Uncovering Writing

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A fast-paced, engaging and exciting history of the Sumerians. I read this in the late 80s as part of anthropology minor and turned to it in 2016 more for the Sumerian poetry. I enjoyed the book but felt at times the author made leaps he couldn’t justify. I will keep this book for his wealth of translations and information. A good reference though it is showing its age today.

Wow, I’m so impressed and proud of my professional organization, the American Anthropological Association.  In response to worries about anthropologists providing unethical aid to U.S. military operations, in particular the Human Terrain System project, the AAA Executive Board has stated that

The Executive Board views the HTS project as an unacceptable application of anthropological expertise.

Something that’s really been bothering me lately is the national security frame. This frame has cropped up more and more in political dialogue. Basically, in order to gain attention for your cause du jour, you must frame it as a national security issue.

HIV/AIDS is a national security issue. Climate change is a national security issue. Hunger is a national security issue, and has even been re-franked as “food security”. To be hungry now means to be food insecure. Energy policy is a national security issue. It’s as though an issue isn’t important unless it’s something that affects national security.

I worry about this further militarization of our language and our thoughts. War and violence themes abound in our metaphors. Daily life is a battle, we need a plan, our company’s life is at stake, we must overwhelm and destroy our competition, etc. Now, basic human rights, especially of the social, economic and cultural bent, are being militarized and brought into a national security realm.

Some might not care, being content with the tactical benefit that a favorite issue is at least being discussed. However, these issues had value and importance before they were dragged into a militaristic frame. Why weren’t they discussed before? What insight can we gain from an analysis of that? Tactics matter but strategy is important for the long haul.

Just something to think about.

Jonesing for an anthro fix, I attended the public oral defense of my friend Damien’s PhD last Thursday. Hosted in the anthropology department’s lounge on American University’s campus, I got there a bit early and ran into Damien, Bill, Brett, and Apollo. It was so great to see all of them, it’d been ages. I’ve really been pondering my return to anthropology lately, and getting back on campus, in the department, and into a dialogue was really uplifting.

Seeing Damien defend his dissertation, which was on gentrification, grassroots power, and identity in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of DC, was very empowering. He framed his research on power, place, and history, always strong concepts in AU’s department of anthropology. Using ground-up ethnography, participant and observation, and a Marxist class-based approach, he vividly portrayed and analyzed a community and its efforts to maintain, sustain, and grow public space in the midst of economic and social restructuring in the neighborhood. I even got to ask him a question during his defense.

Everyone was emotional when we were invited back in the room after his committee had discussed the defense. He passed! Yay! Very cool to see that happen. This was my first oral defense in anthropology and it really made my day. I’m so glad I was able to attend and be there for him, and to be honest, being there for me too.

Continuing in my anthropological readings, I took on Hancock’s The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen. This seemed like a logical follow up to Marcus’s Where have all the homeless gone. This book-length treatment of the public image of welfare recipients and especially the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Act (PRWA) of 1996 would have been better rendered as a long article, perhaps 20 to 40 pages. At 250+ pages, it’s full of repetitions. However, it could also be a fine class syllabus on the topic, as it continually reinforces past learnings as it moves through its theses.

Hancock presents the politics of disgust as characterized by four features: perversion of democratic attention; monological not intersubjective communications; representative thinking; and finally a lack of solidarity between citizens marked and unmarked as the target of the PRWA legislation. The first of these features means not providing attention to all citizens claims, thus presented a highly circumscribed view of the issue at hand. The second feature implies that one has one voice in front of a large microphone instead of many voices. Representative thinking is when people react to stereotypes or the representative image of a person or issue, instead of the actual person or issue. In other words, the politics of disgust displays how emotions regulate power relationships. This brings to mind, for me, the frame concept I discussed in my posting on Lakoff’s book. Stereotypes are frames we have in our head; and we’re more likely to throw away facts that discredit those frames rather than disposing of the frame.

A large portion of her analysis is textually-based, looking at public, media, and Congressional documents and how they frame, or de-frame, welfare recipients. This analysis shines a light on the public identity of welfare recipients, an identity that “serves as an unconscious filter through which Americans receive the policy options presented in pubic discourse about welfare reform” (Hancock 2004: 115). She notes how “policy options were discussed, selected, and implemented with no effective contributions from those affected most” (Hancock 2004: 115). More insidiously, this public identity serves to delegitimize welfare recipients' claims and lived experiences. She writes that “democratic deliberation falters as public identities long debunked by empirical research persist in the memories of elites and citizens” (Hancock 2004: 150). While welfare recipients have agency, the ability to act themselves in the public sphere, this agency can be severely circumscribed by the construction of the public they inhabit.

