Upcoming NT Intervention Protests

We haven’t posted anything on the NT Intervention for some time but the issue is still very much alive.  A report on SBS news last night included some interviews with Aboriginal women from Bagot,  an urban community in Darwin, on their views of the intervention.  Two key points stuck out for me based on those interviews:

1. The prohibitions of alcohol use appear to be leading to new population movements as people attempt to escape regulatory mechanisms.  This means that the effects of the Intervention are uneven, with problems being exacerbated rather than reduced in some areas.
2. The paternalistic nature of the Intervention, with its enforced quarantining and management of all welfare income, means that “model” members of communities — those who are best able to manage their funds independently — are resentful about being treated as though they were not capable of looking after themselves.   If the Government’s goals are pedagogical, i.e. aimed at producing new kinds of subjects closer to the bourgeois ideal of the self-managing individual, it’s problematic that those people most closely resembling that kind of subject are punished and feel disempowered.  The predictable result of such a policy would be the increasing institutionalisation of welfare dependence.

Meanwhile, anti-Intervention protests have been organised for this weekend.  Here are the details:

On June 20, marking two years of the Northern Territory Intervention, demonstrations will be held across the country in defense of Aboriginal Rights .

See the Youtube promo at

http://www.youtube.com/user/solidtv7#uploads/7/9rHbpKEZVco

Darwin: 11am Raintree Park contact Dave 0407209520

Sydney: 10:30 Belmore Park contact Monique on 0415410558

Brisbane: 11.00am Queen’s park contact Rob 0424265730 or Sam 0401227443

Melbourne: 12pm outside the State Library Cnr Swanston/La Trobe sts.

Perth: 12 noon Wesley Church.

This rally will have a focus on Aboriginal death’s in custody, demanding justice for Mr Ward.

www.rollbacktheintervention.wordpress.com

www.stoptheintervention.org

Some HTS updates

A couple of news items about the Human Terrain System have crossed my desk in the past week and I’m finally getting around to writing about them.  First, there’s an extended article in the Boston Globe about Paula Loyd, the HTS anthropologist who was killed in Afghanistan by a man who set her on fire (she died after 2 months in the hospital).  It gives more details than had previously been available about the man who killed her, suggesting that it wasn’t a spontaneous act of rage but something a bit more premeditated:

As part of a new military program that uses social scientists to improve the troops’ understanding of the local population, Loyd began interviewing a gregarious stranger who approached her with a jug of cooking fuel in his hands. He talked for 15 minutes, thanking her profusely in English. But just as her guards motioned it was time to leave, he lit his jug on fire and engulfed the 36-year-old Loyd in flames.

The other news item from this week’s Wired.com and Pravda is that HTS employees are about to become government employees instead of private contractors, with a substantial decrease in pay. From Wired.com’s Danger Room:

Imagine you’re on a mission for the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. The job is dangerous. The hours are long. And suddenly, you find out that your pay is about to be cut by sixty percent or more.

That’s the situation facing interpreters, researchers and  managers, deployed overseas as part of the Army’s social science program, the Human Terrain System. Since the inception of the project in 2006, these specialists have been generously-paid contractors, serving as cultural counselors to combat units. Earlier this week, however, program manager Steve Fondacaro told workers that they’re all becoming government employees — effective almost immediately. Which means that Human Terrain pay is suddenly not all that generous. One linguist, previously pulling in an annual salary $270,000, will now make about $91,000 — if that person continues his warzone work for the Human Terrain project, that is.

It abruptly changes the incentives calculus for anthropologists working for the military, which is something that has been widely reported on and critiqued — though even a ‘measly’ $91,000 a year is still about double the average starting salary of most anthropologists who teach at U.S. universities.

