fixed and essential rather than what it more likely is: an unarticulated negotiation between what you call yourself and what other people are willing to call you back. Geniusz has lived her life culturally among the Ojibwe and is recognized by them as an Indian. Her easy comfort at calling herself an Indian comes in part because everyone in her area recognizes the essential Indian life she has led. Her physically European features are, in this part of Michigan at least, understood as only marginally curious.

The way the ethnic negotiation works depends on what part of the country you are located in. Native Americans recognize that there exists a kind of spectrum. At one end there are Indians living on a well-established Western reservation in a tribe that is branded as seriously authentic — Hopi, say — where many in the tribe retain the classic Indian physical characteristics. Moving along, you encounter various tribes that have intermarried a lot — like the Ojibwe — yet whose members still feel a powerful sense of authenticity. But once you visit tribes of newcomers, where few members knew their Indian ancestors personally, you begin to sense a clawing anxiety of identity. At the far end are hobbyists, those Indian groupies who hang around powwows, hoping to find a native branch in their family tree. They enjoy wearing the traditional tribal garb and are, as the University of Michigan history professor Philip Deloria titled his book, ”Playing Indian.”

Hitt is careful to point out that the whitening of the Native American population was actively promoted by U.S. government policies:

Some Native Americans carry what is called, awkwardly, a white card, officially known as a C.D.I.B., a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood. This card certifies a Native American’s ”blood quantum” and can be issued only after a tribe has been cleared by a federal subagency.

The practice of measuring Indian blood dates to the period just after the Civil War when the American government decided to shift its genocide policy against the Indians from elimination at gunpoint to the gentler idea of breeding them out of existence. It wasn’t a new plan. Regarding Indians, Thomas Jefferson wrote that ”the ultimate point of rest and happiness for them is to let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people.” When this idea was pursued bureaucratically under President Ulysses S. Grant, Americans were introduced to such phrases as ”half breed” and ”full blood” as scientific terms. In a diabolical stroke, the government granted more rewards and privileges the less Indian you were. For instance, when reservation lands were being broken up into individual land grants, full-blooded Indians were ruled ”incompetent” because they didn’t have enough civilized blood in them and their lands were administered for them by proxy agents. On the other hand, the land was given outright to Indians who were half white or three-quarters white. Here was the long-term catch: as Indians married among whites and gained more privileges, their blood fraction would get smaller, so that in time Indians would reproduce themselves out of existence.

Compounding this federal reward for intermarriage was the generally amicable tradition most tribes had of welcoming in outsiders. From the earliest days of European settlement, whites were amicably embraced by Indian tribes. For instance, the leader of the Cherokee Nation during the forced exile of 1838-39 — the Trail of Tears — was John Ross, often described as being seven-eighths Scottish.

Because phenotypic markers of Indianess are so hard to find among some of the newcomers (who seem to have tremendous anxiety about their own whiteness), language has become a crucial marker of authenticity:

Because it is time-consuming and difficult to learn any language, the commitment it takes to attend one of Wendy Geniusz’s camps or to sign on with Fielding’s work or to participate in any of the widespread Native American language revivals weeds out the easy hobbyists and leaves a cohort of Indians whose authenticity — regardless of genealogy or blood quantum — may one day be hard to question.

Finally, it is also interesting to learn about the various levels of of official recognition that are available for Native American tribes:

The Cherokee Tribe of Northeast Alabama is, according to the University of Oklahoma anthropologist Circe Sturm, one of more than 65 state-recognized tribes, most of which have emerged in the last few decades in the Southeast. State recognition is merely one of many legal mechanisms used to legitimate a Native American tribe. They range from the most difficult — federal recognition, which is required for running a casino — to state and local designations and on to unrecognized groups. (The Cherokees alone account for more than 200 of these recently formed unaffiliated tribes.)

And no, it is isn’t about cashing in on casino money, very few of these new groups qualify for casinos, and those who do are very restrictive about who can be a member.

The only quibble I have with the article is the implication that academics used to treat ethnicity as some kind of a fixed quantity but now recognize it as more mutable and negotiated. Anthropologists have understood the mutable nature of ethnic identity at least as far back as Boas. And, although it falls outside the scope of the article, if I were teaching this topic in a class I would want to point out how in South Africa or Brazil the links between race and ethnicity are conceived of quite differently than they are in the United States.

Two-Spirit vs. Berdache : acknowledging self-identity

This is my second, and possibly last for now, post on queer issues resulting from post-Montreal Pride reflections. The first one was “here”:/2005/08/04/redefining-marriage-queering-up-anthro-textbooks/.

One thing that struck me at this year’s Pride was the increasing presence of the Two-Spirit community at queer events. A corollary thought that occurred to me is the apparent disparity between how anthropologists define the Two-Spirit identity and how Two-Spirited people themselves define it.

First of all, Two-Spirit is increasingly being used as a replacement for the misleading and inappropriate berdache, which has negative connotations due to its linguistic roots. In fact, searching for berdache on “Wikipedia”:http://www.wikipedia.org automatically takes one to a page on “Two-Spirit”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berdache. However, many anthropology texts still refer to berdache. I guess old habits die hard.

Now, when anthropologists talk about berdache, they are often referring to male gender variants (please note that I have adopted Serena Nanda’s usage of this term from her book “Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations”:http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/1577660749/qid=1125195598/sr=1-5/ref=sr_1_0_5/702-5693806-0815232 – an excellent book) in Aboriginal North America. One frequently finds the disclaimer that the berdache does not necessarily marry or have sexual intercourse with other male-bodied persons and that the gender crossing is mainly at the occupational or vestimentary level. Ironically (I think it’s ironic because of the mainstream Western fascination with female-on-female sexuality) this disclaimer appears to be even more ardent when discussing the “occasional” female gender variants.

So from this older anthropological stance, which still permeates much current anthropological discussion on gender variance, gender identity is not so completely intertwined with sexual orientation (in the strict sense of who one has sex with) that one will adopt the prescribed orientation of the gender to which one adheres. In other words, a male bodied person who adopts a female gender will not necessarily adopt the “sleeping with men” that is supposedly included in this gender role.

What is contradictory, however, is that the standard rubric of homosexuality in many texts incorporates a discussion of the berdache and often fails to make the very distinction between sexuality and gender. The berdache is then used as an example of (usually) male homosexuality with the implication that it’s probably more about the gender role than an actual sexual preference. What remains unclear in these discussions is whether there ever existed men who slept with men or women who slept with women without changing gender roles.

What I love about Nanda’s book is that she shows the complexity of gender variance in North America. There is no one single way of being a gender variant and, yes, there are more female gender variants than some would let on, although perhaps not as many as male gender variants for reasons that Nanda briefly discusses. But I digress . . . according to Nanda, some gender variants engage in heterosexual relations, some engage in homosexual relations and some engage in (gasp!) both. Heck, some don’t even engage in sexual relations at all.

