Providing assistance to Burma

The devastation wrought on Burma by Cyclone Nargis is becoming all the more apparent by the day.  There are also serious concerns about the Burmese junta’s approach to the disaster, which may be responsible for thousands of more deaths through neglect.  Under these circumstances, it is particularly difficult to know how to make donations that might be at all effective at reaching their target.  Personally, I donated via avaaz.org, which is supporting an organisation of Buddhist monks in Burma.

The post reproduced below was circulated on a Southeast Asia-focused mailing list that I subscribe to.  It provides an argument for the most effective forms of assistance and recommendations about the best aid agencies to approach.  This might provide some assistance to those considering the best way to help. I do not make any personal endorsement of the organisations listed.

Book on the visual constitution of “race” in online environments

Here is a post from Anthrodesign:

DIGITIZING RACE: Visual Cultures of the Internet
Lisa Nakamura
University of Minnesota Press | 304 pages | 2007
ISBN 978-0-8166-4612- 8 | hardcover | $58.50
ISBN 978-0-8166-4613- 5 | paperback | $19.50

The implications of how we see and exhibit race and ethnicity online.

Lisa Nakamura, a leading scholar in the examination of race in digital media, looks at the emergence of race-, ethnic-, and gender-identified visual cultures through popular yet rarely evaluated uses of the Internet. While popular media depict people of color and women as passive audiences, Nakamura argues that they use the Internet to vigorously articulate their own types of virtual community, avatar bodies, and racial politics.

“With Digitizing Race, Lisa Nakamura, one of the most perceptive observers of identity in the digital age, skillfully draws our attention to those taken for granted interfaces at which race and ethnicity are constituted, revealing the centrality of these techno-visual practices to contemporary political culture.” -Alondra Nelson

For more information, including the table of contents, visit the book’s webpage:

http://www.upress. umn.edu/Books/ N/nakamura_ digitizing. html

Although the book deals with the US only, it makes me think of the very distinctive visuality of Chinese sites. On the one hand, there is the “cuteness” that has by now probably become a visual identifier of being East Asian (though it is very interesting why it is so broadly accepted and what sort of identities and includes); on the other hand, there are specific national(istic) symbols, though normally far less prominent. The organisation of the sites also tends to be very different from English-language ones, which raises the question whether such things as formatting can in itself convey a particular (vaguely ethno-political) identity.

Value of Life

Jovan’s latest article on the censorship of online research on ‘abortion’ in the US reminded me of philosopher Peter Singer’s article ‘Devaluing Life’ , which was published on the website http://www.project-syndicate.org on February 2006. Although Singer’s article is not on the controversy of abortion, he reflects on a similar issue, which is the controversy about the stem-cell research that requires the destruction of  human embryos. George W.Bush denied government funding for stem-cell research since it encourages the destruction of human-embryos and as a result devalues human life.

Peter Singer challenges this argument by George W.Bush and people with a similar worldview in the US who on the one hand value and respect the life of human embryos, and on the other hand who encourage wars in other countries and cause the killing of millions of people.

Peter Singer’s article is food for thought; and also I suggest that American anthropologists should study the ‘exotic cosmology-worldview’ of these people which is full of contradictions. Singer’s article is below:

Devaluing Life

February 2006

In August 2001, President George W. Bush told Americans that he worried about “a culture that devalues life,” and that he believed that, as President of the United States, he has “an important obligation to foster and encourage respect for life in America and throughout the world.”

That belief lay behind Bush’s denial of federal government funds for stem-cell research that could encourage the destruction of human embryos. Although the Bush administration acknowledged that some scientists believe stem cell research could offer new ways of treating diseases that affect 128 million Americans, this prospect evidently did not, in Bush’s view, justify destroying human embryos.

Last month, the military forces that this same president commands aimed a missile at a house in Damadola, a Pakistani village near the Afghanistan border. Eighteen people were killed, among them five children. The target of the attack, Al Qaeda’s number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was not among the dead, although lesser figures in the terrorist organization reportedly were.

Bush did not apologize for the attack, nor did he reprimand those who ordered it. Apparently, he believes that the chance of killing an important terrorist leader is sufficient justification for firing a missile that will almost certainly kill innocent human beings.

