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.

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.

AAA annual meeting: Inclusion, Collaboration & Engagement

The AAA have announced the theme of their 2008 conference: Inclusion, Collaboration & Engagement. The call for papers covers a lot of the themes that have been very central to this blog, including the public role of anthropology as an engaged, as well as applied, discipline.One of the framing statements reflects a sentiment that has been expressed on this blog a several times: “Anthropologists, scholars in other disciplines, and the general public have begun to recognize that anthropology has a great deal to contribute in this era of globalization. Still, our discipline remains a mystery to many and we are often not approached when social science information is needed”. Indeed, this would appear to be a direct response to the main concerns raised by Hylland Eriksen in Engaging Anthropology when he asks why a discipline which should have so much of relevance to say to the wider public about the world we live in remains relatively obscure to most people. I think it’s heartening that the AAA is willing to put this sort of question at the centre of its next annual meeting. It will be interesting to see what comes from it.

Here is the full text of the call for papers:

Inclusion, Collaboration & Engagement

The theme for the 2008 AAA Annual Meeting in San Francisco is “Inclusion, Collaboration and Engagement.” This theme provides us the opportunity to critically examine anthropology’s relationships: across subfields, with other disciplines, with our many publics, and with contemporary social problems. The Executive Program Committee envisions healthy debate as we confront methodological, ethical, and epistemological concerns that unite and divide us; as well as discuss the challenges, risks, and opportunities for growth enabled by this dialog.

Inclusion, Collaboration, and Engagement are ideas that have been central to anthropology throughout the discipline’s history and they are particularly important today. Anthropologists, scholars in other disciplines, and the general public have begun to recognize that anthropology has a great deal to contribute in this era of globalization. Still, our discipline remains a mystery to many and we are often not approached when social science information is needed. Moreover, anthropologists are conflicted about whether and how to participate in important public debates. Although there are the myriad attempts to develop a public interest anthropology, we are also wary of activism and public engagement, particularly as we recall government influence on anthropology during times of war.

This theme deserves our scholarly exploration. Analysis of the processes that promote inclusion, collaboration and engagement for positive human outcomes is a common area of interest for both academic and applied/practicing anthropologists, as is clear communication of anthropological perspectives to the wider public.

Inclusion

Anthropology’s historic mission to study humanity through the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities by definition requires the inclusion of multiple disciplines. For example, paleoanthropology and archaeology depend on chemistry, zoology, botany, geology and other disciplines to date sites and interpret data. Similarly, linguistic and sociocultural anthropology regularly include perspectives from other disciplines, including history, philosophy, psychology, and political science. Moreover, there is much merit in an enhanced inclusive dialogue between the branches of anthropology. Cultural and biological anthropology, for example, have opportunities to work together in examining themes such as race, disease, and the environment. Many applied and practicing anthropologists have joint roots in anthropology and other professions such as public health, urban planning, education, business, international development or social work. Their work relies on and contributes to these other disciplines as well as anthropology.

Inclusive anthropology implies more than a holistic or interdisciplinary approach. It suggests research problems and relationships that explicitly address the knowledges and concerns of those who have been relegated to peripheral zones of analysis and theory because of preconceptions about the seemingly static division of intellectual labor. Bringing diverse voices and epistemic perspectives onto the discipline’s center stage—and enlarging that space according to a less hierarchical logic—is consistent with anthropology’s historic principle of inclusion.

Collaboration

Working together toward a common goal is a central characteristic of anthropology, where collaboration may describe work done by teams of anthropologists from diverse subfields or research done by a single anthropologist working together with a subject. For example, heterogeneous research teams in physical anthropology and archeology assemble to address complex intellectual problems. Additionally, the relationship between anthropologists and many Native American tribes might now be best described as collaborative. Native American tribes often require that all anthropological work conducted on reservations directly and actively involve tribal members in the design, implementation, and dissemination of research that addresses problems with contemporary relevance to their tribes. This reconceptualization of the researcher-subject relationship both suggests new challenges and reveals exciting opportunities to improve research and ensure it engages community needs.