Now, with regards to the replacement of berdache by the term Two-Spirit there might still be problems. In light of the diversity that is characteristic of North American gender variance, can we assume that all gender variants are blessed with two spirits? From an anthropological standpoint does the term Two-Spirit reflect the many variations on the theme any more accurately than berdache? I’m not sure. However, one thing I am sure of after reading texts written by Two-Spirited folk and listening to them is that the term is held in higher regard by Aboriginals and that is enough for me to adopt its usage.

What is interesting about the Aboriginal usage of the term is that it includes pretty much all the varieties of queer that are summarised by the mainstream queer community by one of the brands of alphabet soup (LGBT, LGBTT2I and so forth). All lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, intersexed Aboriginal males and females may self-identify as Two-Spirit.* This is a far cry from the very specific denotation of berdache yet at the same time, it acknowledges the diversity that is a part of this identity.

What is also interesting is that Two-Spirit maintains the spiritual component of this identity unlike its predecessor which reduced the identity to one relating purely to sexuality. Coupled with the European tendency at the time of contact to associate all things sexual with icky, sinful things, the use of the term berdache imposed and propagated an ethnocentric view of gender variants and people who had sex with members of the same sex (MOSS). Two-Spirit, however, reminds us that Aboriginal conceptions of sexuality before the influence of Christianity were far different than those of Europeans.

Now, is Two-Spirit a term that could readily correspond to the local terms in all the linguistic groups across the continent? Probably not. Are the realities of present-day Aboriginals who have sex with MOSS or who adopt gender roles that differ from those usually assigned to their physical sex the same as those of pre-Euro North America? Probably not. Do all Aboriginal people who have sex with MOSS experience what psychologists would call gender dysphoria? Probably not.

Does the term Two-Spirit enable queer Aboriginals to feel solidarity in a society where they risk being ostracised by the dominant cultural groups, by their respective home communities and even by the rest of the queer community? Certainly. And it does this without denying the enormous range of diversity within the Two-Spirit community itself or the presence of some shared elements with non-Aboriginal queers. I’m all for it.

My suggestion for anthropologists, then, is not necessarily to refer to what used to be called berdache in the literature as Two-Spirit. I think that the term gender variant is quite adequate for that in a cross-cultural context and that local terms such as nadleeh, alyha or hwame are most appropriate when discussing specific case studies. However, I think it’s important that anthropologists recognise the self-identification of Two-Spirit individuals and to remember that they exist right here, right now and that they are dealing with realities that are much different than those that existed at the time Europeans encountered Aboriginals.

*As with the increasing use of the term “queer” rather than the terms for specific identities, this is what I would call extreme lumping in the taxonomy of alternate sexual orientations and gender/sexual identities. Our extreme splitters would be the ones who resort to the alphabet soup and keep adding on letters. Me? I’m a lumper. But I recognise the good intentions of both camps.

Updates and Shorts

  • The Meskwaki adoption case has been resolved with the decision by the mother, after three months of living with her child, to keep the baby.
  • The NCAA has backtracked somewhat on its recent decision to disallow most Indian mascots, logos, and team names from post-season games. The newly released appeals process would allow colleges to cite the support of the Indian groups being represented — e.g. the Seminoles in Florida State University’s case — to strengthen their cases.
  • In related news, USA Today has a round-up of editorial opinion on the NCAA’s new mascot policy.
  • Also related, despite the current visibility of the mascot issue, the town of Fox Lake, Ill., is considering reviving the Indian-head logo they abandoned some 50 years ago. Fox Lake was once home to a community of Meskwaki, before the government pushed the Meswkaki west of the Mississippi River to their current homes in Iowa and Kansas. Says Meskwaki tribal historian and perhaps-too-nice-guy Johnathan Buffalo:

    “We don’t want to berate this little town just because they want their Indian head back,” he said. “But they should remember us, that we used to live there and their houses might be built on our graves.”

    If the village reverts to the logo, it should be reworked to reflect a correct image of the Meskwaki, who never wore the headdress depicted on the old logo, he said.

  • In White County Arkansas, meth use is linked with arrowhead hunting. The sherriff, the improbably-named Pat Garrett, hypothesizes that arrowhead hunting gives the hyperactive and hyper-alert methheads something to do while they are tweaking, but there’s an economic angle as well — good collections can be worth good money, which can come in handy given the kinds of legal problems that can accompany meth use.

“Savage” Mascots Take A Blow

In a somewhat surprising (and maybe confusing) development, the NCAA announced today that it would ban the use of “hostile and abusive racial/ethnic/national origin mascots, nicknames or imagery” at NCAA championships. (Apparently, the NCAA does not have the authority to impose regulations on regular season play.) This is a significant victory for anti-Indian mascot activists, who for years have been challenging the use of often denigrating Indian imagery by sports teams. Affected by the new guidelines are several different “Braves”, even more “Indians”, and one each of the “Chippewas”, “Seminoles”, “Utes”, “Redmen”, “Illini”, “Choctaws”, “Fighting Sioux”, and the “Savages”.

It’s easy to see why many American Indians are offended by the use of clear ethnic slurs like “Redmen”, “Savages”, and “Redskins” to describe a sports team. It also might be easy to imagine why some groups might be offended by the appropriation of their names to describe teams that they are in no way affiliated with. But these are not really the issues around which debate has focused — or, rather, they are just the shallowest and easiest-to-grasp points of what is a much deeper debate, one that focuses largely on representationand the question of who history and tradition belongs to.

Defenders of Indian team names and mascots obviously resist the charge of racism, but they do so in a way that, at first, seems surprising. They do not, for instance, question the significance of a team mascot in the face of systematic racism with much more far-reaching impacts — like forced sterilization of Indian women in the very recent past. One could imagine such a claim — “how much damage is this really doing?” they could ask — but don’t (at least not usually). In fact, they cling tenaciously to their mascots — as fiercely as any Indian nation ever clung to their own traditions and autonomy. Consoder, for example, this statement from the Honor the Chief group at the University of Illinois:

For 78 years, the Chief has been the symbol of the spirit of a great university and of our intercollegiate athletic teams, and as such is loved by the people of Illinois. The University considers the symbol to be dignified and has treated it with respect. His ceremonial dance is performed with grace and beauty.

Chief Illiniwek embodies the attributes valued by alumni, students, and friends of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The tradition of the Chief is a link to our great past, a tangible symbol of an intangible spirit, filled with qualities to which a person of any background can aspire: goodness, strength, bravery, truthfulness, courage, and dignity.