Other American politicians took the same stance. Senator Trent Lott, a conservative Republican – and a prominent opponent of abortion – said of the attack: “Absolutely, we should do it.” Senator John McCain, another leading Republican, though one often ready to disagree with Bush, expressed regret for the civilian deaths, but added, “I can’t tell you that we wouldn’t do the same thing again.”

Indeed, it would be hard for the current administration to say that it wouldn’t do the same thing again, because it has done it many times before. On November 1, 2001, American planes bombed Ishaq Suleiman, a group of mud huts, because a Taliban truck had been parked in one of the streets. The truck left before the bomb hit, but 12 local villagers were killed and 14 were injured. There are many more such stories of innocent lives being lost in the war in Afghanistan.

In Iraq, too, American attacks have taken the lives of many civilians. Again, one of many examples will suffice. On April 5, 2003, a civilian neighborhood in Basra was bombed. The target was General Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as “Chemical Ali” because of his use of chemical weapons against Iraqis. One bomb hit the home of the Hamoodi family, a respected, educated family, none of whose members belonged to the ruling Baath Party. Of the extended family of 14, ten were killed, including an infant, a two-year-old baby, a 10-year-old boy, and a 12-year-old girl. Four months later, Majid was captured alive; the bombs had missed their intended target.

This consistent pattern of readiness to inflict civilian casualties – often when striking targets that are not of vital military significance – suggests that Bush and other pro-life American leaders have less concern for the lives of innocent human beings in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, than they have for human embryos. This is a bizarre set of priorities. No parents grieve for a lost embryo in the way that they would grieve over the death of a child. No embryos are capable of suffering, or have hopes or desires for the future that are abruptly cut off by their death.

It might be possible to justify the loss of innocent human life in Damadola by a utilitarian calculation that killing Al Qaeda’s leaders will, in the long run, save a larger number of innocent human beings. After all, if they remain at large, they may succeed in carrying out further terrorist attacks that take hundreds or even thousands of innocent lives. Bush, however, cannot rely on that argument, for it is precisely the kind of justification that he rejects when it comes to destroying embryos in order to save, in the long run, those dying from diseases for which we currently have no cure.

Other moralists will say that the difference between destroying embryos for research purposes and killing civilians in military attacks is that the former is deliberate killing, whereas the latter deaths are “collateral damage” – unintended, if foreseeable, side-effects of a justifiable act of war.

We can grant that it was not the primary intention of those who planned and authorized the attack on Damadola to kill innocent people. We can also accept that al-Zawahiri is undoubtedly a dangerous foe, still active in a terrorist movement, and that he is a legitimate military target. Perhaps this particular attack can be justified on those grounds.

Nevertheless, the doctrine that it is acceptable to take actions that will foreseeably kill innocent people can have the effect of leading us to treat more lightly than we should the deaths of those killed. That, it seems, is what has happened somewhere in the American chain of command. The presence of a Taliban truck does not justify bombing a village in which civilians are going about their daily lives. Killing innocent people in order to bring a kind of rough justice to “Chemical Ali” – a particularly nasty member of Saddam’s military elite, but one who at the time of the raid was no longer in command of military forces – is wrong.

A culture that allows – and even endorses – such tactics is not one that is genuinely committed to encouraging respect for life. We can be quite sure that American forces would not have acted in the same way if the civilians nearby had been other Americans.

Self censorship of US public health search engine

Recently, BoingBoing posted about change to a government-funded public health search engine, Popline, so that queries including the search term “abortion” turn up no results. According to the article, the owners of the engine Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, have made the modification because they believed it was a condition of their federal funding.

Lisa Wynn, our resident expert on reproductive technologies, is not able to post about it herself as she’s off doing research in Egypt, but she did send me these comments on the story:

1) what’s interesting to note is the self-censorship. We’ve all known for years that the US administration under Bush has had a chilling effect on research and provision of reproductive health services internationally (the so-called “global gag rule”), but the idea that people in a university would voluntarily self-censor their database based on the interventions at an unofficial and extra-legal level from individuals at a federal funding agency is bizarre and troubling;

2) and secondly, on a whole different level, the restriction would have excluded a large body of medical literature that has nothing to do with “abortion” as it is popularly used, since the medical community uses the term “abortion” to also include miscarriages (”spontaneous abortion”) as well as intended abortions (”induced abortion”).

