When some colleagues and I did research on Chinese and Afghan children in Hungarian secondary schools in 2003-04, we found that xenophobic views were consistently expressed by Hungarian students more or less regardless of social class (though of course there was individual variation). We hypothesized that this had to do to a large part with the absence of what is usually referred to as citizenship education — i.e. a coherently transmitted picture of what constitutes the Hungarian polity — which allows the ethnicist, descent-based views of nationhood held by many teachers and not refuted in mainstream media to spread unchallenged. In this, Hungarian schools were starkly different from those in Northwestern Europe, and this has not changed since Hungary joined the European Union.

This has just been confirmed once again by a survey carried out by a group  of sociologist, led by Mihaly Csako, on secondary school students’ views of democracy. Fewer than half of the students considered respect for the rights of minorities an important feature of democracy. Consistent with this, a majority said they would be bothered if they had to sit next to a Gypsy student. (60% of students at the more ‘elite’ type of secondary school, gimnazium, said so, in contrast to 40% at vocational secondary schools, where they are much more likely to actually have Gypsy classmates.)

The relegation of minority rights to a marginalised liberal discourse has been a gradual process. Tolerance of all minorities — ethnic, religious, sexual or social, e.g. the homeless — has been rising. Whereas homophobia was not discernible in Hungary’s political landscape in the 1990s, it has today become a regular feature of nationalist discourse. It must be said that in the ’90s, gay rights were not part of the liberal human-rights discourse or the politicized identity that they have become now, with politicians’ “comings-out” and Western-style gay pride parades (very small and heavily protected from physical attacks by hecklers though they are). But in Hungary, homophobia has little to do with religious concerns; rather, the thematization of any minority rights provokes angry attacks by nationalists who see this as part of a liberal discourse that betrays national interests. Anti-semitism, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-Communism and anti-liberalism are related and almost interchangeable sentiments in Hungarian nationalism, and indeed frequently feature in the same speeches. The kike, the Chinaman, the faggot and the Commie have become signifiers for the same conspiracy that threatens Magyardom. In this respect the nature of xenophobia in Hungary is different from Western Europe (where it is conceptually difficult to be both Islamophobic and antisemitic) or Australia.

A few days ago Jovan wrote about Gabriele Marranci’s blog. When I was in Singapore I had a chat with Gabriele about xenophobia in Italy, and to my surprise he told me that the main xenophobic party, Lega Nord, which is part of the current government,  has recently upgraded Chinese immigrants to being as dangerous as Muslims. I had thought that in the last few years Muslims have become the unchallenged embodiment of the dangerous Other. This does have its flip side, though. At a conference today in Amsterdam I heard a paper by Gargi Bhattacharya denouncing Britain’s criminalization of forced marriage as a step to stigmatize Muslims/South Asians further. But, commenting on her paper, anthropologist Jacob Rigi reminded us that “slavery” (combatting which was one of the rationales for the legislation) really does exist; just look at all those trafficked Chinese. In other words, even those in the academia who are sensitive towards “security talk” about Muslims may not be so critical when the same type of rhetoric crops up with regard to other migrants.

In my native Hungary, the situation is somewhat different. A few years ago, a social worker at Hungary’s single migrant-aid NGO told me how, when the organisation took a group of Afghan children on a trip to the countryside, an unfriendly villager asked: “Why did you bring all this gypsies here?” Told that the children were not Gypsy but Aghan, the man was visibly relieved and said that was okay then.

Today I came across a blog post on the Hungarian subsite of Stormfront a white-supremacist online forum.  The site seems to be populated by members from Hungary, other Eastern European countries, and ethnic Hungarians abroad (including North America).  Here is what the post, by Corvinus, said:

Here is a funny ad, posted at the most chinese-immigrant centers such as chinese food markets and such:

It says:

Dear Chinese!
For every 10 gypsies you kill , you get a greencard in exchange!

Corvinus’ signature says: “We are all Palestinians right now.” This did not seem to bother Norum, from Latvia, who posted the following response:

Chinese – “bad”
Gypsies – “worse”
Muslims – “worst”

 Most respondents from Eastern Europe seemed to agree that Chinese, though bad, were nonetheless better than Gypsies and Muslims. But a member who identified his location as “Europe – Catalonia – Spain” disagreed:

Chinese is a closed community but this reason doesn’t mean that they aren’t dangerous.  (…) Though they work silently they ruin our economy (I speak about my country) with their disloyal competence [competition] (because their prices are very low) and our local companies cannot do anything against them. In zone manufacturer near to my house there are dozens of stores that they dedicate to the manufacture of clothes and shoes while our merchants lose money or have to close the business. They were never mixing with us, but their economic activities are harmful to us. And if they come in mass, with the democratic system, they were finishing deciding for us. They are destroying our economy from the inside.