The Chief Illiniwek tradition can be transformed into an educational asset, to both the University and to the Native American community. Elevating the symbol of Chief Illiniwek provides an opportunity for the University to promote the attributes that have come to be identified with this tradition. Together, we can utilize our considerable strengths and resources to celebrate diversity—our growth as a human race—and create a true consensus for the future.

Put that way, it seems almost cruel to strip the University Illini of their tradition and their code of “goodness, strength, bravery, truthfulness, courage, and dignity”. Which is to say, the defenders of Chief Illiniwek have defined him as a symbol of a “lifeway” every bit as valuable — and valid — as that of the actual Illini themselves. What is at stake here is no longer a mascot, but a culture, of which Chief Illiniwek is only the most visible symbol.

While this positioning is not likely to impress most Indian activists — any more than arguments about the Confederate flag as a symbol of the pride and honor on Southern culture is likely to impress civil rights activists — it is the corrollary that really bothers them. Because the argument from tradition is often paired with an argument that essentially says that Indians should be honored by being chosen to represent such high ideals. What’s more, that they should be proud to be represented by such a fine and authentic mascot. So, for instance, another U of IL-based site, the Chief Illiniwek Educational Foundation (Ch.I.E.F.), puts forth as its mission:

…to utilize the presence of Chief Illiniwek to promote greater education and awareness of American Indian people, culture , tradition, and history to the students, alumni, and friends of the University of Illinois.

The Ch.I.E.F. site incudes an in-depth history of Chief Illiniwek, his regalia and dance, noting the authenticity of the representation (although it appears that, since his inception in 1926, Illiniwek has owed more to the Lakota than to more local Illinois tribal traditions).

As Philip Deloria has noted, the appropriation and enactment of Indian identities in “play” has a long history in the United States — essentially since there was a United States — and it is premised on the idea that Indian tradition and history could be claimed as non-Indian tradition and history.

Indianness offered a deep, authentic, aboriginal Americanness….To play Indian has been to connect with a real Self, both collective and individual… (Playing Indian, 1998, Yale University Press).

This “authentic Americanness”, though, is premised on the evacuation of real Indians, on their supplantation — in “playing Indian”, the new “authentic American” replaces the old one — so it makes sense that mascot defenders often claim that they are preserving Indian heritage when Indians themselves cannot or will not, as in this comment (scroll to 4th comment) left on a U of IL alumni discussion board:

Consider the irony that the tribes themselves were unable to perpetuate the traditional dance the Chief does at halftime; it took a bunch of “immature frat boys” to do so. Now, there will be NO living record of this element of Illinoisian culture….

Playing Indian legitimizes the displacement of aboriginal Americans by suggesting that the new Americans are the rightful inheritors of Indian tradition. At stake in the debate over Indian mascots, then, is not just school tradition, but the very right of the school, as an American institution, to exist in the first place. For if appropriating a mere image like that of Chief Illiniwek is wrong, then how much more wrong must be the appropriation of an entire continent from its “rightful” occumpants?

Inside/Outside Troubles

Three recent articles about blogging or otherwise posting personal thoughts online caught my interest. The first, which I commented on at my personal website is the Chronicle piece by "Ivan Tribble", "Bloggers Need Not Apply". Tribble, recently released from search committee duties at his school, rails against academics who blog, under the guise of "helpful advice" to job-seekers.

We all have quirks. In a traditional interview process, we try our best to stifle them, or keep them below the threshold of annoyance and distraction. The search committee is composed of humans, who know that the applicants are humans, too, who have those things to hide. It’s in your interest, as an applicant, for them to stay hidden, not laid out in exquisite detail for all the world to read. If you stick your foot in your mouth during an interview, no one will interrupt to prevent you from doing further damage. So why risk doing it many times over by blabbing away in a blog?

The second article is a NYTimes "Style Desk" piece entitled "The New Nanny Diaries Are Online" (this piece may have fallen behind the Times’ paywall; read the Village Voice’s take on the subject here or Bitch PhD’s take here). The author, one Helaine Olen, describes her growing discomfort with her nanny after reading about her private life on her blog (the nanny has since abandoned the blog, but not before writing a fairly extensive and humiliating rejoinder to Olen’s piece).

Yet within two months of my starting to read her entries our entire relationship unraveled. Not only were there things I didn’t want to know about the person who was watching my children, it turned out her online revelations brought feelings of mine to the surface I’d just as soon not have to face as well.
…
My husband thought her writing precociously talented but wanted to fire her nonetheless. "This is inappropriate," he said. "We don’t need to know that Jennifer Ehle makes her hot."

And, finally, a Boston University journalism professor was fired for making this comment about a student on an online sports board:

"Of my six students, one (the smartest, wouldn’t you know it?) is incredibly hot. … It was all I could do to remember the other five students."

I don’t want to defend or castigate any of the actors in any of these situations — I’ve said my piece about Tribble at One Man’s Opinion and am working up something more specific on the Boston University case (stay tuned, folks!); Olen’s case has been suitably discussed by both her nanny personally and a bevy of Internet commentators. Instead, I’m concerned here with how each of these pieces illustrates conceptions about the division of public and private life in American (North American? Western?) conceptions of the self, especially where work is involved. In each of the cases, the blogger/poster has committed a transgression, revealing his/her private life in a public forum (the Internet).

Modern American culture is structured around the hard division between public and private spaces, personaes, and expression. This division defines and bounds our behavior among every dimension — religion, gender, sexuality, class, economics (consider how improper it is to ask someone’s annual income!), politics, and so on. Each of us does a pretty remarkable job of adapting to the varying definitions of proper and improper behavior in each context we move through in the course of our daily lives. At the same time, these boundaries can become contested — consider the furor over the Supreme Court’s decision striking down Texas’ sodomy ban (in Lawrence et al. v. Texas). The advent of the Internet has posed one of the greatest challenges to these "hard" boundaries in recent years, confouding efforts to adequately define public and private spaces and often shifting behaviors that were once considered "private" into the "public" eye, and vice versa. It is telling that Tribble contrasts the public exposure gained from blogging with the "privacy" of face-to-face interactions in such public venues as cocktail parties and classrooms:

We’ve all done it — expressed that way-out-there opinion in a lecture we’re giving, in cocktail party conversation, or in an e-mail message to a friend. There is a slight risk that the opinion might find its way to the wrong person’s attention and embarrass us. Words said and e-mail messages sent cannot be retracted, but usually have a limited range. When placed on prominent display in a blog, however, all bets are off.

