The 2016 Olympics in Rio are fast approaching. For the past two months, people I haven’t seen in years—and people I have never even met—have been emailing to ask if I can help them find an affordable and, above all, safe place to stay during the Games. Never mind that I haven’t been to Rio for four years. Never mind that “affordable” and “safe” are relative terms. The assumption is that, having spent several years conducting fieldwork in northeastern Brazilian prisons (most recently in 2014-2015), I’m a better guide to Rio than the Lonely Planet.

While I do know of an inexpensive pension house in Humaitá where an order of Catholic nuns hosts unaccompanied women who don’t mind a 10 p.m. curfew, I can’t provide much information about lodgings. What I can offer is a nuanced perspective on safety—one that is informed by the study of the historical relationships, public institutions, and cultural logics that have contributed to making Rio (and other Brazilian cities) seem so dangerous. But the people who have contacted me to find out if Rio is safe don’t seem to want that. They want me to reassure them that their (mostly) white skin and their easy access to American and European consular services will insulate them from the threats they’ve read about online and in the news. 

References

Caldeira, Teresa Pires. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Larkins, Erika Mary Robb. The Spectacular Favela: Violence in Modern Brazil.Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015.

Penglase, R. Ben. Living with Insecurity in a Brazilian Favela: Urban Violence and Daily Life. New Brunswick, NJ:Rutgers University Press, 2014.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I also still remember the rose in cappuccino foam.

There were many problems with HTS. Not only was it unethical, the quality of work it produced was, iirc, pretty lousy. Moreover, it actively supported American military action which was not only morally wrong, but a tremendous strategic error with an enormous price tag in dollars and lives. According to Counterpunch, HTS’s slice of the pie was US$725 million dollars. It’s hard to see HTS as anything except an object lesson in ethical and scientific failure. It didn’t even engage interesting ethical questions about collaboration with the military, applied anthropology, and ethics. It was just fail. Anthropologists everywhere can be glad it has now been relegated to ethics section of anthropology syllabi.

Perhaps one good thing that has come out of HTS is that the AAA managed to show strong ethical leadership throughout this period. This is in stark contrast to the American Psychological Association, which colluded with the CIA to produce ethical standards that made facilitating torture acceptable to its members. To be honest, I’m not really sure this indicates the strong moral fiber of the AAA so much as its lack of relevance to American actions abroad, at least until a network of concerned anthropologists pushed it to act (or, perhaps, to act in and through it).

At the end of the day, anthropology took a stance against HTS, and history has born this stance out. Goodbye and good riddance to HTS.

Die-In, lobby of the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, Washington DC

ABA Statement Against Police Violence and Anti-Black Practices (8 December 2014)

The Association of Black Anthropologists condemns, in no uncertain terms, the ongoing terrorism waged against Black U.S. communities by the state, police, and White vigilantes. We condemn the executions of our boys and girls, women and men by the police in Ferguson, Staten Island, Saratoga Springs, Los Angeles, and throughout the country. We also recognize that these forms of state violence are perpetrated against Black people globally. We are enraged by the fact that no police officer has been indicted in the recent murders of Aiyanna Jones, Michael Brown and Eric Garner; and we are outraged that in the hundred days since the murder of Michael Brown, police have also murdered unarmed Ezell Ford, unarmed Tanisha Anderson, unarmed Roshad McIntosh, unarmed Akai Gurley, unarmed Dante Parker and unarmed Kajieme Powell. These are state-sponsored massacres of our people, massacres enabled by a long history of national and global anti-Blackness.

As it pertains to the ongoing atrocities of the criminal justice system in this country – alongside those who spoke before the United Nations in November, we charge genocide.[1]

As members of the academic discipline with the distinctive history of establishing the language and “science” of race to justify settler colonialism and slavery, we recognize full well that the root of today’s anti-Black state-sponsored violence in the U.S. is white supremacy. We know that our discipline played a significant role in developing the trope of a particular Black subject – the “urban” Black – that has been deployed by society at large to dehumanize Black people.  At the same time, we also realize that our discipline has been tepid in fruitfully acknowledging and addressing its own white supremacist foundation. We therefore call on our colleagues in the American Anthropological Association to join us in not only condemning this history but also in affirming that Black Lives Matter – beyond the role of ethnographic subjects and cultural vessels. We call on our colleagues in anthropology to stand against the U.S. state’s terrorism against Black and Brown peoples. We call on our colleagues to join us in demanding redress and restitution, with expediency.

As Anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston is known to have said, “If you are silent about your pain, they will kill you and say you enjoyed it.” We will not be silent. For members of the American Anthropological Association to be silent at this time given our discipline’s historic complicity in establishing the current order, and when we have the means to make a difference, is criminal.

To this end

1. We call on the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association to issue a formal statement that condemns the heinousness of these crimes and calls on our academic guild to more forcefully tackle the problems brought on by racism and racial profiling. We ask that the Executive Board make every effort to make this statement accessible to the general public through mainstream media outlets so the discipline’s stance and investment in these efforts can be widely known.
2. We call on our colleagues to join the ABA in challenging the power positions from which we produce anthropology.
3. We join with other anthropologists, and stand in solidarity with people from around the country, in calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to review the use of force by police and to make a commitment to working for the eradication of racism and racialized state violence.

AAA Section Assembly Motion on Anti-Black Violence in the USA (5 December 2014)

The Section Assembly of the American Anthropological Association is outraged by the failure of the Ferguson and Staten Island grand juries to indict the police officers who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and the dismissal of the case against the officer who killed 7 year old Aiyana Jones.  In the hundred days since the murder of Michael Brown, police have also murdered 12 year old Tamir Rice, Ezell Ford, Darien Hunt, Aura Rain Rosser, Tanisha Anderson, Roshad McIntosh, Akai Gurley, Vonderitt Myers, and Rumain Brisbon, among others – all unarmed. These incidents reflect a blatant disregard for the value and dignity of their lives and the communities in which they live. These events are representative of a broader U.S. history of systematic anti-black violence, dating back to the enslavement, lynch laws, and the prison-industrial complex that affects black children, men, women and gender queer people.