In an epilogue, she looks at the renewal process of the PRWA Act under the second Bush administration. With the President turning towards faith-based, hetero-normative values, he is seeking to impose ideology rather than policy. The administration posits marriage as a panacea to income and social inequities, without any regard to how this devalues female voices and potentially forces woman back into abusive relationships that some of these woman fled from. Welfare was their safety area and with it being removed, the return to the nest, as it were, is not a medicine that’s palatable to them.

Where have all the homeless gone? The making and unmaking of a crisis, by Anthony Marcus, explores the homeless crisis in the 1980s. He explores the rapid rise in public and scholarly attention to the homeless that started at the beginning of the 80s and how attention to this crisis rapidly disappeared by the beginning of the 90s. He turns a focused anthropological gaze onto who are the homeless and, more importantly, explores the reification of the category of homeless that academics, social works, and government policy makers focused their attention on.

Why should we focus on why the homeless were carved out as a distinct category and offered assistance? Isn’t that a good thing, i.e. identifying people who need help and helping them? The effort is good, but it’s important to look at the bigger picture. Marcus writes that this delineation and laser-focus on the homeless has “left much of the theoretical debate on poverty in America focused on arguments over who the poor actually are and where they came from, rather than the politics of social inequity in America” (Marcus 2006: 60). Later on, he concludes that “a group of nonwhite urbanites who were often lacking in some combination of proper housing, medical care, education, and employment was reified and ethnicized into ‘The Homeless’ … Rather than identifying a concrete set of needs and life tasks bedeviling all working Americans and destroying the lives of my informations there were two nations that were imagined: those who made it over the bar that separated homeless and homeful and those who did not.” (Marcus 2006: 147)

Getting into the details, Marcus talks about food stamps and how while they offer assistance, they also create an alternative currency to delineate the other in America. I’d add that food stamps help render the poor visible. Poverty in America, especially in the post-Fordist era, has worked hard to push the poor into the shadows. Food stamps bring them into the light, albeit it’s not a flattering light.

Marcus did much of his research in shelters set up in New York City for transitional and permanent homeless people. He deconstructs the public reports of the disfunction and exotic behavior in shelters (e.g. surrounding open and/or homosexual relationships), positing that such behaviors are more the result of viewing private actions in the public spaces of shelters (Marcus 2006: 74). I’d note that public performative behavior is tiring cognitive work and such social performances cannot be kept up 24-7, blurring the line between public and private space.

He devotes a chapter to black families and discussions around black homeless men and women. He takes on public discourses that ask why can’t African American families act like recent immigrants, suck it up and make a better life for themselves. His thoughtful and detailed research shows that it’s not fair to compare African American families to recent immigrant families. Black families grew up as Americans and thus have the same values, goals, and beliefs in what citizenship confers on them as white families. It’s asking a lot, and perhaps too much, to demand that they give up their birthright to accept a different bill of rights that is conferred on recent immigrants. Marcus writes that “there are few American families that can comfortably incorporate high-functioning socially successful extended kin, much less those who have fallen on hard times and absorbed the quirks and liabilities that come with failure” (Marcus 2006:115).

Overall, this is a fascinating book and one that you should check out if you’re interested not only in the homeless but on how policy makers, activists, academics, and the public look at, react to, and comprehend social and economic crises in the United States. My only negative comment about the book is superficial: the font is horrible and makes reading difficult.

I rapidly moved through Carolyn Nordstrom’s Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century. I picked this book up at the 2005 AAA meeting, and just turned to it about a week and a half ago. [Aside: I have found that I really need to re-energize my anthropology side of late. My career in political campaigns has had a profound draining effect on my inner being. More on that in a future posting!]

Nordstrom’s book is a fabulous tour through the shadows, the places where legal and illegal, extra-state and state, and survival and profit intersect. She studies these shadow phenomena primarily along the front lines of wars in Angola, Sri Lanka, Mozambique, and elsewhere. However, her trenchant analysis shows that how the local is intimately intertwined with the global. It’s not a simply globalization is bad story, nor it is a simplistic core/periphery argument that she lays out. She shows how people survive, both culturally, politically, and economically in today’s world. She shines a bright light on these shadow or informal economies that are so often ignored by academics, politicians, and diplomats, or, perhaps worse than ignoring them, these people place informal economies within less-than-civlized groupings of people or speak of them as solely illegal.