What seems to bother Tribble here is not so much the comments themselves (after all, one would think an academic would have a bit more worry about inane comments made in the classroom!), but their iterability — their capacity to be repeated and, in being repeated, to escape the control of their author. The appropriate public venue for academic speech is publication, after passing through layers of vetting and peer review to minimize the consequences of iterability. While off-hand comments made in person are, in the Derridean sense, iterable, their lack of a permanent material form somewhat limits their impact. By writing on a weblog, though, the author grants his/her comments the permancence of publication without the benefit of academic screening. (An argument that might seem surprising to anyone with any depth of experience on the web — pages come and go with a surprising suddenness! For example, in the post on "iterability" I just cited, a link is broken, and the post is less than a year old. Tribble answers this argument bypointing to mechanisms like Google’s cache: "Even if you take your blog offline while job applications are active, Google and other search engines store cached data of their prior contents. So that cranky rant might still turn up.")

Iterability seems to lay at the heart of Michael Gee’s case as well. Consider, for example, Robert MacMillan’s commentary at the Washington Post:

But just because his words are gone doesn’t mean they haven’t been preserved elsewhere… like right here in this column, and over at Boston Sports Media, where blogger David Scott posted them on July 15 so the rest of us could wonder at them…

A fellow BU prof, Michael Feldman (writing as "the Dowbrigade"), adds these comments in his own response:

As regular readers will note, the Dowbrigade also works at a Major Boston University, and over the years we have had our share of "hot" students, but we would never dream of saying so in a public posting.

Gee could not have been fired for having "hot" students — professors cannot very well have a policy forbidding attractive women from enrolling. He also could not have been fired for noticing the "hotness" of his student — unless a professor is blind, s/he is going to have students that s/he thinks are physically attractive, whether in relation to their own standards of physical beauty or to those of society at large. Where Gee transgressed was in letting it be known that he found a student attractive (Feldman highlights the "sloe-eyed Sabra" part of the comment as a racial slur, but I don’t think this is the primary reason for Gee’s dismissal)– that is, in exposing the always-present but always-suppressed private reactions of a professor to his/her students (on whatever grounds) to the public eye. We professors are supposed to be neutral with regard to our students, to judge each of them solely on their ability to master the material presented in the class, not on their physical attractiveness, political beliefs, personality quirks, financial status, or any other individual quality (except, maybe, inasmuch as it contributes to their greater or lesser mastery of the course material). By making his private reaction public, he made the illusion of professorial neutrality more difficult to perform not only for himself, but for academics in general.

Gee’s offense lies not so much in his private reaction as in the his public puncturing of his (and his professorial colleagues’) professional image — which is also the offense committed by Olen’s nanny Tessy. Time and again, Olen notes that there are "things I didn’t want to know" about her nanny, things that, eventually, so punctured Olen’s image of what a nanny is supposed to be that she ended up firing Tessy. Now, nannies already blur the line between public and private — they are employees who are paid to take care of their employer’s children and household, but they are also "part of the family", often living with "their" family and certainly privy to many of the most intimate details of the family’s life. For many women — especially, perhaps, of the New York liberal career-woman type — the illusion of "nanny as family member" is crucial to what is, after all, a rather exploitive work relationship. As long as Tessy could be viewed as "one of the family", Olen was comfortable with the arrangement; but when she started reading posts that described Tessy’s nannying as "work" and her employers as just that, "employers", Olen’s comfortable illusion was shattered:

Most parents don’t like to think the person watching their children is there for a salary. We often build up a mythology of friendship with our nannies, pretending the nanny admires us and loves our children so much that she would continue to visit even without pay.

Without that "mythology", Olen literally grew disillusioned with Tessy’s performance.

Each of these cases presents an act of discipline, in which a person is punished for their transgressions against the supposedly hard and fast boundaries between public and private expression — which Tribble and Olen, in their decision to "go public" and write about these punished transgressions, have made to act as a warning to the rest of us (Tribble’s weak objection that no candidate was passed over solely for blogging notwithstanding — the intent of his piece is clearly to warn would-be academic bloggers to keep their mouths shut). But what does this say about the nature of employment in today’s American society? With Tribble’s and Olen’s cases, the real discomfort came not so much in their employees’ (or prospective employees’) lack of qualification for the job at hand, but in their suspicion of an active life outside of work. Although Gee’s transgression touches more directly on his ability to do his job, it must be noted that there is little in his comments to suggest that Gee would be impartial in his grading practices or as a teacher — if anything, his post seems like the effort of a new professor (he had worked as a reporter the prior 17 years) to deal with the realities of his situation. How do you deal with a student whose physical presence is distracting?

In each of these cases, it seems to be the fact of merely having an "unauthorized" — that is, non-work-related — private life that is being punished, reflecting an effort to extend the discipline of the workplace — of public life — into the worker’s private life. The epitome of this attitude can be found in Henry Ford’s Dearborn, a model community where news, church, even appropriate recreation was provided by Ford’s agents — and where workers’ home lives were monitored as well. While ostensibly protecting the boundary between public and private, the employers in the cases mentioned above are all in effect defining what their workers’ appropriate private life should be.

In this respect, the act of blogging/posting becomes problematic not so much for the inability of the author to control the reception of his/her words, but for the inability of his/her employer to control the private life of the author. The act of posting becomes evidence of a deeper transgression than just misrecognizing or refusing to recognize the boundaries of appropriate public behavior; it shows the failure of the employer to adequately discipline his/her worker, or the failure of the worker to adequately conform to the expectations of his/her employer. In the end, though, both transgressions amount to the same thing — in the face of an employment regime determined to draw ever-smaller boundaries around the private, rejecting those boundaries is in itself evidence of an "unauthorized" private life. Which is why, I would venture, blogging has caught on in such a big way; in the face of greater and greater incursions on our private life — not just by employers, but by government, social advocates across the political spectrum, religious organizations, black-hat hackers and identity thieves, and ever-tightening security in retail facilities — blogging has provided a way to "push back", to assert a private life that nobody owns, ironically enough by making it public.

What’s wrong with Yali’s Question

I finally watched episode one of the Guns, Germs, and Steel TV show last night. Its all on TiVo, but I’m finding it hard to sit and watch – it is a rather painfully made show. So many shots of Jared Diamond looking scholarly: peering out windows, looking at maps, walking back and forth, etc. Ugh! And do they really need to work the title of his book into every other sentence? I mean, in the first episode they don’t even get up to the invention of guns…

The show is framed by the motif of “Yali’s Question.” Yali is portrayed as some local guy (he looks like a worker) whom JD bumps into on the beach one day and asks him:

Why you white man have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little?

But Yali isn’t just some guy on the beach. He’s a politician. This isn’t JD’s fault. Here is what he says in the book:

I had already heard about a remarkable local politician named Yali, who was touring the district then.

But I can’t completely absolve JD for this portrayal. I believe there is something fundamentally wrong about the very question he is asking.