–L.L. Wynn

Anthropology cover girl

I am looking forward to reading Alfons’s posts; meanwhile, a PhD student at VU’s anthropology department, Erella Grassiani, has made it to the cover of the student newspaper, Advalvas.  I am not clear yet whether this paper is really edited by students, but at least it does discuss political controversies. In this instance, it is about Erella’s activism in opposing Israel’s intervention in Gaza. Erella, herself an  Israeli, recently completed her dissertation about Israeli soldiers who serve in the occupied territories, and recently was instrumental in setting up a group of Israelis in the Netherlands critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza. The cover story, entitled ”"Erella Grassiani may not criticize”, is about the reaction of Dutch Jewish groups, which have rejected her initiative, even as they support “dialogues” with Arab intellectuals who are similarly critical of Israel’s policies. Erella’s position is quite mainstream within Dutch academia (or dare I say it, “among Dutch intellectuals”), and her conflict with Dutch Jewish organisations may well be due in part to the challenge this poses to the latter in their role as spokespeople for the Jews vis-a-vis the Dutch government. Yet what makes it a more complex issue is that (as I speculated in an earlier post) anti-semitism may be rising in Europe, and though the synergies between the current popularity of anti-Israeli political positions and antisemitic conspiracy theories should not be overstated, they cannot be ignored either.

In Hungary, the front lines are drawn in a strikingly different way. Leftish/liberal Hungarian press has been full of condemnations of a prominent leftist intellectual, Tamás Gáspár Miklós, who had condemned fellow intellectuals for their cowardice in not protesting against Israel’s invasion, and stated that this had nothing to do with one’s opinion of Hamas. Although among my colleagues here and probably in Australia this position would probably be quite mainstream, the responses, ranging from conservative-liberal philosopher Agnes Heller to committedly left-wing sociologist Vásárhelyi Mária, were furious. They insisted that it was not possible to ignore the context of Hamas, and indeed some of them bid TGM farewell, saying he had parted ways with them. By contrast, the Hungarian nationalist press, which often publishes antisemitic articles, cheered TGM, although he is one of its most implacable and vitriolic opponents.

“Role for Culture in Economic Recovery:” New York Times

Today’s New York Times reports that “Arts Leaders Urge Role for Culture in Economic Recovery”. “Culture” here means the arts, and what the “leaders” urge is state funding for public art projects, ranging from more fine art commissions built into public construction and transportation projects to a European-style government-level secretary of culture.

Because in the past there has been much less of this in the US, discussions of “culture” have centred less on the arts and more on education and the media, which — along with museums — is where the “culture wars” largely played out (of course, they did in the National Endowment for the Arts as well, but that wasn’t so significant and visible to a broad public). If the wishes reported in the article materialise, then the American state will be confronted with the question of how to shape public representations of culture in the arts more strongly than before, and similarly to the way that, say, Britain’s Arts Council has. Considering the dominance of the “heritage format” (in Andrew Shryock’s term) in the (self-)representations of American society, there is a risk that ethnically labelled “cultures” will proliferate in this imagery.  This was, for a while, the case in Britain, where, say, certain artists tended to be selected qua British-Chinese or British-Caribbean artists, and expected to represent their “constituencies.” On the other hand, the fact that Obama’s own person, to an extent, defies the “heritage format” raises hope that this will not be the case.

Anthropologists in the Dutch public sphere

There appears to be a lull on the blog, as my colleagues at Macquarie are (I guess) off to do fieldwork. So, as I have been silent here for a while, I’ll take the opportunity to share my first impressions of anthropology in the public in the Netherlands, as I experience it having just arrived at the Free University (VU) in Amsterdam.

While this is not Norway, where anthropologists are constantly in the news (though Thomas Eriksen did have a guest appointment at this department for a while!) it does seem that the media are more interested than, say, in Australia in what anthropologists have to say. In December alone, my departmental colleagues (including PhD students, who are considered staff) have been interviewed in the media on religion, Gaza, environmentalism, and Suriname. There is also a feature article in the popular Volkskrant of the type that we are by now used to, about corporations hiring anthropologists. This is true also for Philips, one of the Netherlands’ best-known multinationals, which has a Futures, People and Trends team. (The article notes, though, that anthropology students are often unaware of how trendy they are, as are their teachers who sometimes advise them to write in their CV that they studied “social sciences.”)