Anthropologists who use participatory action methods engage in a knowledge production process that converts “informants” into research consultants and collaborators. These methods can empower local people to have a voice in government and corporate decision-making. Beyond invoking notions of partnership and the sharing of ethnographic authority rhetorically, many anthropologists work to build concrete collaborative relationships in community settings. The benefits, challenges, and contradictory outcomes of collaboration are worthy of examination and constructive self-criticism.

Engagement

Engaged anthropology has many dimensions. Engagement is becoming a key value in college and university settings where anthropologists recognize that relationships with local publics and community organizations are essential to higher education. From both within and outside of academia, engaged anthropologists have examined public policy issues related to welfare reform, immigration, and protection of indigenous knowledge and rights, and have joined with local participants to instigate and sustain government and community change.

In this area anthropology has much to offer, but the discipline has not yet decisively stepped forward. This year’s theme provides an opportunity for academic and applied/practicing anthropologists to engage in dialogue to set a new agenda for making anthropology increasingly relevant to key issues in the twenty-first century, including social identity, economic growth, cultural preservation, peace-making, and environmental and social justice.

‘Exploitation’ of foreign students

In a recent post I mentioned an article by a psychiatrist about the often poor levels of mental health found among international students in Australia.  Now The Australian has just published a piece in which it is claimed that many foreign students in Australia are being exploited.  A study done by researchers at Monash and Melbourne Universities is highly critical of an ‘industry’ that treats foreign students as ‘cash cows’.

Particularly striking for me was the revelation that a recent study by the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee on student welfare did not include overseas students in its scope.  This kind of exclusion accords with other structural impediments for overseas students, for example the fact that they do not qualify for student concessions.  In essence, international students are on their own — expected to be self-sufficient and not needing to avail themselves to the support of the state.  Dare I say that they are highly ‘neoliberalised’ subjects, existing in a much purer version of the ‘free market’ than domestic students would be expected to endure.

The full text of the article follows:

CONTRARY to their image as cashed-up BMW drivers, many overseas students cannot afford to eat, are paid well below the minimum wage and are among those most vulnerable to exploitation in this country, new research says.

More than one-third of overseas students struggle financially and about 60 per cent are paid less than the legal minimum wage, according to the research.

The alarming findings come as education overtakes tourism as the nation’s biggest services export, increasing by a huge 21 per cent in 2007 to $12.5 billion. The number of international student enrolments rose 18 per cent on the previous year to more than 450,000, the latest figures show.

The authors of the joint Monash University and University of Melbourne studies slammed universities for treating foreign students like “cash cows”, and criticised the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee (now known as Universities Australia) for failing to include overseas students in a recent student welfare study.

They wrote that “many internationals are disadvantaged by their relative deficit of language and cultural skills, they are crowded into a narrower range of jobs than is available to their domestic peers, and they commonly offset these disadvantages by working for less than the legal (minimum)”.

The two papers, one on international students in the workforce and the other on the financial difficulties faced by overseas students, were based on interviews with 200 students at nine universities across Australia.

The researchers found that almost 60 per cent of students earned below the minimum wage and 37per cent had experienced financial hardship, including not having enough money to travel to university or even eat.

“I had a very hard time finding a job. (For the) first two months I was unemployed,” one 36-year-old Indian student told researchers. “My rent is very high - it’s $120 a week - and other than that you have travelling, eating, everything.

“So I starved.”

The researchers discovered 70 per cent of international students worked at some stage during their studies in Australia and a number admitted to working more than the maximum 20 hours allowed by their study visas.

“Of the students who reported their hourly rate, 58 per cent earned between $7 and $15 per hour at a time when the legal minimum for a casual waiter was $16.08 an hour and the rate for a casual shop assistant was $17.97 per hour,” the study states.

Conducted by Simon Marginson, Chris Nyland, Erlenawati Sawir, Gaby Ramia and Helen Forbes-Mewett, the research also found foreign students were more likely to be exploited because of their lack of English skills and ignorance of workplace rights. The researchers called for urgent action by governments and universities.