The modern U.S. is the richest, most powerful state on earth. It’s crammed with more cargo than most New Guineans could ever imagine. But why? That’s what Yali wanted to know. How did our worlds ever come so different?

By framing the question in this way, the show is forced to portray New Guniea as a land of poor people, and the US as a land of wealth. Although we are told that there are intelligent people from New Guniea, they are portrayed as hunter gatherers, or poor farmers. While the show does show the hubub of urban New Guinea at the end, one would hardly know that there is internet access in the country.

This gets to the fundamental problem I have with JD’s question. While it is interesting and important to ask why technologies developed in some countries as opposed to others, I think it overlooks a fundamental issue: the inequality within countries as well as between them. I assure you that logging industry executives in New Guinea live better than you or I do! Both New Guinea and the United States are far more unequal (by some measures) than is India. Moreover, inequality throughout the world is increasing more rapidly now than every before.

Although it is a contentious argument, economist Amartya Sen argues that inequality within countries can be more important than inequality between countries. I’ve collected a bunch of writings about this question on my wiki, and there was some lively discussion about it in response to this earlier Savage Minds post. But the main point Sen makes is that people in societies that are objectively poorer, but less unequal live longer than people who are objectively wealthier, but at the bottom rungs of a more unequal society. It doesn’t help to have more cargo if you can’t afford the dental work necessary to meet new standards of beauty. (Read this post about a US woman who couldn’t get promoted because of her teeth.)

Yes, it is interesting to know the environmental constraints societies have struggled against over the course of history, but it is a mistake to see this as an explanation of contemporary inequality.

To take a recent example, Nigeria (environmentally blessed with some of the largest oil reserves outside of the Middle East) used to be one of the richest countries in the world. Corruption, aided by Western banks who provided the means of funneling the majority of the nation’s GDP into private bank accounts, and deep cultural divisions between North and South, destroyed that wealth. Yet there are still many, many, millionaires and billionaires in Nigeria, and their collective wealth would be enough to give them plenty of “cargo” …

So, no offense to Yali, but his question should be:

Why is cargo distributed so unequally both within and between our societies?

Once you frame the question that way, environmental factors seem rather incidental.

UPDATE: Brad DeLong, points out that I overstated my case with the Nigeria example. However, I still think my overall argument still stands. The comparative wealth of Nigeria is less important for my point than the inequitable distribution of that wealth within Nigeria.

I would also add that the poor farming conditions DeLong speaks of are partially a result of the oil economy:

During the oil boom, Nigeria’s small family farms became marginalized. Women and children largely ran the farms as men sought work in the cities’ industrial-development schemes, which were heavily subsidized by petroleum wealth.

UPDATE: My discussion with Professor DeLong continues in the comments section of this post – which also has links to discussion on other sites.

Kennewick Skullduggery

Perhaps it is because most of my physical anthropologist friends spend their time looking at DNA rather than old bones, I’m never too enthusiastic about bone studies. Sure, they are important, especially when entirely new species are discovered, or people are discovered in a location they weren’t expected at a particular time, but the problem is that there are so few bones out there that it is hard to make much of a few isolated data points.

So I enjoyed this great post by John Hawks, debunking all hype surrounding the recent victory of scientists in the Kennewick Man case. As he points out, scientists are unlikely to learn much new after examining the 9,000-year-old skeleton. Why? Because scientists have already analyzed the skeleton!

Yes, it’s true. The plaintiffs in the case have assembled at last to study the remains, and are putting on a public show of it. But almost all of what they are going to do has already been done. And most of the new analyses they intend could be accomplished with data that are already published.

The National Park Service maintains a website related to the Kennewick case. Included on the site are detailed reports of the analyses that were carried out on the specimen during the preparation for the court proceedings.

Interesting … as part of the preparation for a court proceeding over whether or not scientists would have the right to conduct scientific investigations on the skeleton, scientists conducted investigations on the skeleton. No wonder Native American’s don’t trust the government!

The National Park Service website is truly an interesting find. It includes, for instance, this report by Eugene S. Hunn, a student of Berlin and Kay, on the “linguistic evidence that Sahaptin-speakers were intimately familiar with the flora and fauna characteristic of the central Columbia Plateau habitat surrounding the Kennewick Man site.”

Here is some more background on the controversy. And here is a post explaining what is involved in analyzing the remains.

(John Hawks post found via Pharyngula.)

Yanomami Referendum

Oops. I’d been thinking for several days that it seemed odd that the results of the referendum on rescinding the report of the El Dorado Task Force had not come out. I kept checking the AAA website — where, to my knowledge, they don’t appear in any obvious way — and finally decided to google search “yanomami referendum”.

Well, this is probably not news to many of you, but

“Members of the American Anthropological Association, weighing in on a dispute that has divided their discipline, voted 846 to 338 to rescind a controversial 2002 report on allegations of research misconduct by scholars studying the Yanomami people.”

This is from Inside Higher Ed.

I do belong to the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America but feelings about this have been so sore that there seems to be a collective decision not to discuss the issue at all on the listserv, thus I didn’t get the results from any flurry of discussion over there.

This outcome, while not surprising, is pretty saddening. First, doesn’t the AAA have something like 11,000 members? What a tiny turnout. And it’s not at all heartening that the association president herself — even now that the voting is over — refuses to say how she voted on it. Of course it’s her perfect right to keep her vote private, and I can imagine an argument for her not publicly stating her position before the vote. But why maintain silence even now?

I fear that the outcome recapitulates a contemporary disciplinary tendency: an incredible willingness to stake positions at an exalted, empyrean level and an utter refusal to say anything at all on small, messy, immediate issues except to ignore and/or dismiss them. For the record, I voted absolutely against the movement to rescind the report. The whole obfuscatory process that culminated in the effort to rescind reminded me of certain trends in U.S. public life — say, the discrediting of that 60 Minutes report about Bush’s national guard service on the basis of challenging the particular authenticity of certain documents rather than the substance of the report itself — and made me want to puke.

The only thing that makes me feel slightly cheered-up is the thought that with referendums like this one, a highly mobilized base can hijack the outcome. I hope this is what happened: that most people got what Rex has called “Yanomami fatigue”, stopped paying attention, and just sort of felt nonplussed by the time they got the ballot question (which was posed, in classic tricky-referendum form, as a double negative). Still, this vote is now a part of our disciplinary history, to our grave collective discredit.

Live 8: Naughty or Nice?

So I’d like to put a general theme of discussion here on SM to a concrete test: Live 8, naughty or nice?

I don’t work in Africa, but I do work in a HIPC (Highly Indebted Poor Country), Bolivia. And many Savage Minds readers and participants obviously work on and think about issues of global inequality & the forms of mutual, ahem, recognition made possible and impossible by global inequality.