Johns Hopkins Public Health has a statement by their Dean, Michael Klag, on their website stating that the restriction of the search term was only intended as a temporary measure while certain articles deemed to be “abortion advocacy” were removed from the Popline database. Klag also states that the block on “abortion” was immediately removed once he learned of it. He also kindly includes details of the references removed from the database.

While this paints a slightly better picture of the affair, I’m concerned that materials regarded as advocacy should be excluded from searches. People interested in public health research might have perfectly legitimate reasons for wanting to read advocacy materials. What if some anti-abortion scholar is researching a paper on pro-abortion advocacy and is unable to find materials? It would also seem to imply that there is a clear line between advocacy and other scholarly writing on a topic. Isn’t it possible for writing to be both? And does this mean that all research and writing aimed at promoting social change of some form, or engaging in a debate, should also be excluded on the same grounds? And who is to be the judge of such questions, deciding what is advocacy and what is not? The over-reaction of the administrators to this issue would suggest that many making these decisions will err on the side of caution, and the self-censorship will continue.

The global food crisis II

Following on from Nursel’s recent post, I’d like to draw readers to a recent New York Times article about the “global food crisis”. According to the article, rising commodities prices, especially fuel and food prices, are producing unprecedented stress and anger across the globe, resulting in unrest and even riots. The article includes disturbing descriptions of people in Haiti eating concoctions made in part from mud in order to still their hunger pains. It is worth being reminded that what is experienced as a bit of additional pain at the checkout for the world’s wealthy can be an issue of survival for the world’s poor.

The article states:

“It’s the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and special adviser to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. “It’s a big deal and it’s obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there’s more political fallout to come.”

Significantly, the article also acknowledges the interconnectedness of the global economy in that rising prices have “pitted the globe’s poorer south against the relatively wealthy north, adding to demands for reform of rich nations’ farm and environmental policies”. The production of biofuels putting upward pressure in prices is mentioned, though the competition between animals and humans for grains is not.

Given the likely future impact of rising fuel prices, climate change, the expansion of economies such as China and India on food production and prices, the fact that the situation appears already to be so bad is worrying indeed.

See also the NYT’s index of articles on food prices.

“Stolen Generation kids ‘used for tests’ “

There was an article about Stolen Generations on the Sydney Morning Herald the other day. According to the article Stolen Generation Kids ‘Used for Tests’ (SMH, 15 April 2005), the Senate Legal and Constitutional Committee’s inquiry into a Stolen Generation Compensation Bill 2008 was told that some Aboriginal children removed from their families and placed into institutions were used to test medical treatments. Below is from the article:

On the first day of hearings in Darwin today, Kathleen Mills from the Stolen Generations Alliance said the public did not know the full extent of what happened to some children.

And efforts to obtain records that support the claims, such as that children were injected with serums to gauge their reaction to the medication, had been hampered, she said.

“These are the things that have not been spoken about,” Ms Mills told the inquiry.

“As well as being taken away, they were used … there are a lot of things that Australia does not know about.”

Outside the inquiry, Ms Mills said her uncle had been a medical orderly at the Kahlin Compound in Darwin.

She said he told her that children were used as “guinea pigs” for leprosy treatments.

“He said it made our people very, very ill … the treatment almost killed them,” she said.

“It was a common experience and a common practice …

“People are very inhibited to speak about their experience and it is not a nice subject … I don’t want them to be shamed.”

Senator Brown said it was important to get to the bottom of the claims, which he called “very, very serious”.

“It may be right, it may not,” he said.

“It needs investigation. If within the indigenous community there is a feeling that children may have been experimented upon for a treatment for leprosy or anything else, the air needs to be cleared.”

Ms Mills said information to do with the testing would be in health department archives and she called on the government to assist “opening Pandora’s box”.

