Tag Archives: Race, genetics

“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?

Anthropology’s Guns, Germs, and Steel Problem

Kerim suggested Savage Minds mount a response to the recent “PBS special”:http://www.pbs.org/previews/gunsgermssteel/ (link courtesy of Kerim) on the theories of self-described polylingual polymath “Jared Diamond”:http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010805G.shtml (scroll down to “about the author”). Rex, our Melanesianist and thus an obvious choice to take up the task, was unfortunately departing for China just at that time. None of the rest of us leapt at the job, though we all conceded it was a worthy idea. Our collective reluctance points, I think, to anthropology’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393317552/qid=1122176923/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/002-8361077-2211200?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 problem.

Has this ever happened to you? You are at a party, or perhaps a family gathering, or maybe even just standing in line at the DMV when the person next to you strikes up a conversation. If they don’t start talking to you about Indiana Jones at the mention of anthropology, there is a fair chance they’ll bring up GG&S – expecting that you just love the book. Now you’re in a pickle. Diamond showily positions GG&S as the definitive anti-racist take on human history. If you say you don’t really care for it, your interlocutor is likely to get a slightly baffled look on her face. What could you possibly mean, you don’t like Diamond’s noble tome? Are you… a racist? To explain why you don’t like the book would take more time than most people making friendly small talk want to spend, and – worse yet – your explanation will necessarily impugn the motives of people who do like it, a group that you now know includes the person with whom you are speaking. My own usual reaction in such encounters is to say that unfortunately I have not read the book but that boy, it sure does sound interesting. Continue reading →

The Genealogy of Neoliberal Capitalism and the Atlantic Slave Trade

A few days ago I came across Long Sunday, a group blog whose contributors write, for the most part, on continental theory writ large. Reading the posts there have taken a while because the comments are often magisterial in length (not unlike some of the posts here at SM!)

Quite frankly I am jaw-drop amazed at the high level of discussion there and I am glad I came across this wonderful site. I have been on-and-off following the individual blogs of some of the contributors (such as Fort Kant, Charlotte Street), but having one place to go to get my RSS feed fix will be convenient.

One particular post, begun by Jodi Dean, caught my attention. She has launched a learned discussion about the ways in which neoliberal capitalism produces a fantasy of Capital as the Real. Taking cue from Slavoj Zizek‘s concept of the imaginary real, she suggests that this neoliberalist fantasy is so sublime (and subliminal) that when disguised in the language of the Symbolic (economic laws, for example) it tends to obfuscate the institutional violence of state power at both the national and international levels.

Here’s a long quote from this post, which neatly summarizes a paper she has made available online titled “Enjoying Neoliberalism“:

Zizek argues that Capital is Real in several senses: it is the ‘positive condition of hegemonic struggle’ (Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 319), it ‘sets a limit to resignification,’ and it determines “the structure of the material social processes themselves’ (Ticklish Subject, 276). But, to assert that Capital is Real is to embrace neoliberal ideology, to accept its premises without a struggle, without inquiry into how neoliberal faith in the market has come to produce a sense of its own inevitability. What is necessary, then, is an account of the neoliberal imaginary allied with the Real.

One might want to claim that Zizek’s elaboration of the Real in terms of an imaginary Real, a symbolic Real, and a real Real and his specification of capital as a symbolic Real (one that operates in terms of basic formulae or persists as an underlying structure) contributes to thinking about capitalism insofar as it points to a logic determining and distorting, that is, forming, the basic matrix of contemporary socio-political life. I disagree. The specification of capital as formulae invests economics with a scientific status, with the ability to formulate laws or truths about the world that tell us how the world functions. Such an investment occludes and naturalizes the roles of governments, both as national states and as international organizations, in creating property rights, establishing corporations, producing a functioning tax system, and sustaining and militarily defending the very infrastructure necessary for business.

As I understand her argument, neoliberal capitalism produces a fantasy around the very notions that guarantee it, such as free trade, private property rights, the right for governments to tax and enforce regulation, etc. These elements of neoliberal capitalism, however, are backed by the state’s fundamental power to mete out punishment. In her short essay she explores this idea through a sharp analysis of the shopaholic and the criminal as two prominent subject positions in neoliberal capitalism.

In her discussion she takes Zizek to task for downplaying the role of disciplinary power in neoliberal capitalism while overemphasizing the truimph of unfettered exchange-value. She asks:

How is that we have been taken in by capital? That we find ourselves so entrenched in it that escape seems impossible, a step into oblivion?