As members of an academic discipline with the distinctive history of establishing the language and “science” of race, which has been used to justify settler colonialism and slavery, we understand the roots of this state violence. While U.S. ideologies hold that we are all equal under the law, this has never been the case, and in fact inequality has been structured into the justice system from the start, and is currently escalating via the militarization of local police forces.

To this end, we want the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association to: 1) make a formal statement condemning these activities and structural conditions, 2) create a Task Force to explore issues related to racialized police brutality and extra-judicial violence; and 3) call on the U.S Justice Department to review the use of force by police and to make a commitment to working for the eradication of racism and racialized state violence.

Action and Organizing at the AAAs

For many people, this year’s AAAs was like no other. Who knows when the last time was that so many members attended the organization’s business meeting? Energy and commitment was palpable, powerfully so at the business meeting as the vote on the above Section Assembly Motion followed a landslide vote to continue discussion and education on a possible boycott of Israeli education institutions. Political crises brought scholars together across fieldsites, generations, issues, and more. ABA member Bianca Williams (Colorado) speaks to this sense of momentum:

“The activities and energy at the AAA has truly reestablished my faith in our discipline. I worked diligently with folks from different walks this past week—ABA members; researchers who study police violence; anthropologists from all four fields; AAA Executive Board members; passionate graduate students; and scholars who have been committed to fighting anti-Black thought and practices–to ensure that anthropology clearly stated and demonstrated its investment in destroying the structural racism that facilitates an environment where Black lives are devalued. The die-in, the major presence at the general body business meeting, the support of senior anthropologists, and the ABA’s statement lets me know, and hopefully lets others know, that anthropologists are committed to fighting this struggle for the long term, as we have particular theoretical and methodological contributions to make. For me, this is what engaged anthropology looks like. Hopefully AAA 2014 was a call to action for all anthropologists.”

We are learning as we are acting too; a powerful image went up on Twitter of AAA President Leith Mullings (CUNY, The Grad Center) guiding younger scholars in the ways of AAA bureaucracy, on task forces and sections and motions, and how to get things done.

In reflecting on #AAA2014, Aries Dela Cruz (Rutgers) captured the sense of possibility for work inside the AAA that speaks to and with the outside world:

“This was my first AAA as a new anthropology student, and what it has taught me is that our discipline can be most effective and affective when we respond to a political moment. The public takes us seriously when we speak in a language that’s relevant to them, understands their grammar and modes of being. In addition to physically symbolizing racialized repression and state violence, the die-in laid the groundwork for the motion to be overwhelmingly passed by the section assembly.

All over the world, people can now see anthropologists as a resource they might be able to access in their local communities as allies, as people who can train them to conduct ethnographies of police departments to be able to be used in civil rights lawsuits.”

How can we best use the institutional spaces and structures available to us? How can we transform these spaces and structures as needed? One thing is for sure: our ethnographic knowledge, our teachings, our energy is needed now inside anthropology as well as outside of it. Next year in Denver….and between now and then, there is much work to be done.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/11/we-charge-genocide-movement-chicago-un/382843/

With thanks to Whitney Battle-Baptiste, Aries Dela Cruz, Marco Hill, and Bianca Williams for photos, stories, and help putting it all together. For more photos from the AAA Die-In, see Marco Hill’s website.

The New York Times describes it:

At a candlelight vigil on Sunday evening, the heightened tensions between the police and the African-American community were on display. A crowd estimated in the thousands flooded the streets near the scene of the shooting, some of them chanting “No justice, no peace.” They were met by hundreds of police officers in riot gear, carrying rifles and shields, as well as K-9 units.

The Washington Post elaborates:

His death immediately sparked outrage, with protests and vigils beginning that day and showing no sign of abating on Monday. The reaction took a violent turn on Sunday, as some protesters began looting businesses in the Ferguson area over several hours, leaving a trail of broken glass and burned-out storefronts in their wake.

It sounds like there was a confrontation between protestors and police as well as loss of property later on. Is this a riot?

Yes, suggests NYT:

Images and videos captured on cellphones and posted on social media sites appeared to show people spray-painting and looting a QuikTrip gas station and other stores. Rioters shattered the windows of the gas station and damaged several police cars, said Brian Lewis, a spokesman for the St. Louis County Police Department.

Not necessarily says WaPo:

Hundreds of police officers responded to the looting on Sunday night, arresting 32 people in total, according to the St. Louis County police. Two officers suffered relatively minor injuries. The people who were arrested could be facing charges of assault, burglary and larceny, a spokesman said.

Labeling a conflict as a “riot” is an inherently political act as it draws a rhetorical contrast between this event and others which it may superficially resemble but have been assigned alternate valences in the dominant narratives. For example the Stamp Act Protests or the Boston Tea Party also involved street protests, opposing groups taking sides, and illegal destruction of property but are considered rebellions, revolts, the harbingers of revolution.

So-called “riots” are odd artifacts of our legal system. The Bill of Rights protects freedom of assembly but riots per se have some violent quality about them that transforms them into an illegal assembly. What makes a riot distinct is that it is comprised of warring parties that are working in concert for some purpose. So this is different again from a rowdy group in bar or theater coming to blows resulting in property loss. Rioters belong to factions and so joining in one is a kind of identity statement. Thus in addition to being destructive and dangerous they are also performances of collective identity.

Here’s one to look for in the coming days: rioting not only as threat of bodily harm or loss of property, but as a moral threat, the “mob mentality.” The seething mob acts against its own best interests because of its lack of restraint. In a similar vein to riot is to indulge in an excess of luxury, it is a display of gluttony. Rioters are criticized for deriving pleasure and personal gain at the expense of others.

That is unless some combatants come to be held in high esteem and are given a positive moral evaluation. Then they become leaders in a “rebellion.”