She also said it was important to work with indigenous groups to ascertain who is eligible for compensation.

“It has to happen … but there’s this reluctance to do it,” she said.

“We don’t have the necessary information … it’s probably tucked away in some archive but we don’t have the resources to research, we don’t have the people who are qualified.”

Senator Brown said there was a national responsibility to help Aboriginal people to get to all the records, including those being held by church institutions.

“This is about their identity, this about their sense of being, their history,” he said.

The compensation bill aims to pay money to victims of the stolen generations, including living descendants, out of a Stolen Generations Fund.

Ex gratia payments would be set at $20,000 as a common experience payment with an additional $3,000 for each year of institutionalisation.

Rodney Dillon, from the National Sorry Day Committee, said that while the government debated action more Aboriginal elders entitled to some form of compensation were dying.

“We are going to lose a lot of people between now and the next time this bill is put on the table,” he said.

“Although it does not have all the things in it we would like, I think we should push ahead.”

Zita Wallace, chairperson of the Stolen Generations Alliance, said it was time to act “with urgency”.

“Because I know we are dying and all of us elders from the first generation we will be all gone … maybe the government would wish that would happen, then they would not have to pay compensation.”

The Global Food Crisis

George Monbiot’s latest article ‘The Pleasures of the Flesh’ on 15 April 2008  is about the causes of the current global food crisis. Currently there are food crises in 37 countries. Monbiot says “the price of rice has risen by three-quarters in the past year, that of wheat by 130%(1).” and according to the World Bank one hundred million people could become poorer by the high prices. Actually there is no scarcity of food; for example “at 2.1 bn tonnes, last year’s global grain harvest broke all records” and “it beat the previous year’s by almost 5%”.

A significant amount of food produced are used as biofuels; for instance according to the World Bank “the grain required to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle with ethanol … could feed one person for a year”. And according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), this year 2.13 bn tonnes is likely to be consumed, and only 1.01bn will feed people. Monbiot complains that now in the UK, all sellers of transport fuel have to mix fuel with ethanol or biodiesel made from crops. He says: “In the midst of a global humanitarian crisis, we have just become legally obliged to use food as fuel. It is a crime against humanity in which every driver in this country has been forced to participate. “

Monbiot also discusses the other cause of the food crisis, which “is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer”. This year 100 m tonnes food will be used as biofuels, and a bigger amount, 760 m tonnes, will be used to feed animals. Since meat consumption in Asia and Latin America has been booming, and the UN estimates that the population will rise to 9bn by 2050, Monbiot tries to answer the question “What level of meat-eating would be sustainable?” and he says “ If you care about hunger, eat less meat”.

At the end of his article, George Monbiot says:

Re-reading this article, I see that there is something surreal about it. While half the world wonders whether it will eat at all, I am pondering which of our endless choices we should take. Here the price of food barely registers. Our shops are better stocked than ever before. We perceive the global food crisis dimly, if at all. It is hard to understand how two such different food economies could occupy the same planet, until you realise that they feed off each other.

Link to applied neuro-anthropology

Normally, I wouldn’t cross-post from the other anthropology site that I do, but my partner-in-blogging on Neuroanthropology, Daniel Lende, has been putting up some great posts that could just have easily been featured on Culture Matters because they’re about applying anthropology in all sorts of ways. I won’t reference them all, but I thought I’d flag a couple that might be of special interest to those involved with applied anthropology:

In Cellphones Save The World, Lende looks at an article in The New York Times on Jan Chipchase, a ‘human-behavior researcher’ and ‘user-anthropologist’ who works for Nokia. Daniel provides an extensive commentary on the original article in the NYT magazine, Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?; both would likely be of interest to Culture Matters readers. Lende follows up his original commentary with more information on Jan Chipchase here.

Another post explores an ongoing project, Digital Ethnography, at Kansas State University, with a couple of good video clips including A Vision of Students Today.

Finally, and I’m just sampling from a few of his April posts, there’s a series on obesity that looks at the ‘obesity epidemic’ from a holistic, anthropological perspective. There’s several posts, but the last (which have links to the earlier ones) are On the Causes of Obesity: Common Sense or Interacting Systems and Human Biology and Models for Obesity.