Her deep ethnography of those living through war and not-war as well as the humanitarian and development corps that always pop up on the scene, illustrates the deep, varied, and strong ties that link human beings in one area to people in other areas. Surprisingly, she shows us that while statesman and media focus on illegal drug or arms networks, these informal economies also provide food, medicines, clothing, and the various necessities and pleasures of life. Additionally, in some war-torn or recently postwar societies, these informal economies can make up 20, 30, even 90% of the total economic activity of the nation. Economists, development organizations, the United Nations, and national leaders do not look at these economies, perhaps because doing so would lend credence to the fact that states aren’t as powerful as they portray themselves to be.

This is a fabulous book that explores territory that you won’t normally find in a international relations text or an economics lecture. But, you should read it to start to explore notions of power, the state, legal and illegal, formal and non-formal. In order to work in the international realm, be it development, politics, conflict resolution, or humanitarian aid, Nordstrom’s book should be in your satchel as you work to help people.

The last thing I did at AAA on Saturday (besides buying tons of books) was to see Anthropology off the Shelf: Speaking Truth to Power With Books. This special session featured Paul Farmer, Howard Zinn, and Andrew Barnes.

Paul Farmer spoke first, trying to talk to the session’s theme. However, he noted that he didn’t think his books had had that much impact or that books were the best method for action in some cases. He made two comments about writing and research with respect to his work that really hit the nail on the head. He said that in talking with his patients and informants over the years, “No one has ever asked me to write about their suffering” and “No one asked me to do research.” I really took those two comments to heart, in the vein that we should not just sit back and write about injustice. The poor already know their situation. Get out there and act, dammit, and act now! Scholars must do activism, not just with their graduate students but with all their students, and with the general public. Farmer noted that he wrote his book Uses of Haiti to influence U.S. policy on that country. He said it was one of the few books that he’s written that had that direct aim when he started out. This book was never meant for his anthropological or medical colleagues. Sadly, he noted that “it’s had very little impact.”

Howard Zinn rambled on for quite a bit (about 15-20 minutes over his alloted 15 minute presentation). But, he was an affable gentleman, who had lots of interesting stories to tell. He talked about how books can change consciousness, via throwing out new ideas the reader might never have thought about or showing that not all people see things the same way. Ironically, while I think he’s right, his comments (cheered on by many of the listeners) implied that once people hear new, and correct facts, will shock people into changing their world view. A lot of my work, especially with our US in the World framework tool has shown that people are more likely to throw out facts rather than the frameworks that guide their thinking. So, Zinn’s got good ideas but how he communicates them might need some fine tuning. One of Zinn’s coolest comments was when he quoted Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut, when asked why he wrote, said, “I write so you won’t feel alone.” Paraphrasing another Vonnegut quote: he writes so that you know know there are others like you in the world.

The final panelist was Andrew Barnes, who works for the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and also served on the Pulitzer Prize Board from 1996 through 2005. He’s an historian by education and a journalist and writer by profession. He talked about the Pulitzer Prize process, as an insight into speaking truth to power via books. Regarding writing, he stressed that the topic must resonate with the general public to have an impact. He agreed that it was sad that this was the case, but it was true. An interesting quote from Mr. Barnes was one that I swear I told some work folks about 9 months ago. He said “if you try to speak truth to power and power doesn’t want to hear it, it will shut the book.” An important take away comment from him was that “if you wish to be widely read, you’ve got to focus on your writing. It’s very hard work.”

Sadly, many people at this session took little note of Farmer’s comments. They were shocked, literally, that he said that books might not have as much impact as they thought. They took it the other way and cried out that books are critical and important. Farmer responded later, during the discussion period, by noting that research and writing are indeed crucial. But, they should pair that with action. Most people still missed the point. My take is that books don’t change the world, action does. Writer later, act now!

My first session on the 2nd day was What’s the Matter with the United States? One of the early speakers was Jeff Maskovsky, whose work I find excellent. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it there early enough to see him speak, but I did see him make some responses during our short discussion period. Unlike many sessions at AAA, this one had a shortened discussion session since the hotel fire alarm went off during one of the presentations. We all had to hurry out a side exit and stand on an elevated concrete area waiting for the all clear.

During this session, Jane Schneider made a great connection between government morality policies and an actual upsurge in vice. One example she presented was the puritanical imposition of Prohibition in the early 20th Century. It was meant to cut down on vice but it ended up created an entire new market niche for liquor producers and runners. This illicit business actually caused more harm (bodily and mentally) than the supposed vice that Prohibition was attempting to proscribe.