In addition to the forthcoming FBI investigation, what an conflagration like this demands is savvy public relations strategy on the part of governments. It is not unusual for persons in positions of power to avoid the term “riot” altogether because of its stigma. Instead euphemisms such as “disturbance” serve to minimize or metonymy such as “the violence” are used to ignore the political demands at the heart of violent conflict against the state and its symbols.

In sum riots may viewed as social dramas, they embody the sudden emergence of a neglected population demanding visibility and mainstream society, caught off guard, must acknowledge their presence.

One of my most memorable moments in graduate school was when Fredrik Barth — who I have a lot of respect for — came to give a talk to our department. The highlight for me was when he was describing how much he enjoyed spending time with people in Papua New Guinea during his fieldwork there. They were, he said, friendly and “the most wonderful shade of brown.” I think he was trying to be provocative and he succeeded — there was an audible gasp from the brown anthropologists in the room, as well as from pretty much everyone else.

And then there is Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf.

A friend of mine recently turned me on to this interview with him from Alan MacFarlane’s massive series of oral histories of anthropology. It’s worth a listen, since his fieldwork experiences seem completely INSANE to me and probably will to you too. His luck at going on a punitive expedition in northeastern India. His assurance to MacFarlane that burning down a village is not a big deal because ‘it was only made out of grass and bamboo’. The looting of human remains. And, probably my favorite, when MacFarlane asks CvF-H to rate the beauty of the different groups he’s studied with and CvH-F says that one group was not attractive because they were ‘darker’.

I’m not sure what to make of CvH-F’s career. He personally doesn’t seem like a bad person. But his career… what are we to make of it? is it a lesson in how far we’ve come, ethically, and anthropologists? Is it a lesson in how far we have to go? Am I wrong in thinking there’s something ethically problematic in accompanying government patrols in which villages are destroyed? 

I have no idea. I just personally feel like we will not be able to move forward as a discipline unless we understand our past. The deeper we understand it, the better. Rethinking our canon includes expanding it to include people like St. Clair Drake, as well as continuing to read about CvH-F. But mostly, listening to this interview my overall thought was: there are some things that are so INSANE your first thought is: blog first, ask questions later.

In the last few weeks, social work scholar turned pop-psychology web superstar Brené Brown came out with a short animated video summarizing much of her writing on empathy. It opens by drawing a distinction between empathy and sympathy.  According to Brown, empathy fuels connection while sympathy drives disconnection. For those of you who are expert in the area of the anthropology of emotions, I am guessing it would be fairly easy to come up with cross-cultural scenarios that put this pop-psych in its place (and please do!). That sympathy has become the bad guy in US self-help genres isn’t all that surprising.  In psychology and analytic philosophy, empathy and sympathy are part of a larger cohort referred to as “other regarding emotions”. Debating the appropriateness of the other regarding emotions—from pity to compassion to sympathy to empathy—lends itself to prescriptive ways of being the world.  This short video presumes that we can know what will feel good to others. In this case empathy feels good, and sympathy feels bad.

In the video, Brown lists four qualities of empathy

1.     Perspective taking, recognizing that someone else’s perspective is their truth

2.     Staying out of judgment

3.     Recognizing emotion in other people and then communicating that

4.     Feeling with people

The empathy list above implies concepts of the self, society and personhood that we may not like. Yet, these list items do seem to be part of the anthropological tool kit. As people who excel in perspective taking, I wonder what anthropology might make of a growing interest in empathy?  Anthropology seems to me to be great place to think through empathy’s merits and limits.

In the worlds of counselling, education and social work, empathy is experiencing a mini boom. Brown’s video is only a snippet of the empathy industrial complex. Ok, that is gratuitous use of ‘industrial complex’, but hear me out. A good philosopher/friend of mine recently took a job with a non-profit that purports to bring lessons in empathy to schoolchildren across Canada and increasingly around the world. The program rests on the premise that developing empathy is a universal human trait, which reduces conflict. Indeed, the program is typically promoted in terms of its self-identified power as a “universal preventative intervention.” However, it gained international attention when, following the London riots, Cameron’s Tory government responded by stating that rioting was a result of a “lack of empathy”. He quickly moved to introduce a pilot version of the empathy curriculum in the city’s “troubled” neighbourhoods.

I will share my own thoughts and struggles with empathy in a subsequent post. To start, I will say that I sometimes wonder if the current ontological questions are meant to unshackle us from the empathy anchor. Anthropology is other-regarding. Its emotional state is far less clear. Is anthropology with or without empathy?

Scott repeats several common criticisms of Diamond in his review: he likes Diamond’s discussion of endangered languages and is disappointed by how obvious Diamond’s advice on how to live is. It is the final third of his review which really shines.

Scott’s first argument will be familiar to anyone who has read Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History: Diamond’s “fundamental mistake,” Scott writes, is to try to “triangulate his way to the deep past by assuming that contemporary hunter-gatherer societies… show what we were like before we discovered crops, towns, and government.” Rather, he argues,

The inference of pristine isolation, however, is completely unwarranted for virtually all of the 35 societies he canvasses [Scott excepts PNG]. Those societies have, for the last five thousand years, been deeply involved in a world of trade, states and empires and are often now found in undesirable marginal areas to which they have been pushed by more powerful societies… So thoroughly have they come to live in a world of powerful kingdoms and states that one might call these societies themselves a ‘state effect’… Contemporary foraging societies, far from being untouched examples of our deep past, are up to their necks in the ‘civilised world’ (this quote and all others are from Scott’s review)

This is an important point for people to realize: the people Diamond discusses were not on pause until The West showed up with a giant remote control labelled “colonialism” and pressed its play button. They are the results of colonial history, not something that proceeded it. Every single one of them (Papua New Guinea included).

