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.

A couple of people (thanks Greg and Laleh) sent me this link: USA Today has an article on anthropology and the military that covers debate over the Human Terrain System (HTS) at the last AAA meeting.  The article situates the anthropology-military relationship within the history of colonialism, reports that two HTS social scientists were killed in the last year (but doesn’t clarify that they weren’t actually anthropologists), and covers perspectives advanced at the AAA by anthropologists Roberto Gonzales (whose book on HTS will soon be published by University of Chicago Press), Kerry Fosher, Brian Selmeski, and Phillip Stevens.

There is also a sidebar where Montgomery McFate answers questions about the program, and another sidebar that notes that three other academic/professional associations (the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Psychological Association) have policies barring various forms of professional participation with the US military.

The article contains several typos, I’m afraid, which doesn’t speak all that highly of USA Today, but it’s still interesting to see anthropology being covered in such a mainstream news outlet with national coverage.  There are 93 comments on the article — most of them inane.

[cross-posted to Khaldoun]

CTlab is hosting a virtual symposium on the Hamdan trial, and they’ve got a lot of people, including myself, poised to comment on Dr Brian Glyn Williams’ fascinating account of the trial of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver. Williams was an expert witness for the defense.

This week, Williams has been posting a five-part narrative account of his experience, and after the fifth installment, CTlab will post comments and observations from a panel of invited legal scholars and social scientists based in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

–L.L. Wynn

Wired magazine has just reported that the Pentagon has kicked off ‘Minerva’, its project to include social scientists and other academics into the “War on Terror”.  The article also mentions the debate that has been going on in anthropology over the US military’s new-found enthusiasm for culture and social science methods.

Wired also has covered this issue in surprising detail, and there is a good archive of related stories at the bottom of their article.

Thanks to ANU PhD student Bree Blakeman who posted this link on the AAS mailing list, AASNet.

As Greg has noted, the “Lost Tribe of the Amazon” have received a massive amount of media attention since their “discovery” (the drive-time hosts were making jokes about them on the radio this morning — a sure sign they have achieved their 15 minutes of fame).  It’s interesting to compare this avid fascination with the almost complete lack of interest in this much more humdrum, far less sexy story of indigenous people being publicly humiliated in Bolivia (see also here).

The incident, which shook the country but received little attention from the international press, occurred on Saturday, when President Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian, was to appear in a public ceremony in Sucre to deliver 50 ambulances for rural communities and announce funding for municipal projects. But in the early hours of Saturday morning, organised groups opposed to Morales began to surround the stadium where he was to appear a few hours later. Confronting the police and soldiers with sticks, stones and dynamite, they managed to occupy the stadium. The president cancelled his visit, and the security forces were withdrawn, to avoid violent clashes and bloodshed. But violent elements of the Interinstitutional Committee, a conservative pro-autonomy, anti-Morales civic group that is backed by the local university and other bodies, continued to harass and beat supporters of the governing Movement to Socialism (MAS) and anyone who appeared to belong to one of the country’s indigenous communities. A mob of armed civilians from Sucre, partially made up of university students, then surrounded several dozen indigenous Morales supporters, including local authorities who had come from other regions to attend the ceremony and were unable to leave the city after the event was called off. The terrified indigenous people, who had sought refuge in a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of Sucre, were stripped of their few belongings, including money, identity documents and watches, and forced to walk seven kilometres to the House of Liberty, a symbol of the end of colonial rule in Bolivia, which was declared there on Aug. 6, 1825. In the city’s main square in front of the building, they were forced to kneel, shirtless, and apologise for coming to Sucre. They were also made to chant insults to Morales like “Die Evo!” They were surrounded by activists from the conservative pro-autonomy movement, who set fire to the blue, black and white MAS party flag, the multicolour flag of the Aymara people, and colourful hand-woven indigenous ponchos seized from the visiting Morales supporters, as a signal of their “victory” over the president’s grassroots support bases.

Suffice it to say, Sucre hasn’t exactly become a household name in Sydney (and I’d guess anywhere else outside of Bolivia).  Of course, this sort of story might indicate why isolated groups of indigenous people might prefer to remain “lost”.

Jovan Maud

[cross-posted at Khaldoun]

Ralph Nader has announced that he is again running for president in the United States. As the BBC notes, the 2% of votes that he received in the 2000 elections when he represented the Green Party was a deciding factor in Bush’s win over Gore, and this time around, Republicans again welcome his candidacy, since it is again expected to split the Democratic vote.

So, on the occasion of Ralph Nader’s entry into the 2008 U.S. presidential election, and since we’ve been talking about the anthropology links of another presidential candidate, let me tell you how I first found out who Ralph Nader was.

It was the summer of 1994, the year before my last year of undergrad at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and I was in Walnut Creek, visiting my grandparents. I was also getting ready to apply to grad school to do a PhD in anthropology, and we had a family link to Berkeley, since my parents had met there in the 60s, and it just so happened that one of my anthropology heroes (heroines, actually) was on the faculty of the anthro department there. So I made an appointment to go talk to Professor Laura Nader.