Over the weekend I watched a bit of TV coverage from the show in London (a city that has had quite a week…), and wasn’t at all sure how to feel about it. Or, to be more transparently honest, it’s the kind of thing for which I am a complete sucker but know I oughtn’t be.

Given the indubitably necessary and yet insufferably snarky anthropological literature of the past two decades, I know how to take Live 8 apart in a critical spirit. The trope of hapless Africa rescued by salvific Euroamerica. The unwarranted catharsis provided to a privileged audience by the spectacle itself. The cover given to the nasty machinations of the Man, recently manifested by G-8 leaders pretending their association exists only to help poor people and to watch out for the environment. Etc. etc.

On the other hand… well, I don’t guess I have to outline the “pro” side of the equation for anyone. Everyone involved vociferously and repeatedly made the case for the worthiness of the undertaking.

There are, of course, multiple other possibilities. One that comes to mind is that the whole thing was the last hurrah of anglophone imperialism, soon to be displaced by some combo of China/India/Brazil, so that Live 8 was a spectacle of another kind, ironically headlined by an (ex-colonial) Irishman, showily insisting upon the mighty benevolent potential of (mostly) England-and-the-United States just as they begin to slide under the domestic burden of their foreign adventures and have only to look forward to days ahead when they’ll be wanting a little external debt forgiveness of their own.

Who is to say. But to return to the point, I’ll state my position on Live 8: naughty AND nice. Does this make me a fatuous booby? Don’t hold back.

Non-Indian Indians and the People Who Fight Over Them

I think I’ll retreat from the global scale of my last couple posts and dwell in the details for a while with this story about an adoption dispute on the Meskwaki Settlement. The story: a Meskwaki woman had a baby by a non-Meskwaki father and put the child (named Braven) up for adoption. The couple that chose to adopt the child was also non-Meskwaki. When it came time to turn the baby over to it’s new parents, the Meskwaki tribal council invoked the Indian Child Welfare Act (hereafter ICWA; see an FAQ on the ICWA for a plain-language description) to prevent the adoption and to take custody of the child. A tribal judge has returned custody to the mother, but she must now petition the tribal council to pursue the adoption.

I find this story interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, it highlights several ongoing points of contention within the Meskwaki community about who is Meskwaki and what that means in today’s world. Also, it illustrates the assumptions that have informed US Indian policy, even well-intentioned policies like the ICWA. (There are a handful of other stories detailing the Meskwaki case here, here, and here; the details are pretty much the same. I’ve chosen to focus on the first story that emerged on the subject because of what I find to be an interesting, and probably unintended, editorial content.)

The Meskwaki face the same issue that other American Indian peoples do (which is shared by other American minorities as well): how to maintain some sense of boundedness in the context of a pluralistic society. In recent years, the question of identification has been compounded for many Meskwaki by the construction and subsequent success of a tribal casino. While the financial security afforded by the casino has given the Meskwaki the autonomy to protect their cultural patrimony — for instance, by allowing the construction of a bi-lingual school under Meskwaki control — it has also raised concerns among some Meskwaki about the possibility of remaining true to their heritage while acting as corporate capitalists. One of the ways that these concerns have expressed themselves is through concerns over tribal membership. While there have long been worries about “half-breeds” and non-Meskwaki living on the Settlement — the fieldnotes I have from the ’50s contain numerous references to the “half-breed problem” — the issue has taken on new valence with the success of the casino and the distribution of services and annuities made possible by the new source of income. Tribal enrollment is not just a matter of cultural belonging, it is now more profitable than ever to be a recognized member of the tribe.

But enrollment is not easy to achieve. Under the Meskwaki tribal constitution, and in keeping with the strong patrilineal kinship system, enrollment requires recognition by an enrolled Meskwaki father. This raises two concerns in the community. One is that when a Meskwaki man has a child by a non-Meskwaki woman, the child is eligible to enroll, even though it may never set foot on the Settlement and even though it may be wholly raised by its non-Meskwaki mother (which is not always the case, but is likely), which is to say raised as a non-Meskwaki. The other concern is the reverse: when a Meskwaki woman has a child by a non-Meskwaki man, the child is not eligible to enroll, even though it may be raised on the Settlement as an integrated part of the Meskwaki community. On the one hand, there is a growing resentment about enrolled Meskwakis who play no part in the social life of the community; on the other, there is growing concern about resources being used to support people who are not recognized members of the community and, because their children cannot be enrolled, will not contribute to the ongoing reproduction of the society. These concerns have given rise to a mounting pressure to reform the enrollment provisions — perhaps by adopting DNA testing to establish “Meskwaki-ness”, a troubling development in its own right — as well as efforts to further limit residency of un-enrolled persons on the Settlement. The child whose adoption is in question has been born into the middle of these conflicting viewpoints: as the child of a non-Meskwaki father, he cannot be enrolled, and yet as the child of a Meskwaki mother (in a family that has some prominence as keepers of Meskwaki tradition) he represents part of the future of the Meskwaki culture.

These concerns are highlighted because adoption and kinship have a special meaning in Meskwaki culture. The death of an individual is followed by special adoption ceremonies in which the kinship role that the deceased played is “passed on” to another person — who becomes one’s father, brother, or whatever. We recognize in funerary customs the attempt of a group of people to come to terms with the “hole” the death has left in their network of social relations; Meskwaki adoption practices clearly fit into this model. But there’s a secondary meaning, as well, one which has special weight given the Meskwaki’s history — the protection of kinship networks has been essential to the survival of the Meskwaki as a people. Several times in the last couple centuries, the Meskwaki have faced extinction as a result of warfare or of disease. At one point, the community was reduced to only a couple dozen members; the adoption or reintegration of Meskwaki who had married out of the tribe or been captured in battle and integrated into their captor’s tribe was essential to the continuation of the Meskwaki, and the elaboration of multiple kinship roles essential following the literal decimation of the people — when 9 of 10 roles are suddenly vacated, kinship takes on a rather profound meaning.

Into this mix comes the ICWA. Passed in 1978, the ICWA was intended to put a stop to the use of adoption to advance an assimilationist agenda. Historically, adoption agencies have consciously striven to place Indian babies with non-Indian parents, arguing that poverty and ill education made Indian parents unlikely candidates for adoption. Family service agencies have also contributed to the assimilative project, often removing children form Indian homes after observing local customs that they deemed “abusive”. The intent was clearly assimilative: if government policies could not force Indian peoples as a whole to assimilate into the “general population”, at least individual Indians could be “spared” the penalties of an Indian upbringing. The ICWA grew out of the greater empowerment of native peoples in the US following the rise of the American Indian Movement and the development of more sophisticated legal strategies built around the concept of sovereignty. Essentially, it allows tribal governments to intervene in the adoption process and to prevent the removal of Indian children to non-Indian adoptive or foster parents, keeping such children within the community. In this case, however, the enrollment standards of the Meskwaki mean that the child in question is legally not Meskwaki; any Meskwaki identity that can be ascribed to the child must necessarily be premised on standards that the Meskwaki do not recognize in their enrollment standards. The child both is and is not Meskwaki; the law does not apply because the child is not Meskwaki, yet the law’s intent is to protect Indian cultures of which the child may well grow to become an important part, even without enrollment.