Scott’s second point deals with the idea that “maintenance of peace within a society is one of the most important services that a state can provide” and that people naturally chose to live in them for the security they provide. Scott disagrees. First, he points out that the state centralizes violence, rather than curbing it. Second, and more importantly, Scott points out that, frankly, it sucked to live in an early state. Reading Diamond’s account, Scott writes, ” one can get the impression that the choice facing hunters and gatherers was one between their world and, say, the modern Danish welfare state. In practice, their option was to trade what they had for subjecthood in the early agrarian state.” This included a world of slavery, patriarchal authority, wars and rebellions, and labor exploitation. Diamond argues that the ever-present threat of violence in ‘traditional societies’ led people to embrace living in states. But in fact, Scott argues, hunter gatherers had many methods to avoid violence such as compensation and migration — methods which, I might add, Diamond himself praises at great length in his book. Their diet was healthier (another Diamond point) and their lifestyle was as well — Scott points out the dangers of germs (another Diamond favorite) in large, unhygienic early cities. “It’s hard to imagine Diamond’s primitives giving up their physical freedom, their varied diet, their egalitarian social structure, their relative freedom from famine, large-scale state wars, taxes and systematic subordination in exchange for what Diamond imagines to be ‘the king’s peace’.” Scott concludes.

Furthermore, Scott points out that violence in ‘traditional societies’ the Diamond examines is the result of living in “a world of states,” not living in one free of them. Much ‘tribal fighting’ is the result of non-state people scrambling to access the rare goods that state-dwellers desired but non-state people had access to: ivory, pelts, and so forth.

Those familiar with Scott’s work will not be surprised to see the angle of approach that he takes in this essay. Those who are familiar with the critical reception Diamond has received in the blogosphere will also see that Scott’s points have been made before, most especially in a post on Jason Antrosio’s Living Anthropologically blog. Still, it is nice to have these points made by a ‘big name’ in a ‘real publication’ and in under 4,000 words. To some — for instance: me — the idea of James Scott criticizing Jared Diamond for writing a big-picture book about that falls apart when subject to scrutiny by specialists will seem a little ironic. But this is a worthwhile review that deserves wide readership.

On Saturday September 21st 2013, an upscale shopping center in Nairobi, Kenya became the target of a ruthless siege. A group of gunmen, their estimated number ranging between 6 and 15, entered the Westgate Mall and opened fire on bewildered shoppers, indiscriminately killing men, women and children. A few hours into the siege, Al-Shabaab – a Somali Islamist group with ties to Al-Qaeda – claimed the Westgate attack, not through an auspicious video delivered to a major television network, nor through an official statement of Al-Shabaab’s leader, Ahmed Godane, but via a Tweet on the organization’s Twitter account. The militants’ use of social media, and of Twitter in particular, would be featured centrally in the international media’s coverage of the attack. This preoccupation with Al-Shabaab’s use of new media technology, and the concern it was able to create, revealed much more about our apprehension toward the unexpected linkages and similarities social media create than it did about Al-Shabaab’s international reach. The media coverage of the Westgate siege illustrated how we laud the “power” of social media when it generates desirable similarities; unanticipated linkages, however, need to be explained away. A focus on “outliers” or “extremists,” or the identification of practices that answer to our social imaginary then restores the familiar distance between of “us” and “them.” 

During the four-day siege, twitter feeds from both Al-Shabaab militants and Kenyan security forces provided the public with updates on their positions and strategies. The Al-Shabaab account, purportedly monitored by allies communicating with the Westgate attackers, provided often disturbing minute-to-minute updates of the events in the mall, ranging from reports on the shooting of hostages to warnings at the address of the Kenyan government. Although Twitter suspended the purported Al-Shabaab accounts numerous times, newly created ghost accounts had hundreds of followers soon after the flow of Tweets recommenced. 

Al-Shabaab’s use of this particular social media outlet fascinated international media. Interest in feed content aside, the use of the platform itself and the linguistic practices of tweeters seemed to suggest that American youth were involved in the attack and thus hinted at the international support network behind the Westgate assailants. The reports on the siege, the hate speech, and threats of future retaliations were not stated in Arabic, Somali, or ‘deficient’ English. Rather, the majority of the postings were formulated in faultless, often even colloquial, American (and sometimes British) English. Statements such as “y’all shall remain doomed forever,” “karma is a bitch” or “we ain’t negotiating till you pull your troops out” served as evidence to Al-Shabaab’s earlier proclamations regarding the participation of young men from the United States, the UK and Canada (among others) in the Westgate siege. Although the authenticity of the account as well as the accuracy of the statements were never confirmed (and were, in fact, highly questionable) North American media eagerly picked up on the Tweets and shifted the focus of its reporting. The unfolding at the Westgate mall itself, the fate of the hostages, the aftermath of the siege and the implications for Kenyan citizens thereby disappeared to the background. Only one question appeared to now occupy news anchors: What does Westgate mean for America? 

Social media brought far removed terror home to the United States. The ease with which alleged Al-Shabaab militants used new media technology as well as the language they used transformed the morally unknowable foreign “others” into recognizable social types, making these “terrorists” more familiar than the American public might otherwise prefer. North American media’s emphasis on Al-Shabaab’s use of Twitter and the value they attached to the unverified messages (something news stations like CNN would be criticized for in the days to come) was striking. After all, the use of social media by groups like Al-Shabaab is nothing new. On the contrary, militant groups like Al-Shabaab are known to have used channels like YouTube, Soundcloud, and Twitter to recruit youth for quite some time. Many North Americans, however, tend to view social media as representing their own networks and cultural practices, as something almost inherently “western.”

This does not mean that others can’t appropriate such practices; the Arab Spring clearly illustrated the social power behind the use of new media technology. But in that context social media facilitated the “liberation” of people in a much-needed “revolution.” Westgate exposed something entirely different: it created an estranged confrontation with “terrorists” who speak and act “like us,” thereby producing, as it were, a cognitive dissonance. 