Like I said, normally, I wouldn’t shamelessly cross-plug posts on the two blogs, but since I’m not the one doing the postings, and I really do think that they’re great examples of applying anthropology to pressing practical issues like poverty or public health, I’m breaking my usual rule for self-restraint.

Visual Ethnography workshop at Macquarie

Dr Jennifer Deger just sent me a notice about an exciting visual ethnography workshop that she’s running in May. Info below.

See: Feel: Think: Know: New Ethnographies of the Visual

One Day Workshop May 23, 2008
Macquarie University

How do visual experiences enable us to encounter culture and difference differently? What new possibilities for research and experimentation do digital visual technologies enable, if not demand? What scope is emerging for scholarly work that engages visual practices in the field? How might working with the visual recast questions about the politics of identity, knowledge and the ethics of representation? How can aesthetics be recast as an arena of contemporary social politics?

This one-day workshop will focus on new methodologies, epistemologies and practices in visual culture research. It will explore the intertwined practical and theoretical issues that arise when research takes the visual on its own terms. No longer simply illustrative or evidentiary—no longer secondary to the ‘real’ work of politics, history or culture—the visual is recognised to convey understandings and mediate encounters that are of a profoundly different order to ethnographies that emerge from processes of ‘writing-up’.

Beeman on Anthropologists in Iraq

Brown University anthropologist, William O. Beeman, recently published Lethal Field Work: Anthropologists Cry Foul Over Colleagues’ Aid to Iraq Occupation in Le Monde diplomatique (the link is to an English version on Alternet). Beeman is probably one of the anthropologists who most successfully publishes in the popular press, drawing on his fieldwork in the Middle East to comment especially on US foreign policy in regular columns. In this article, he covers the basic outline (very basic) of the recent controversy over the Human Terrain Systems (HTS) in the US military.

One of the principal proponents of cooperation is Montgomery McFate, a Yale PhD anthropologist and senior fellow at the U.S. Institute for Peace. In a seminar on 10 May 2007, McFate presented a plan that was influential in establishing the HTS project. She pointed out that the U.S. military spends almost nothing on social science research that would be crucial to the success of operations, and recommended an approach to closing the cultural knowledge gap.

The article really does not add much to the anthropological discussion of anthropology’s potential role in Iraq, certainly nothing beyond what’s already been covered on this site and on others, like Savage Minds. In fact, the article is so general that the only reason I provide a link to it is to note that this mostly internal discussion in our field is only leaking out in very limited forms. I’m left perplexed by the article, frankly. Either Beeman does not know about, or chooses not to write with any recognition of much more extensive debate in our field, including some much stronger opinions than those he relays: basically, that there is a conflict, with some anthropologists doing HTS-related work, even when not experts in the regions involved, and other anthropologists criticizing them and pushing for a resolution to prohibit intelligence gathering for counter-insurgency by anthropologists.

I usually like Beeman’s columns, but this one left me flat. If this is how discussions within our field are being relayed to those outside it, then the effect of any critiques of these programs is liable to be negligible. The debate sounds polarized and, oddly, comes out muffled, balanced between those who want to use anthropology to reduce casualties and those who worry that anthropology will be used as a weapon. Do we use anthropology for good or for evil? Is that really all this debate is about, because if that’s it, then it’s a pretty easy debate to resolve: I’m for good and against evil. But I think that if the debate is reduced to this flat of a discussion, the general public isn’t going to really understand why its still going on. ‘What are you guys carrying on about? Just use anthropology to decrease casualties and don’t assassinate people. What’s your problem?’

In this case, I think a simple moral framing actually robs the public account of much that is engaging in this debate. The methodological, pragmatic, structural, and other difficulties of doing serious ethnography, and of using anthropological knowledge in these settings, the likelihood of becoming ethically compromised, of having data compromised by its use, and the epistemological challenges of anthropology in war are, in my opinion, also amenable to popular accounts. And these all make the simple, do-we-use-anthropology-as-a-weapon-or-to-save-lives framing, actually more interesting because it becomes clear the question is not so simple.