Tag Archives: war

Fulbright Program

The AAA is asking people in the US to contact their congressional representatives over cuts to the Fulbright program and the NEH – and the possibility of even more drastic cuts in the near future. In addition to urging you to do the same, I wanted to add some comments about the Fulbright program.

I probably would have had to change my research topic if I hadn’t received a Fulbright dissertation grant to come to Taiwan. The Fulbright program was founded by Senator William Fulbright in 1946, and was initially paid for by selling off war surplus. This makes the current situation all the more depressing. The following chart shows where the current debt comes from.

budget

As you can see, half the debt comes from a combination of Bush-era tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That means that the Fulbright program, originally paid for out of war surplus, is now being cancelled to pay for war debt.

As Maura Elizabeth Cunningham puts it in her post on the China Beat:

Programs like the Fulbright-Hays grants aren’t just about supporting individual scholars; they have a larger mission of promoting work that collectively helps all of us contextualize the world we live in and recognize how it has come to look the way it does. By not providing the funding necessary to support this year’s crop of applicants, the government is implying that such work isn’t important, that we can exist in a global community but don’t need to understand it.

Unlike HTS, the Fulbright program and NEH fund important research which I believe genuinely contributes to our understanding of the world. It is depressing to see our reckless involvement in two unfunded wars now threatening these programs.

Codename: Geronimo

Following quick on the heels of the announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s demise at the hands of U.S. Special Forces Special Operations personnel, the public has learned more about the top secret operation to find this elusive enemy. One of the most revealing bits of trivia has been that Bin Laden was assigned the code name “Geronimo” by the operation tasked with capturing and killing him. This raises the question, what does a nineteenth century Apache leader have to do with twenty first century Saudi millionaire? Perhaps nothing when viewed from an academic standpoint, it seems more like a non sequitur. But when read as expression of an underlying ideology, one that has legitimated American military action for centuries, the answer is: quite a lot, actually.

In his seminal work Playing Indian, Philip Deloria describes the history of white performance in Indian disguise, exploring the role of the Indian in the American national imaginary. Mainstream American perceptions of Indians are defined by a dialectic of repulsion and desire. The Indian, he writes, is at once “Us” and “Not-Us.”

In this ambivalent relationship, Indians as savages serve as “oppositional figures against whom one might imagine a civilized national Self” (Deloria 1998:3). Yet just as frequently Indians were trotted out as symbols of freedom for they were in possession of “barbarian virtues,” to borrow a phrase from Matthew Frye Jacobson, that deserved to be emulated especially as an antidote to the supposed ills of modernity and city life with its changing gender norms.

This was a uniquely American nationalism: one that saw itself as civilized, yet not European, native born of a society rooted in ancient history and of the natural American landscape. This history shows that Indian play has always “[clung] tightly to the contours of power” (Deloria 1998:7) within U.S. national subjectivity. Indian play, Deloria argues, came to serve a function in the ongoing search for an authentic and meaningful social identity in the face of modernity’s uncertainties. This tradition of playing Indian in the U.S. has wrought a slue of stereotypes in U.S. popular culture including: the Indian as environmentalist, spiritual messenger or guide, team mascot, filmic protagonist, and tourist destination.

Turning now from Deloria’s critical analysis of practices American cultural and literary expression, we can see how Indian play has served a prominent role in helping Americans make sense of war. As a polysemous and highly flexible trope of the U.S. military, Indian imagery in representations of American military conflict constitutes a veritable genre unto itself. Broadly speaking it boils down to two general types that mirror Deloria’s dialectic of desire and repulsion: the Indian as martial ally and the Indian as worthy opponent.

To wit – the Indian is Us and Not-Us:
 
Osama Bin Laden, “Geronimo”

Geronimo, an Apache

An Apache

Continue reading →

3 Cups of Orientalism

I haven’t read 3 Cups of Tea, and I don’t really have any intention of doing so. (I haven’t yet seen any compelling argument for why I should read the book.) However, I did read another book in the genre, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, by the founder of Room2Read. I was interested because we became involved in a project to support a library/informal school in India while making our last film, and I wanted to see if I could learn anything from the book. While it was mostly about what a great guy the author is (I guess that is a requirement for this genre), I did like the fundraising model they use—in which local communities are expected to buy-in to the project. We are working on trying to replicate that on a smaller scale in the library project. (If you have any relevant experience and would like to help – please contact me.)