They urged better education for international students about their workplace rights and better investigations by workplace authorities to expose the injustices experienced by working overseas students.

Professor Nyland and his colleagues wrote that the decision by UA not to include overseas students in its finances study “sadly lends credence to the much repeated claim that Australian university managers view international students primarily as customers who exist to be milked”.

But UA chief executive Glenn Withers rejected the claim that tertiary institutions treated international students like cash cows and don’t care about their welfare.

He defended the decision not to include international students in their student finances survey, saying that that survey was targeted at the federal government to try to improve income support for domestic students.

Dr Withers said universities were helping overseas students where they could by providing support services and going into public-private partnerships to construct accommodation for students close to campuses.

“The biggest problems are the exchange rate - and universities cannot control that - and expensive housing, and universities cannot control that either,” he said.

See also: International study, mental health, and migration in Australia

Speculum (because it’s almost Friday [in Australia])

At Macquarie University, where the popular perception amongst the older generation is that student activism is at an all-time low, there was a bit of excitement when we heard that a student publication would be launched. We all fancied it would be the start of a new era of student extracurricular activity.

Well, today I saw the first issue. Jovan showed me his copy. It’s a glossy magazine. “It’s called Speculum,” Jovan told me. My jaw dropped. Jovan said, “Isn’t that…?”

International study, mental health, and migration in Australia

I’ve been very quiet of late as I’ve been on holidays after submitting my thesis in December.  I decided to give myself a break from all thinking for that period, which has been blissful.  I’m now back in the department and will start posting to CM again.  First off, an article in the Herald I noticed today which provides a commentary on the experience of many international students who come to Australia to feed its $11.3 billion “export industry”, the country’s fourth largest.  Although the view from the USA and elsewhere in “the West” might be that study in Australia provides a “beaches and beer” holiday, many poor students from Bangladesh, India and China are intent on gaining permanent residency.  The article’s author Tanveer Ahmed, a psychiatrist, writes about one of the less obvious dimensions of this “industry” the consequences the mental health of students who are often betting their family’s wealth on gaining PR:

Some universities have been the target of allegations that their degrees are little more than extended migration schemes, with the qualifications useful for only the points on the residency application but almost worthless in the employment marketplace.

But what is less commented upon is that overseas students are fast becoming one of the most vulnerable groups in our society. Working in mental health, I see more and more each month and their situations are often horrendous. Suicide attempts, self harm or drug overdoses are the most common way they present, usually in relation to financial and study pressures. It is complicated further by language and cultural difficulties and lack of adequate health insurance.

A 2004 study by the University of Queensland found their international students were three times more likely to suffer depression than local students through the course of their study.

Only this month a house fire in suburban Melbourne killed three Indian students. It emerged that they were sharing the one room in bunk beds and would sleep in shifts while the others were working part time jobs. Overcrowding and difficult living conditions may have contributed to the accident.

Overseas students are the new refugees, living on the edges of Australian society under the weight of visa difficulties, imminent deportation and reduced access to social services. They inhabit that ill defined landscape of unbelonging.

A psychiatrist’s perspective is welcome here.  I have also thought that the “international student experience” is something worthy of ethnographic study.  For an enormous “industry” the social dimension of international studentdom in Australia is poorly understood.  It’s perhaps not surprising that universities aren’t all that interested in knowing too much about this subject as it might raise uncomfortable questions about the largely financial, rather than academic, motivations which are driving ever increasing international student numbers.  In my opinion, it is also something of an open secret in the university “industry” that migration, rather than education, is the primary reason for many international students coming to Australia.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/no-spin-needed-on-desperation-for-residency/2008/01/24/1201157558750.html?page=fullpage

NT Intervention on the ABC

On Thursday the ABC program Difference of Opinion addressed the topic of the Northern Territory intervention.  Entitled A New Deal for Indigenous Australians?, the program featured a panel of Indigenous leaders debated the merits of the Intervention in front of an audience.