The media’s response to the Twitter feeds is confrontationally telling about the West’s unwillingness to accept the new linkages that social media have created and thus the refusal to rethink the networks to which we “belong.” In an attempt to “tidy up” the distorted image of “us” and “them,” North American media set out to find elements that confirmed the familiar social imaginary: in the Twitter feeds, in the Somali community in Minnesota, in the new myth of Britain’s white widow, and in the oft-repeated sensational stories about the attackers’ careful separation of Muslims and non-Muslims. What Westgate, and its North-American coverage, painfully illustrated is the discursive, mediatized erasure of the unwanted connections and similarities between the feared “other” and “us” that were manifested through social media practices. New media technologies are linking us in a variety of ways, yet Westgate showed that we are only comfortable with a few of these. We look at social media practices when they answer to our social imaginary, but prefer to ignore them when they don’t, thereby erasing the unexpected similarities new media have created. 

As I was writing this article, I was informed about another event that disturbed the peace in Kenya. Via Facebook and Twitter I heard about the targeted shooting of four Muslims, including one Imam, in the coastal city of Mombasa. This time, none of the national or international media channels picked up on the Twitter feeds, despite the graphic images posted. However, the next day the images of Muslim youth burning churches in the riots that unfolded as a response to the shooting were featured centrally in the Friday news. The more familiar picture of the “radical” Muslim youth and a repeated emphasis on the East African coast being a “center for Islam radicalism” reestablished a comfortable distance between “us” and “them,” removing “home grown terrorism” from the picture. 

As a researcher working with Muslim youth in Kenya, there is much more I could say about Westgate, its aftermath and the international media’s coverage of the events of the past three weeks. For now, let me end by asking whether social media are, in fact, as powerful as we often assume them to be.  With a growing anthropological interest in circulatory forms and social media’s new “imagined communities,” maybe we ought to look for the similarities that are erased and the boundaries, borders, and dissimilarities that are re-created in order to establish, or often maintain, those linkages that reflect a desirable social imaginary. 

Just over a month ago a Peruvian indigenous federation circulated remarkable video footage showing about a hundred isolated (so-called “uncontacted”) Mashco-Piro Indians just across the river from a Piro indigenous village along the Rio de las Piedras in Peru. They  appeared to be asking for food and trade goods like rope and metal tools. The Piro and Mashco-Piro languages are close enough to allow communication. Hoping to avoid direct contact and the possibility of disease contagion, forest rangers at Monte Salvado floated a canoe laden with bananas across the river. After a tense three-day standoff, the Mashco-Piro eventually disappeared back into the forest. No one is quite sure why the Mashco-Piro — who have so steadfastly avoided such contact until recently — suddenly showed up. Many suspect that illegal loggers active throughout the region have disrupted their usual migration routes.

In late 2011, a different group of Mashco-Piro living near the border of Manu National Park shot and killed Shaco Flores, an old Matsigenka friend of mine, with an arrow. Having lived among the Piro for many years and learned the Piro language, Shaco had been patiently communicating and trading with the Mashco-Piro for over twenty years, always maintaing a safe distance but slowly drawing them closer with his gifts, food and conversation. But something happened on that fateful day in late November: perhaps the Mashco-Piro were spooked by Shaco’s appearance with several relatives at the manioc garden on a small river island where he had been allowing the Mashco-Piro to harvest his crops; perhaps there was internal disagreement among the Mashco-Piro whether or not to accept Shaco’s long-standing offer to bring them into permanent contact. We may never know.

Just a few days earlier, a Spanish ornithologist had been staying at Shaco’s house and photographed a small group of Mashco-Piro across the river through a birding scope. It is possible that the powerfully built, somewhat bearded man pictured in these photographs is the same one who fired the single arrow that killed Shaco. After Shaco’s death, these sensational photographs, like the Mashco-Piro video clips this year, went viral across the internet, briefly drawing the attention of international media outlets including the BBC, MSN, Huffington Post and even Fox News. Our overly connected, globalized world is fascinated with stories about “uncontacted” peoples, especially if those stories involve violence.

Today the Mashco-Piro are entirely nomadic hunters and gatherers who keep no gardens and make no permanent houses, just lean-to palm shacks under the forest canopy, sometimes woven from living, standing palm saplings. Yet they are hardly throwbacks to the “Stone Age,” as some media outlets present them. In fact, the Mashco-Piro are every bit as modern as, well, the automobile and the rubber tire. In the late 19th century, before John Boyd Dunlop invented the pneumatic tire and Henry Ford drove the first “horseless carriage” out of his shed in Detroit, the Mashco-Piro inhabited the upper Manu River in settled agricultural villages. In 1894, the infamous “King of Rubber” Carlos Fermin Fitzcarraldo, hauled a steamship across a small hillock into the Manu River basin and opened this isolated region to rubber tappers. This historical event was immortalized (and heavily fictionalized) by Klaus Kinski’s signature performance in Werner Herzog’s film, “Fitzcarraldo.” After the “Mashco” (as they were then called) resisted Fitzcarraldo’s incursions, his men slaughtered them in a gory battle that was said to have left the river water undrinkable from so many corpses (see Shepard et al. 2010). Apparently, surviving Mashco-Piro took to the woods and have maintained a nomadic lifestyle ever since, hunting and gathering in several distinctive local groups throughout a wide territory between the Piedras and Manu Rivers in Madre de Dios, Peru.

It is hardly appropriate to call such peoples “uncontacted,” since their very isolation occurred in the aftermath of a particularly violent form of contact. For this reason, I coined the term “indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation” in 1996, when I wrote an open letter to Mobil Oil warning the company as well as the Peruvian authorities and several indigenous federations of the many dangers of oil exploration along the Piedras River, where the Mashco-Piro are known to circulate. Then again, “voluntary isolation” may also be another kind of misnomer, given their forced, almost refugee-like status. But the concept of “voluntary isolation” caught on in Peru and elsewhere in Amazonia, emphasizing the important fact that most such groups are not Stone Age innocents, isolated and left behind by Progress, unaware of modernity and all its wonders and discontents. Rather, the Mashco-Piro and other groups have chosen ongoing isolation as a conscious strategy for survival, and have actively resisted  repeated attempts by missionaries, tourists, film crews and even well-meaning indigenous neighbors to establish “first contact.” In addition to the cultural erosion and personal indignities recently contacted groups usually endure, they also inevitably suffer severe, often fatal epidemics of viral diseases, including the flu. Amazonian groups like the Mashco-Piro who have been isolated since the turn of the 20th century essentially re-live (and often die from) the great flu pandemic of 1918, and all its virulent permutations since then, when they enter (or re-enter) “contact.”