I tend to be very skeptical of such efforts, but I think anyone who sees the film will understand how important the library is to the community – and we wanted to have some kind of mechanism in place so that when the film cames out people could support the library. But we’ve also learned that it is important not to go too fast or try to do too much. For this reason, I really liked Timothy Burke’s piece on the 3 Cups scandal: Continue reading →

What Tim Hetherington Offered to Anthropology

Tim HetheringtonOn March 15th, I moderated a panel at RISD called Picturing Soldiers: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Contemporary Soldier Photographs featuring photographers Lori Grinker, Jennifer Karady, Suzanne Opton, and Tim Hetherington, who as killed today in Libya.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anthropological Keywords, 2011 edition

What are the central concerns or topics of cultural anthropology today? What are the main ideas and influences that constitute a middle ground which could unite the discipline? It’s a question that I’m guessing is on many people’s lips and it turns out there is an answer! I recently registered for the 2011 American Anthropological Meetings in Montreal and found that AAA has — wait for it — outsourced the registration system to private company. The new ‘streamlined’ system has many exciting new features, including technical glitches which have resulted in extending the deadline for papers. There is a silver lining though: this year there is a controlled vocabulary for the keywords you use to classify your paper. That’s right: the AAA has provided us a list of terms that anthropologists use to classify their work. I’m not sure where they got the list, but I offer it up here for people to scrutinize and utilize as the ponder what keywords will guide their work for the next 8 months:

Continue reading →

Around the Web: Sex and Gender Edition

Non-scandal at Northwestern

  • Psychology Prof. John Michael Bailey organized a optional outside of class lecture for his Human Sexuality class that concluded with a live sex act using a toy to demonstrate female ejaculation. This generated a bit of media attention, both the NYT and the BBC picked it up, prompting bloggers to leave first hand accounts of what really took place. The President of Northwestern was embarrassed. Prof. Bailey stood by the educational value of the demonstration but also apologized and said he would never do it again.

Women and Islam

  • Max Forte starts off this post critiquing the Western imaginary of non-Western women, in particular “the liberation of women” discourse that has circulated around the current American wars, with a brilliant quote by anthropologists Cathy Lutz and Jane Collins. More links follow about representations of Muslim women in popular culture, sexual assault in Tahrir Square, and the culture of rape in the U.S. military.

Marriage in India and the United States

  • The payment of dowries was banned in 1961 but remains a commonplace practice in contemporary India. The Independent reports that the dowry is at the heart of what in the U.S. would be termed “culture wars” as the Indian government contemplates amending the legislation.
  • According to a recent Time/ Pew poll, marriage has become a prestige commodity, “the relationship equivalent of a luxury yacht” and thus an unrealistic goal for many people. A savvy post at Brainstrom matched links from the mainstream media reacting to the poll – many read it as a about the “decline” of marriage – with commentary that recognizes the massive and ongoing structural change that has reshaped how Americans do work and friendship.

It Gets Better

  • Dan Savage made a name for himself with his kinky, political, and frequently hilarious sex advice column, Savage Love, which has spawned a bevvy of internet memes and catchy acronyms like GGG, DTMFA, and, of course, Santorum. Now there is the “It Gets Better Project” which has quickly evolved into something of a movement in which adults address video messages to queer youth that the struggles of growing up can be overcome! Dan and his husband-in-Canada/ boyfriend-in-the-United-States Terry Miller gave a fantastic interview on NPR’s Fresh Air promoting “It Gets Better,” which has now come out as a book.
  • Also on the LGBT front, Two Spirits, is a PBS documentary about the hate-crime death of Navajo teen Fred Martinez.
  • Enjoy this absolutely incredible performance from Thailand’s Got Talent (I love the big hug at the end):

Beauty

  • Meet Sandra Dubose-Gibson, Mrs. Black North Carolina who, diagnosed with alopecia from age 25, is totally bald. Hat tip to Racialicious, from whom I steal links all the time.
  • Book review – Pretty Modern, an ethnography of beauty, race, and plastic surgery in Brazil.
  • Oprah talks to Lea T, a transgender supermodel for Givenchy who has appeared in French Vogue and is becoming one of the most sought after models in the industry.

