The Prism

What Next?

2011-02-14T14:15:00.003-05:00

The dictator has been handed his pink slip, and not so quietly, been shown to the door. What then? A few days of revelry, yes, then the protesters get kicked out of the square - the time has come to get back to business. But will it be business as usual, or will there be real change? Now is the time when that question will truly be answered.

Of course it won't be business as usual in the strict sense - Mubarak is gone, and nothing's going to bring him back. But how deep will the changes go? Will the Egyptian military still control the country? Will the emergency rules be released? Will there be a crack-down on the protesters? Will the next elections be truly free and fair? Who will lead? What other social and political changes will occur as a result? These questions remain unanswered as of yet.

You see, it's one thing to take down a dictator - to deconstruct a regime. It's a marvelous thing, to be sure: a moment of beautiful chaos where the passions of the populace are ignited and the affective resonance carries the movement forward. Wave upon wave crashing upon the rigid cliffs - no rock can withstand the power of the water!

But once the deconstruction has been done, the real work is only just beginning. The aftermath is not so momentous, not so beautiful or romantic, but it is, by far, more important (and, in my opinion, far more interesting anthropologically) than the revolution. Now is the time when a new world can be built out of the rubble. Now is the time when the questions posed above will be answered. What will that new world look like? I don't know.

Kim Stanley Robinson defines Utopia as "Struggle Forever" but too often we stop fighting when the battle is only half won. My hope is that the Egyptian people don't stop now; that they continue the fight, and build a better society for themselves and for the world.

(Cross-posted at Eidetic Illuminations)

The Anthropology of a Revolution

2011-02-13T13:55:00.001-05:00

The spark has been ignited and the whole world is aflame. The Egyptian people rose up and took back their country, and, in so doing, sent waves of response and reaction across the globe. Democratic uprisings have now occurred in several other Islamic nations, and commentators in the West are beginning to wonder: Why not here? Yes... why not?
The blogosphere has been buzzing over the last few weeks with news and analysis of the uprising in Egypt. I want to share some of the best - most anthropological - coverage that I've seen:

Graham Harman has been providing detailed coverage of the events including his own experience return to Egypt during the protests and being evacuated.
At Immanence, Adrian Ivakhiv provides some thoughts on the revolution from a process-relational perspective. He also offers a look at the affective resonance that drives these types of events.
At Zero Anthropology, Max Forte has been serving up insight in his usual provocative style, including a piece on what he calls the "(Hillary) Clinton Doctrine" of foreign policy at play right now in Egypt and other nations.
Chris Vitale has posted Eleven Theses Toward a Theory of Political Change, drawing lessons from the Egyptian people.
Krista Tippett's On Being had a special program titled "Demonstrations, Hopes, and Dreams" in which she interviewed Anthropologist Scott Atran about the future of Egypt and the role of the US in democratic uprisings.
Undestanding Society asks the question "Is there a Revolution Underway in Egypt?"
Kerim at Savage Minds speculates on the role of social media in the events in Egypt.
And Michael at Archive Fire offers his Congratulations to the Egyptian People.

If I've missed anything, I apologize. Please feel free to add your own links in the comments section.

Daniel Lende: "You can read this blog for free"

2011-02-13T11:36:00.003-05:00

Daniel Lende over at Neuroanthropology has a new post about some of the possibilities for anthropology. He talks about some of the recent PR controversies that took place within the field, and how this is illustrative of some of the primary issues and challenges that anthropologists face these days. We are, it seems, at a bit of a crossroads. And it's probably about time to move away from some of the old models and explore new ways of not only doing anthropology, but also publishing and disseminating anthropology. My favorite part of the post is when Lende talks about the contrast between old school publishing models (which lock up information behind expensive subscriptions) and some of the new possibilities:

The Nature commentary by Adam Kuper and Jonathan Marks is behind a paywall. It costs $32 to buy, unless you have institutional access. Ulf Hannerz’s article in American Anthropologist, which Greg drew on extensively in writing about diversity as anthropology’s brand, is available either through institutional access or by joining the American Anthropological Association. The cheapest AAA membership costs $70. You can read this blog for free (my emphasis).

That last line is a beauty. The point, as I see it, isn't to do away with journals, but instead to realize that the publication models are severely limiting. If we are all about the dissemination of anthropological analysis, concepts, and ideas to wider audiences, how is that supposed to happen if all of the latest research sits behind a subscription wall? The irony of course is that there is still a fairly skeptical view among THE ACADEMY about online publishing. Many question whether or not REAL RESEARCH can be published online. I mean, is it possible? However, I have recently run a complex experiment and come to the conclusion that yes, all 26 letters of the English alphabet do show up on screen, so it is indeed possible to publish real, valuable, and important work online. The only thing stopping this is a lack of either interest or desire. So it goes. As Lende points out:

A negative view of writing online (i.e., blogging) and a closed view of knowledge production (i.e., through institutional access or society membership) is still predominant in anthropology.

It's funny, when you think about. Or, at least, when I think about it. Anthropologists are doing all sorts of cutting edge, timely, and fascinating research. So why is our publishing model and ideology so....well...stale? The good thing is that people like Lende, Greg Downey, the folks at the OAC (Open Anthropology Cooperative), Max Forte, the Savage Minds crew, John Hawks, John Postill, Colleen Morgan, and a slew of others are indeed messing with the boundaries. Who knows? Maybe, at some point, more people outside of the academic world will actually know what anthropologists are up to.

Here's another good section from Lende's post:

Online media, not just writing, is an incredible way to reach the public. Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist who became interested in new media and teaching after doing his doctoral work in Papua New Guinea, work with his students to create a video, A Vision of Students Today. It has been viewed 4,136,850 times. That is an incredible impact.
And open access? Take PLoS One. It was founded in 2006, and covers research in science and medicine. In five years, it became the world’s largest journal. That is incredible success. One of its more technical journals, PLoS Biology, was founded in 2003, the first of the PLoS journals. It has been the highest impact journal in biology, as ranked by the Institute for Scientific Information. Open access isn’t just viable – it is the way to reach the broadest possible audience and have the greatest scholarly impact.

On Amazon, which came to fame and financial success by selling books online, its #1 product is its Kindle e-reader. Books themselves are going digital. And not just books. Amazon recently launched Kindle Singles, which presents “a compelling idea–well researched, well argued, and well illustrated–expressed at its natural length.” Apple’s iPad offers ways to integrate multi-media features with traditional text. Digital innovation in how we present scholarly material is already happening, and will continue to grow extremely rapidly.

Anthropologists need to go digital – blogging, collaborating, creating, sharing, and disseminating the field online. Blogs, the integration of new media with text, e-publications, and open-access publishing need to be part of how we keep our borderlands discipline healthy and vibrant.

To do otherwise, is to make the field into a marginal borderland, rather than the key meeting place and vibrant area of production the anthropology is today and can be even more so in the future.

Agreed. No need to remain on the borderlands any longer. Time to go push the boundaries and go digital. What's stopping us?

Cross-posted @ Ethnografix

The Dangers of Natural Gas Drilling

2010-09-19T10:23:00.004-04:00

Anyone else dealing with this boom on drilling for natural gas? They've been going around here wanting to drill the wells without even tapping it yet, just setting up the infrastructure. People are concerned for the groundwater.

PBS:

Trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZe1AeH0Qz8

CEO John Mackey of Whole Foods Market on Conscious Capitalism, etc.

2010-08-08T00:36:00.002-04:00

Admittedly I've been gone for a while teaching in the Marshall Islands. Now I'm starting a new job in the bustling town of Lewisburg, WV. I'll work as an AmeriCorps VISTA on sustainable local foods development, with support from the Natural Capital Investment Fund, Greenbrier Valley Economic Development Corporation, and Mr. Jim Cooper, recently retired from the USDA -- not to mention everyone else already involved in local foods who I'm eager to meet.

I've begun background research, mostly into USDA publications, but today my wandering mind led from Maine Tablestock Potatoes to the Whole Foods Market to this video conversation with CEO John Mackey discussing Conscious Capitalism, Consequences of Authenticity, and Public Trust in Business.(link)

His points on how the public imagines businesses and CEOs (often negatively) caught my interest. When I see Whole Foods Markets in GA along the road, I don't notice them as better than any other grocery. SHOULD I see them as different? I'm not convinced. Where is the line between business and "non-profit" organizations? Can we draw one, if "conscious" consumption becomes a habit in the marketplace, leading more and more businesses to try and tailor their products to the growing demand?

Also see: Whole Foods Market: Our Core Values

Whole Foods doesn't have stores in West Virginia, but I wonder if any local producers have luck marketing their products there in nearby metropolitan regions.

Convincing Climate Deniers

2010-03-12T14:37:00.002-05:00

This article is cross-posted at Eidetic Illuminations.

Recently there has been quite a commotion on the Environmental Anthropology (EANTH) listserv over the science around global climate change (GCC). Essentially, a couple of climate deniers have stirred up the list, and they've been encouraged by a combination of polite people who want all voices to be heard and others who are willing to argue with them endlessly. This got me thinking about what it will take to convince climate deniers, and whether or not we should actually waste our time.

Part 1 - What is a Skeptic?
First of all, the climate deniers on the EANTH list have insisted on being called skeptics rather than deniers. They claim that "deniers" is a pejorative term meant to associate them with the likes of Holocaust deniers. So the question arises, what is a skeptic and do these individuals deserve that title?
A skeptic is a person who has an inherent doubt about any claim, and, therefore, requires a certain burden of proof to be established. Even then, a skeptic might hold on to some doubt as new evidence comes along which may change the picture. A genuine skeptic would look at the two sides of the climate debate and see that the climate scientists have a mountain of strong evidence in support of their claim (most of which is freely available from the IPCC) and a general consensus among scientists and the leading scientific organizations around the world that climate change is occurring and that it is caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gasses. The skeptic would then look at the denier's case and see a paltry amount of very weak evidence, and no general consensus except among energy companies, and others for whom climate policy poses a potential threat. A genuine skeptic might look for alternative explanations, but would conceed that the weight of the evidence is in favor of anthropogenic climate change.
As a result, I reject the use of the term skeptic to describe climate deniers. They don't weigh each side equally, expecting the same burden of proof from both sides. They have taken an emotional, political stance against climate change, and will automatically reject any evidence that contradicts them. Furthermore, their "science" is driven by economic and political claims, and backed by substantial funding from oil companies.
In fact, science has a built in skepticism. Any claims must be backed by substantial evidence, and those that are not will be outed in the peer-review process. I think a great disservice has been done to science in the last decade by those who think that all opinions should carry equal weight. In the scientific world, however, claims that cannot bear the burden of proof (i.e. intelligent design and climate denial) must be discarded. Climate deniers will claim that a conspiracy of scientists has kept them from getting a fair consideration. However no such conspiracy exists, and I would be far more doubtful of "science" that comes from powerful corporations with a vested interest in halting climate policy.

Part 2 - What will it take to convince them?
As I said above, climate deniers have taken an emotional, political stance against climate change science. They are not scientists, they are not concerned with the accuracy of the data, and they are will re-interpret or discard any data that contradicts their position. The mountains of evidence that support the climate change science is not enough to convince them, so what is?
I don't think anything will convince them short of some massive disaster with clear and direct ties to climate change. Nor will long, drawn out discussion and arguments on email listservs. Whenever I see debates such as the one on the EANTH list, I am torn between the desire to correct the climate deniers and the knowledge that my arguments will never change their minds. We seem to be caught in a double bind - we can't keep quiet or they'll win, and we can't engage in discussion because they don't care about the evidence. It seems to me that all we can do is mechanically repeat the facts "The planet is warming. The warming is caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gasses. It's already harming people, and will only get worse. We can do something about it." Rinse and repeat.

Part 3 - Do we really need to convince them?
The media tends to exaggerate extremes, and that's why we hear scientists arguing with climate deniers all the time in the news. Some of that needs to be done, especially for building support at the policy level. But it should be done in the way I mentioned above. Like the captured soldier being interrogated - just repeat: name, rank and serial number (or in this case, the facts behind climate change).
But Policy is not the only way to address climate change meaningfully. As Elinor Ostrom has pointed out in her report to the World Bank, Polycentric Approaches to Climate Change, we should be looking for multiple solutions on multiple scales.
When I was doing my research on the controversy surround the Holcomb power plant, I talked to a lot of people in Western Kansas about issues like climate change. There were a couple of people who suggested to me that they believed that climate change is a fiction, but overall I got the sense that most people are aware of the science and at least somewhat concerned about the potential problems that could occur. They may not be fully convinced, but they are not generally climate deniers like the two on the EANTH list or those in the media. They want to do something about climate change, but, at the same time, they take a pragmatic view of it. They are concerned about their jobs, about their families, about their health. They want a better life for themselves and their children, and climate change simply isn't the most pressing issue in their lives.
On the plus side, we don't need to convince them either, we just have to sympathize with them and figure out workable solutions that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, provide jobs and other economic benefits for them, and help build sustainable communities. This kind of grassroots effort could then develop into a broad-based support for national policy and international governance. This approach, I believe, will be far more successful than trying to convince all of the deniers and trying to craft national legislation or international policy that will satisfy everyone.