Ida Susser described the impact of US neoconservatism on US AIDS policy (both domestic and international). She noted the current administration’s attempt to re-regulate the poor and ethnic minorities. She threw particular scorn (as do I) on the abstinence only requirements built into TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) and PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). In PEPFAR, it’s mandatory that 33% of the funding provided be spent solely on abstinence programs. Condoms, birth control, help for sex workers, and sex education are forbidden. This ideological policy is a death sentence for so many people in the US and throughout the world. The ideologues say that abstinence and “be faithful” are the best options. However, some married men stray and have multiple sex partners and the woman living in an assumed monogamous relationship suffer the consequences. The ideologues are creating repressive understandings of familial and women’s roles in society.

Dorothy Roberts, the discussant, summed it up well by noting the punitive aspect of American neoliberalism. The state is not simply withdrawing from its responsibilities but it is leaving in its wake a new, repressive social contract. Claims of multiculturalism and social harmony from the right simply mask strong racist policies.

My next session was Public Interest Ethnography: Theory, Practice, and Action. There were some interesting talks about Indy Media, and how it might help unite the cyber-left and provide an avenue for praxis-oriented ethnography. Amy Rosenberg Weinreb described an interesting concept of shadow publics. Chris Thornton and Peggy Sanday raised an interesting tidbit in their talk on male violence. The described a model of male-male social relationship that posited woman as the medium through which men define these relationships.

I attended the AIDS and Anthropology Research Group (AARG), which is a special interest group in the Society for Medical Anthropology section of the AAA. It was an interesting meeting and something I might get involved with in the future.

After that, I went to the Compliance, Resistance and Social Realities: How Does Medical Anthropology Inform Ethically Responsible Research. Chris Simon talked about the difficulties of funding social health research vs. what a community needs and desires. He and others on the panel discussed the 90/10 problem where 90% of the global research dollars for health are applied to 10% of the total global disease burden. In the developed world, anti-aging and sexual performance are the primary focus while health dollars rarely go towards developing world problems such as clean water, treatable infectious diseases, etc. In summing up this panel, Barbara Koenig noted, as I and many people have said before, that the root causes of today’s global health situation is rooted in poverty and wealth inequality. While biotechnology is a unique tool we can use to work on health issues, we must avoid a biomedical reductionist solution that renders invisible poverty as the core factor.

My first day’s impression (December 1st) wasn’t that great, although it started out good. My first session was Bringing the past (back) into the present: Exploring the Present Tense of History in Queer Lives - Part II. I don’t have a great deal of experience with gender theory in anthropology, but the chair of the anthropology department at American University, where I went, was speaking on this panel.

The talk that stood out the most to me was one by Deborah Elliston. Her paper was entitled Queer History and its Discontents at Tahiti: The Contested Politics of Modernity and Sexual Subjectivity. In this paper, she discussed the mahu and rairai of Tahiti and how these two groups of people create and are created by historical, economic, and social forces in Tahiti. The Mahu are male-bodied but present a female persona in public. They dress in female clothes and affect female speech patterns They are accepted by the community and form this gendered identity is adolescence. The rairai are also male-bodied, but perform a female gender internally and externally. The mahu have more of a ritualized place in the society while the rairai often perform as sex workers. Elliston tied the rise of the rairai to the 1960s, when the French colonial authority poured a great deal of money and people into the area, in order to facilitate transfer of their nuclear weapons testing from newly independent Algeria to the South Pacific. With the influx of capital, and men to spend it, the rairai started servicing these foreigners for cash. Internal to the society, there was an attempt to assert who was the truest mahu, between the two groups. The rairai said the traditional mahu weren’t true to their gendered identity, while the mahu asserted their traditional role as their authenticity. It was a really exciting talk.

After that session, I went to In the Name of Security: Anthropology in the Age of Surveillance. This was a good preaching to the choir session. This was one of the closest talks to what I do at work; however, there were no solutions offered. The speakers simply talked about the horrible state of our national and foreign policy, but they didn’t provide any options for how we should fight back. My last session on Thursday was Reinscribing the State: Governmentalities of Globalization. This was predominantly a student panel and the presentations weren’t delivered in the best of ways. The topics were intriguing and more time or a roundtable discussion with the authors would have been much more valuable.