Sex and Performance

  • In Quebec an administrative assistant at a local high school was suspended when it was discovered (by a male student) that she was also a porn star. A harsher fate for a psych professor who was fired for appearing in burlesque act. Thank you Gawker, this is why you exist!
  • A contributor to the Ms. Magazine blog remembers a short-lived career stripping on Bourbon Street. The transformative experience wasn’t shaving her legs or wearing pasties, it coming off the stage to serve drinks to the customers.
  • The NYT reports that on the popularity of Japanese porn stars in Indonesian domestic films. Even though the performers leave their clothes on their very presence in the country brings negative attention from Islamists and production companies must operate under secrecy or else be subject to protest or vigilante action.

Representing Women in Popular Culture

Violence

  • Another from Sociological Images:

Seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Email me at mdthomps AT odu.edu.

Illustrated Wimmin, #4 – The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For

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

…

Alison Bechdel crashed the party on American literature’s main stage with Fun Home (2004) a stunning graphic memoir about coming of age, coming out, and discovering her father’s own closeted gay identity. It received rave reviews and was featured at the top of a number of end of the year best book lists and, with the close of the ’00s, reappeared on some best of the decade lists. And rightfully so, there wasn’t a more monumental nonfiction comic book in a decade that will be remembered for an explosion in top notch comic output. There hasn’t been a more significant comic memoir since Maus (1986).

My own encounter with Fun Home began on the Eastern Band Cherokee reservation as I was conducting the ethnographic field research for my dissertation. I was cast in a theatrical production as a soldier in Andrew Jackson’s army and one of my fellow Indian killers was a bohemian epileptic artist named Pat working his way back to Florida from Knoxville. Like Capote’s villain from In Cold Blood he traversed America’s highways with a library in his trunk: Zizek, Baudrillad, and a borrowed copy of Bechdel’s novel.

After I settled in Newport News I discovered Fun Home in the stacks at my public library and got hooked on Bechdel’s beautiful ink lines, hyper-literary self reflection, and slightly neurotic gallows humor. I was anxious to get my hands on more of her work and I soon learned I had a lot of catching up to do. Before achieving celebrity status Bechdel was already a star in the gay and lesbian community for her biweekly strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, first published in 1983. A nearly 400 page retrospective was released in 2008 as The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For.

Continue reading →

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Madison – by Eric S. Piotrowski

When I first heard of the Madison protests against Governor Walker and his attempt to squelch collective bargaining rights for public employees, I knew my friend of some fifteen years Eric Piotrowski would be taking the fight to the streets. I invited Eric, a high school English teacher, activist, musician, and avid wikipedian, to share his thoughts with us about the experience of being there in the protests and to outline what he saw as at stake in this struggle. –Matt

…

I wanted to join Scott Walker for his Fireside Chat on Tuesday evening. (Transcript here.) I was ready for some exciting debate, especially since the riots and chaos I had been promised by FoxNews were either exaggerations or (though I find it hard to believe, coming from such a reputable news organization) total lies. Alas, I was not allowed anywhere near Mr. Walker’s fireplace.

The past couple of weeks have been exhausting. Even more exhausting than my usual school schedule, which — I don’t mind telling you — is exhausting enough already. By Friday evening, my wife and I are usually worn out to the point where an evening out with dinner and a movie is usually replaced by delivery food and a rental DVD. On weekends we grade papers and try to regain our sanity before school starts again. (I teach at Sun Prairie High School; she works at the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, and teaches at Madison Area Technical College.)

So when our pugilist governor announced his plan recently to (among other drastic measures) abolish collective bargaining rights for public-sector employees (which have been protected by Wisconsin law for 50 years), I knew I was facing a whole new level of physical exhaustion and psychic fatigue.

Continue reading →

Why I <3 Anthropology

I love anthropology — cultural anthropology, my subfield of the discipline — because it is the most human of the human sciences: the one that is the most about people. The one which thinks you can learn about how people live their lives by watching how they live their lives — not by building models of them, or having them live small parts of it laboratories. In order to understand people we study people, and is willing to embrace all the challenges this entails.

I love anthropology because it is the discipline that takes seriously the idea that our common humanity with those we study is a boon and a strength, not an impediment that distort objective judgment. It works with and works through the fact that we can be powerfully changed by our research, and that this change is a strength. I love the fact that we stick with the project of ethnography despite the fact that it is aa project of telling the stories of others, an entitlement to be earned, not a right to representative authority that can be assumed.

The other day for a project I read the tables of contents for every issue of American Anthropologist from 1900 to 1960. One of the articles I came across was called “Columns of Infamy”. I love that.