I guess one reason for this higher profile is that the Dutch press simply has more in-depth debates on social issues than the Australian one. Another may be that PhD students are often treated as authorities on their own right. A third, and perhaps more specific to the VU, is that within this department there is a strong research stream to do with religion, which is clearly a hot topic for journos (even though research here is mostly on neoprotestant conversion rather than Islam; but the VU also is a hub for Muslim students. Apparently, the fact that it is a university that has religion in its charter is considered a plus by many Muslim students, even though that religion is Protestant Christianity). And finally, there is a separate department of organisational research within the faculty of social sciences, whose members define themselves largely as organisational anthropologists. This is interesting, as such departments tend to be within business schools and thus fairly isolated from mainstream anthropology.

SMH offers enculturation argument about topless lust

The Life and Style section of the Sydney Morning Herald has a fascinating article by Sydney-based writer Emily Maguire about the way culture trains men and women to respond in particular ways to their “biological responses to beauty.” Here’s an excerpt:

…boys are not taught, as girls are, that their bodies could have a disruptive effect on people around them, that they should wear looser clothing so as not to distract their classmates. They’re not told that how they look could incite nasty rumours or prevent them advancing at work or cause them to get raped. They aren’t told that the sight of their flesh may cause grown women to turn into mindless brutes.

But the fact is male bodies can have the same effect on women as female bodies can have on men. That far fewer men than women are harassed or attacked by people claiming sexual provocation is not because women aren’t visually aroused, but because women have learnt that their biological responses to beauty are not an excuse to commit acts of violence or discrimination.

The context is a recent attempt by conservative MP Fred Nile (Parliamentary Leader of the Christian Democratic Party in New South Wales) to ban women’s topless bathing on Sydney beaches.  Here’s what Maguire has to say about that:

Women’s learnt ability to deal with inappropriate lust brings us back to those topless sunbathers. In supporting Nile’s proposal, the NSW Labor MP Paul Gibson revealed his deep discomfort with both women’s bodies and the language used to describe bits of them when he asked, “Do you want somebody with big knockers next to you when you’re [at the beach] with the kids?”

Plenty of beach-loving mums can relate: there you are, rubbing sunscreen into your toddler’s back when a delicious slab of man meat lays his towel down right beside you. What to do?

How about this – remember that the person lying there is a human being whose hotness does not negate their right to bake unmolested. If the kids ask awkward questions like, oh, “What are those?” You say, “Nipples, we’ve all got them. Cool, huh?” Then you stop being a creepy perve and concentrate on the sandcastles and surf.

In a culture which is fascinated by biological arguments about the differences between men and women, it is awfully refreshing to hear a wittily argued rejoinder that lust and reactions to naked bodies are shaped by culture.

–L.L. Wynn

More on HTS

It’s a pity that the month that Culture Matters won the Savage Minds blog award, we’ve been really slow. It’s the end of the semester right before everyone disappears for the summer, and I assume that everyone is either swamped with marking or making exciting travel plans. I have a huge backlog of work and e-mails to answer so I probably shouldn’t be taking the time to post something, but I couldn’t resist because I keep getting distracted from grading by a couple of Wired articles on the Human Terrain System.

We already reported on news coverage of the attack on a Human Terrain Team member, Paula Lloyd, who was set on fire in Afghanistan by a man she was interviewing. Another Human Terrain Team member, Dan Ayala, then reportedly shot her attacker in the head after the attacker was disarmed and fully restrained. Ayala has since been charged with second degree murder and subsequently released on bail and is back in the U.S. (Open Anthropology has a list of links covering the story.)

Of course the attack and the revenge killing raise to a whole new level the debate about the ethics of putting social scientists in the middle of a war, and though I didn’t attend the AAA meetings this year in San Francisco, my sources tell me that this was hotly debated (see Inside Higher Ed for coverage). But all of this has been amply reported on elsewhere, so I didn’t think we needed to write more about it, until a friend and colleague based at SOAS in London sent me to have a look at the comments that have been posted to the Wired articles.