To answer this question, Alphonse van Worden, another blogger at the site, delves into the history of the Atlantic slave trade. If Dean argues that neoliberal capitalism produces a sublime fantasy around the institutions of state power, for Alphonse this resonates specifically with the genealogy of emancipatory politics (she brings up the transatlantic slave trade) as integral to understanding the legacy of private property rights.

She makes sure to explain the process of inversion whereby the initial calls for liberating slaves, which were initially a response to the traumatic encounter with the horrors of industrial capitalism, had been usurped by Capital itself in the form of liberal economic thought. For this inversion to be convincing, however, required not only “the revival of antique narratives and the fanstastic and the fabulous” but also the twisting of the political mythology from an image of freedom to that of bondage. This is why she says:

Its a head-exploding irony that the modern concept of ‘freedom’ upon which the idea of ‘free trade’ is built and which is the fairy in its shell was first embodied in sugar industry slaves, who were physically the ‘freedom’ of their proprietors.

Reading this exchange I immediately thought of a parallel discussion about the theory of labor power in Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, which was mentioned in the commentary (Alphonse also mentions Robert Brenner’s Merchants and Revolution, which I did not know of but sounds fascinating from a comparativist perspective.)

I am quite enthralled by this bringing together of Zizekian musings on neoliberal capitalism and what seems to me as a more “British Cultural Marxist” look at the history of industrial capitalism. Although I am not fully convinced of Dean’s critique of Zizek (but then she’s read much more Zizek than I have, so who am I to say this), this move to ground a critique of neoliberalism in a nuanced historical materialist sort of analysis is promising. If anything, it blasts through the comforting mythology of neoliberal capitalism that we (or I should really say “I” to be less presumptuous) often wrap ourselves in by tuning into the emancipatory potential of one’s encouters with the acute economic and political inequalities that exist today. This engagement with the Real is for me at the heart of the ethnographic encounter — and perhaps is part of my answer to oneman’s discussion about the disciplinary “moral core” of anthropology.

This discussion also brings back some of the key theoretical issues in the anthropology of political economy (the work of Sidney Mintz immediately comes to mind). It also touches on the anthropology of law, which in rent years has been energized through a double-whammy of Giorgio Agamben‘s reappraisal of Foucault’s theory of biopolitics and the critique of neoliberalism from what I see as a more Anglo-American take on the politics of recognition.

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.)

Caucasian Eden

Tom Tomorrow has posted an excerpt of an article on race by Jack Hitt, a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine. Here is an excerpt of the excerpt, on the history of the term “Caucasian”:

It was not until the Age of Reason that scientists tried to figureout empirically what race meant and how it came to be. The signal year was 1776, with the publication of a book called On the Natural Varieties of Mankind, by German biologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. At the time, Blumenbach’s theory had a certain symmetry that made it the very model of good science. These days, his theory seems insane. He argued that Native American Indians were the transitional race that eventually led to Asians. (Don’t try to work out the geography of this: it will make your head explode.) And another group— which Blumenbach simply conjured from a faraway people, the “Malayans”—evolved over time to become Africans. (Again, if you’re puzzling out the geography, watch your head.) At the center of all this change was the white race, which was constant. Blumenbach believed darkness was a sign of change from the original. All of mankind had fallen from perfection, but the darker you were, the farther you had fallen. As a result, the best way to locate the original Garden of Eden, according to Blumenbach, was to follow the trail of human. . . beauty. The hotter the women, the hunkier the men, the closer you were to what was left of God’s first Paradise. Here is Blumenbach explaining the etymology of the new word he hoped to coin:

I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian . . .

Blumenbach’s theory is totally forgotten today by everybody (except maybe Georgian men). All that remains is a single relic, the word he coined for God’s most gorgeous creation—”Caucasian.” The word itself is lovely. Say it: Caucasian. The word flows off the tongue like a stream trickling out of Eden. Its soothing and genteel murmur poses quite a patrician contrast to the field-labor grunts of the hard g’s in “Negroid” and “Mongoloid.” Caucasian. The exotic isolation of those mountains intimates a biblical narrative. You can almost see it when you say it: the early white forebears walking away from paradise to trek to Europe and begin the difficult task of creating Western Civilization.

Commodifying Girls, Harajuku Style

I wanted to avoid writing about Japan in my first post on Savage Minds (because I do that all the time at my own blog), but alas I am a creature of habit. But I hope I will be pardoned: I’m reporting about an anthropologist in a major print publication. And this will be sort of a riff on Kerim’s earlier mention of the clever parody on the African village planned at a German zoo.