Aside from questioning popular notions about “primitive” nomadic societies, the recent appearance of the Mashco-Piro at Monte Salvado asking for food brings up vexing issues about the ethics of isolation and contact. In Peru’s close neighbor, Brazil, the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) and its predecessor, the Indian Protection Agency (SPI), throughout much of the 20th century pursued an aggressive strategy of locating and contacting isolated indigenous groups who were dangerously close to (or in the way of) expanding frontier zones. The tragedy of this official policy became especially apparent during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, as rapid road construction and colonization accompanying the “Brazilian miracle” devastated huge swathes of forest and threw hitherto remote indigenous groups like the Cinta Larga, Waimiri-Atroari, Arara, Surui, Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau and others into apocalyptic situations of demographic and cultural collapse. In 1987 FUNAI reversed this policy under a new “Department of Isolated Indians,” focusing their efforts on locating, demarcating and protecting territories where isolated groups live  in order to avoid contact as long as possible. Contact, carried out by teams with long-time field experience, is considered a final, emergency option if a particular group is in imminent threat of conflict with outsiders. Such was the case in 1996 when a FUNAI team contacted a small group of the warlike Korubo (known locally by the quaint moniker of “head smashers”) in the vast Javari River indigenous reserve, close to the Peruvian border. This group had apparently split off from the main population in the center of the reserve and moved dangerously close to the reserve’s border, entering into conflict with local non-indigenous populations. FUNAI decided to contact this one group, giving them vaccinations, health care and other assistance but maintaining them in a state of partial isolation to this day.

In Peru, however, there is no such agency as FUNAI with the funding, institutional presence and field experience (however tragically earned) necessary to carry out such contact operations and protect recently contacted groups. In the past, missionary groups have typically been the ones to handle (and often initiate) contact situations in Peru. Yet neither missionaries of various denominations nor the anthropological team of Manu National Park were able to respond quickly or effectively enough to the Nahua (Yora) contact on the Mishagua river in 1984-1985, leading to the death of nearly half the group (Shepard et al. 2010).

The Peru-Brazil border region has perhaps the world’s largest concentration of isolated indigenous groups, and is also beset by numerous problems associated with illegal logging, gold mining and drug trafficking, rapid deforestation along the new Interoceanic (Trans-Amazon) Highway, and a boom of oil and gas exploration and extraction. FUNAI has long sought institutional partnerships with the Peruvian government to deal with these often overlapping problems across the porous, mostly invisible border, but so far little progress has been made. The indigenous federation in Madre de Dios province, FENAMAD, has taken on the role of recognizing and defending Peru’s isolated indigenous populations in the face of self-serving denials by loggers, oil and gas companies and even government agencies themselves as to the very existence of such groups. FENAMAD, like FUNAI, supports a fundamental policy of “no contact”, respecting such peoples’ apparent choice of isolation.

But what if the Mashco-Piro, for whatever internal reasons or external pressures, return to Monte Salvado to ask for food and gifts in the future? What of the risks of flu contagion, or worse, as these exchanges continue and perhaps intensify? In addition to the risks of of contact or near-contact to isolated groups’ health, Shaco’s tragic death underscores the risks that isolated groups can pose to local populations. Peruvian protected area management plans, anthropological impact studies, and oil exploration projects in the Madre de Dios region and elsewhere now often include “contingency plans” for dealing with isolated indigenous groups. The improvised yet apparently effective (for now) response to the tense situation at Monte Salvado shows that this process of reflection and planning has paid off; the forest rangers, rather than succumbing to the usual paternalistic instinct to give not just food but clothes, matches, and so on to the “poor naked savages,” took the precaution of floating their food gifts across in a canoe, reducing the chance of direct disease contagion. Yet what would happen if a Mashco-Piro were to come down with a cold? Is there an emergency medical-anthropological-indigenous team in Peru that could be put into action on short notice to contain an epidemic outbreak before it decimates the group? How could Peru take better advantage of the experience of FUNAI’s Department of Isolated Indians in neighboring Brazil to prepare itself for the real and possibly imminent contingencies of contact with the Mashco-Piro and other isolated groups?

I don’t claim to have the answers to these difficult questions, but I do hope this posting will provoke useful debate.

Glenn Shepard is an anthropologist, ethnobotanist and film-maker now working at the Goeldi Museum in Belém do Pará, Brazil. He has done field research in Amazonian Peru and Brazil as well as in Mexico, Asia and the Middle East. He writes on topics ranging from shamanism to human ecology to indigenous modernity. He blogs at “Notes from the Ethnoground” and is on Twitter @TweetTropiques.

Heavy Hearted and Sick

by Dana Davis

It has been six days since the verdict.  Nothing has changed; I was heavy hearted and sick then, and I continue to be.  I was not surprised at the verdict, but I was glad I did not have a son.  I was sad that I even had the thought. I wrote my friends with boy children and reminded them that they should ask their friends to make a protective circle around their sons to shield them from the atrocities of racism.

It has also been six days since Marissa Alexander of Jacksonville, Florida received a sentence of 20 years because she defended herself against her abusive husband by firing warning shots inside her home at the ceiling to stop him from attacking her.  As a result I must equally remind my friends that they should rely on their friends to make a protective circle around their daughters from the atrocities of racism and sexism.