Part of the confusion stems from the fact that the law has to cover all sorts of enrollment regimes. Many, perhaps most, tribes offer immediate recognition to anyone who can demonstrate a particular percentage of descent from recognized “full-blooded” members of the tribe. For instance, the local Paiute colony requires 1/8 descent from members of a list compiled in 1923, all of who are considered “full-blooded”. Meet the terms and you are Paiute. The Meskwaki system is unusual, though perhaps not unique, in requiring the father’s active involvement in recognizing the child. But more than the need to accommodate different and sometimes conflicting enrollment regimes, confusion arises from the underlying premise of the law, a long-standing idea in American thought — that “Indian-ness” is inborn, that children are either born Indian, or they are born non-Indian. If they are born Indian, then they “belong” with the Indian tribe they were born into; if not, then they “belong” with non-Indians. A child like Braven challenges this assumption, because although he was born non-Indian (in the legal sense) he was also born Indian (in the sense of his potential to take part in and enrich Meskwaki culture).

The article I’ve cited is interesting in its own right for the assumptions about individual rights and cultural identity it reveals. The story portrays the mother as the “good guy”, motivated only by the assessment of what would be best for the child — an assessment which she is entitled to make both by virtue of her motherhood and by virtue of her right to individual freedom and choice. Opposed to her is not so much the tribal council, but rather the mother’s cultural identity itself: “…when it came time to turn him over to the couple that wanted to give Braven a home, his heritage got in the way” (emphasis added). The tribal council, as embodiments of that “heritage”, is seen as interfering with “the [mother’s] right to say who should raise [her child].” It is only decent, the article seems to suggest, to protect the mother’s and child’s rights from the tyranny of “heritage” — exactly the kind of thinking that the ICWA was drafted to oppose in the first place. Where the ICWA privileges cultural identity (as determined by affiliation), the article privileges individual identity (as determined by individual decision-making). And, of course, neither perspective can resolve the ambiguities presented by a non-Indian Indian like Braven.

Perceptions of anthropology

Tad at Fieldnotes has a post on “Resources for Researching Aboriginal Issues”:http://www.anthroblog.tadmcilwraith.com/2005/06/23/resources-for-researching-aboriginal-issues/ that I find quite interesting. The second resource that he mentions in his post is a researcher’s handbook by the Union of BC Indian Chiefs called “Stolen Lands, Broken Promises”:http://www.ubcic.bc.ca/Resources/rilq.htm . This is basically a guide for Aboriginal community members who wish to do research on various issues affecting their communities. The various chapters touch on different but related research topics of interest to anthropologists. What particularly caught my attention was chapter 8: “Anthropology Resources”:http://www.ubcic.bc.ca/files/PDF/RILQ2005/CH8_Anthropology.pdf .

Unsurprisingly, the ethnocentric nature of some anthropological research projects is pointed out. In fact, the authors of this handbook are very well aware that the early anthropological project was mostly reflective of Western values that were tied into a colonial project in many ways. For example, the following statement jumped out at me:

Whatever the scope of your project, you will need to make sure you cafefully analyze the material you collect. Anthropological reports were most often produced by outside researchers with distinctly different cultural practices and expectations than the people they studied. They may include important information but they may also reveal more about the beliefs and values of the time and place in which they were created. Often, these studies may meet the standards of academic research but fail to accurately represent Indigenous Peoples and our communities. Consider the biases and limitations in the documents you encounter while extracting the information you need for your research.

To me, this touches on several of the topics we have discussed here on SM recently. More specifically, theory and morality come to mind. I’ve long been ambivalent about the process of theorising about a group of people with the goal of contributing to an overarching “scientific” project, particularly when the people being theorised about have little voice with regards to the theories constructed around them or little concern for the scientific project of theory creation. Therefore, I feel that Aboriginal peoples are justified in their wariness of anthropological research. We cannot deny that many ethnographies have unjustly portrayed Aboriginals and other societies, sometimes to the detriment of fruitful dialogue.

During my own fieldwork in Chisasibi, the comment was made to me that the Cree had felt misrepresented in some previous works and were now quite sceptical of what exactly anthropologists were trying to do. As noble as I felt my intentions were at the time (ie. to help foster inter-cultural communication), in the end my project benefited me much more than the community that hosted me: it got me an M.A. and a subsequent job at a publicly funded college. In the 7 years since my fieldwork, I have not yet even had the opportunity to go back to Chisasibi to give the band council a copy of my thesis as promised. I could mail it . . .but it wouldn’t be the same.

On the other hand, I feel strongly that anthropologists can and should be doing research that both meets the standards of academic research and fulfills a need that Aboriginal communities may have, taking into account their perspectives on self-representation. Of course, this may require changes in the criteria for academic research in the first place.

How are anthropologists supposed to preach cultural relativity if we can’t practice it with regards to cultural differences in the perception of how cross-cultural research should be carried out? This strikes me as a fundamental problem in anthropolical research, a sort of hypocrisy, that continues to plague us in spite of ongoing critiques by the people with whom we deal and to whom we owe our livelihood.

William Fenton Dies at 96

In the “I didn’t know he was still alive” category, anthropologist William Nelson Fenton has passed away.

Here is a biographical sketch from the William N. Fenton Papers archive at the American Philosophical Society website:

Born in New Rochelle, N.Y., on December 15, 1908, William Nelson Fenton, became a leading scholar of the history and culture of Iroquois Indians. Raised in New Rochelle until the age of 16, he passed his summers on the family farm in western New York state, located midway between two Seneca Indian reservations. Exposed to anthropological work, Fenton’s interests were encouraged by his father and grandfather, friends to Indians there, who assembled a small collection of Indian memorabilia which was later acquired by the Museum of the American Indian.

After receiving his B.A. from Dartmouth in 1931, Fenton attended Yale for graduate study in anthropology. At the end of his first year in New Haven, the Laboratory of Anthropology at Santa Fe awarded him a scholarship for training in field archaeology on the Great Plains of Nebraska and South Dakota, where he took part in his first professional ethnological interviews. Returning to his old home in New York in 1933, Fenton embarked on what would become more than fifty years of field research on the Allegany, Cornplanter, Cattaraugus, and Tonawanda Seneca Reservations and on the Six Nations Reserve in Canada. From 1935 until he received his doctorate in 1937, Fenton also served as a community worker for the United States Indian Service, working principally on the Tonawanda Reservation.