I love anthropology’s willingness to compare anything to anything else and to study anything under the sun. If people have done it — or thought about doing it — it’s not off-limits. And I love that fact that we can compare people who think they were abducted by aliens in Arkansas in the 90s with ascent to heaven narratives from Sumer written thousands of years earlier.

I love our regional, middle-range expertise: where people call soda coke and where they call it pop, how far south the cultural syndrome of the vision quest extends, and how lycra got marketed to the women’s movement in the 1960s.

But I also love our willingness to completely throw the middle range to the wind, our ability to start with a local taboo against eating bandicoots and ascending to universal theories of human anxieties about embodiment. We drive the philologists mad, which is ok with me.

I love anthropology’s protean genres — our ability to articulate with public health, philosophy, english literature, and military intelligence. When we say we will study anything, we are talking just as much about adjacent disciplines — and they are all adjacent — as we are people out in the world. At the same time, when locked into a four-field configuration like an X-Wing with foils extended into attack position, we really do have some answers to some important questions about what it means to be human. And if the physical anthropologists want to go talk to physicists about strontium isotope analysis, who can blame us for having lunch with someone who studies French literature?

Anthropologists can find anything interesting, and I love that about the discipline. You meet someone and ask what they are studying and they say “rodeos as cultural performance” and heads start nodding. You drive past a garage sale and stop the car in the middle of the street and say “they’re… selling… old lampshades…” And yet at the same time we are incredibly jaded. More fears in the Andes that aid workers are using syringes to suck the fat out of people’s bodies as they sleep? Well that’s not very surprisng, is it?

I love anthropology’s ability to take people’s beliefs incredibly seriously one minute and then to totally ignore them in the next. That’s not witchraft, you fool, that’s your anxiety about your social organization. Except, no wait, what if there are witches? Biology? You think that stuff at the bottom of the microscope is ‘reality’? Have you read Rheinberger’s book on the history of the ‘discovery’ of protein synthesis?!?! Except, actually, this whole ‘cooperative breeding’ thing does knit together what we know about primate behavior, evolution, and the human capacity for culture. Hmmm….

I love that fact that anthropologists refuse to give up on the fact that a two hundred page book has more insight and value than ten twenty page articles. I love the fact that we are willing to grasp the nettle of style instead of pretending it isn’t an issue. I love that fact that we believe our subjectivities add value to our scholarly work, rather than contaminating it.

Above all I love how anthropology, a science of the human, articulates with our lives: we study kinship, and raise children. We read about enculturation, and we teach students. We analyze power and we try to create a democratic, just world. Our discipline is connected, intimately and irrevocably, to our whole persons — and that’s what I love about it most of all.

Breaking Ranks

Since we’ve just entered the 10th year of U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan (well, 10 years this century) it seems a good time to say a few words about Breaking Ranks: Iraq Veterans Speak Out Against The War (University of California Press 2010) co-authored by Matthew Gutmann and Catherine Lutz.

Breaking Ranks recounts, largely through interview excerpts, the stories of six Iraq War veterans who became involved with Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and other military anti-war organizations and participated in the larger GI Rights Oral History Project. It takes us from their decisions to join the military, through combat, anti-war epiphanies, homecomings, and involvement in anti-war activism.

The patchwork composition of the book reflects the veterans’ attempts to piece together a narrative of their lives defined by the watershed of their experiences in Iraq. While book’s overall structure parses these experiences into a general arc of life—from enlistment, to the shock and fog of war, to political awakening, to struggles with trauma, to activism—it doesn’t smooth over the rough edges of these experiences or impose too clear an order on the muddle of reflexive memories that the soldiers offer.

As the authors note in the introduction, the book is an account of how these six people (five men and one woman; three soldiers, one sailor, one Marine, and one National Guardsman) found their way to a public, anti-war position and of “the striking and original ideas each developed to understand the war and what it meant. Their critiques are not simple matches to those of the civilian antiwar movement or to our own as authors” (8). Thus Breaking Ranks suggest that while it is possible to speak of a single anti-war movement, that singularity subsumes a multiplicity of different meanings and the ones we hear here are not always foregrounded.

Gutmann and Lutz’ Zinn-ian project of documenting the grassroots critiques so often written out of American History is well complemented by their anthropological attention to the little details of daily life (in the military, at war, and after) that aggregate into feelings of frustration and individual acts of political resistance, suggesting the complex and divergent paths through which soldiers come to, as they say, “speak out”.