Obesifying America

2010-03-01T10:25:00.005-05:00

By now everyone knows that obesity is a serious problem in the US. We hear about it in the news on a regular basis. The CDC recently released a study claiming that obesity costs us about $147 billion per year in direct and indirect costs, and the First Lady has made it her personal mission to educate Americans about living a healthy lifestyle (see here).
It's an issue that hits home for me as well. My father is currently obese and trying to lose weight. He's making progress, but his weight has caused him innumerable health problems. He has bad knees and ankles, has a stint in his heart, and takes ridiculous amounts of medicine to keep his blood pressure and cholesterol down and to treat many other diet related problems. It pains me sometimes to see him struggle to move around and do his daily chores. It's especially disconcerting when I think that his dad died of a heart attack at roughly the same age.
With that in mind, I think the focus on obesity and the stigma associated with it is misguided. If we continue to focus on weight and appearance as a determinant of health, we risk swinging the pendulum in the other direction and ending up with an anorexia epidemic.

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The Obesity Epidemic - Amy Farrell

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Instead, the focus should be on providing access to quality, fresh foods and encouraging a healthy diet and physical activity. But the issue is complex - it's one of the most obvious examples of a biocultural disease (one that involves both biological and social-cultural factors). In his award winning TED talk, Jamie Oliver focuses on a triangle of causal factors - Main Street (i.e. big business), the home, and the school.

The subsidy system needs to be fixed so that we're not making unhealthy food cheap. Instead we should be subsidizing fresh, organic produce and ensuring that it is available to everyone. Currently there are places where people simply can't get fresh food (called "food deserts"). And for those who do have access, it's often more economical to buy the unhealthy processed foods than it is to buy quality fresh food.

Furthermore, schools need to provide healthy meals and should not provide unhealthy foods. I remember when I was an intern at the Connecticut General Assembly. The representative I was working for was sponsoring a bill to ban junk food from schools. It went through several committees and got watered down to the point where it was basically meaningless - it limited the sale of sugary milk drinks and eliminated some (but not all) vending machines. Nevertheless, the Republicans were vehemently opposed to it. They thought that it was an imposition on their ability to decide what's best for their own children. But there is not right to access junk food. If parents want to provide that, then they can pack a lunch. By default, schools should serve healthy meals and not provide unhealthy food as an alternative.

People need to learn to cook again. Ideally they'd learn to garden and preserve their food as well, but that's not necessary. As a college student I see people eat some seriously disgusting things simply because they can't make food for themselves. Instead they eat fast food or heat up a pizza.

In fact, preparing a meal is very easy, but it does require time, and time is an issue as well. A lot of people simply don't have enough time to prepare fresh food every day for every meal. Between work, school, children, and entertainment, it's understandable that people would simply go to the freezer for something to heat up instead of actually cooking.

I think, fundamentally, we need to make it possible and desirable to connect to our food again. We need to be able to know where our food comes from, how to prepare it, and where it's going to. This is a lot more complicated than it sounds, but if we were to accomplish it, we would be healthier, happier, and more environmentally responsible as well.

The Redistribution of Wealth: Comparative Economics, Neoliberal Capitalism and Wall-Street Bonuses

2010-01-15T17:37:00.004-05:00

One thing I've noticed from studying anthropology and reading ethnographies of other cultures is that every economic system, whether it's composed of egalitarian hunter-gatherers or hierarchical aristocracies, has had some method for redistributing wealth. I think there's a good reason for this; it seems intuitive to me, though I couldn't back it up with actual data, that the natural flow of wealth is always upward. That is, wealth tends to flow towards those who already have it and away from those who do not. There are, of course, exceptions, but it seems to be a reasonable generalization. The same is true for power. Though I don't agree that wealth and power are equivalent, I do believe that there is a reciprocal relationship between the two - wealth can buy power and power can attract wealth. In fact, it may be this cyclical relationship between power and wealth that drives the upward flow of both.

The problem is that, when a society's wealth becomes overly concentrated in a few hands, that society becomes increasingly unstable. Extreme poverty sits outside in the cold while extravagant wealth dances and drinks cocktails in a penthouse on the top floor. The flow is unsustainable, and it is the flow of wealth, like blood through veins, which keeps a society alive. This is why every economic system has developed some system for redistributing wealth - small groups use reciprocity, slightly larger groups use complex rituals and centralized priesthoods, even larger groups use governments and taxation. The point is to siphon wealth from those who have a lot of it and give it to those who have little, thus maintaining the flow of wealth and a degree of equality within the population.

I'm sure you've all seen, or at least heard of the champagne glass distribution of wealth. What has happened in recent decades is that wealth has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a very small population. The reason for this is that classical, laissez-faire Capitalism, as it's presented in theory, lacks any form of redistributive mechanism. Government intervention through taxation, the only form of redistribution that could potentially handle the enormous flow of money generated by industrial capitalism, is considered harmful and the "invisible hand" of the market is supposed to take care of everything.

In the past, the government has intervened anyway. After the Great Depression made it clear that laissez-faire capitalism doesn't work, the US government implemented a series of social programs that effectively redistributed wealth to the general population (mostly in the form of services rather than actual cash). In the years that followed, welfare state capitalism attempted to balance the distribution of wealth (though it still allowed for extreme differences as well, and it also gave rise to the Military Industrial Complex that Eisenhower warned about). Then, in the 1970s, the oil crisis hit and the world was thrown into another economic recession. This time the blame was placed on Keynesian economics and the welfare state, and Neoliberal economists were able to worm their way in to a dominant role.

There is, however, a key difference between Neoliberal economics and classical capitalism. The difference is that Neoliberals are not opposed to the redistribution of wealth, as long as the wealth is redistributed to those at the top in the hope that it would "trickle down" to the rest of the population (which, of course, is the opposite of the theory proposed above). The result is that there has been an acceleration of the natural upward flow of wealth so that, in just a few decades we have seen both the US and the Global economies develop that champagne glass shape. The problems with this have become glaringly apparent in the last decade as the global economy has been plunged into a deep recession and a number of economic scandals (i.e. Enron and Godlman Sachs) have plagued our nation.

However, policy makers have done nothing to address the root cause of the crisis - the lack of redistribution of wealth. Bush's final act was to give trillions of dollars to the banks to bail them out of their problems. Obama has continued that approach, and what we see now is that the banks are the only groups to have recovered - drawing record profits roughly equivalent to the amount of taxpayer money they were given by the government and offering enormous bonuses to the very CEOs that caused the current economic crisis.

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With this principle in mind - that an economy requires redistribution of wealth in order to be sustainable - the best practice, one which most economists would likely scoff at, would have been to give the money to the poorest populations either in the form of hard cash or services (i.e. universal health care, subsidized college tuition, social security programs, etc.). That kind of subsidy would truly lift all boats, as the money would flow up the wealth ladder, enriching everyone on the way. Instead, our governments and international agencies continue to support the trickle-down theory, which amounts to corporate welfare and legitimized theft by the wealthy from the poor.

It's time we were outraged by this. It's time somebody said "Enough is enough!" and demanded that the corporations give back our money so we can do something useful instead of waste it on a fragile, inequitable economic system.

Cap'n Trade, Human Rights and Alternative Approaches to Climate Change

2009-11-28T11:42:00.001-05:00

Update Dec. 1, 2009: Here's a video from Annie Leonard (The Story of Stuff) on Cap and Trade. It says just about everything I mentioned below, only better and with animations. Enjoy.

With the Copenhagen conference quickly approaching, Climate Change is the next big agenda in US politics. The solution that's being offered - the only politically viable solution, I've been told - is Cap'n Trade. As most of you probably know, this is a system where carbon emissions would be capped and taxed beyond a certain point, but polluters could purchase offsets that would allow them to avoid the caps. In my opinion, the plan is flawed for a number of reasons:

1) It only affects the largest emitters. The current plan's cap is so high that most emitters wouldn't have to do anything to avoid the cap. Certainly, the cap will be reduced over time, but it would probably only have a minor impact for the next 10 years or more.
2) Most of the credits are slated to be given away, gratis, by the US government. This is meant to make the plan acceptable to power companies, but essentially it allows them to continue doing what they've been doing while appearing to comply with carbon reduction - subsidized by the government.
3) Companies can buy offsets which would, theoretically, neutralize the effect of their carbon emissions. This amounts to a sleight of hand, which allows industrialized nations and high emitters to continue their normal practices while giving the impression that something is being done to reduce carbon emissions. The fact is that without substantial reduction in carbon emissions as opposed to sequestration, we will not be able to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide to the recommended 350 ppm level that is necessary for avoiding the worst case scenarios of Climate Change.
4) The carbon offset plan is essentially another mechanism for wealthy nations to push the environmental and social consequences of our lifestyle onto poorer nations. Many of these projects displace indigenous populations or involve other human rights abuses.

Cap'n Trade is a solution which is tailor made for industry - not a genuine attempt to limit carbon emissions. In their efforts to make the regulations politically viable (meaning that they will encounter less resistance from the energy industry), our legislators have made them more or less worthless.

Further complicating the Climate Change issue is the recent leak of a mass of emails between some of the world's preeminent climate scientists. This has laid bare the deeply political processes involved in climate science, and left many concerned about the public's perception of the issue. Jerome Whitington over at Accounting for Atmosphere points out that "...what we’re left with is a silly, irresponsible debate between elite Northern science and the elite Northern conservative populists who don’t want the UN eroding their right to play frontiersmen on the grand stage of American exceptionalism."

In a recent report to the World Bank, Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom "A Polycentric Approach for Coping with Climate Change" proposes an alternative to the typical Western approaches based on Markets and Science. She emphasizes multiple solutions at multiple scales which would take into account the on-the-ground experiences and local knowledge of the people who are most affected by Climate Change. The result would be a system that would be more resilient, more open to innovative approaches, and less prone to total failure.
Climate change is, without a doubt, a huge issue. We need to find real solutions rather than giving the energy industry an easy way out. We also need to think of Climate Change as an Environmental Justice issue, and make sure that the interests of those who are most affected (usually those who are least involved in the modern industrial project) are accounted for.

Interview: Colleen Morgan

2009-11-22T14:17:00.003-05:00

The following is from an email-based interview with Colleen Morgan, who runs the blog Middle Savagery. These days I have a lot of questions about the direction(s) of anthropology, especially when it comes to the publication and dissemination of the information that anthropologists produce. Since Colleen Morgan's dissertation research is heavily focused on the use of New Media in archaeology, I thought that she would be a great person to start the discussion with:

Ryan Anderson: What do you think about the current model for academic publishing?

Colleen Morgan: I think that we are currently seeing academic publishing in flux—in academic disciplines such as physics, you see a wide engagement with open access publication, but in anthropology and archaeology we are still struggling with the complexities involved with our unique disciplines. In archaeology we have several different forms of data that we collect and there is not a robust, viable methodology for integrating these data in traditional publication or online. I think that there is still a lot of resistance to open access publication, and while there are some very valid reasons for this resistance such as revealing sacred indigenous knowledge or depicting sacred objects or human remains, the current "closed," paper-based publication model is not viable in the long term. That said, it is a dangerous prospect for graduate students who are trying to publish and establish their research--hiring and tenure are still based solely on peer-reviewed articles in traditional journals.

RA: In your opinion, how well do anthropologists and archaeologists engage with wider audiences?

CM: I think I have a skewed perspective on outreach within the anthropological and archaeological community. In my program at UC Berkeley, we are encouraged to do large amounts of outreach and we are given academic credit for this work. I am sure that this is not the case at other academic institutions and I do not know how much people do on their own. I think that archaeologists in particular do pretty well with outreach in a person-to-person scenario where people come to the site and we explain what we are doing as we work. In other respects we could do more with online outreach, and even more involvement in community-based research.

RA: Should anthropologists/archaeologists try to reach a more public audience?