Anne Allison, a Professor of Anthropology at Duke University, is mentioned in this week’s the New York Times Magazine in an article titled “Love. Angels. Product. Baby.” The piece is written by Rob Walker, who regularly writes for the magazine about consumerism and the money-centric culture of the capitalist society we live in. His column, “Consumed,” is in the “Way We Live Now” section of the NY Times Magazine).

(By the way, here’s another anthro connection: in this interview, Walker describes his endeavor as a “hybrid business-and-anthropology column.” Hmm…)

Walker writes that popstar Gwen Stefani‘s new album, Love. Angel. Music. Baby, and the entire marketing carnivalesque surrounding it (including an HP digicam branded as “Harajuku Lovers“), can be summed up by this neat phrase: “the commodification of commodification.”

Stefani’s latest album prominently figures “The Harajuku Girls” and is a paean to Harajuku, a section of Tokyo known as a neighborhood where hip youngsters come out dressing up in the strangest mixture of goth, tribal, haut-couture, and seemingly every other trend in the world history of fashion. Along with Shibuya, which has more love hotels and generally feels a bit more “adult,” Harajuku is the testing ground for Japanese marketers trying out their ware: they know that if a product catches on among the young hipsters who loiter there, it will sell well and perhaps conquer the world.

To Stefani, Harajuku Girls are hip. Why does she think this? Walker clues us in:

What is unusual is tha Stefani does not seem drawn to this subculture by ideology, rebelliousness or even a dance style. She seems drawn solely to a group’s apparent skill as shoppers. The song “Harajuku Girls” is a cross between a fashion-magazine trend story and an expositional number from a Broadway musical.

So Stefani, whose earlier persona in her band No Doubt was the punked up bad girl who bansheed around and shouted her head off to ska beats, is now all starry-eyed about shopping for the latest trends. Walker continues:

So what we really have here is not just a pop star endorsing a product but a pop star paying tribute to a consumer tribe. The real star behind the camera is not Stefani, but a specific breed of global hyper-consumer — as translated by Stefani. […] It is the commodification of commodification.

At this point Walker cites Anne Allison as a critical observer of the way Japanese subcultural icons have been swept up by the global mediascape (she examines, for example, Pokémon, in an article in this book), and asks a loaded question: “But […] does that mean that Japan has a real currency now? Or is it just a cool brand?”

Walker’s article is insightful in many ways. But I have a few problem with his interpretation of the Harajuku Girls.

For one, I don’t think Walker addresses the fact that these girls are represented in an exploitatively orientalist manner. When Stefani came out with the Harajuku Girls back in April, the blogosphere was flooded with feminist and Asian-American critiques of how these four dolled up cyber-ghetto-geisha girls have become a harem-like accessory piece of a white girl (much of this criticism launched by a Salon article by MiHi Ahn and reproduced here by Howard French). The poster up top is a photoshopped expression of this critical perspective.

Yet there is another set of stereotypes being evoked here by Stefani, which has to do with Japan as somehow beyond the present, without history, and self-absorbingly capitalist in some techno-utopian state of bliss. This kind of thinking has its roots in Alexandre Kojève‘s oft-noted declaration that Japan is a post-historical society (retracted I think later in his life) and Roland Barthes‘s otherwise great masterpiece, The Empire of the Sign. (I won’t go into details here, and I know I’m reaching a bit if I claim that the following also applies to the Harajuku Girls, but this line of thinking also resonates with 1. Japan’s wartime fascist ideology, which cast Japan as already beyond the West and” post-modern”, and 2. the contemporary triumphalism of neoliberal economics as in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of the History.)

A few years back Japanese critic Toshiya Ueno, writing about Japanimation, called the representation of a technologically utopic Japan as “Techno-orientalism.” In the case of the Harajuku Girls, some “consumer-orientalism” may be at work: a representation of a nation and its people as serious shopaholics to the point where girls would be willing to “whore up.”

Walker, whose sole criterion for judging good products seems to be “about figuring how to remake a subcultural style into something salable on a mass scale” (from the NYT Mag article), joins Stefani and her marketing team in celebrating this “commodification of commodification.” He understands that commodification involves not only buying (such as the act of girls accessorizing) but also selling. Yet he seems unfazed about what it is that they’re actually selling.

Walter Benjamin, in “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” writes of the prostitute as a figure of pure commodity: “a saleswoman and wares in one” (Reflections, p.157). It is difficult for me to not see these Harajuku girls as a similar figure of the prostitute as commodity, one that mixes racism, sexism, and the technologies of consumption into one bold entertainment package.

Now whenever a blogger debunks exploitative images in mass media, someone has to make a comment that is a variation of the following: “this is only a video/movie/pop song, so don’t take it so seriously.” To this I reply: I am not the one who might take this seriously, but rather the little boys and girls watching Stefani videos and taking in all this stereotyping as reality.