Every immigration is bad and the silent immigration is the worst.

Resentment of Chinese traders seems to be greater in Spain and Italy than elsewhere, as there they are successfully competing with the existing local garment and shoe industries. More broadly, I wonder if the recession, besides increasing xenophobia overall, will shift it towards migrants who are seen as economically successful, including Chinese as well as skilled white(-collar) migrants (witness the demonstrations against Italian workers today in England and Wales). Although I don’t think it will be easy to dislodge Muslims and Gypsies from the seat of the top threat, concerns about cultural norms may for a while be overshadowed by economic competition. It may also increase antisemitism, which has a difficult relationship with Islamophobia on the extreme right (especially in Eastern Europe).

If Corvinus is right and this sticker has really been put up around Chinese shops in Hungary, I wonder about reactions by Chinese. Anti-Gypsy prejudice is quite widespread among them, and some may feel vindicated.

I don’t quite know what to make of this interesting news item from Arab News, one of Saudi Arabia’s English-language newspapers, but since it’s about “tribes,” as an anthropologist I feel like I should be paying attention!

Saudi ‘Tribal Codes’ Draw Mixed Response
Ali Al-Zahrani, Arab News

RIYADH, 7 March 2008 — Increasingly, young Saudis are using three-digit numeric codes to indicate their tribal affiliations. Among the codes used by them to identify the tribes they originate from are 511, 505, 502, 707, 711, 501 and 111.

The code is aimed at others who know how the numbers translate.

The numbers indicate the number-bearer’s tribe and, by implication, where his loyalty lies.

These numbers are showing up in school, cars and in graffiti.

…

Some students claim that the trend started in the Eastern Province when locals distinguished others by their areas of residence inside public housing complexes in Al-Jubail Industrial area. Saudis from a certain tribe would be often found in a certain area with a three-digit code similar to a zip code in the US. The location code then evolved into a code for particular tribes.

“I really do not know where these codes came from. I only learned of it now when I saw the codes glued to the windows of my big brother’s car,” said Al-Qahtani.

–L.L. Wynn

Numerous Native American activists, including former American Indian Movement leader, Russell Means, presented a kind of declaration of independence for the Lakota Sioux on 19 December, 2007, to the United States State Department. Here’s the account of developments from Lakota Freedom, the website which seems to be an official newsource from the delegation:

Lakota Sioux Indian representatives declared sovereign nation status today in Washington D.C. following Monday’s withdrawal from all previously signed treaties with the United States Government. The withdrawal, hand delivered to Daniel Turner, Deputy Director of Public Liaison at the State Department, immediately and irrevocably ends all agreements between the Lakota Sioux Nation of Indians and the United States Government outlined in the 1851 and 1868 Treaties at Fort Laramie Wyoming.

“This is an historic day for our Lakota people,” declared Russell Means, Itacan of Lakota. “United States colonial rule is at its end!”

“Today is a historic day and our forefathers speak through us. Our Forefathers made the treaties in good faith with the sacred Canupa and with the knowledge of the Great Spirit,” shared Garry Rowland from Wounded Knee. “They never honored the treaties, that’s the reason we are here today.”

The four member Lakota delegation traveled to Washington D.C. culminating years of internal discussion among treaty representatives of the various Lakota communities. Delegation members included well known activist and actor Russell Means, Women of All Red Nations (WARN) founder Phyllis Young, Oglala Lakota Strong Heart Society leader Duane Martin Sr., and Garry Rowland, Leader Chief Big Foot Riders. Means, Rowland, Martin Sr. were all members of the 1973 Wounded Knee takeover.

Reports have cropped up in some of the mainstream news outlets (such as USA Today), but most of the accounts simply derive from a reading of the official statement made by the group. As Fox News reports (I can’t even imagine what their editors are saying behind the scenes):

“We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us,” long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means said.

A delegation of Lakota leaders has delivered a message to the State Department, and said they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the U.S., some of them more than 150 years old.

The group also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and would continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks and months.

Aside from the fascinating sight of watching the heads of conservatives explode, the development is provocative, to say the least (and, from what I can tell by looking on line, nearly unreported). I first read about the development on Alternet (where there’s a great discussion of the Fox News story).

As all the reports discuss, Lakota country would include parts of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. According to the report, citizenship in the new country would be open to all residents, not merely those recognized as Native Americans, as long as potential citizens renounced their US citizenship. According to the reports, citizens of the new Lakota country would be able to live ‘tax free’ (again, I wouldn’t stand too close to any conservative friends when they learn about this: ‘tax free… Native American independence… head exploding…’). Bill Harlan, from the Rapid City Journal, quotes activist Russell Means as claiming, ‘It will be the epitome of individual liberty, with community control.’