CM: It is symptomatic of the current mode of the information age that archaeologists are attempting to make our data more available to the public. How much of this information will be lost in the ever increasing digital noise is the question. Fundamentally I show my roots in contract archaeology when I say that of course we should try to reach a wider audience--our funding structure and preservation of sites depends on it.

Ultimately the tension is between our interpretations of the past that show doubt, complexity, and conflict and a public that wants clarity, narrative, and resolution. Can we and should we cater to these impulses when they conflict with our "messy" interpretations? Obviously not, but it takes a good deal of skill to maintain a balance--I am not the Carl Sagan of anthropology, by any means.

RA: What are the benefits of attempting to reach wider audiences? And what about the drawbacks?

CM: Well, as I stated above, the benefits include getting more funding and perhaps saving sites from being completely looted. I will be utterly selfish though, in saying that one of the main benefits to reaching a wider audience is that moment of understanding and interest on a person's face as I describe an artifact or a site to them and they find a personal connection to a place and a way of life that was once far removed from their personal sphere. There are also benefits to learning how adaptable we are as a species and how our social relationships have been very different in the past--different in ways that make our current controversies over sex and religion seem rather minor.

The drawbacks have become even more pronounced for me in my more recent work in the Middle East with the highly politicized views of the past, especially in regard to the Bible and Islam. I am just beginning to negotiate these territories, but I still feel that it is important for us to share our finds, and be the major source of information about these finds. It is important in these cases to be comfortable in one's role as the interpreter of this information and to be available to rebut outrageous or inflammatory reuse of our data.

RA: How do you think information will be published and disseminated in the near future? What changes do you imagine (or hope) will take place, if any? If you could change anything about the current model, what would it be?

CM: In stark contrast with my interest in digital archaeology, I would dearly love some of the old modes of visual communication back, such as medium format photography and Victorian-grade site artists for illustrations. As I grow more comfortable with photography and 3D reconstructions, I get a greater appreciation for the interpretive potential of these older technologies. I hope that in the future there is room (and funding!) for all of these representations. The dream is obviously to have the uber-database with all archaeological materials and sites cataloged in a geo-located, cross-referenced, folksonomic structure, but finding the time, money, and legion of monkeys at typewriters to do all of the data entry is problematic, to
put it mildly.

In the short term, I don't see much of a change in publishing and dissemination, sadly. I think that we will see a greater availability of traditionally published articles and books, but big innovations will be slow to come because they are not rewarded financially or academically. There is also not an established peer review system for digital materials and there are only a handful of archaeologists trained in digital methodologies to critically evaluate these works. A lot of my work is at a very foundational level, coming up with citational strategies and showing the relevance of a particular technological application to theoretical and interpretive archaeological work.

One relatively small change that I would like to see in the digital publication world is a move toward Creative Commons licensing for all archaeological photography. There really is no reason to keep the rights for images locked up and not many people respect these copyrights anyway.

Cross-posted at Ethnografix.

Mobility. Prison. Class. Strands of society from sociology and rap

2009-11-16T21:09:00.007-05:00

According to an online dictionnary, a strand is "a pattern forming a unity within a larger structural whole". Can a juxtaposition of quotes from a book* by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and some songs** of french rap (with english subtitles) bring light to some aspects of a larger structural whole ? If you have about half an hour, you can see for yourself.

"The mobility enjoyed by "the people who invest" - who have the capital, the money needed for investment - brings about a disengagement of power towards any duty, a phenomenon which takes a new form, of a yet unseen radicality : no more duties towards the workers, towards the youngest or weakest, towards future generations, towards the preservation of the condition of life. In one word, we are witnessing the end of the duty to contribute to everyday life of the community, and its perpetuation. Today exists an assymetry of a new kind between the deterritorialized nature of power and the maintenance of "life in general" in its territorial frames - life which the new power, able to move suddenly and without warning, is free to exploit, and to abandon to the consequences of this exploitation."
Bauman, 1999, p. 20.

"The summit of the new hierarchy is extra-territorial; its lower strata are marked by varying degrees of spatial constraints, and the lowest is that of the glebae adscripti (those who are ascribed to the glebe), exploitable at leisure. "
Bauman, 1999, p. 160

"The state that seems the most awful to us, the most cruel and ghastly, is forced immobility, the fact of being enchained somewhere without having the right to leave; what makes this situation unbearable, is impossibility to move, rather than frustration which would come from an actual desire to leave. Not being able to move is a remarkable sign of impotence, incapability and pain. (...) Immobilization is the fate that people who are haunted by their own immobilization would like to see imposed on whom they are afraid of, and who deserve to their eyes an exemplary and cruel punishment."
Bauman, 1999, pp. 183-184.

About why the penal system strikes lower classes harder than higher classes, Bauman gives the following reasons :

"On the one hand, we find the particular intents of lawmakers, who have a very precise notion of order. What actions are susceptible to find a place in the Penal Code ? Acts which can committ those who are excluded from this notion of order : losers and oppressed ones. Stealing the resources of entire nations, is "promoting free enterprise"; stealing the livelihood of whole families and communities, is called "downsizing", or "rationalizing". Those two thefts are of course not inscribed in the list of criminal acts and susceptible to sanction."
Bauman, 1999, p. 185

(Lyrics -in french - here )

"On the other hand, as every police services dealing with this kind of affairs know, illegal behaviors committed at the "summit" of the hierarchy are hardly separable from the tight web of day-to-day and "ordinary" affairs. (...) The crimes of "high society" are ill-defined, and are furthermore extremely difficult to track down. (...) These crimes imply a degree of financial and juridical sophistication, almost impossible to understand for an outsider, especially if he is profane or unexperienced. These wrongdoings are "disembodied", they are without physical substance; they "exist" in pure space, in the imaginary space of pure abstraction : they are literally invisible. Relying on its intuition and its common sense, the population can suspect that the constitution of fortunes is punctuated with thefts, but nothing is more difficult than to point a precise action. (...) It is hard to see how judging the convicted ones could alleviate the everyday sorrow hauting poor neighborhoods or dangerous streets of our cities. There is thus not really any political advantage to get for who "actually" act against crimes "at the summit" . "
Bauman, 1999, 186-188.

[the following video contains graphic violence almost from the beginning]

* I translated the quotes from a french edition : Zygmunt Bauman, 1999, Le coût humain de la mondialisation , Hachettes. [1998, Globalization. The Human Consequences, Polity Press and Blackwell publishers]
** Kery James - Banlieusards // Kery James - Thug Life // Mafia K'1 Fry - C'est la Guerre // Ideal J - Hardcore //
- Subtitles by youtuber hiphopisdead92 Very big thanks to him.

If you wish so, please feel free to leave a comment below.

What's so Great about Politics?

2009-11-08T22:37:00.005-05:00

I hope this makes sense, and, if not, we can discuss. I've been following several discussions on power, politics, etc., but haven't yet come to any firm conclusions on what power/domination/imperialism is and how to study or combat it.

For some of these discussions, see anthropology/war/power by Ryan Anderson, Questions about Colonialism and Anthropology: Epistemology, Methodology, and Politics by Max Forte, Thoughts on Power by Jeremy Trombley, and some questions on political engagement by J.M at the bottom of the page here. I've also been thinking about the recent shootings in Fort Hood and Orlando.

U.S. Congress, Joint Session, link

The discussions of politics reminded me that, personally, I've never taken much interest in politics. After all, why should I? I can't conclude that politics is unimportant, but I don't see much reason to be excited about 'participating' or being complicit in what's going on.

What's an election? I'm casting a vote for someone to get paid to sit in D.C. in a suit and tie and represent "me." This person is, in my case, always male. The district where I vote in Georgia has never had a female Representative, and the whole state of Georgia has only had one female Senator, back in 1922. Anyway, gender would only make a slight difference because, whether male or female, the person in Washington also barely knows the people he/she represents. Politicians are twice as bad as the anthropologists Max Forte critiques in his posts because politicians claim to represent the interests of people who they've never even MET. Then it becomes "our" burden to protest or write letters to our Congressmen to tell them our opinions because, honestly, they have no clue, and even if they do, they rarely seem to care unless it compromises their re-election.

Moreover, it seems to me that only a power-hungry individual would go into politics in the first place. Politics: i.e. "the art or science concerned with winning and holding control over a government," or "competition between competing interest groups or individuals for power and leadership" (source). All my vote does is affirm their right to hold that power over people, and what's so exciting about that?

On top of that, we appoint judges so they can decide for us what's right and wrong -- judges who only have to use a slim veneer of consistency or logic, e.g. "precedent," to support their conclusions. They can say that killing another person is wrong, "homicide," and then turn around and say it's OK to kill people in another part of the world, so long as it's in the interests of the State -- that is, in the interests of those people they supposedly represent but don't actually know. Ultimately, then, they probably just decide based on their own beliefs and, in the case of politicians, the interests of their primary supporters.

What does all this have to do with the shootings at Fort Hood and in Orlando? Men who carry out shootings always remind me of Pierre Bourdieu's essay "Gender and Symbolic Violence" and the case of domestic violence I studied for my college thesis, in the book A Private Family Matter. Bourdieu, on power and gender, writes:

[T]he structures of domination...are the product of an incessant (and therefore historical) labour of reproduction, to which singular agents (including men, with weapons such as physical and symbolic violence) and institutions -- families, the church, the educational system, the state -- contribute. ... Symbolic violence is instituted through the adherence that the dominated cannot fail to grant to the dominant (and therefore to the domination) when, to shape her thought of him, and herself, or, rather, her thought of her relation with him and which, being no more than the embodied form of the relation of domination, cause that relation to appear as natural (Bourdieu 2004:339).

I think there are some serious problems with this way of explaining domination, but what I'm particularly interested in his how he suggests that violence is a resource that men possess, "weapons such as physical and symbolic violence," that allows them to gain hegemonic power over women, who are completely "dominated" (2004:339).

It's ludicrous to call women "no more than the embodied form of the relation of domination," but I'll give Bourdieu the benefit of the doubt that he's stuck in his own symbolic violence (2004:339). Actually, women do have the power to enact violence against men but, in many cases, decide not to use it. In the case of domestic violence in A Private Family Matter, Olga, the abuser's wife, planned violence against her husband, Tony, but never carried out the plans. She thought about pouring gasoline on the bed and lighting it, burning Tony in his sleep, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. Then she considered stabbing him with his scuba diving knife. She went in the bedroom while he was napping and held the knife above him, ready to kill. At the last minute, her daughter Barbie yelled that someone was at the door. After these failed attempts, she tried to commit suicide instead, eating all the pills in the bottles on her dresser. And, more importantly, she had many other ways of asserting power without violence -- ways of reasserting control over her life without necessarily doing it by achieving domination over others.

Even her husband Tony and her son Victor resisted power/violence in non-domineering ways, on certain occasions. For instance, to the son Victor, who was also abused by Tony, not enacting violence proved his own superiority and ability to escape Tony's violence, regardless of whether or not Tony accepted that interpretation. When Victor was little he dreamed himself a tiger, but a tiger who never attacked things but rather protected creatures in danger (Rivers 2006:64). He sought out other father figures in the media, as alternative role models to Tony. If Tony abused him, he would imagine, alternatively, Jack’s fatherly punishment: “President Kennedy would have given me a stern talking-to, or sent me to my room to write an essay, but that would have been the end of it” (2006:59). Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird was also a significant father figure for Victor. Victor prayed to make Tony more like Gregory Peck because Peck portrayed fatherly “devotion” and justice, “truth and righteousness”: “Finch’s heroism in standing up for truth and righteousness was equaled by his devotion to his kids, Jeb and Scout” (2006:119).

Gregory Peck, To Kill a Mockingbird, link

One of Victor's greatest fears was that he would become his father. Consequently, escaping violence became more important to him than being able to counter his father's violence with violence. To him, his relationship with his son proves the achievement: “All of the anxiety and fear I had carried with me for thirty-nine years washed away in those first private moments between this father and his son. Eli would have a home that he would want to come home to and never fear” (2006:358). All of this was a way of re-asserting control over his life, in a way very different from his father's power/violence, and, for that, I wouldn't exactly call either him OR his mother "domination embodied."