In his first academic appointment in 1937, Fenton introduced anthropology to St. Lawrence University, though he remained for only three semesters before being called to replace J.N.B. Hewitt at the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) of the Smithsonian Institution, earning promotion to Senior Ethnologist in 1943. During the war years, he served as a Research Associate of the Ethnogeographic Board and as Secretary of the Smithsonian War Committee. While a member of the Committee on International Relations in Anthropology at the National Research Council (NRC) from 1952 to 1954, he served as the first Executive Secretary of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology. Meanwhile, he was employed as a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, and Catholic Universities, and at the University of Michigan.

In 1954, Fenton returned to New York State with his wife, Olive (1908-1986), and their three children to become Assistant Commissioner of the New York State Museum and Science Service in Albany, serving as director of the State Museum for thirteen years. In 1968, he abandoned administration and returned to teaching as Research Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Albany. In 1979, the trustees named him Distinguished Professor, and Anthony F.C. Wallace delivered the honorary lecture.

Throughout his career, Fenton’s research centered on the religious ceremonies and customs of the Iroquois, epitomised by his translation (with Elizabeth Moore) of The Customs of the American Indian Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times by Father Joseph François Lafitau, and hy his most influential work, his 1987 book, The False Faces of the Iroquois.

His obituary suggests that his activities were not always appreciated:

He frustrated some tribes by not returning artifacts, insisting museums were necessary safeguards for the items. Some Indian leaders were upset with Fenton for writing about rituals considered to be sacred.

The only book of his which still seems to be in print (at least as far as Amazon.com is concerned) is The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy.

I’m not very familiar with Fenton’s work so if you have some insights into his legacy, please contribute in the comments!

Speaking of fiction . . .

Seeing as discussion has turned to film and TV and the extent to which they represent or misrepresent various cultural or anthropological issues, I thought that “this fictional piece”:http://swiftreport.blogs.com/news/2005/06/gay_coloring_as.html on the proposed limitation of colours with which kids could draw to be quite interesting. What is fascinating is the near-believability of the article and the ensuing comments. What does it say about USAnian (or even North American) society that to some, the article is quite plausible in that it could actually happen but that to others, it is so ludicrous that the satire is obvious?

Now . . .are the comments for real? I’m not sure. Given that some of them refer to a coming war against those who carry a “homosexual agenda and others actually wish death upon all queers, part of me really hopes that they are not.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that I found the link to this article “here”:http://liliane.keenspace.com/.

No Shamans Here

When you tell someone you study anthropology, the chances are that you will hear one of the following responses:

  • I have a friend/relative who studies insects.
  • Like Indiana Jones? Do you have one of those hats?
  • I think shamanism is so fascinating, don’t you?

The shamanism one is the one that gets me the most upset. The other two are understandable confusions caused by ignorance of the field, but the last one is the result of a type of anthropological hucksterism – the deliberate use of pseudo-anthrpological discourse to sell spirituality to New Age believers.

So I was happy to see this page devoted to proving that North American natives do not practice shamanism. The argument is made that shamanism is a very specialized term, originally referring to specific practices associated with the natives of Siberia. From an article by Tori McElroy:

The word “shaman” actually originates among the natives of Siberia, where it describes a specialized type of holy person. The shamans of Siberia interact with deities and spirits not only with prayer, ritual and offerings, but through direct contact with the spirits themselves. With the aid of rhythmic drumming and chanting, the shaman enters a very deep or “ecstatic” trance.

UC Davis anthropologist, Jack Forbes looks at Western traditions of shamanism:

But if we back off and take a look at so-called shamanism from a multi-cultural perspective, instead of a Eurocentric one, we find that the most famous “shamans” of the 20th century have been people like Amy Semple McPherson (founder of the Foursquare Church), Oral Roberts, Billy Joe Hargis, and the legendary Billy Sunday. Moreover, the day-to-day work of “shamanism” in North America is carried mostly by Roman Catholic and other priests who daily enact “shamanistic” rituals (such as Mass, a “magic” ritual where wine becomes blood and wafers become flesh) or by charismatic Protestant preachers (healers) who attempt to cure by the laying on of the hands and other techniques of “faith-healing,” or by religious figures (preachers or priests) who attempt to “control” events, obtain wealth, drive away death, or determine who gets into “Heaven” by means of prayers, incantations or ritual. Millions of Catholics recite a ritual incantation on their rosary beads every day while the church actively sells (or has sold) “relics,” medals, and other items which are thought to possess “magic” powers. The Bible has apparently been used as a “talisman” by fervent Protestants, and the cross is viewed as a potent object by many Christians of different denominations. Being “born again,” spirit possession and other acts of “ecstasy” are regular features of some Protestant sects.

The fact of the matter is that there is no such religion as “shamanism,” since all of the religions of the world make use — perhaps equally — of the tools of the “shaman” including liturgy (ritual), songs, incantations (recited prayers or formulas) and direct contact with the spiritual world (visions, ecstasy) in order to bring about changes on the physical plane.

And since I’ve been writing about etymology-as-argument lately on my own blog, I think it is worth mentioning the way in which etymology is used here. Unlike arguments which seek to persuade showing that two words were linked in the language of some ancient culture, the anti-shamanism argument uses etymology as counterfactual. By showing that the term has its roots in Central Asia, they seek to disprove its applicability to the the American context. Now, I’m not sure I necessarily buy the Sanskrit (via Chinese) origins of the term, but there is no doubt that the word is not North American in origin, as the Oxford Dictionary shows:

from German Schamane and Russian shaman, from Tungus šaman.

Which isn’t too say that we can’t apply words from one culture to another. We do it all the time. But we should be careful about how we do it. As Forbes puts it:

Quite obviously the above definitions present a culturally hostile picture since the use of terms such as “magic,” “demons,” “gods” and “ancestral spirits” will likely be interpreted as backward, evil or even “devilish” by many European readers.

Of course, it is exactly the exotic otherness of shamanism which attracts:

more than 5,000 people each year who take [a] rigorous training in core shamanism, the near universal methods of shamanism without a specific cultural perspective

A have to admit that while it may not seem to be as immediately harmful, the marketing of such cultural exoticism by anthropologists upsets me even more than when they work for the CIA. But then again, orientalism and colonialism have always been connected …

To end on a personal note: The only time I’ve found myself the object of such orientalist mysticism (my South Asian wife gets it all the time) was when I travelled in Germany. I can’t tell you how many people told me: “You’re Jewish? I think Kabbalah is so fascinating.” I have to say, I was pretty tempted to drop out and become a shaman in Berlin…