In the moments just after the verdict of Not Guilty was announced in the case of the State vs. Zimmerman, on Saturday July 13^th, and the State vs. Marissa Alexander, I was unable to fall asleep, unable to quell the rage. My mind in a state of excess activity, thinking about what this verdict meant, and what I might do.  Because I stayed up most of the night mourning, I quickly found out that there were protests planned across the country one of which would be in Union Square in New York City.

In the days after Trayvon Martin was killed, I attended the vigil in Union Square, brushing lightly against his mother as she was ushered from the podium to the front of a line forming to lead the march.  So it seemed fitting to go there again; it seemed like a good place to be in the company of others who also felt the same rage.  No explanation for tears, or silence, hugs and handholding would be necessary. I went.  I marched some, but the flame of rage would not die out.

The act of communing was not enough because the questions kept coming.  The kinds of questions you ask when the reality of a situation refuses to settle.  Why didn’t the prosecution interview Trayvon’s father’s girlfriend?  Might she have be a lone white person attesting to Trayvon’s character since he was staying in her apartment? How come no thought to suggest that when one smokes marijuana, as it was claimed he did, that aggression is rarely the behavior that accompanies it?  Why didn’t they question Martin’s parents in a way that would have allowed the public to see that he was the one who was killed, not Zimmerman?  Why didn’t the Prosecution figure out a way to “let” race be part of the inquiry?  Why this?  Why that? Why?  What if?

Enough questions.  A larger picture had to be the focus in order to numb the pain. I called people, I posted on facebook and asked people to consider, What could we do in Trayvon Martin’s honor.

The first thought was to boycott all of Florida.  Why not refuse to purchase any products that come out of Florida.  No Tropicana, no booking flights on AirTran, no visiting Disney. Let’s bring Florida to its economic knees until it changes the Stand Your Ground Law.  This morphed into making Sanford, Florida pay.

Trayvon Martin was killed in Sanford, a 22.96 square mile town, in Seminole County, Florida. According to the Census, about 54,600 people live there; 57% are White, 30% are Black and 20% are Hispanic.[1]  In 2012, the city launched the “Imagine Sanford” initiative, which asks all Sanford residents to get involved in city planning by submitting and voting on improvement ideas via the city’s Imagine Sanford website.

This information became the linchpin in intersectional thinking: How to honor the need to seek justice for the Trayvon Martin’s death by working at a broader level to shift the political pathologies inherent in the redistricting and voting rights issues.  Thus it became easier to transform “Imagine Sanford” into “Imagining Trayvon Still Alive”.  How could that happen?  How do we rearrange the monster that is State rights, which inculcates a far right agenda through massive infusions of money, distorted redistricting; whereby “democracy” is compromised?

As it stands now, redistricting processes can undermine democracy, in ways that simply depletes competition between candidates of different parties.  If there were an independent redistricting body, then maybe there would be a better chance of getting a wider range of ideologically and politically varying candidates, who might be able to undo the insidious state laws such as “Stand Your Ground. “

One way to honor Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander is to redistribute the balance of power that keeps so many powerless and too many dead or incarcerated.  Racial justice is simply too fragile to be left in the hands of a legal system that was never designed to protect Black people.  Redistribution of power, however and massive voter registration and agitation to shift redistricting, is a pragmatic practice that demands our complete attention and will carry us through, when people “tire” of hearing about Trayvon.

Unless communities engage in radical empathy and help out-fund those who see nothing wrong with either verdict, these injustices will happen again and again.  If we continue to allow this statist form of terrorizing; that allows states to uphold “stand your ground” (or not depending on your race and gender), we will have no chance of achieving justice.

Monday morning I wrote a political asylum report for a victim of political violence in Nepal. Monday afternoon, bombs exploded near the Boston marathon finish line, killing several people, injuring hundreds, and stunning many (including this Massachusetts native, runner, and former Boston resident). The next day, I read about a twenty-year-old Tibetan mother who self-immolated and died in Tibet, and I wrote two more Nepali political asylum reports, one especially gruesome, and then collapsed on the couch, paralyzed in a sort of grief and shock and despair at the bad things human beings do to other human beings.

Writing felt necessary but debilitating. I could only write about the particularly horrific asylum case in short increments, writing a sentence or two, then turning to something that would allow me to breathe freely, breathe in some goodness and hope, and then exhale the horror. Write the horror down. Make sense of the horror for a judge. Or at least try to.

How is it that I have unconsciously developed a relative scale for how “bad” another’s suffering is? And yet, some cases are just unbearable to read, to sit with, to know. I can’t even imagine the “to live” part. What is the responsibility of the writer, of the anthropologist when stories of people’s suffering are in our hands? How do we meet that responsibility when we feel melancholy in the writing?

I’ve long written about politically charged topics—Tibet, guerrilla warfare, the CIA, menstrual blood and bullets, and so on. However, it wasn’t until I started serving as an expert witness in Nepali political asylum cases that I came to experience other people’s suffering in a deeply personal way. As expert witness, my role is to testify that the claimed details of an asylum petitioner’s case are consistent with the political conditions in the country. As an anthropologist, my job is also one of testimony, of speaking truth to life (not just to power), of representing and interpreting people’s lives as ones mired—for better and for worse—in cultural systems composed of contradictions. Both of these require the ability to get at insider and outsider understandings of any given situation, to make the one understandable or minimally translatable to the other.

Last April, one year ago, the journal Cultural Anthropology published a special collection of essays on the self-immolations in Tibet. Duke University anthropology professor Ralph Litzinger and I edited the collection, working over a two-month period with eighteen other scholars and writers to write about the thirty-some Tibetans who had set themselves on fire and died; that number now is roughly 120 Tibetans who have self-immolated, eighty more in just one year. Both painfully and poignantly, we collectively tried to speak to this unfolding phenomenon, attempting to provide context, background, acknowledgement, recognition, and to provide answers to questions we knew we could not answer. One day, after having spent 72 hours straight reading and editing the final versions of the essays, I realized a depression had set over me. The weight of so many stories of death, of bodies burning, of political intractability, and the feeling of being so small in the face of all this was overwhelming. Yet, the collective power and strength and compassion of the writers was also there, especially the unanimous sense among the contributors that our writings were needed, could contribute something, were meaningful in some way including, but not limited to, our own individual feelings of humanity and obligation as we witnessed individual after individual setting themselves on fire. And still, the heaviness of it all.