My point? I would say that those who engage in violence, "the dominating" (according to Bourdieu), do choose to use certain tools that give them special power over others, e.g. the power to beat/shoot/kill. Violence also has a certain legitimacy as *the* proper cultural tool for revenge and bringing attention to what's happening. How it achieved this cultural status I'm not sure, but Victor didn't consider using a gun until he went to the police and was told it was a "private family matter." After that, he decided, “Since I had come to the conclusion that no arrest would be made unless [Tony] killed one of us or we killed him there didn’t seem to be any alternative” (2006:145). Even then he didn't carry it out, and this reluctance of many of the "dominated" to use violence also means something. Actually, there *were* alternatives which Victor didn't quite see at the time but did discover gradually.

How does this relate to politics? Aspiring to achieve political political power seems to me like too much complicity with the system, not unlike enacting violence to get back at violent people. Philosopher Naomi Wolf once spoke to several philosophy classes at my college and advocated that we have an all-woman political party supporting a woman candidate for president. I asked if a man would be allowed in this party if he shared the same philosophy and she said absolutely not. It seemed like reverse exclusion to me. I haven't read her book Fire with Fire, but I think it elaborates on some of her ideas. The Publishers Weekly reviewer on Amazon writes, "Wolf theorizes that little girls, as much as boys, have fantasies of absolute dominion but learn to repress their 'will to power' at a very early age. Wolf here sketches a psychological road map designed to help women deal with their ambivalence about success, power, equality and money."

Maybe I'm too much of a FEMALE, but why would we ever even want this kind of power and domination in the first place? So that everyone gets a chance to dominate? It doesn't make sense to me. I would be more enthused about drawing on alternatives to violence, or alternatives to politics, or at least stripping politics to the basics, rather than playing into systems created by and for individuals bent on dominating others.

Sources

Bourdieu, Pierre. 2004. Gender and Symbolic Violence. In Violence in War and Peace. Pp. 339-342. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Rivers, Victor Rivas. 2006. A Private Family Matter: A Memoir. New York: Atria Books.

Opposition to U.S. Military Buildup in Guam

2009-11-04T13:10:00.006-05:00

Discussion of US colonialism in Guam, as well as critique of U.S. plans for military buildup. If the video below takes too long to load, you can also go HERE for the original video and transcript.

Being 'We the People': US-Afghan Student Photo Exhibit

2009-11-01T20:49:00.016-05:00

Students from Marefat High School in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Constitution High School in Philadelphia, U.S.A., are currently engaging in a civic photography education program sponsored by the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, the National Museum in Kabul, and the American Association of Museums (AAM).

The project is titled "Being 'We the People:' Afghanistan, America and the Minority Imprint" and centers on "establishing international exchange and promoting constitutional principles to emerging democracies through educational and civic learning initiatives" (source).

Week 9 Kabul

Click here to view these pictures larger

Week 8 Philadelphia

Click here to view these pictures larger

The program's early statement of intent on the AAM website details the program's aim:

Nasim Fekrat is a young journalist, who publishes in both Farsi and English, and is a member of one of Afghanistan’s ethnic minorities. Several years ago, he traveled to a province in the south of the country controlled by the Taliban. “Why do you speak my language,” a villager asked Nasim, “if you are from China?” Nasim insisted that he was Afghan like the villager, despite his distinctly Asiatic features, characteristic of Nasim’s particular ethnic group. The villager, having never seen anyone outside of his own community, and knowing no public figure of Nasim’s ethnicity to serve as a frame of reference, refused to believe that he and Nasim shared a national identity.

Nasim was inspired by the experience to suggest a traveling portraiture exhibition, to expose Afghans all over the country to images of the people with whom they share a country. But Nasim’s story, which he told Center staff during a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan, raised a further question: What role can minority groups have in a democracy that does not always recognize them—in Nasim’s case, literally—as citizens? Dedicated to promoting citizenship, the National Constitution Center engaged enthusiastically with this question, and, in collaboration with partner organizations in Afghanistan, developed the following response: The role of minority groups in a democracy depends entirely on how its members perceive themselves as citizens,which, in turn, depends entirely on what they interpret “citizenship” to mean.

Combining the fields of documentary photography and oral history, the Center will partner with a school in Afghanistan and with the National Museum of Afghanistan, to empower students to answer—or interpret—the question for themselves. As they explore the question, they will be sharing the process, imparting what they learn, and collaborating with a predominantly minority high school in Philadelphia as its students explore the same question. (source)

As part of exhibit development, students are sharing photos online on Shutterfly, at http://beingwethepeople.shutterfly.com/. The photos don't include titles or descriptions from the students to help explain, but maybe these will be added later at the actual exhibit. The students do have the opportunity to comment on the photos, and if you scroll to the bottom of the main page, you can see some of the dialogue students have been having. I like how these comment posts allow students to write their own statements of intent, separate from the project itself. Here are just a few excerpts:

Zainab from Marefat High School (MHS) writes:

My people are trying to forget the bad acrimonious memories from the past, which were no more than war, affliction, destruction and desperate. I want to help my people, myself, and the entire world to forget those days. The world remembers and knows Afghanistan by the pictures of war and agonies. I think it is enough now. It is the time now that the world should get the other pictures of my country too; a country where its people are working for a great change, though there are still bad things and realities too. Joining ‘we the people’ with my photos and paintings, I want to say that my country is not the place of gun and tank. Furthermore, it’s improving and it wants to develop. I don’t want my photos to hidden the hopes of people. Though I admit the harsh realities of affliction too. I wish my people to have the smile of hope. My photos should have this very cry that hatred, war and destruction are enough. (source)

Razia from MHS writes:

Some times when the world watches Afghanistan behind the cheek of poverty, suicide, fighting, and zealotry, I think the real picture of my country is not reflected fairly. I knew that Afghanistan is going to progress and there are lots of people who really work hard to bring a lightening future against all the past darkness and the present pessimism. I thought ‘we the people’ would help me to discover goodness of my people. Many important things happened in the course of the current year. For example the second elections is one of the good events which had lots of things to say: people who were witness of a big change on their life (fate) and candidates who were narrator of Afghanistan by a new way. (source)

M. Saeid Madadi from MHS writes:

When this program (WE THE PEOPLE) started I thought that it can be a very good opportunity to reach my goal and have communication with other people of our world and say that the post-war generation of Afghanistan thinks otherwise and have a word to say for their world, for their era and for their history. . . .I will have the ability to talk a few words about my people here in Afghanistan, but I have only a rough idea and vision about my fellows in the States. Perhaps this is the first step and we have a lot to do in the course of our mutual works and activities. America is one of the greatest examples of mankind ability and civilization. We are in need of some experiences developed in that country. At the meantime, we may have lots of otherwise things to pass to our fellow Americans. We are trying to build a country and this would have marvelous experiences for us. I am looking forward to having these experiences shared with our fellows. (source)

Bismellah from MHS writes:

Of course my goal is, as goal of the project is, to design a proportionately real portrait of Afghans their life and culture and certainly the pictures we took can some how convey our message to our audience, the other side of communication that I am sure it can. I am aware of the condition in which people live, because I am also one of them who live with them and shares sorrows and pleasures with them. And I witnessed every day how they live in my vicinity and how they are. Thus this was not a completely new experience for me; any how, it was an experience. I witnessed once again that how people live, their way and level of life, life of children, who are the bases on which future of his society is being built, their deprivation and sanitary condition.

Although I witnessed all mentioned above, I am not pessimistic about the situation, because I can not ignore and under estimate what has been done during seven or eight years in the country, I mean Afghanistan, and changes that has came into our lives. We are optimistic but not satisfied or content, we will try our best to make it better than it is.I admit that my present picture from the States is that taken roughly from the movies and some books. I am sure it will be much otherwise when we go ahead and make communications and interactions with our fellow Americans. . . . Once again I hope our photographs and essays can convey our mutual messages across. (source)

I wish the teachers had gotten comparable statements from the students in Philadelphia, but you can see some of their intent from the photos themselves. Please check out the site for yourself because it's constantly developing, and there's much more going on than I can capture in a single post. It's definitely an interesting project to consider.

Again, the full project and photos can be found at: http://beingwethepeople.shutterfly.com/.

Civilizing Violence for Human Rights

2009-10-25T23:26:00.014-04:00

Global Peace Index
Institute for Economics and Peace, from Hagemann and Kelzad, source

What does it mean to label certain countries and groups as peaceful and others as violent and in need of human rights intervention?

This post is partially in response to a quote Ryan Anderson shared at Ethnografix from Beatriz Manz's (2008) article "Continuum of Violence in Post-War Guatemala." Manz encourages people to take a more active stance on human rights violations occurring in other parts of the world. Specifically, she decries violence in Guatemala that persists despite the signing of the 1996 peace accords to end the Guatemalan civil war. Manz's discussion of violence and peace eerily reminded me of U.S. rhetoric used to justify intervention during the Guatemalan civil war, as well as rhetoric against terrorism used in support of ongoing US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

During the Guatemalan civil war, U.S. intelligence agencies informing policymakers pushed an anti-communist agenda that aimed to stop the violence of groups vaguely defined as terrorists, insurgents, guerrillas, communists, social reformists, extremists, etc. (Garthoff 2004:40)(examples of intelligence documents here).

One especially pertinent document, "Guatemala: Prospects for Political Moderation," lays out the history of violence in Guatemala and considers how to promote moderation, mostly for Guatemala's importance to "US regional interests" and the "potential spillover of any unrest and instability" to other countries in Latin America (CIA 1983:1).

The analyst praises the work of President Ríos Montt in helping stabilize the country, in countering insurgency and violence:

The President [Ríos Montt] has demonstrated a strong personal commitment to "civilize" Guatemala. He has adopted a counterinsurgency strategy that combines selective repression and civic action. He has taken some steps to reduce human rights abuses and integrate previously excluded social groups -- such as Indians, peasants, and urban workers -- in to the political and economic mainstream . . . beyond 1985, the probability of steady movement toward moderate government becomes lower in our estimation. We believe that extreme ethnic and class differentiation and sharp socioeconomic disparities will continue to inhibit the development of political tolerance and compromise -- key elements of democracy. . . political polarization and fluctuating levels of violence will increase, and military domination of the political system will persist. The United States can expect continuing difficulties in exerting a moderating or stabilizing influence over Guatemalan political events.(iv)

For three decades, Guatemala has been beset by escalating cycles of violence and repression. . . . the regime of President Efrain Ríos Montt has reduced -- at least temporarily -- indiscriminate repression and has taken initial steps to reduce political polarization.(1)

This Ríos Montt is the SAME Ríos Montt cited on Amnesty International's site as having been the most repressive and violent regime of the civil war:

Ríos Montt ruled Guatemala between March 1982 and August 1983, during which the most extensive human rights violations of the 36-year conflict were committed," said Renata Rendón, AIUSA's Advocacy Director for the Americas. "In that time, the Guatemalan government led a brutal campaign to wipe out large portions of the country's indigenous populations using methods of cruelty described as an outrage to the moral conscience of the civilized world." (source)

Ironically, the U.S. is implicated in human rights violations through its support of the Montt regime, but the rhetoric that allowed the U.S. to feel ok doing so centered on the belief and/or rhetoric that they were countering violence and furthering human rights.

To return to Manz's article, her point was that distant observers should take an ethical stance on violence perpetrated in other regions of the globe:

In considering levels of responsibility in cases of mass terror, there is the "atrocity triangle," composed of victims, perpetrators, and observers. The observer, or proverbial bystander -- a part often played by the academic -- does not need to witness human rights violations directly. Nowadays, violence that is inflicted in distant geographic regions implicates us all in some way, given the globalized world in which we live. Global bystanders should not evade responsibility by claiming a conflict of interest and recusing themselves in order to avoid participating in the jury and ethical judgment. When it comes to human rights, we live in a world without borders and therefore have a far broader moral burden of accountability.(Manz 2008:158)

She adds that academics in the U.S., in particular, should take a strong stance on such issues because of their positioning:

Are all bystanders equal? Some, especially those in the United States, carry greater responsibility. US academics occupy a privileged position and should be willing to expose human rights abuses, injustice, degrading poverty, and exploitation.(158)

In light of how 'mass terror,''human rights abuses,' and 'violence,' can be defined in innumerable ways, for differing purposes, a call for a wholehearted defense of human rights makes me uneasy. Is it always true that "violence that is inflicted in distant geographic regions implicates us all in some way, given the globalized world in which we live"(158)? When violence occurs in another country, a civil war for instance, is it always right to intervene on what we believe is the side of "human rights"(158)? The fact that U.S. analysts hailed Rios Montt as harbinger of human rights is enough to call that claim into question. Given a 'globalized world' we might have strategic interest in quelling certain kinds of violence, but that doesn't necessarily make it right to take action. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are another example, although here the rhetorical focus was more heavily on the need for the U.S. and its allies to unite to combat global terror.