Thought the text of the book is devoted to six stories, it is also peppered with facts and events that position these very diverse lives within a single post 9/11 historical moment which is also linked, by both the authors and the subjects, to the American legacies of the Vietnam War and its contemporary anti-war motifs.

In their curation of the stories, Gutmann and Lutz also demonstrate the ways that war insinuates itself into civilian life in America, making military service seem like the best possible option for many Americans whose lives are made hard or unstable by the exigencies of family expectations, national pride, poverty, and youth. The Introduction and endnotes are also full of data and resources for further reading about the ‘dark side’ (as Alex Gibney might say) of America’s war in Iraq.

Lately, ‘the good war’ in Afghanistan is consuming more and more of America’s attention and resources and, in the months since Breaking Ranks was released this summer, American combat operations in Iraq have been declared over (again) and the ‘draw-down’ of combat troops and ‘civilian surge’ there have begun. In this context, we can read in Breaking Ranks deeper questions about the different justifications for American military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq at the level of individual experience and public discourse alike, as well as about the fundamental nature of wars in which nation-states confront non-state entities through the sanctioned, violent acts of their citizens. As our attention, and perhaps attitudes, to America’s two main post-9/11 military operations seems to be shifting, Braking Ranks can help readers think about how things have (and haven’t) changed in military life and policy at home and down range.

In addition to being a powerful documentary record and conversation starter about the Iraq War, Breaking Ranks strikes me as an important, accessible, and eminently teachable book that speaks of the conflicted experiences of soldiers in war, the political failings of America’s doctrine of pre-emptive war, and the contingent evolution of personal conflict into political action. It would be well suited to undergraduate classes on war, trauma, social movements, public or activist anthropology, and—given its format—methods courses that discuss life-story interviews and practices of ethnographic writing.

[A bit of full disclosure: Royalties from Breaking Ranks are being donated to IVAW; an organization with which I did some fieldwork in 2008 and which I’ve personally supported]

Around the Web

Neither grading exams, drafting Powerpoint slides, nor job applications will keep Around the Web down for long. We’re back with links about anthropology, culture, and the Black Eyed Peas.

Information and war

The meaning of airport security

Capitalism: Betting against the Wammies

  • Remember that game show Press Your Luck? Well Maxine Udall (girl economist) has been taking stock of everything in her life she’s gained by luck noting that to do so is to cut against the grain of American meritocracy. She was inspired to these metaphors and more by a recent scholarly economics publication, Roland Benabou and Jean Tirole’s, “Belief in a Just World and Redistributive Politics.” Wonder if she’s read Roger Caillois?

Aluminum gets heavy

  • A few weeks back, Around the Web alerted you to the struggles of the the people of the east Indian state of Orissa and sympathetic street protests in London against the mining company Vedanta who wants to gut their land for bauxite. Material World offers high praise in this book review for Out of this Earth by Felix Padel and Samarendra Das which explores the subject in ethnographic detail.

Roma in perspective

  • As the expulsion of Roma continues in France, anthropologist Sam Beck offers some historical notes on the recent history of Roma people that broadens the scope to all of Europe. “Since the 1990s, the people who are being displaced and resettled are the ones who are poor. These are not the migratory Roma. Much like low-income migrants from all over the world, Roma are looking to gain a better life for themselves and their children.”

On Matt’s wish list

Higher Ed jobs: Gone the way of journalism?

  • Adjuncts and other contingent faculty may want to take this survey investigating our working conditions. I completed it in less than 30 minutes.
  • Any young adult feeling insecure about the future of teaching anthropology as a viable way to make a living from the present until retirement may want to read this blog post by Dean Dad. Will our jobs still be here 30 years from now? Here’s his response in a nutshell: (1) the elite schools will continue to be able to do whatever they want, (2) as tuition rises the low-cost, high quality community colleges and 4-years will become even more attractive, (3) the for-profit universities will continue to grow, (4) the less prestigious but still expensive private schools will fade away. Here’s a quote from the Dadster:

A cliche of economic history is that the early railroads failed because they thought they were in the railroad industry, but they were actually in the transportation industry. Trucks ate their lunch. The educators who will thrive in the future will be those who understand that they aren’t in the Tenured Professor business; they’re educators. That may mean online delivery, or mediated delivery, or modular approaches, or structured group tutoring, or mentoring, or I don’t know what. But outside of the elites, the one strategy I can almost guarantee will lose is digging in your heels and trying to stop history. If you don’t believe me, ask your local newspaper editor.