The declaration of independence is accompanied by a statement of their intentions that has a number of interesting wrinkles from the point of view of combining cultural survival with environmentalism. From the statement:

Education, energy and justice now take top priority in emerging Lakota. “Cultural immersion education is crucial as a next step to protect our language, culture and sovereignty,” said Means. “Energy independence using solar, wind, geothermal, and sugar beets enables Lakota to protect our freedom and provide electricity and heating to our people.”

This is certainly not the first time that ‘third wave’ human rights (indigenous rights) have been combined with environmental demands to strong rhetorical effect in a way that some academics have criticized. It also shows the degree to which this movement has probably been in the planning stages for a while.

Local media in the area are reporting that the group is not representative of the Lakota Nation, nor is it an official branch of Lakota government. Harlan in the Rapid City Journal, for example, points out that “Means’ group is based in Porcupine on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. It is not an agency or branch of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. Means ran unsuccessfully for president of the tribe in 2006.”

Doreen Yellow Bird, writing in the Grand Forks Herald, suggests that the whole ’seccession’ is anachronistic, a ship that ‘has already sailed’:

Of the people who called or e-mailed me, most are chuckling at the absurdity of it. Means and his group, of course, would be speaking for themselves and not tribes, whose tribal councils speak for them. But Means and his group have some points – perhaps 200 years too late, but they do have some points….

We have, however, gone beyond those years. We have taken on the federal government as our government, too. That means the government also provides us funding and supplies for programs such as Head Start, housing, social services and so on – just like it does for the rest of the country.

Many of our family members willingly serve in the military. Indians serve in the armed forces in extraordinarily high numbers. In general, American Indians are proud of their record as defenders of this country – our country.

Finally, there the treaties. For the Three Affiliated Tribes, the Fort Laramie treaties of 1851 and 1886 provided land. True, the U.S. government took some of that land rather surreptitiously, but we were able to hold the line because of that legal document – a treaty.

Those documents are important, shouldn’t be abrogated and should be taken seriously.

Means and his group are seemingly out of step, but they remind us of our tragic history.

The fact that the movement is likely quite limited is, in some sense, not surprising; the demand of Native American activists for independence in the US is not high by comparison to indigenous activism in other places with which I’m more familiar, but there are some very savvy, very angry Indian activists in the US. The boon of Indian casinos has not shut up all of the demands for real justice, autonomy, and social development. As Wonkette describes, the fact that the US Department of the Interior hasn’t been paying royalties on petroleum extracted from Indian lands for a few decades might have something to do, too, with their irritation at treaty violations (although I’m not as cynical, there’s nothing like being robbed through a pipeline to really continually remind you of just how your rights are being undermined.).

One of the dimensions of this that interests me most is the way that property law is being used as a primary tool of activism. As I found in research on the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra or MST) in Brazil, since property law has become such an expansive area for pressing legal claims of all sorts (for example, trademark infringement being easier to pursue redress for than libel or slander), property has also become an important tool for human rights issues. Especially around indigenous groups and other traditional owners (sharecroppers and small farmers, maroons), land title is a major wedge for extracting not just regularization of holding, but also other concessions. In the case of the Lakota land, the declaration is explicitly being described as a shadow cast over any land transfers in the affected area. As the Free Lakota media announcement says:

Property ownership in the five state area of Lakota now takes center stage. Parts of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana have been illegally homesteaded for years despite knowledge of Lakota as predecessor sovereign [historic owner]. Lakota representatives say if the United States does not enter into immediate diplomatic negotiations, liens will be filed on real estate transactions in the five state region, clouding title over literally thousands of square miles of land and property.

Whether or not the declaration does immediately affect land transactions remains to be seen (I’ll try to find out more and post on it). Real estate systems in a lot of places have been very successful at ’suspending doubt’ and carrying on with transactions even if the legitimacy of title is questionable, so I suspect this will not slow down sales. (Of course I’ll also be watching to see if the Lakota get blamed for any housing slump in the region, even though the subprime mortgage crisis is far more likely to be to blame.) Bill Harlan points out that land has long been a central issue for the Lakota:

A U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1980 awarded the tribes $122 million as compensation, but the court did not award land. The Lakota have refused the settlement. (As interest accrues, the unclaimed award is approaching $1 billion.)

In the late 1980s, then-Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey introduced legislation to return federal land to the tribes, and California millionaire Phil Stevens also tried to win support for a proposal to return the Black Hills to the Lakota.

Any comparison to Australia is strained for a number of reasons, including the lack of treaties with Aboriginal Australians and the relatively recent recognition by Australian courts of legitimate land claims, whereas these had a much longer traditional of judicial recognition in the United States. But the idea of the Lakota claiming independence in the middle of the American heartland will no doubt fuel fears among some Australians that the ‘red heart’ of this country might up and declare its independence if granted any rights.