I'm not denying that there aren't global ties that implicate faraway people in helping perpetrate human rights abuses. However, these are specific ties between specific people and nations. Poverty in one country, for instance, may very well be the result of economic exploitation by the people of another. In fact, we don't even entirely live in a "world without borders" as Manz suggests, because some forms of extreme poverty could be seen as the result of border regulations and property rights that prevent people in a region prone to droughts from moving elsewhere (158).

Thoroughly considering specific global ties and histories before proclaiming the need for action on behalf of a specific human rights violation would probably help, but then again the author of the CIA report on political moderation seems to have spent plenty of time considering and still praised Montt.

Manz uses an "atrocity triangle" format model discussed by Stanley Cohen in the bookStates of Denial, but the discourse on human rights and countering violence in Guatemala, given its earlier manifestation in the CIA intelligence, seems to fit right into Cohen's discussion of perpetrators and denial:

A recurrent question about perpetrators of political atrocities and serious crimes is this: how can ordinary people do terrible things, yet, during or after the event, find ways to deny the meaning of what they are doing? These denials play a causal role in allowing atrocities to be committed initially and allowing offenders to continue with the rest of their lives as if nothing unusual was happening. The same denials -- whether contrived lies or sincere beliefs -- appear in official discourse and government appeals to persuade their citizens to do terrible things or keep quiet about knowing them. And they reappear in the rhetoric later used to deflect any criticism. (Cohen 2001:15, link)

Thoughts??

More Sources

CIA. (1983). Document 26: Guatemala: Prospects for Political Moderation. In “The Guatemalan Military: What the U.S. Files Reveal,” National Security Archive Online, accessed Apr. 9, 2007, available at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB32/vol2.html.

Garthoff, Raymond L. (2004). Foreign Intelligence and the Historiography of the Cold War. Journal of Cold War Studies 6(2):40.

Manz, Beatriz. (2008). The Continuum of Violence in Post-War Guatemala. Social Analysis 52(2):151-64.

Obama and the Peace Controversy

2009-10-13T23:19:00.009-04:00

"... hopes everybody shits all over the achievements of people who are shitting all over Obama's. A little bitter still over the election, are we?"

"... ATTN: Idiots. Please read, and stop making my brain hurt. 'Why Obama Deserves the Nobel Peace Prize'"
- J., Facebook

This post is dedicated to my best friend J. who makes it blatantly clear on Facebook that she's pissed about people attacking Obama's Nobel Prize win. Lol, if you're reading J., feel free to comment, or pummel me next time we chat, whichever makes you happiest.

Why the defensiveness of Obama? First, it's not necessarily something to smirk at. I heard the same claims this weekend among a group of outspoken liberal neighbors, the kind who, in spite of Glen Beck's warnings, proudly display Van Jones' The Green Collar Economy on the coffee table.

What seems to have happened is that the award has revived Obama's highly resonant campaign message for hope:

"In issuing the prize to Obama, the committee decided to take a chance and do something relevant: Hope for peace" (source).

“Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future,” the committee said. “His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population” (source).

As Obama states in his Rose Garden speech, the vision that has been affirmed by the award aims for "a new beginning among people of different faiths and races and religions, one based upon mutual interest, and mutual respect. . . .an unwavering commitment to the rights of all . . . to live in peace and security in nations of their own. . . . the security that you won't have to live in fear of disease or violence without hope for the future" (source).

The message resonated with voters during the election and, in many cases, still does. Why not? After all, it's not a bad vision, one that many Americans can and did affirm by voting Obama into office. The devil is in the details, but with the details the vision may not have worked:

It is precisely its lack of specificity that enabled Obama's hope to be replicated as others' personal hope (seee also Hiokazu Miyazaki, "Sen. Obama's Policy of Hope," Ithaca Journal, February 29, 2008). ... [T]he heavily criticized portion of his Super Tuesday speech in Chicago captures the simultaneously personal and general quality of his concept of hope: "Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. ... We are the hope of the future; the answer to the cynics who tell us our house must stand divided; that we cannot come together; that we cannot remake this world as it should be" ... "We" here refers neither to the Obama campaign nor to Obama supporters. It is a much more general 'we.' It is this conscious conflation of the personal and the general that defines Obama's hope and that invites us all to replicate it as our own personal and specific hope. (Miyazaki 2008:8)

Given the collective nature of the vision, is an attack on Obama's Peace Prize win now being interpreted as a very personal attack on the Hope? It's hard to interpret it as otherwise when almost all the rhetoric about the award, and even the statements by the Nobel committee, focus on that vision. In many senses, the attack really IS an attack on the vision, and maybe those who share it do have a right to be mad.

Although, maybe they should also consider getting mad when the vision ISN'T honored ... defend whatever vision they support rather than Obama's embodiment of it. When people criticize Obama for Afghanistan or Iraq, does it spark the same defensiveness among the left wing? If it has, I haven't seen it yet. The critique targets Obama, yet resonates slightly with the Obama-inspired vision, therefore not really pissing off the same crowd. At the same time, there's no big rally for ending the wars, even though the Hope doesn't want people to have to "live in violence" (source). Has Obama's embodiment of Hope made it difficult for those who ascribe to this vision to, in turn, criticize Obama, i.e. the Vision? Or, at the very least, has it left them less interested in doing so?

Or maybe I've taken it too far and they really do ascribe to the administration's policies in the Middle East. You tell me.

I close with an interesting Palestinian perspective on the Obama administration, and any hope the Fatah Party might ONCE have had:

Palestine’s Fatah Party, led by the Palestinian Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas, has issued a written statement that it has lost faith in the Obama administration. The document stated, "All hopes placed in the new U.S. administration and President Obama have evaporated. He couldn’t withstand the pressure of the Zionist lobby, which led to a retreat from his previous positions on halting settlement construction and defining an agenda for the negotiations and peace." (source).

And what would it mean if, along these lines, more people in the U.S. "lost faith" in Obama? To lose "firm belief in something for which there is no proof"? (Merriam-Webster Online). It doesn't mean that all is lost. Less solid belief might be good for a change. There would be more reason to turn a critical eye to what's going on and gauge policy piece by piece, in terms of our own interpretations of where we should be headed, rather than solely through Obama's.

... a "critical hope" rather than a "faithful" one.

Educate

2009-10-09T10:11:00.006-04:00

What is the actual role of education? Is it to actually educate and teach people how to think critically? Or is education all about creating obedient citizens who work within a given socio-economic system? Or, is "education" something that is differential across the United States, something that can be one thing in one place, and something completely different in another?

Is our education system fair? Is it even consistent? Why are some communities so resistant and frustrated with public education? Why do they feel that it's a waste to use taxpayer money for public education. Right about now, I think it's time for my favorite Paulo Freire quote:

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world (1970).

Is the education system here in the US about freedom, or about control? Or, is it about apathy? Paul Krugman recently wrote a piece on his blog called "The Uneducated American." Here is a small excerpt:

If you had to explain America’s economic success with one word, that word would be “education.” In the 19th century, America led the way in universal basic education. Then, as other nations followed suit, the “high school revolution” of the early 20th century took us to a whole new level. And in the years after World War II, America established a commanding position in higher education.

But that was then. The rise of American education was, overwhelmingly, the rise of public education — and for the past 30 years our political scene has been dominated by the view that any and all government spending is a waste of taxpayer dollars. Education, as one of the largest components of public spending, has inevitably suffered.

For me, this only brings up more questions. What is the role of education here in the US? And what are the realities of our education system? What purpose does it really serve? This conversation is not something that should simply be brushed off. I think that paying attention to the complaints about public education (from various social and political positions) is important here. What is it about our public education system that is creating so much tension for so many groups of people? And, on the other hand, why are some groups of people fairly content with certain ideals and realities about public education?

Progress/development

2009-10-07T16:33:00.002-04:00

So, dictionary.com defines "development" as:

"the act or process of developing; growth; progress."

That would mean that "international development" means something like "international growth and progress". Right?

Interesting:

Cross-posted at Ethnografix.

Hillbillies: 'Silly Nonsense' or 'Dangerous Truths'?

2009-09-30T07:00:00.031-04:00

In Who’s Inventing West Virginia, I noted the misinformation and stereotypes that pervaded a recent news article about West Virginia and the yearly Roadkill Cookoff here in Pocahontas County. As J.M. suggested in a comment, though, focusing on stereotypes misses something . . . something which can’t be found in the journalist’s one-sided perspective.

Consider the pride expressed in the song “Small Town USA” (right now #1 on the country billboard) or “Bonfire.” Or, to go back a ways, there's the 1989 popular album "Pickin' on Nashville" by the band called Kentucky Headhunters, an irony given Max’s Forte’s article “The Revenge of the Local, The Horror of the Provincial, and Western Cosmopolitanism at Risk,” which includes a section on Western elites' making of the American cannibal.

In short, people are self-identifying as rednecks, praising their small-town, simple way of life, and some even assume the name headhunter. The labels seem wrong and, yet, empowering.

Forte hints toward the latter when he feels that Shelby Lee Adams’s photos of Appalachian people are “stunningly beautiful . . . engrossing, a testament to lived alterity within the heart of empire, even if forgotten or scorned” (source). As he states from the beginning, though, his post focuses heavily on Western elites’ depictions, so perhaps these are the ones who have “forgotten or scorned."

In an analysis of the TV show the Beverly Hillbillies, Sandra Ballard, who self-identifies as a native of Appalachia, can’t help but love the show despite its depictions of Appalachians as what she calls “comic fools” (139). She finds an admirable subversiveness:

[T]hey enjoy life, and in their encounters with everyone, from police officers to clergy, physicians, and college professors, they challenge figures of authority with honest questions. As Al Capp said of his Yorkums in Dogpatch, the Clampetts have refreshingly ‘indestructible’ innocence, and ‘they reveal through their foolishness our own absurdities.’ They are fools who hold up mirrors to us when they speak the truth. The hillbilly fool may get his way without trying because his actions are based on common sense and honesty, exposing the base ignorance and greed of someone with more power who considers himself superior (147).

So are the Beverly Hillbillies fools, or are they actively fooling, i.e. making fools out of Beverly Hills culture? Who’s playing the joke on who? Are Western elites casting Hillbillies in a stereotypical role and scorning their ways of life or are the Hillbillies making fun of Western elites in Beverly Hills? I’d say the Hillbillies are the clear winners. Of course, I live in rural Appalachia. Who knows. Maybe people in Beverly Hills see the opposite.

Here’s one example from the “Garden Party” episode. The Clampetts' neighbor is hosting a high-class garden party. In Part 3, the elite seem to have the upper-hand. One of the Clampetts’ friends has to convince them that they’re not supposed to bring garden tools to the party and has to find clothes to wear because the ones they have aren’t deemed suitable. In Part 4, the Hillbillies start to win out. When the Clampetts arrive at the part with their mannerisms, liquor, chitlins’, crawdad dip, and possum sausages in hog renderings, the host has a fainting episode, very exaggerated. She sends them home with the excuse that they can host the overflow guests at their house. Jed and Granny sit at their table and mock the music and the punch. Jethro complains that nobody’s dancing. They take measures to liven things up on their side, and by the end all the guests have left the neighbor’s house, preferring the Clampetts' party.

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

Ballard suggests that that, in fooling, those who are being mocked can laugh at themselves because the “fools” are able to place themselves outside American culture, but I would argue they're not outside American culture at all:

The fool is ‘the detached spectator who has been placed, or has placed himself outside accepted codes. From this point ‘outside’ – this extrapolated fulcrum – he takes his leverage on the rest of us.’ In other words, if we dismiss the ‘hillbilly fool’ and assign him a place to ‘lean’ on American culture, he has the potential to be in a position of power (140).

Do Hillbillies really have to be ‘outside’ American culture an accepted codes to have weight? Perhaps the very fact that their personas strike a common chord with large numbers of American audiences shows that many parts of the ‘Hillbilly’ ethic are widely valued in America, and growing since these shows (and, now, country songs) have solidified feelings of affinity.

Ballard also adds:

. . [W]hen fools express ideas that can be dismissed as silly nonsense, they may be speaking dangerous truths. . . . Fools boldly raise questions and call attention to truths and contradictions that many dare not voice (140).