Public libraries fall to neoliberalism

  • If you’re skeptical about for-profit higher education how about for-profit public libraries? The company LSSI runs 14 library systems in 63 locations making it the fifth largest library system in the United States. No wonder there’s so much public acrimony. Retired people love libraries and they’ve got a lot of time on their hands for organizing.

Podcast covers cargo cult

  • The monthly podcasts at Memory Palace have turned their attention to the Vanuatu version of the cargo cult. Its a compelling story, I agree, and more than a little bizarre which gives it the power to unsettle. I’ve tried to use it as an example before in Cultural Anthropology classes, but I’ve always struggled to get students over the “Hey, this is really weird” part. And in this version of the tale the tone is kind of melancholy. Are we supposed to feel sad for the natives for believing in cargo cults? Nice production but I’m still ambivalent.
  • Also interesting to me was this comment at Boing Boing, which linked me to the podcast. “If you compare post industrial economic reasoning with the SouthWest Pacific cargo cults, the parallels are scary.” Now, that is something to think about.

Anthropology illuminates the internet age

Forgetting Margaret Mead

  • Over at Zero Anthropology, Max Forte is rummaging through the detritus of popular culture looking for references to Margaret Mead. Here’s my two cents. If ethnographies had sexier book covers we’d sell a lot more copies. This one could have come off the desk of the Mad Men themselves. (Purchased at a used bookstore and coffee shop in Tivoli, New York, a bedroom community for Bard College, for a mere twenty-five cents back in ’99. A souvenir of a summer well spent.)
  • So perhaps Mead hasn’t aged well. But you know who has? Jane Goodall. Whereas Mead’s culture and personality work has become passe (I don’t recall even reading her in grad school, Benedict yes, but not Mead), Goodall’s discovery of tool use among chimps in Gombe contributed to a rethinking of the culture concept in the 1970s and her conservation efforts have only grown more important. Kudos Jane on 50 years of hard work!

Timewaster:

  • According to the WSJ the Black Eyed Peas are the most corporate band in America. “From Coors to Levi’s, Honda to Apple, Verizon to Pepsi, brands have padded the group’s video budgets, underwritten its tours and billboarded band members in prominent places… If will.i.am wasn’t in music, ‘He’d be the best ad executive on Madison Avenue,” says Randy Phillips, president and CEO of the concert promoter AEG Live. “I’ve never seen anyone more astute at dealing with sponsors’ and companies’ needs and understanding their brands.'” Is it still called selling out if that was your goal all along?

Seen something around the web you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Email me at mdthomps AT odu.edu

The Semiotics of Islamophobia

Via the PostSecret website, it is unclear whether the poster intentionally picked a photo of Sikhs or if this was unintentional irony. Not that the sentiment would have been any less offensive if the person wearing a turban was actually a Muslim. It certainly didn’t matter to the families of victims of post 9-11 hate crimes whether the victim was Muslim or not. I bring this up because William Dalrymple has an op-ed in the NY Times about the proposed Islamic center planned for lower Manhattan (for those living under a rock, see William Saletan’s piece in Slate for a good roundup of the issues surrounding the center):

The problem with such claims goes far beyond the fate of a mosque in downtown Manhattan. They show a dangerously inadequate understanding of the many divisions, complexities and nuances within the Islamic world — a failure that hugely hampers Western efforts to fight violent Islamic extremism and to reconcile Americans with peaceful adherents of the world’s second-largest religion. Most of us are perfectly capable of making distinctions within the Christian world. The fact that someone is a Boston Roman Catholic doesn’t mean he’s in league with Irish Republican Army bomb makers, just as not all Orthodox Christians have ties to Serbian war criminals or Southern Baptists to the murderers of abortion doctors. Yet many of our leaders have a tendency to see the Islamic world as a single, terrifying monolith.

Dalrymple’s main point is that the Sufis behind the Cordoba Initiative are themselves “infidel-loving, grave-worshiping apostate[s]” in the eyes of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. We’ve been here before:

In 2006, the investigative reporter Jeff Stein concluded a series of interviews with senior US counterterrorism officials by asking the same simple question: “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shia?” He was startled by the responses. “One’s in one location, another’s in another location,” said Congressman Terry Everett, a member of the House intelligence committee, before conceding: “No, to be honest with you, I don’t know.” When Stein asked Congressman Silvestre Reyes, chair of the House intelligence committee, whether al-Qaeda was Sunni or Shia, he answered: “Predominantly – probably Shia.”