The panel was made up of Sue Gordon, Chair of the NT Task Force; Tom Calma, Acting Race Discrimination Commissioner; Olga Havnene, CEO of the Combined Aboriginal Organisations of the NT (and Women for Wik organiser); and Lowitja O’Donaghue, Inaugural Chairperson of ATSIC.

The context of the debate was both the NT Intervention and the recent surprise announcement by John Howard that he had suddenly become interested in reconciliation after 11 years of doing everything in his power to undermine any form progressive policies in relationship to Indigenous Australia.

While announcing his change of heart on reconciliation and his willingness to hold a referendum on putting a mention of Indigenous Australians into the preamble of the Constitution (but not into the body mind you). Howard claimed that he had recently discovered the value of “symbolic” gestures, as if a decade of refusing to apologise to the Stolen Generation isn’t a symbolic gesture. 

Actually, I think the move was a symbolic gesture, but more towards the Australian electorate than towards Indigenous Australia. A week before he announced the election it was pretty clear he was trying to demonstrate to the electorate that although he was an old dog he still has some new tricks to play.

Back to Difference, the opinions expressed by the panel were varied, which helped to illustrate that there is certainly no consensus even within Indigenous Australia about the merits, or lack thereof of the Intervention.  As would be expected, Sue Gordon was a lot more upbeat about the Intervention and claimed that people in many remote communities were very happy to have part of their income quarantined.  This was hotly disputed by the other panelists, who emphasised the confusion and lack of information in these communities which has bred a lot of uncertainty and fear about what the government would be doing.  I was particularly impressed by Olga Havnene, who made the point that although the Intervention is ostensibly addressed at protecting children from abuse, there is no mention of children in the new legislation and it is very hard to see how many of the policies are supposed to contribute to child protection. 

A couple of the panelists also pointed out that the real tragedy of this process is that there has been virtually no consultation with Indigenous Australians at large, and specifically with the remote communities being targeted.  Thus even if some of the policies might have some objective benefits for some members of the communities, they don’t contribute to any sense of empowerment or control within the communities themselves.

In any case, there is a strong contrast between Howard’s proposal for “reconciliation” as an essentially abstract notion and the concrete reality of the policies that are impacting on actual Aboriginal communities.  Good ethnographic studies done in these communities would, I think, help to illuminate discrepancies of this kind.

The show’s website is worth a visit.  It includes video from the program, the transcript, online forum and a poll about the Intervention. 

More on the dreaded Intervention

I feel like it deserves capital letters — The Intervention — such is the gravity of the recent government push to restructure the way remote indigenous communities are managed. Already a number of the more dubious policy changes seem to be bearing fruit.

For example, one of the more disastrous aspects of the Intervention would appear to be the dismantling of community-based employment projects that have provided government subsidised work in remote communities. Anthropologist Jon Altman has written this article criticising the scrapping of the Community Development Employment Programmes (CDEP). The article also provides some background on the rationale for setting up the scheme in the first place.

Accounts are emerging of the damage scrapping the CDEP is causing. For example, an anthropologist who recently returned from doing fieldwork in Arnhem Land, Jennifer Deger, has cited cases of people who have had community-based roles for many years, such as collecting the garbage, and have effectively been left without jobs since the CDEP funding ran out. There also doesn’t seem to be any plan in place for replacing such vital services or offering similar sorts of employment opportunities. Instead, Aborigines are being forced onto Work for the Dole schemes, a move which would seem to increase welfare dependency rather than providing any meaningful employment.

On a larger scale, entire projects have been scuttled by the sudden shift in the management of employment and community development. Margaret Carew, a lecturer from Alice Springs writes:

I don’t know how you are all feeling about the intervention, but the reports coming in are making me angry, sad and sick to the stomach. We keep hearing of terrible stories from places like Titjikala (Successful tourism enterprise forced to close) Utopia (existing training doesn’t fit into new compulsory work for the dole being introduced on 29 Oct) and Tennant Creek (Pink Palace Arts Centre is closing its doors because they have abolished CDEP).