Can an idea be both “silly nonsense” and a “dangerous truth”? I’d say it depends on who’s doing the labeling. Who are the truths dangerous TO? In The Beverly Hillbilles, the mockery targets Beverly Hills elite. John Rich’s song “Shuttin’ Detroit Down” expresses more anger than mockery, but the target is similar: Wall Street elite and rich executives:

At the same time, though, if the depictions are dangerous, country songs are supported by the music industry, and, likewise, the film industry produced The Beverly Hillbillies. Is giving the ideas a place in American culture also a way of repressing them?

Another case to consider is comedian Stephen Colbert’s 2006 speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It's the best example I could find of mockery sanctioned by those in power who, at the same time, oppose many of the speaker's statements. Colbert acts the part of a "jester” entertaining but mocking the president and journalists, along the lines of the Medieval fool, where "the medieval state caught on fast that . . . sanctioning such folly was the best way to limit it" (Ballard 140).He would also fit the model of Sheakesperean fool: "Shakespeare's fools enjoy sanctioned exemptions that allow them to be truth-tellers. . . Because the fool acts 'completely outside the social hierarchy,' he is free to speak and to act without constraint.' His function is to speak the truth to power" (141).

Maybe the Hillbilly's sanctioned role as fool or jester, or the film and music industries' wide acceptance of songs and programs that criticize the elite, undermine any potential subversion by making it seem that poor people who affiliate with these characteristics are "outside of," "above," or "detached from" the social hierarchy when, in fact, they're deeply embedded in it.

And where do comedians like Colbert fit into all of this, or, more importantly, shows like the O'Reilly Factor and Glen Beck that draw on similar values to those expressed in Hillbilly figures, like simplicity, fundamental truths, and bold statements off the beaten path, in order to argue their cases and attract viewers?

Ballard, Sandra L. (1999). Where Did Hillbillies Come From? In Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes. Eds. Dwight Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford. Lexington: U. of KY. Pp 138-49.

Evolutionary Politics, again: The Growing Pains of Ray Comfort, Kirk Cameron, and Charles Darwin

2009-09-25T16:20:00.011-04:00

Here we go again, and again, and just one more time. This year is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, which has generated controversy from the day it was released. There has been a longstanding battle in the United States between Creationists and scientists over Evolutionary theory. This epic and continuing confrontation includes the Scopes Monkey Trial, Epperson vs. Arkansas in 1968, Daniel vs. Waters in 1975, McLean vs. Arkansas in 1982, Edwards vs. Aguillard in the 1980s, the subsequent shift from "creationism" to "intelligent design," the Kansas Evolution hearings in 2005, and the more recent trial in Dover, Pennsylvania. It has been a long and contentious history, indeed.

Here is the NOVA documentary that was made about the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Trial:

The Dover trial became a forum in which ideas about science, evolution, religion, and politics were placed under intense scrutiny. The end result, however, was a decisive ruling against the Intelligent Design movement, which has clear links with earlier "creationist" movements.

One of the newest salvos in this broad campaign comes from former teen sitcom star Kirk Cameron and his colleague Ray Comfort:

For Comfort and Cameron, this issue is about "the culture of our nation" and how the nations youth is being "brainwashed by atheistic evolution." As Cameron states, the only way to "change the sinful heart of the individual" is through the "power of the gospel." Clearly, for Comfort and Cameron, this is a moral and ethical battle that they face. Here is a conversation between Ray Comfort and televangelist Pat Robertson in which Comfort makes his ambitions and concerns quite clear:

This leaves me wondering exactly what it is that Comfort and Cameron are looking for, and what they are really trying to accomplish. Is this really about evolution and science, or is there something else going on here? First of all, I think it is not only quite fascinating how Comfort frames his introduction of Charles Darwin as a bitter, frustrated man who never knew God. This is anything but a balanced way of leading into a discussion about the "basics" of evolution, and serves as a rhetorical means of discrediting Darwin before any discussion of his ideas even begins. It's tactical, of course, and directly at the audience he is speaking with.

So it's certainly apparent that Comfort has his issues with Darwin. In his view, Evolution is little more than a "fairy tale for grown-ups" that is a form of idolatry in which man has created a God in his own image (side note: this is, then, a reversal of the Judeo-Christian system in which man is created in God's image). This "god," according to Comfort, is one that does not "require moral accountability," which is why so many people have latched onto the idea. So there, I think, we reach the crux of the matter not only for Comfort and many others. This is about morality, it is about faith, and it's about politics.

Still, I am not completely sure why Darwin and the theory of evolution have become the lightning rod for Comfort, Cameron, and other creationists today. I do not see why evolution, let alone Darwin's ideas, are such a threat. When Kirk Cameron says that he is concerned about college kids being "brainwashed," I can't help but think of the incredible irony, since Comfort's 50 page "introduction" to Darwin's book is little more than a butchery of history, science, and evolutionary theory. It is absolute propaganda dressed up as a "fair and balanced" presentation of the argument. It is anything but. Comfort clearly has his mind made up from the start, and is simply scrambling for a way to discredit what he feels is his god-given enemy. And I think, ultimately, that the whole argument is absolutely irrelevant.

Maybe I have read way too much Stephen Jay Gould, but I really think that this head-on collision between science and religion need not exist. And in many cases, when speaking about Catholicism, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, there is no major clash. Why is that? Why is one specific sect of Christianity so concerned with Darwin, science, and the theory of evolution? Interestingly, the former chief astronomer of the Vatican once stated that,

Intelligent design isn't science even though it pretends to be. If you want to teach it in schools, intelligent design should be taught when religion or cultural history is taught, not science.

One of my absolute favorite aspects of my field is the anthropological study of religion. Creation stories--from the Dogon to the Kumeyaay to the Maya--are ways in which different human groups have organized, categorized, rationalized, and explained the world around them. Creation stories are found throughout the world, take a variety of forms, and serve different culturally and historically-specific purposes. The creation stories that Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron adhere to, based upon Judeo-Christian ideologies, represent just a fraction of the ways in which humans have given meaning and form to the world they live in. The Biblical account of creation is indeed a fascinating narrative. For some people Genesis provides the explanatory framework that provides unquestionable meaning in their lives--just as other people place incredible value in their own faith-based ideas.

Testing creation stories with empirical reality is, from my point of view, rather beside the point. Religion is a system based upon belief and acceptance of certain ascribed realities, and for that reason it exists outside of the scope of scientific exploration. As Clifford Geertz wrote about the difficulties of actually trying to grasp religious meanings as they are understood by the faithful, "So far as we are concerned with religion as a perspective, with the meaningful interpretation it gives to experience, we necessarily see it through a pretty dark glass" (in Islam Observed, pg 109). Anthropologists can interpret religious beliefs, but in many ways they will always remain completely outside of what they really mean to those who believe. Science, and this includes anthropology, can only operate with the experienced realities that are readily observable, or that participants can relate. Beyond that, the core of religious belief remains wholly outside of the scope of scientific validation or scrutiny. How can faith be tested scientifically? It can't.

The reverse can be argued as well. Science cannot be tested by faith-based realities, which cover completely different (non-empirical) territory. In religion, the answers to questions are already known, so there is no use for any kind of empirical testing. It is beside the point. And I think that many creationists are missing the larger point of their own religious beliefs while they bash their heads on the mantle of Darwinian evolution.

In the end, this whole ordeal seems to be more about politics than anything else. Comfort, Cameron, and their fellow creationists feel that they have the answers to life, and they want to push their way into scientific discourse to argue their case. The only problem? They don't belong anywhere near science, and their arguments make that abundantly clear. "Intelligent design" is little more than a VERY thinly veiled version of the "scientific creationism" of the 1980s. The NOVA documentary made that point quite well.

These creationists, while attempting to frame their arguments in scientific terms, are little more than rhetorical hitchhikers who are trying to make political inroads against what they feel is a threat to their worldview. My argument? Maybe it's time for creationists like Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron to rethink their game plan. If they are trying to share their "good news" with the rest of the world, I am not sure if dressing up their beliefs in a cheap scientific costume is the best way to go. If they want to enter the stage and participate in the national discourse about the direction of our society, why not do so with honesty and openness, instead of deceit and outright slander? Instead of continually re-creating conflict where none need exist, they might actually be able to find a way to encourage dialog and communication about these often contentious subjects.

Birthers, Tea Parties and Astro-Turf

2009-09-21T22:16:00.010-04:00

Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/melissascamera/

Recently, US liberals have been struggling to understand the current upsurge in radical right-wing sentiment. A number of people have offered their opinions (see here and here for some insightful posts). Some say it's an “astro-turf” movement promoted by corporations and special-interests. Others claim that the movement is composed of far-right nut-jobs who have hijacked the political debate. Yet another view (recently dismissed by the administration) holds that there is an underlying racist element to the movement. It seems to me that all of these explanations hold some truth, but all of them are partial and none of them provides a method for combating what has proven to be an extremely influential movement.

Not knowing any of the demographics for people involved in the various protests – whether it's anti-healthcare, anti-stimulus, anti-government or just anti-Obama – my sense is that these are not the people who would generally be consider to be right-wing extremists. These are not the people who have bunkers and weapons caches in their back yards; who paste big American flags to the back of their trucks and hang out along the Mexican border hunting for illegal aliens. Instead these are ordinary citizens whose political views would ordinarily be described as right-leaning moderate. What has driven them further away from the center is an existential uncertainty and perhaps even resentment which has crystallized around an antipathy for the persona of President Obama and his moderate-left policies.

Certainly, special interests are active in this movement, and there are definitely some extremists involved as well. Latent racism is also a contributing factor. However, my sense is that there is no over-arching motive behind these protests, rather, what we have here is a heterogeneous collection of individuals and groups, each with their own unique ideology and social-political motivations, which have been drawn together to oppose the current administration. This process has been catalyzed by media sensationalism and corporate funding, but these could not be considered primary driving forces – they merely hasten a reaction that already existed in the background.

The result is what is referred to by William Connolly (drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri) as a resonance machine – an

“...energized complexit[y] of mutual imbrication and interinvolvement, in which heretofore unconnected or loosely associated elements fold, bend, blend, emulsify, and resolve incompletely into each other, forging a qualitative assemblage resistant to classical models of explanation” (his italics).

The same kind of mechanism could be said to have been behind the conservative revival of the 1980s and 90s as well as the election of Barack Obama himself.

The danger in allowing this resonance machine to continue uncontested is the potential for a revival of the neoconservative policies of the 1980s and 90s which have left a lasting scar on the face of the U.S. that has only just begun to heal. Its effects can be seen in the state of the media, in the economic crisis, in the environmental crisis, in health care, and in many other domains as well. With increased media attention and faster methods of communication, the current resonance machine has the potential to be more far reaching and dramatic than the prior. One does not have to be a supporter of Obama or his policies to recognize this threat – it goes against our own basic self-interest and the necessity of moving ahead with important socioeconomic and environmental reforms.

Because they have a foundation in affective thought, a resonance machine cannot be countered with rational arguments. Nor can they be picked apart and contested piece by piece. Town hall meetings may have some impact, but are also insufficient, and any concessions made may further catalyze their growth.

What's needed is a counter-resonance machine. One that disarms the influence of the first, halts its self-organization and redirects the energy into a more positive set of goals. In order to resist the underlying fear and resentment of the current machine, the counter-machine would have to be based on mutual respect and responsibility as well as a sense that there is great potential in uncertainty. The strategy for building such a resonance-machine would have to be long term – incorporating the current debates over health care and environmental regulation, but looking beyond them as well – and involve a number of tactics including education, policy, outreach, grassroots organizing, activism, and outright resistance.

There is no way of knowing exactly what tactics will work best or what end-form the counter-resonance machine will take. Experimentation will be key. In order to be effective, though, it must not center around the persona or policies of President Obama – doing so would make it too fragile and easily disbursed. As with the current machine, it will have to be a heterogeneous assemblage with no single underlying motive or ideology, but, rather than halting the search for solutions to our challenges, our machine will move them forward in a positive direction, possibly resulting in ideas that are different from those promoted by the administration.

While democrats and the media fumble around trying to understand and explain the growing anti-Obama movement, the resonance machine continues to grow. The consequences of leaving it uncontested or of taking a limited approach to resisting it are socio-political stagnation at best and, potentially, a return of the neoconservative policies of the 1980s, with greater force and greater potential for harm. Working to build a positive counter-resonance machine will not only halt the current resonance machine but will also help to propel the US into a brighter, healthier, and happier society.

Who's inventing West Virginia?