I picked up a ton of books at the AAA exhibit hall last week. Discounts galore, with books selling at 20, 25, and 50% off. On the last day, some of the university presses were selling paperbacks at $5 and hardbacks at $10 a pop. This was 50 - 75% off the list price. Woohoo! The books I got were:

Achino-Loeb, Maria-Luisa, ed. 2006    Silence: The Currency of Power. New York: Berghahn Books.

Collins, John 2004    Occupied by Memory: The Intifada Generation and the Palestinian State of Emergency. New York: New York University Press.

Hancock, Ange-Marie 2004    The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen. New York: New York University Press.

Marcus, Anthony 2006    Where have all the homeless gone? The making and unmaking of a crisis. New York: Berghahn Books.

Nordstrom, Carolyn 2004    Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sanford, Victoria 2003    Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Stein, Rebecca L. and Ted Swedenburg, eds. 2005    Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press.

Walkowitz, Daniel J. and Lisa Maya Knauer, eds. 2004    Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space. Durham: Duke University Press.

Prior to my trip to Santa Fe, I finished reading Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, by Paul Farmer. I wanted to finish it up before I moderated our HIV/AIDS panel at our second annual conference. I wanted to see if there was any great material I could draw on for my portion of the panel.

This is a great book, which really helped drill in his concept of “a preferential option for the poor”. It laid out a solid epidemiological case and backed it up with deep ethnography. It seems that Paul’s combination of anthropology and medicine are perfect for confronting the deeper structural issues of modern plagues. He argues effectively about the fallacy of cost effectiveness. We must treat people with infectious diseases. It’s not fair to offer one class of people one thing and another class a lesser option. He also argues that treatment vs. prevention is a false dichotomy. With millions already infected with HIV and millions with TB (both regular and multiple drug resistant strains), we don’t have the option to exclude those who are already sick. Their sickness is often a manifestation of structural violence. The situations they find themselves in contribute as much, and often times more, to their infections than do their individual agency (ability to affect their own lives).

Infectious disease in the modern world is as much about class and politics as it is about bacteria and viruses.

I found an earlier book of his, Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues, to be a better read. But this book is certainly one to have in your hand. I wanted to say have on your shelf, but these types of books need to be used, not just used to decorate your bookshelves.

I just finished (this morning) reading Tracy Kidder’s book, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest for Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World. To use an oft-abused cliche: if you read just one book this year (or in your life), read this book! I studied Paul Farmer’s work when I was a graduate student in anthropology and I had the opportunity to meet him after a talk he gave at my undergraduate school. He’s a remarkable individual and this biography of his life is simply superb. It’s almost a guide on how to be a human being. Farmer’s not about megalomania or personal enrichment. He’s just a person out there helping the poor because that’s what you need to do. Farmer, through his work, talks, and experiences, shows us that that many diseases are not individual problems but often arise out of larger economic and political inequalities. Treatments shouldn’t be based on cost-effectiveness or appropriate technology for the geographic or demographic group you’re working with. That just creates classes of people, creating artificial dichotomies of the deserving and undeserving. We’re all human beings and we all deserve access to quality heath care.

Two last things: (1) read some of Dr. Farmer’s own works, such as Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues; and (2) Tracy Kidder’s book is a fast & fabulous read. It’s a page-turner and you’ll fly through it and be glad you read it.

I had the great honor to meet Paul Farmer this past weekend. Paul gave a talk entitled “Making Medicine Matter: Rethinking Health and Human Rights” as part of the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture series. This series is sponsored by the Anthropology department at the University of Rochester. This lecture series, founded in 1963, has seen a great number of prestigious anthropologists, including Meyer Fortes, Sidney Mintz, Elizabeth Colson, and Lila Abu-Lughod.

Paul spoke about access to health care being a fundamental human right, following in the footsteps of other great social activisits, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He is an anthropologist and a medical doctor, having received both degrees at the same time from Harvard. He is an activist who puts his money where his mouth is. He doesn’t live in an ivy-covered office and jet around on the lecture circuit. He works in a clinic in rural Haiti and treats the poorest Haitians who have HIV, Tuberculosis, and other maladies that derive as much from political and economic causes as well as epidemiological ones. His book, Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues, brought his work and his insights to my attention. I read it in an anthropology course on urban poverty but his book is also read in the medical community and by environmental justice advocates. His cross/inter-disciplinary work is something everyone should read.

I had a chance to talk to Paul before he left the lecture. He was rushed, but he took the time to ask what I do and I had time to tell him how much of an influence he had on me and my fellow AU anthropology graduate students. I also was lucky enough to get him to sign my marked up and dog-eared copy of Infections and Inequalities. Overall, an excellent experience!