Now, most anthropologists probably know Laura Nader from her famous “Studying Up” article, in which she urged anthropologists to study elites, the affluent, bureaucracies, the powerful and the colonizers, rather than the poor, the downtrodden, and the colonized. But she has another article, published in a somewhat obscure journal, that is a cult classic with anyone who is interested in the Middle East and gender. It is called “Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Control of Women” (Cultural Dynamics 1989; 2[3]:323-355). In it, Nader points out (with amazing prescience) that the same sort of rhetoric that we heard years later on the eve of the invasion of Afghanistan — about how we needed to save the poor Afghani women from their burkas and the Taliban — is mirrored by similar rhetoric in Middle Eastern countries. At the time, I was a voracious consumer of the Saudi English-language press, which was replete with denunciations of the vile treatment of women in the West. For example, consider this excerpt from an article in the Saudi Gazette circa 1992:

It is one thing to clamour for the rhetoric ‘women are equal to men,’ but when that very equality means in pure and simple language exploitation of the privacy and unique beauty of women, such as is witnessed in advertising anything from a screw to a tractor with a semi-clad beauty, the attitude of Islam begins to take on a new dimension — even for non-Muslims. (“Islam treats ladies with real respect,” Saudi Gazette, 24 April 1992, p.5)

Nader expands Said’s “observations that the Moslem world exists for the West, to include the notion that the West also exists for the Islamic world and serves as important contrastive comparison” (Nader 1989:324). She then goes on to argue that claims of ‘our women are better off than your women’ is an essentially male discourse that serves to distract women from the real issues and from the processes that serve to control women in both worlds. “[B]y taking a position of superiority vis-a-vis the other, both East and West can rationalize the position of their women” (ibid p.328)

Anyway, she’s better known for her other work with indigenous people in Latin America, but that was the piece that I loved most, and I idolized (and frankly still do) Laura Nader. I wouldn’t have had the guts to go meet with her to tell her how much I wanted to do my PhD under her if it weren’t for my parents’ encouragement, so they came with me. Nader graciously received the lot of us in her office at Berkeley. I told her how much I admired her work. She asked me about my own interests in anthropology. I told her about my perceptions of life in Saudi Arabia, where I’d been living with my family and working as a teacher and photographer before I went to McGill. My dad asked her if she was Arab, with the last name Nader (which is from the Arabic for “rare”). She said that yes, she was American-born to Lebanese immigrant parents.

Then my dad asked her if she was in any way related to Ralph Nader. She sighed and gave the impression that she was barely restraining herself from rolling her eyes. “Yes, he’s my brother,” she said.

“Who’s Ralph Nader?” I asked. I was naive. I felt really stupid for not knowing who they were talking about. But she smiled in a way that told you that she was pleasantly surprised to find someone for whom the name “Nader” meant “Laura” and not “Ralph.”

– L.L. Wynn

Dana Milbank’s recent book,  Homo Politicus: The Strange and Scary Tribes that Run Our Government (Doubleday, 2007), plays on the jargon of classical anthropology to send up “Potomac Man, that strange indigenous tribe inhabiting the area in and around Washington, D.C.“  Here’s an excerpt from the official book synopsis:

Deep within the forbidding land encircled by the Washington Beltway lives the tribe known as Homo Politicus. Their ways are strange, even repulsive, to civilized human beings, their arcane rites often impenetrable, their language coded and obscure, violating their complex taboos can lead to sudden, harsh, and irrevocable punishment.

Normal Americans have long feared Homo Politicus, with good reason. But fearless anthropologist (and Washington Post columnist) Dana Milbank has spent many years immersed in the dark heart of Washington, D.C., and has produced this indispensable portrait of a bizarre culture whose tribal ways are as hilarious as they are outrageous.

Robert Leopold, Director of the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian, has just reviewed Homo Politicus in the Washington Post.  You might have to know or care about Washington, D.C. political society to be interested in the book, but any anthropologist will enjoy Leopold’s review:

…these cursory cultural excursions are merely tongue-in-cheek set-ups for the Potomac Land institutions that follow: the curious rituals (face time), rites of solidarity (fundraisers), fictive kinship (party affiliation), Kabuki theater (judicial confirmation hearings), purification rituals (the Gridiron Club) and shadow puppets (pundits), to name only a few…

L.L. Wynn

Usually anthropology is only in the news when some new theory about Neanderthals is announced. But in the past week, anthropology has been all over the news, thanks to the American Anthropological Association meetings in Washington, D.C. which just ended a few days ago.

Before I left for the meetings, I fantasized that every night I would post some news from the day’s events on Culture Matters. I diligently took notes during the sessions on anthropology and the U.S. military, but between the intensity of the perpetual overlapping meetings (at one point I actually ran back and forth four times between two panels that I was trying to follow simultaneously) and the jet lag, I barely opened my computer. Now that I’m back, I see that journalists have covered the AAA meetings better than I possibly could have done, so instead I thought I’d just provide a round-up of the coverage and links to recently published stuff.