2009-09-20T22:10:00.026-04:00

New Guinea is a Western invention, a name and a cultural identity given by European travelers in the 1500s . . . authorized by anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, who claimed to have a superior way of life. . . . [W]hen beliefs about the “other” are confirmed through further myths derived by their hosts, a portrait of a culture is painted with unfamiliar and startling things in order to make it interesting and exciting for the home audience (64). The distortions created by anthropologists have stripped the indigenous people of their dignity and right to determine their own future (57).

- Warilea Iamo

In a February 2009 Newsweek article, Tony Dokoupil wrote about Hillbilly stereotypes in West Virginia. The article, poorly written and poorly researched, did more to promote than to combat stereotypes and tries to place much of the blame on West Virginia residents themselves.

There is a key difference between people from other states, such as journalists, capitalizing on stereotypes about West Virginia and people within the state trying to turn that history into a money-maker for the community. How West Virginia represents itself will have no impact on Dokoupil's life, except as the next “hit” news story. It will have an impact on West Virginian lives and businesses, so why not stop perpetuating stereotypes and let them represent their own state?

Before continuing, watch the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce’s recent advertisement for West Virginia for comparison, entitled "This is Our West Virginia":

While some might find parts of the ad contentious, it does draw from facts and statistics about the state and tries to strike a balance between depictions of environment and industry.

In comparison, few of Dokoupil’s statements are even rooted in fact, only “shock factor,” and many are blatant stereotypes, or just wrong. For example:

Lack of paved roads in early history is reason to suspect incest? : “[M]any of the state's mountain communities—unconnected by paved roads and railways until after World War II—have indeed been isolated enough to raise eyebrows about genetic diversity” (Dokoupil 2009:2) People don't need paved roads to travel. Were the Silk Road trade routes paved? If this comment had been directed at Native Americans, maybe more people would have seen it as the blatant, degrading stereotype that it is, or maybe not.
He initially cited the wrong political party for the Governor: “Correction (published Feb. 27): Gov. Manchin is a Democrat, not a Republican, as previously reported” (3) Maybe West Virginia is not the Republican bastion he assumed it was.
The video of the Roadkill Cookoff in Marlinton, WV misspelled the city’s name as “Marlington” (1). If a person in West Virginia had misspelled New York as “New Yorke” the journalist probably would have cited it as another instance of lingering truth to stereotypes about low education levels.
In a comment below the article, 'Meepy04' rightly notes that the short example Dokupil chose to start his article with is deceptive. It comes from Kentucky, not West Virginia. She concludes, “I wish that just once a journalist would spend some time in WV before writing an article, rather than renting "Deliverance" and making it up as he or she goes. Where is the integrity?” (3)

Dokoupil is right that West Virginia is undergoing debate about its image in the popular media: “West Virginia's governor is launching a massive campaign to liberate his state from ugly and unyielding stereotypes. He's got his work cut out for him” (1). However, the stereotypes appear to be less the product of a 'lingering truth' and more the result of certain outside journalists’ and filmmakers’ depictions. He covers his tracks by appealing to an expert who points out that most discussions of stereotypes result in perpetuating stereotypes, as if he couldn’t avoid what he wrote.

Instead of trying to lay out the debate that’s taking place among West Virginians over state image, Dokupil decides to make an unfounded claim that many WV residents are unable to see themselves any differently, that they’re 'trapped in stereotypes.' Most likely, it’s only a strategy to work in his last journalistic punch, the final comment from the Governor:

“Even some of West Virginia's own residents are having trouble seeing themselves differently. . . . While the governor is pushing a forward-thinking "New West Virginia" campaign, tourist-conscious businesses in some parts of the state are proudly serving up less refined fare. The annual Road Kill Cook-Off in Pocahontas, for instance, features dishes you're unlikely to see at your local restaurant, including intestine-challenging "flat cat," "bumper bruised bear" and "deer schmear fajitas." The mere mention of it puts a hard edge in the governor's voice. "Are they still running that s––– down south?" he asks an aide in disbelief, before adding: "Well, I tell you what, if you see [the organizer], kill the son of a bitch" (2).

Are the organizers of the Road Kill Cookoff really 'having trouble seeing themselves' outside of stereotypes? Tourism is a big industry in West Virginia. It looks to me like they’re trying to turn stereotypes into a positive source of income for the community. If you actually look at the advertisement on the Pocahontas County Chamber of Commerce’s website, it seems good way to promote the region: “The West Virginia Road Kill Cook-off is one of the region’s most exciting and fun annual events. In years past, the Food Network, the Travel Channel and the Discovery Channel have all done filming of this wild and wacky festival! If you’ve ever wanted to taste exotic dishes like squirrel gravy over biscuits, teriyaki marinated bear or deer sausage, this is the place!” In fact, are certain characteristics even negative anymore if the community embraces them?

Of course, this would be something for residents to decide, not outside journalists. The organizers are capitalizing on stereotypes, just like the journalist, but still their use of 'culture' is different because the journalist is not part of that culture and has no real stake in it.

Video from the roadkill cookoff:

To repeat the quote at the beginning of this post, in new light:

"The distortions created by ~~anthropologists~~ [outside journalists and filmmakers] have stripped ~~indigenous people~~ [West Virginians] of their dignity and right to determine their own future” (Iamo 1988:57).

Also posted here on The Prism,here on Gather and here on e-tater.

Sources

Dokoupil, Tony. (2009). Hillbilly No More? Newsweek, February 27. Retrieved September 20, 2009, from http://www.newsweek.com/id/186715/page/1.

Iamo, Warilea. (1988). The Stigma of New Guinea: Reflections of Anthropology and Anthropologists. Central Issues in Anthropology 8(1):57-64.

9/11 & Collective Memory

2009-09-16T09:49:00.009-04:00

In her book Paradise in Ashes, Beatriz Manz wrote:

Collective memory is clearly a social product, but individual memory also flows from social context. Individuals tap their own recollections, draw on discussions with each other, and filter these perceptions of the past not only through their own interim experiences, but also through the social arena in which society as a whole interprets these events (230-31).

Paradise in Ashes is about the tragedies and murders that took place in Guatemala during the 1970s and 1980s. Memory serves an important role throughout Manz' discussion of how people dealt with, memorialized, and moved past the atrocities they endured. It is not only an excellent book in its own right, but it is highly relevant to a larger discussion about the role of collective memory.

Ground Zero, New York, 2004. Photograph by Ryan Anderson.

Last week marked eight years since September 11, 2001. The internet is a medium that lends itself to all sorts of ideas and projects, and the collective memorization of 9/11 is one of them. Last Friday I was sifting through different sites, paying attention to the vast stories, reflections, and memories that people have of that day. Here are just a few examples of how this event has been remembered, carried on, reflected upon, and disseminated:

Lorie Byrd over at the blog Wizbang, wrote a post called "Never Forget--Eight Years Later." Here is a small excerpt:

Whether criticized for it or not, I think it is also important that we remember what it felt like on that day. I was watching the Today Show and saw the second plane hit the tower in real time. I remember shock, disbelief, and sadness, but most of all a vulnerability that did not exist on September 10. That feeling stayed with me for quite some time. I had felt it to a much lesser extent when the WTC was bombed years earlier, but 9/11/01 was, obviously, on a level never before seen in our nation's history. When I heard the announcement that the Pentagon had been hit as well, and then saw video of the gaping hole, my only thought was "we have been attacked and we are at war."

Byrd's post is a mix of reflection, politics, and personal memories of what the event means to her. For her, remembrance of this specific day has been on ongoing project, and she links to the past posts she has written about the subject as well. Additionally, she posted links to other sites and colleagues who also wrote about and memorialized the event, which illustrates some of the ways that collective memory works online.

SusanG at Daily Kos used the speech by president Obama as a way to mark the day. Interestingly, she did not offer any commentary of her own, and instead let the words of the president speak for her. The discussion forum of the post is where the real action is, and where people express not only their memories, but also their political views as to how the event should be remembered. This is collective memory in action.

Scott at Powerline wrote "Dartmouth's 9/11," which provides snapshot portraits of Dartmouth alumni who lost their lives on 9/11. These were found in the New York Times piece called Portraits of Grief. Here is just one example that Scott posted:

Kevin P. Connors (Tuck) '73

Whether it was climbing a mountain, playing charades or challenging his four brothers and his sister to a game of Monopoly, Kevin Connors would not be defeated. At work, there was the thrill of picking the next big investment for clients of Euro Brokers, where he was a vice president. At home, the simplest of family gatherings became thrill-seeking adventures. Children would be pitted against adults, and Mr. Connors, 55, would side with the team he thought had the best chance of winning.

"My brother was a voracious fan of winning at all things," said Sheila Connors LeDuc. "He once bought a boat to sail around the world. When it sank off the coast of South America, he beat the ocean by not drowning."

And when planes struck the World Trade Center, Mrs. LeDuc was certain that her brother would survive once more. Slowly, she has had to accept another probability. "This was bigger than the boat going down," she said. "I just hope he is at peace and that those of us who mourn him can come to the same peace."

Matt Corley at Think Progress wrote this in a 9/11/2009 post:

Recently, the Guardian interviewed former New York governor George Pataki to discuss the eighth anniversary of 9/11. Pataki, who was in Manhattan when the World Trade Center was hit, used the opportunity to criticize the decision by Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate CIA interrogators who went beyond their legal guidance, saying it “jeopardizes” national security...

This post is overtly about the continuing politics that surround 9/11, and less about remembering or reflecting on the event. Still, I would argue that it is in fact about collective memory and how the event is characterized throughout the nation. Everyone has their take. It's all a part of the way many Americans circulate, contest, and reshape how that one day is talked about and remembered in larger national discourse. Collective memory, in many ways, is a process more than anything else. Memories are shaped by the present, and the ways that different events are viewed depends a lot on individual perspectives and politics. There are vastly different ways that people from across the political and social spectrum talk about and remember 9/11 through blogs and other online media, and there is no one "right" way to do it. What 9/11 means, in the end, all depends on this vast conversation that Americans continue to participate in, effectively shaping, creating, and re-creating conceptions and memories of that day over and over again.

Landslides, the Media, and Spatial Cleansing in Mumbai

2009-09-14T23:22:00.000-04:00

Monsoon clouds in Mumbai/CC BY-SA 2.0

The night of Thursday, September 3, a landslide occurred in the LBS Nagar, Sakinaka area of Mumbai, killing 11. During monsoon season, landslides and building collapses are common. Understandably, news headlines express concern that current preventative action is insufficient. However, the news accounts also paint residents as oblivious, stubborn, and resigned, and grossly oversimplify the situation.

The News

Express India.com: “Landslide Toll 11, People Still Cling to Danger Spots” (source)
The Times of India: “Locals, Officials Deaf to Warnings” (source)
DNA India: “Disasters Like This Can Be Predicted”(source)

Specifically, articles cite the following:

“Indiscriminate colonization” by “slum colonies” who are “oblivious to the danger”: “In Mumbai, quarrying for rock in an unfavourable geological set-up, where the black basalt rock has a westerly slant at moderate angles of about 20 degrees, creates conditions for landslides. . . .Unfortunately, slum colonies spring up on the abandoned quarry floors, oblivious to the danger lurking above. Such indiscriminate colonisation has led to fatalities during most landslides in Mumbai, including 70 in the Chirag Nagar (Ghatkopar) slide in 2002.” (DNA India)
“The encroachers do not pay heed”: “We sent notices to vacate over 550 structures in our ward. . . .But the encroachers do not pay heed,” said assistant commissioner of L ward of BMC, N Barde. (ExpressIndia)
“Residents…are resigned to their fate”: "We have left it to our destiny,'' said Rakesh Pandey, a taxi driver, who said he witnessed many landslides in the area. (Times of India)
The government doesn’t have enough money: “The BMC has made a list of probable landslide spots in Mumbai and posts warning notices at these places every year. But only Mhada's slum improvements board has built retaining walls. The board seems to be working with a budget that may not be sufficient to tackle all landslide-prone places.” (DNA India)
People don’t support slum housing improvement programs: "The impact of landslides could also be reduced if the quality of housing in these settlements is upgraded. But various programmes of slum improvements have been promoted with limited success,'' said a BMC official. (Times of India)

Beyond the News

1. Residents are not oblivious.

If residents, like the taxi driver, have witnessed landslides and have been told to evacuate, they know the problem. If they understand the risk, why don’t they move? The official concludes they don't "pay heed." A resident says he has left it to "destiny." What neither mentions directly, because it's common knowledge in Mumbai, is that Mumbai has a severe lack of affordable housing, with overcrowding in poor sectors:

According to several analysts, about 50 percent of Mumbai’s 12 million citizens live in slums or other degraded forms of housing. Another 10 percent are estimated to be pavement dwellers. This amounts to more then 5 million people living in degraded (and degrading) forms of housing. Yet, according to one recent estimate, slum dwellers occupy only about 8 percent of the city’s land, which totals about 43,000 hectares. The rest of the city’s land is either industrial land, middle- and high-income housing, or vacant land in the control of the city, the state, or private commercial interests. Bottom line: 5 million poor people live in 8 percent of the land area of a city no bigger than Manhattan and its near boroughs. (Appadurai 2000:646-7)

Dharavi, Mumbai, by Kounosu/CC BY-SA 2.0

2. Government "improvement" programs have not always been improvements, leaving residents with good reason not to support them.