It seems pretty obvious that these sorts of developments are going to negatively affect communities. I also don’t understand what scuttling the CDEP has to do with the original issue which set off The Intervention in the first place, the protection of children from abuse.

The motivation for making these changes seems to be designed to maximise government control and leverage rather than being based on sound social or economic policy. According to Altman, the key objectives of this change are to increase the coercive power tying welfare payments to certain behaviours, such as parents sending their children to school, and to neutralise the political power of Aboriginal organisations. He writes:

One part of the agenda seems to be to sacrifice CDEP positions, many that generate extra hours of work and extra income, to bring participants and their earnings under the single system of quarantining that will apply to welfare payments. It is as if the Government is happy to sacrifice work and income to deal with a perceived expenditure problem: cash is spent on unacceptable goods.

Another part of the agenda seems to be to further depoliticise Indigenous organisations, in this case robust CDEP organisations, perhaps to give government-appointed community administrators greater powers.

In other words the policy is designed to reduce Aboriginal independence, centralise power, and create more docile subjects. This is of course in accordance with other moves, such as doing away with the permit system that gives Aboriginal communities control over who enters their land.

If readers would like to express concern about the Intervention I recommend the Women for Wik website, which has been following developments and also includes a petition against The Intervention.

AAS Statement on recent policy trends in Indigenous affairs

The Australian Anthropological Association has just issued a statement about recent developments in government policy towards Indigenous Australia. The statement came with a request to disseminate as widely as possible, so I am reproducing it here. The statement expresses “deep concerns” about current developments, which include the government reaction to the “Little Children are Sacred” report mentioned in some earlier posts on this blog. Personally I am very happy that the AAS has taken this step as the Association has generally not got involved in public debates in recent years. I hope that it signals a move to a generally more engaged professional association which can demonstrate the contribution anthropologists can make to public debate.

Click on the link below to read the full statement. The original statement can be found here.

Grounding those narratives

Joana’s earlier post about uses of ICT in low-income communities emphasised the value of ethnographic research to challenge widely-held assumptions. When I read it I was reminded me of a post on Savage Minds from about the same time which referenced a Guardian article on British anthropologist Melissa Leach.

Working in the field of development studies, Leach makes clear her disdain for “bullshit research”: i.e. research which constructs grand narratives about a topic without being grounded in empirical, field-based research. In her opinion, this kind of research primarily serves to reinforce assumptions and stereotypes about a particular topic rather than accurately representing what is happening “on the ground”. I tend to agree that one of the primary virtues of good ethnographic work is to challenge and “talk back to” orthodoxies of various kinds by throwing up uncomfortable details “from the world”.  This was illustrated at a seminar I attended some time ago when a historian who was giving a paper threw up her hands in mock despair at yet another “but what about?” question from an anthropologist and exclaimed “That’s the problem with you anthropologists; you’re always ruining our nice neat theories!”

Leach also shows how ethnographic research can ruin a perfectly good master narrative:

“It’s easy,” she argues, “to come up with narratives about deforestation: all the world’s trees are disappearing fast; or, water scarcity will lead to water wars. But these are often contradicted by evidence on the ground about how environments are really changing.”

And the article lists another couple of examples:

Leach and her colleagues had shown how experts can reach wildly wrong conclusions if local knowledge and history are not taken into account. Their findings became a book, Misreading the African Landscape, and a film, Second Nature: Building Forests in West Africa’s Savannahs. A decade later, they are still being used to illustrate the power of anthropological methods.”It shaped my entire career,” she says. “A lot of my work since has been about trying to bring to life the knowledge of local people.”

Seven years later, she struck another blow for social anthropology. Leach and a local anthropologist in northern Nigeria uncovered the reasons for villagers’ fears about taking the polio vaccine, administered to them by the World Health Organisation. Polio was either not seen as a priority, they found, or it was perceived as a spiritual affliction that was impossible to prevent. Leach argued that the polio vaccination campaign was using resources that weakened, rather than strengthened, local primary care health systems.

Original article

See also this recent post on Leach on antropologi.info which also emphasises the value of “local knowledge”.