The first is an article by Noah Shachtman reporting on the charges against Ayala. What’s been distracting me from work is the comments that readers posted following the article. If you don’t get sick reading them, it’s actually fascinating to observe how misogyny and homophobia blend seamlessly with the ostensibly “anthropological” statements about local culture.

Attack on social scientist in the Human Terrain System in Afghanistan

Some sad news: Paula Lloyd, a social scientist on a Human Terrain Team in Afghanistan, was reportedly doused in gasoline and set on fire by a Taliban supporter.  According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lloyd was interviewing a man about gasoline prices when the man, who was carrying a container of gasoline,  doused her and lit her on fire.  Via Open Anthropology, a Reuters news report says that the Taliban claim that children were responsible for setting on fire and killing a “female soldier” when she was searching homes in Maiwand in the province of Kandahar.  Lloyd, however, is not dead; she was evacuated to a hospital with burns over 60% of her body.  Reuters also reports that another “U.S. civilian” shot dead the Afghani who set her on fire.

Minerva: DoD and NSF team up for peer review

I’ve been thinking about the Human Terrain System (HTS) lately, and the relationship between anthropology and the U.S. military more generally, because I’m working on an article on the topic for Weghat Nazar, an Egyptian monthly, which I’m co-authoring with Egyptian journalist Amal Osman. As part of my research for the article, I just came across a few interesting news items (via a listserv I joined on anthropology and the military) related to military funding for social science research.

Basically, the news, reported in Nature on July 10, is that “on 30 June, the defence department signed a memorandum of understanding that will direct some of its money into social and behavioural science research through the National Science Foundation (NSF).”  Here are a few relevant bits from the article:

“All proposals will be selected for funding through the NSF’s standard peer-review process. The research will be unclassified and no restrictions will be placed on researchers’ freedom to publish their results — or for that matter, to criticize the defence department….”

“The NSF agreement has been widely acclaimed by university administrators, who welcome the extra research money . But it has aroused the suspicion among some researchers that it will distort social science towards military priorities. Of particular concern is the fact that the defence department will have some say in the choice of the NSF’s peer reviewers.”

This has also been covered in Science.  Here’s an excerpt:

“The program will have two arms of equal size. One will be managed by Defense officials and the other by NSF, with some Pentagon input on the selection of reviewers. “There are several topics of mutual interest” within the Minerva areas, says David Lightfoot, who heads NSF’s social sciences directorate. “Securing the national defense was part of our charter in 1950,” he adds.”

What this seems to mean is that applications for Minerva Project money will go through an academic peer-review process, rather than being vetted by military officials, which was something critiqued when Wired first reported on Minerva when it was announced a few months ago.

The official NSF announcement is available on their website, and has also been covered in the Chronicle of Higher Education blog, which clarifies that there are two tracks for reviewing proposals, and also a mechanism for people to refuse DoD funding for their NSF project applications:

Burma, biofuels and public anthropology

Seeing as we have been talking about Burma and the cyclone, biofuels, and the role of anthropologists as public intellectuals, here is a short news piece from the ABC by Monique Skidmore, anthropologist at the ANU, which combines all three.

An Australian anthropologist says the push to grow biofuels has worsened the plight of Burmese cyclone victims.

Professor Monique Skidmore from the Australian National University says The Burmese junta this year has ordered farmers to replace rice with a bitter biodiesel plant called jatropha.

She says the rice supplies are shrinking because of the biodiesel campaign.

“It’s quite incredible to see this arid region plant being cultivated all over the country now, even in the delta area,” she says.

“So people have had to rip up paddy in some places to plant hundreds and hundreds of acres of jatropha and this is a plant that doesn’t grow well, and people do not have the production and distribution facilities to do anything with the product once they get it, and they don’t get much. And of course they’re not being able to cultivate rice in the meantime.

“So it’s an incredibly ridiculous path to embark upon.”

Here’s another example of Skidmore’s public engagement, an audio piece on the psychology of resistance in Burma.