I’m usually not one for identity politics. But the Harakuju Girls is just a bit too over the top for me. So what do y’all think, am I just over-reacting?

Funny, you don’t look Jewish

This is a followup to a previous post by Rex about an article which claimed that Ashkenazi Jews are genetically smarter. The folks at Gene Expression have had a few posts on the subject, mostly focusing on the ways in which the paper overlooks the historical importance of Sephardic Jews, and the general importance of “cultural” factors. They also reproduced an interesting paper by Howard Metzenberg. He argues that “above average Jewish intelligence can be traced to the origins of rabbinical Judaism itself around the time of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.” I would re-write that to say “the above-average engagement in academic pursuits” so as to avoid the tricky “intelligence” word, which Rex so rightly picks on in his post. (And which Metzenberg tactfully avoids discussing.)

Nonetheless, the article is full of interesting insights. For instance, I never thought of Judaism as an proselytizing religion, but that’s what it was in the first and second centuries:

In the ancient world of Greece and Rome, Judaism was a proselytizing religion and took in many converts. It has been estimated that in the 1st and 2nd centuries, about 10% of the population of the Roman Empire was Jewish, and as many as 25% in the Greek speaking cities of the Eastern Mediterranean. It was for this largely Greek speaking population that the Septuagint (a Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures) was produced. And it was amongst this Greek speaking Jewish population that Paul of Tarsus traveled, proselytizing Christianity.

He also argues that it is impossible to distinguish Ashkenazis as a distinct genetic group within the Jewish population:

One of the reasons that the authors could find no evidence of a population bottleneck in the Ashkenazi Jewish population is that the Ashkenazi population has never been as distinct or isolated as they imagine. The original Ashkenazi population probably descends from Italian Jews who migrated north in the early Middle Ages. Genetic testing of Y-Chromosome phenotypes supports the theory that Ashkenzi Jewish males are closely related to the remnant community of Romaniote Jews, who by tradition are the descendants of Judeans brought to Italy and Greece as captives after the many religious wars and rebellions in the Middle East. Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews of Europe were engaged in trade with the Middle East, and it was through those trade routes that Jewish scholarship from the Middle East entered Europe. Later on, there was considerable gene flow from Sephardic populations escaping the Inquisition into the Ashkenazi community, and this is reflected in language and surnames.

Personally I still prefer the theory that Ashkenazis are primarily Central Asian in origin…

Bavarian Village on Display in African Zoo

lederhosen2

That’s the suggestion of Doughnut Boy Andy in response to an e-mail about “plans to open an ‘African Village’ within the zoo of Augsburg, Germany.” Prometheus 6 has the full English version of the recently circulated e-mail. Ethno::log covered the story as well.

The only thing I’d like to add to all of this is a recommendation that people see the very fine film “Bontoc Eulogy” by Filipino-American filmmaker Marlon Fuentes. It is wonderfully rye and witty fake documentary which uses real footage from the 1904 World Fair in St. Louis to construct a fictional narrative in which the filmmaker claims his own grandfather was one of the “natives” on display. If your school doesn’t already own a copy they should buy one!

UPDATE: Links to further discussion.

Admission of racial profiling in Canada: What next?

Here’s an interesting “article”:http://sympaticomsn.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1117145635847_112554835?hub=topstories in Canadian news today about the Kingston (I can only assume they’re referring to Kingston, Ontario) police force:

“Kingston’s police chief apologized to the city’s black community Thursday after a controversial study found officers are more likely to stop black people than whites.”

The police chief went on to specify that the officers themselves had no reason to apologise because:

“What we’re doing wrong if we’re doing anything wrong is systemic and that’s my problem.”

I think it’s great that the existence of a problem of racial profiling is being addressed. However, I find it fascinating that the chief of police is willing to carry the blame for a long tradition of systemic and institutionalised racism in Canada (although I realise that this is probably not his intention). As an individual and an authority figure, he can certainly exert some influence on the people under his command, while he is in command.

The problem, though, is that racial profiling is a symptom of a wider societal problem that reaches far beyond the police force. The roots of this problem are tightly intertwined with educational and political problems that also need to be examined. That being said, I’m sceptical about the exercise of looking at police practices in isolation from the social and cultural context within which they are located.

But, hey, it’s a start and I sure can’t complain about the issue being given some recognition and acknowledgement; enough so that an actual scientific study was conducted with the cooperation of the police force. I’m looking forward to hearing about what will be done at a concrete level once the report is fully analysed.