Clearly the United States would be better off if our leaders, journalists, and citizens knew a little more about Islam. But there are also some lessons here about the semiotics of racism which I would like to think offer some insights beyond the 24 hour news cycle.

A Liverpool working-class accent will strike a Chicagoan primarily as being British, a Glaswegian as being English, an English southerner as being northern, an English northerner as being Liverpudlian, and a Liverpudlian as being working class. The closer we get to home, the more refined are our perceptions.

The above quote is taken from a discussion in Asif Agha’s masterful book Language and Social Relations. Agha’s focus here is on the limits of of performativity. By pointing out that the hearer’s own prior socialization provides an important context for the successful performance of identity, Agha sets the stage for one of the book’s central themes: that identity is not only mediated by discourse, but also requires a process of negotiation between speaker and hearer—and that this process of negotiation can be transformative, changing the possible range of identity positions available to both parties as well as society at large.

I quite like Agha’s argument, and in chapter after chapter he makes a convincing case for it. Particularly interesting is his discussion of kinship terms, in which he shows how a mother might refer to her in-laws using terms which, taken literally, would place her in the role of her own child vis-a-vis her relatives, but are nonetheless lexically differentiated from the terms a child might use. In doing so she claims her rights as the mother of the child without reducing herself to the status of a child.

While the discussion of a Liverpool working-class accent shows that Agha is aware of the limits to such performativity, I would have liked to see more discussion about situations where one party refuses to negotiate. Agha’s approach to limits implies that performativity might fail because of one party’s lack of socialization, but what about if one party has a will to ignorance? I think such willful ignorance is behind much American confusion with regard to Muslims, and so I’m not sure how much use historical, ethnographic, or journalistic accounts of the various divisions within Islam can help.

It seems to me that part of the problem derives from the very idea of a “just war.” As Judith Butler argues, such a concept requires the “division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war.” For some section of humanity to remain “ungrievable” requires a willful ignorance which refuses to engage in the kind of dialog which would allow for negotiated meanings to emerge. Thus, Islamophobia is in some ways a prerequisite for waging a global war on Terror, even as our leaders insist otherwise.

Around the Web

Savage Minds’ own patented high-tech webpage filtering software combs teh interwebs for interesting, urgent, and provacative links that usually have something to do with anthropology.

Extractive Colonialism or Globalization?

Culture and American Politics

  • Maxine Udall, one of the best written blogs on my RSS feed, provides some compelling supporting arguments to why well paved roads are an economic necessity, and why letting them go to gravel to keep taxes low is a bad idea. Salon commentator Glenn Greenwald comes to the same conclusion for different reasons, but without the nostalgia for Eisenhower. They’re both talking about this WSJ article.
  • Where do angry Tea Partiers go on vacation? Colonial Williamsburg, of course.

Illegal drugs and new research

Anthropology on the interweb

  • I just got turned on to Somatosphere, a really excellent anthropology blog. Recent posts have included video of the plenary talks by Judith Farquhar and Donna Haraway at the 2010 Society for Cultural Anthropology conference in Santa Fe. And links to an archive of video interviews with prominent anthropologists including: Geertz, Leach, Douglas, Mintz, Rabinow, and the Comaroffs.
  • Zero Anthropology has an interesting piece on the culture concept and the many permutations of the Luftwaffe quote, “Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.”
  • Kudos to the blog Anthropology in Practice for making it to the big board over at Boingboing for their three part series on coffee! Readers, just to let you know, you can submit Savage Minds to Boingboing anytime. Illustrated Man was pretty good, right? I really want one of these nerd merit badges!

Reports from “the Field”

Meat eating and human evolution

Issues in Academia

  • Articles like, “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go” and its sequels (here and here) put English majors on notice that the job market was terrible and their participation in grad programs exploitative. The market has gotten rough for the social sciences too, as many underemployed Ph.D’s can attest. But the hard sciences? Yup, its officially bad for them too.
  • Dean Dad notices an unusual pattern at his community college this season. Applications are up — makes sense, its a recession — but registration is down. A little legwork revealed that even at the c.c. level, students who have been unemployed for too long are getting priced out of higher education.

Seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Yes you have! Shoot me an email, mdthomps AT odu.edu.

Time’s “What Happens…” Cover

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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