What are the stakes of writing about emotionally difficult topics? The social and political stakes are clear to me; I write about issues I feel are important, issues that should be better known, issues on which we collectively need to hear new and valuable perspectives. The personal, emotional stakes are not always as clear. I still feel unprepared for my own deep-felt reactions. The emotions generated from writing on hard, sad topics are real and need tending to. I have multiple strategies for addressing them—stepping away from the computer, reaching out to friends and family, going for a run, focusing on positive things, reading poetry, finding music that feels right in the moment, turning to a ritual such as making a pot of homemade chai, reminding myself that what I feel is but a tiny fraction of the pain felt by the person who experienced it firsthand.

I am grateful for those anthropologists and other writers who have led the way, whose works on violence and suffering I have read and I have taught and I have learned from: Val Daniel and Gina Athena Ulysse and Veena Das and Michael Taussig and Ruth Behar and Donna Goldstein and so many others. I am grateful I have knowledge that sometimes can be used to help others. And, I am grateful for the power of writing, for when I return to it after pausing, each and every time writing ultimately enables me to address, to engage, and to remain undefeated by bad, sad, hard things.

The rape case unraveling in Steubenville, Ohio, brought back memories of my own frightening experience. I didn’t know what was happening that day when the four young men began looking at me differently. I only knew that I had to get away as soon as possible.

In the Steubenville case, a girl who was incapacitated by alcohol purportedly passed out and was allegedly sexually assaulted by two young men on the high school football team while others watched.

What strikes me about the incident is that it demonstrates a split in the boy rape-prone sexual culture. Some young men continue to believe that when a girl gets drunk, staging a sexual spectacle for their mates is part of a night’s fun. They don’t think of it as rape. Some of their buddies, however, disagree. In their transition to manhood, they are able to name rape when they see it.

Read the rest of Sanday’s article here.

Of course the person symbolically omitted from this sonic commemoration is Adam Lanza’s mother, Nancy, who has become persona non grata, not only for having given birth to a mass murderer but for taking him to target practice. For some this seems like an egregious and unforgivable mistake, perhaps more so among people who did not grow up around guns. But as activists rally around the cause of gun control the gender politics of masculinity and parenting are just bellow the surface.

Across the Internet people took to blogs and comment boards to declare Nancy Lanza an unfit mother, to reflect on the difficulties of parenting a child with mental illness, and to criticize others for their opinions and rhetoric. Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about what a proper mother is and they are not shy about voicing their opinions about what other people are supposed to be doing to meet those standards of mothering.

In a Washington Post report from Newtown, CT, one local resident was quoted, “I am feeling that there is more anger toward the mother than there is toward the son.”

As a non-mother, I was somewhat surprised by this. Perhaps those of you out there who are mothers are already familiar with the power of this discourse to enforce conformity. Like all members of the order Primates, humans are obsessively interested in the reproductive behavior of others in our communities especially when, where, and how mothering takes place.

In the United States children are supposed to be given priority over anything else in a mother’s life. This attitude colors everything about the current abortion debate, for example, which is really a debate about what it means to be a mother. Mothers are often held to unobtainable Victorian feminine ideals of complete selflessness and unconditional love such that for a woman to pursue her own interests, say, is to open up the worth of her parenting to the judgement of others. Men and fathers are not surveilled in this way.

Tragically Adam Lanza had access to his mother’s guns and she, along with twenty-six others, died from his rampage. It appears she has not survived public judgement on the worth of her parenting either. However, I have yet to see any pundit weigh in on the relative merits or shortcomings of Adam Lanza’s father. Our society is much more interested in monitoring the parenting behavior of females than males.

With violence, there are no easy answers, as I wrote about in my summer piece Inside the Minds of Mass Killers after the Aurora Batman shootings.

One narrative – that Adam Lanza was mentally ill – is already waiting in the wings, prepped as an explanation. Another – where guns are the culprit – has exploded already with full force. Lanza used a semi-automatic assault rifle with extended clips and shot his victims multiple times. He had hundreds of more rounds to continue his killing. Without that firepower, he couldn’t have killed so many so quickly before taking his own life when the police arrived.

The United States urgently needs more and better mental health care. Regulating guns like we regulate motor vehicles seems reasonable, given how many thousands die from gun shots and from car accidents every year. Neither, though, gets us much closer to why.

Antrosio’s post, Semi-Automatic Anthropology: Confronting Complexity, Anthropologically, takes a different tack:

It really is not so complicated. The murder-massacre of Newtown was made possible by semi-automatic weapons. The answer is simple. Difficult, yes, but simple: a semi-automatic weapons buyback or other measures to reduce and restrict the weaponry. But as anthropologists, we may not figure this one out until we get walloped and wonder what happened.

Read both, and feel free to post related links, comments, and reactions.

*Cross-posted on ethnografix.

UPDATE: From a post by Tim Wise:

But know this: the minute we as a nation lull ourselves to sleep, and allow ourselves the conceit of deciding that some places are beyond the reach of evil, of death, of pain — while others are not, and are indeed the geographic fulcrum of misery itself — two things happen, and both are happening now. First, we let our guards down to the pathologies that manifest quite regularly in our own communities — the nice places, so called — whether domestic violence, child abuse, substance abuse, or any of a dozen others; and second, we consign those who live in the other places — the not-so-nice ones in our formulation — to continued destruction, having decided apparently that in spaces such as that there is really nothing that can be done. They are poor, after all, and dark, and embedded in a pathological culture, and so…

At the very least let us agree that there is something of a cognitive disconnect here, linked indelibly to the race and class status of the perpetrators of so many of these crimes, when contrasted to the way in which we normally, as a nation, discuss crime and violence.