Of course, if you take the Lakota activists at their word, then the lesson should be that secessionist movements are inspired, not by the granting of rights, but by the search for some remedy when a situation is intollerable. As Phyllis Young, representative from Standing Rock, explained: ‘The actions of Lakota are not intended to embarrass the United States but to simply save the lives of our people.’ As the announcement goes on to explain, Lakota men have the lowest life expectancy of any group of men with low HIV+ rates (44 years) and infant death rates are five times that of the majority US population. Unemployment is 85%, and poverty over 95%.

I’ll keep on eye on this one and try to post more as more information becomes available.

With a proposed new Islamic school facing strong community opposition in the Sydney suburb of Camden, it is timely that the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion at Macquarie is screening a new documentary called Temple of dreams. The film portrays similar challenges faced by a group of young Australian Muslims attempting to set up a youth centre in Sydney. Details about the film and the screening are below:

*Free screening*

Introduced by the director, Tom Zubrycki

(Molly and Mobarak, The Diplomat, Billal),

and followed by a post-screening Q&A discussion.

Temple of Dreams follows a group of Lebanese Australians who set up an Islamic youth centre in Western Sydney. The documentary – by one of Australia’s leading documentary film makers – follows the group’s battle against the local council to keep the centre open, and their struggle to fit into the wider community.

When: Wednesday 14 November

Time: 4-6pm

Place: Building C5C Room 498 (Enter via Research Hub EAST), Macquarie University

RSVP: By 12 November 2007 to crsi@scmp.mq.edu.au or on 02 9850 9171

**FREE**

Please spread the word to your colleagues and friends – download event flyer here.

For more information about the film, click here, or visit

http://australianscreen.com.au/titles/temple-dreams

A little while ago Wired magazine reported on Hasan Elahi, a Bangladeshi-American suspected of being a terrorist. He devised an apparently ingenious method of keeping himself “out of Guantanamo”: he would embark on a project of almost complete self surveillance using digital technology. He takes hundreds of photos of himself every day and sends them to his website so that if the FBI want to find out what he’s doing they only have to look there. Like a human sonar, he constantly sends out “pings” to locate himself, a method reminiscent of Twitter. The article discusses his rationale:

“I’ve discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away,” he says, grinning as he sips his venti Black Eye. Elahi relishes upending the received wisdom about surveillance. The government monitors your movements, but it gets things wrong. You can monitor yourself much more accurately. Plus, no ambitious agent is going to score a big intelligence triumph by snooping into your movements when there’s a Web page broadcasting the Big Mac you ate four minutes ago in Boise, Idaho. “It’s economics,” he says. “I flood the market.”

Although Elahi seems pretty cheerful about this I wonder if his strategy is a novel method of pre-empting the surveillance of the state, or a model for self-servitude? In some ways it seems to be a very literal application of Foucault’s theory of self-subjectification, except instead of internalising surveillance and control Elahi “externalises” it by making it available the authorities as an ongoing alibi. He has also perfected the surveillance by outdoing the authorities, suggesting that it’s not the presence of the state’s control that is the problem, rather its lacks and lacunae.

To me, Elahi’s approach to his “problem” suggests he is in a state of being always-already guilty. Rather than assuming he is innocent, his energy must go into a constant struggle against that state. The onus is on him to prove that he is not guilty of something rather than on the state to prove that he is. It’s Kafka-esque in a way. Like the protagonist of The Trial he is guilty of a crime but doesn’t know what it is. His life then becomes devoted to proving that he innocent, which is of course can never be achieved.

Anyway, this is a thought-provoking application of ubiquitous computing, or ubicomp, in a post-911 world. It raises the question of whether, as we become ever more connected, the onus will increasingly fall on us to prove our “innocence” in various ways just because we can. I see an echo in a more trivial domain: the reduced tolerance for ambiguity that comes from possessing a mobile phone. Now that it is a technical possibility I find we tend to check up more on each other. For example, if I am slightly late for a meeting with friends I will inevitably get a call asking where I am. Likewise, I’m held to account for not letting my friends know I’m going to be late. It is also a common experience to find that the mobile, Blackberry or whatever blurs the lines between work and leisure, so that the freedome the phone provides means that we are even more thoroughly chained to the demands of the job. In each of these cases the domain of plausible deniability has shrunk and therefore we are forced to self-surveil and contantly “prove our innocence”.

Of course this is not just a product of technology. Even if we are all guilty some people are more guilty than others. An example is Muslim men in the contemporary USA, or Australia for that matter, as the case of Mohamed Haneef more than amply demonstrates.

The Visible Man: An FBI Target Puts His Whole Life Online