The residents are not as "oblivious" and "indifferent" as the media makes them out to be, and neither are politicians and law enforcement.

The government official declares, "various programmes of slum improvements have been promoted with limited success"! (Times of India). Why don't the poor support them? Many past programs have focused on demolitions, often violent. The efforts bordered on spatial cleansing, as attempts to remove certain unfavorable segments of the population, pitting residents against rehabilitation schemes.

In 2004, the government proposed an ambitious plan to transform Mumbai into a “world-class city”:

Maharashtra’s chief minister . . . submitted an ambitious four-year, $8 billion proposal for modernizing Mumbai, which included the building of new roads, a subway system and a large-scale public housing project. The modernization proposal followed an earlier Slum Rehabilitation Scheme in the mid-1990s that aimed to improve the lives of 4 million slum dwellers through public-private partnerships that involved builders in the private sector and the authorities. (U.N. Habitat 2006:1)

One of the first acts of this “revolutionary” program was to begin demolishing existing slums. The public protested, and the program was temporarily discontinued:

In late 2004, despite progressive slum improvement and tenure regularization policies and programmes, the government of Maharashtra began a slum demolition drive aimed at removing slums and shanty towns in the city. Between December 2004 and March 2005, more than 90,000 shanties were torn down, in violation of poll promises, international covenants to which India is a signatory and a 2001 Slum Areas Act, which protected all slums built prior to 1995. (The Act stipulates that all slum dwellers who could establish that their names were on the electoral roll on 1 January 1995 were protected, to the extent that their homes could not be demolished without rehabilitation.) Amid public outcry and pressure from the ruling Congress party, the demolitions were halted in February 2005, but many believe that the plan to make Mumbai a world-class city is still very much on the cards. (U.N. Habitat 2006:2)

If the government has funds to demolish, it might also use those funds to implement landslide safety measures. Moreover, it could work with communities to agree on housing improvements beforehand, to avoid widespread protest. Why can't they reach a compromise? Unfortunately, slum improvement in Mumbai has an even darker past. In 1992-1993, there was another unsettling series of demolitions. The Babri Masjid had been destroyed in December 1992. Riots broke out among Hindus and Muslims in Mumbai, including a bombing in March 1993. In the meantime, the pro-native, Marathi party, the Shiva Sena, mobilized with its own xenophobic aims: “to create public terror and to confront Muslims with the message that there was no public space for them and that they would be hunted down and killed or evicted from their homes wherever possible” (Appadurai 2000:647). The municipal corporation undertook a “slum improvement” during this period which was felt as an ethnic cleansing of space:

In the weeks preceding 6 December, there had been a renewed effort by the Municipal Corporation to destroy the structures built by unlicensed street vendors and to destroy unauthorized residential dwellings that had sprouted throughout Mumbai. Here, municipal zeal (personified by G. Khairnar, an overzealous city official who was strangely not a Shiva Sena client) joined with political propaganda to create a tinderbox in the heavily Muslim areas of Central Bombay. . . . Although this nexus involved illegal housing and unlicensed vending throughout Mumbai, Khairnar’s muncipal gendarmerie just happened to focus their civic violence on an area dominated by the Muslim underworld.(2000:648)

On public policy, Appadurai adds: “The deliberate effort to terrorize Bombay’s Muslims, to attack their vending stalls, to burn their shops and homes, to Hinduize their public spaces through violent ritual innovations, and to burn and maim their bodies can hardly be seen as a public policy solution to Bombay’s housing problems” (2000:649).

Aside: An interesting CNN INDIA program called "The Stench of Truth" is an expose of attacks on Muslims during the 1993 riots:

In 2006, another series of demolitions took place, the ethnicity of residents unclear, suggesting the rehabilitation may be a broader attempt to cleanse the city of 'unattractive' settlements and a growing immigrant population:

YUVA, a partner of HIC-HLRN in Mumbai, has informed us of a brutal demolition in which local authorities have destroyed 5,000 houses in Mandala, Mankurd in Mumbai, and set fire to an entire slum on 9 May 2006.

“A police force of 500–700 along with Mumbai Collectorate officials and 6–7 bulldozers demolished about 5,000 houses in the slum communities of Indira Nagar and Janata Nagar in Mandala, near Mankurd in Mumbai.

The police came to the site around noon and were confronted by women and men. All of a sudden, people saw smoke rising from the back of the site and rushed there to quell the fire. Meanwhile, the police easily gained entry into the slum and demolished most of the houses and burned the rest, wiping out the entire community. The fire continued burning for several hours, while fire brigade personnel looked on passively, doing nothing to extinguish the fire.

Furthermore, the police engaged in a massive brutal “lathi charge” (assault with batons) in Mandala, beating and dragging residents from the demolished site, and destroying their personal belongings. Police officials also put water in the food being cooked in the community kitchen and confiscated grain stores.

The police assault badly injured three people, who then were admitted to the Satabti Hospital. . . .In all, forty persons received injuries during the demolition and fire.

The police, however, ordered the nearby government hospitals, including Satabti Hospital, not to admit anyone from the slum and not to give the injured persons any medical records, as those documents might be used as proof of injury due to police violence. The lack of cooperation from hospital staff only reveals the tyranny of the police. Mumbai Collectorate gave the residents of Indira Nagar only a 12-hour notice of the demolition. Those evictees living in Janata Nagar had no prior information of the demolition and were taken completely unawares.”

. . .
Women and children are now sitting under the scorching sun with no place to go and no provision for shelter. The authorities have still not provided any resettlement options to the evicted. Police officials are also patroling in nearby slums and threatening people not to give food or shelter to the evicted people. Instances of abuse by intoxicated policemen at night have also been reported.

It is being reported that the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) is planning to resettle people whose houses were demolished as part of the Mithi River Development plan in Mandala. This attempt would pit the poor and displaced against one another. (OneWorld 2006:source)

Given slum "improvements" through demolitions, often violent, incurring public protest, it becomes more clear why people living in inadequate housing in high-risk areas might not want the government undertaking such projects in their communities -- in fact, they might even prefer landslides.

Sources

Appadurai, Arjun. 2000. Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai. Public Culture 12(3):627-51.

U.N. Habitat. 2006. Mumbai's Quest for 'World City' Status. State of the World Cities 2006/7. Retrieved Sept. 12, 2009 from http://ww2.unhabitat.org/mediacentre/documents/sowcr2006/SOWCR%2012.pdf.

OneWorld. 2006. NGO Appeals against Slum Demolitions in Mumbai. Retrieved Sept. 12, 2009 from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, http://www.tiss.edu/news103.pdf.

Contentious Cuba

2009-09-12T16:43:00.009-04:00

In the contentious debate about health care reform in the United States, Cuba is used on all sides as either a model of success or a model of failure. It all depends on who you ask.

One popular--and incredibly controversial--example is Michael Moore's 2007 film Sicko, which lauded the preventative health care system in Cuba. The film took a highly critical look at health care in the US, and Moore decided to use Cuba as an example to prove his point--a decision that may have backfired. Here is the film's trailer:

Reviews of Moore's film reflect the highly divisive nature of the health care debate, which is often split across ideological and political lines. For example, blogger Michelle Malkin responded to the release of Moore's film by writing, "Michael Moore is playing martyr to full effect in advance of the premiere of his latest crockumentary effort." Christopher Hayes at The Nation summed up the film in this way:

Sicko is far, far less partisan than Fahrenheit, but much more ideological. And as such, it is more consistent in what it offers--with one major caveat. The film's final half-hour, in which Moore takes 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba, serves only to reinforce the decades-old slander that equates social democracy with repressive socialism. It's a major miscalculation and nearly squanders the first hour and a half of the film in which Moore so deftly guts arguments that socialized medicine represents the vanguard of Marxism. But that final section aside, the film functions as a compelling advertisement for an alternative way of ordering society, one in which, as in France, there's vacation, paid sick time, doctors who make house calls and even, amazingly, a state-supplied nanny who will come to your house and do your laundry after you've had a child. Who wouldn't want that?

CNN's Tom Charity had similar criticisms:

If Moore missteps, it's in the one sequence he and the Weinstein Company have made sure everyone has already heard about (with a little help from the U.S. government): the boat lift to Cuba for three ailing 9/11 heroes. It's Stunt Man Mike at his crudest, and not as effective as he intended.
To be sure, it's bitterly ironic that Guantanamo detainees have access to better medical care than the soldiers who guard them, but Moore is easily diverted into a silly commercial for Cuban socialist medicine that plays exactly like the kind of Soviet propaganda films he sends up earlier in the movie.

Charity did, however, recommend the film to his readers, despite the flaws. For Charity, the health care system is "sick, no question," and Moore's film might just make the idea of reform a more pressing issue on the national political agenda. It has certainly increased attention on the subject.

In September of 2007, ABC journalist John Stossel ran a series called "Sick in America," with one specific segment in which he directly challenges Moore's claims about health care in Cuba:

Reviews and commentaries on Moore's film run the gamut, and political debate about the health care system in Cuba (which is often held up as a comparison to the health care system in the United States) has continued up to this day. Cuba is both the hero and the villain in this national discourse, which in many ways isn't about Cuba at all--it's about health care in the United States, and whether or not there should be any changes to the system we have in place.

So where are the anthropologists in all this? Good question. Since anthropologists work all over the world, there must be one or two working in Cuba who can provide some insight, right? Indeed, there are. In 2007, University of South Florida medical anthropologist Linda Whiteford, along with Laurence Branch, a professor of health policy and management at USF, published the book Primary Health Care in Cuba: The Other Revolution. Carolyn Sargent, the current president of the Society for Medical Anthropology describes the book as, "a groundbreaking work. Primary Health Care in Cuba makes a significant contribution to medical anthropology and public health by documenting the history, political economy, and ideology that has produced the Cuban primary health care system" (from the back cover of the book).

Whiteford and Branch write:

One of the great achievements of the Cuban Revolution has been its "other revolution," its revolution in health care. This other revolution resulted in the successful reduction in health disparities and inequalities throughout Cuba between 1959 and 2000. This reduction is partly visible in the design and practice of primary health care, the focus of this book (Whiteford and Branch 2007: 7-8).

Anthropologist Katherine Hirschfeld, however, has a very different take on Cuba and its health care system. In a highly critical review of Whiteford and Branch's book in March of this year, Hirschfeld argues that it has oversimplified and over-romanticized the reality of health care in Cuba:

Had more rigorous methods been employed, some very different conclusions might have been reached regarding the respective costs and benefits of the Cuban system. Even a modest attempt at community ethnography, for instance, would have revealed local voices that are often at odds with, or even humorously dismissive of the health claims made by Cuban officials...Even a minimal investigation of lifestyle and income differentials between political elites and disenfranchised populations (such as the families residing in squatter settlements on the outskirts of Havana) would have revealed a gulf between rich and poor that has come to rival that of previous Cuban regimes (Hirschfeld 2009: 294).

Cuba plays a strange, and often contradictory role in political discourse in the United States. In regards to the current debate about national health care reform, the Cuban system is held up by all sides. Some see it as a model to find inspiration from, while others see it as a symbol of the road to disaster. Pundits disagree, journalists disagree, and anthropologists seemingly disagree. It seems clear that romanticizing ANY health care system is not going to get the debate anywhere.

The primary fault that I see with Michael Moore's film, for example, is that while it promotes dialog about the health care debate, and certainly has a number of strong critical points about the US health care system, his choice to color the Canadian, French, British, and lastly Cuban health care systems as idyllic Edens of public health was a serious mistake. Does sugarcoating the possible alternatives really accomplish anything? In the public debate about possible reform, losing a critical perspective about the benefits, flaws, and alternatives to the current system is certainly not going to push the debate forward. While the Cuban health care system may have certain highly laudable aspects to it, ignoring its faults (and clearly there are some serious faults to the system) will only serve to hinder this critical national conversation.