• Inside Higher Ed has covered a slew of anthro-related topics. One was a panel on new media in anthropological teaching. Here’s an excerpt:

Evoking associations with musty, forgotten archives and spiral notebooks in the field, anthropology doesn’t immediately come to mind as a discipline fully situated in the modern, wired world. On the contrary, anthropologists have been tackling the implications of technologies on ethnography with each new innovation, from handheld 16-millimeter film cameras and cassette tapes several decades ago to the Internet and digital video in more recent times.

The information age hasn’t rendered anthropology obsolete, but it has brought with it a host of issues and controversies — as well as injected longstanding debates into new forms of media. At a session Friday at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, scholars and graduate students in visual anthropology discussed projects that harness new media to enrich scholarship, focus the ethnographical microscope on media producers themselves, or both.

In doing so, the presentations encompassed applications on both sides of the ethnographic pipeline: the gathering of oral, visual and audio material; and the storage of such content in online digital archives. Presenters at the “New Media Anthropology” panel raised issues of intellectual property, cultural sensitivity and the intersection of commerce and culture — hot topics in any anthropological pursuit, but especially pertinent in the more open, chaotic online realm.

• Inside Higher Ed also covered a vote on secret research in anthropology:

With debate over the role of anthropologists in aiding the military machine a theme threading through their annual meeting, scholars voted Friday to demand that the American Anthropological Association reinstate strict language from its 1971 code of ethics prohibiting secret research. Members at the meeting – who, for the second time in about 30 years and the second year in a row constituted a quorum in excess of the required 250 — also voted overwhelmingly to oppose “any covert or overt U.S. military action against Iran.”

• On the eve of the meeting, the American Anthropological Association published its long-awaited report of the Ad Hoc Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with Security and Intelligence Communities, setting the stage for debates over anthropology, the military, and research ethics at the meetings. There were several panels devoted to the topic (though not a full day’s worth of back-to-back panels, as one news outlet erroneously reported), and they were clearly the hot issue this year. One session that I attended was so full that people were sitting on the floor and spilling out the back doors of the long, narrow hall. Several places have covered the debates, including USA Today, Arabisto, Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and In These Times.

• Meanwhile, on the topic of the Human Terrain System, the Chronicle of Higher Education is today (December 5th) reporting on a religion grad student named Zenia Helbig who was hired to work on the HTS, apparently because of her multilingual skills but not because of any experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then fired four months later because of a flippant remark she made over drinks that led them to question her “national loyalty.” Here’s an excerpt from the Chronicle article, which is unfortunately available by subscription only:

Recruitment shortfalls have left all of the human-terrain teams in Iraq seriously understaffed, says Zenia Helbig, a doctoral student in religious studies at the University of Virginia. The participants’ training has been haphazard and often pointless, she adds, with too little attention given to the culture and history of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ms. Helbig was released from the program amid an investigation of her national loyalty, shortly before she was to deploy to Iraq. The investigation stemmed from a quip that she made over beers late one night in June. As she recalls, she said, “‘Okay, if we invade Iran, that’s where I draw the line, hop the border, and switch sides.’”

Ms. Helbig says that her firing—which was first reported last week by Wired magazine—was a ludicrous overreaction to a casual piece of hyperbole. With the help of at least one senior administrator in the human-terrain program, she is fighting to expunge her security record and to clear her name. There is even a possibility that she will return to the program, which she describes as potentially valuable despite its problems.

The human-terrain program has generated enormous controversy among academic anthropologists, many of whom claim that anthropologists in military uniforms cannot possibly gain free and informed consent from the people they study (The Chronicle, November 30). Ms. Helbig says that in her four months of training, she can recall no explicit discussion of informed consent or any other element of fieldwork ethics.

But Ms. Helbig, who spoke before an emotional crowd at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association last week, says she believes the program’s scholarly critics are exaggerating its actual power. Organizational disarray, not ethics, is the real story, she suggests. “It’s been funny to watch this debate in the triple A, knowing what HTS has become,” says Ms. Helbig. “Because HTS has become such a joke.” …

… “I made a comment over a beer on a Saturday night,” she says. “There was a handful of us, and we were talking about the potential of the U.S. invading Iran. One lieutenant kept saying, You know, we just need to bomb the hell out of the Middle East. And one point that I made was, If we haven’t learned from Iraq yet, then there’s really no helping us. Iranians are proud, and if they’re invaded, they’re going to support their government, whether or not they like that government. They’re too proud to let someone else get rid of their government for them.”

As the conversation wound down, Ms. Helbig made her fateful joke: “I just turned to somebody, and I said, ‘Okay, if we invade Iran, that’s where I draw the line, hop the border, and switch sides.’”

The line should never have been taken seriously, she says, and it was made in a climate that constantly featured quasi-offensive banter that most people accepted in good spirits. One officer of Arab descent, she says, would often joke about “going jihad” on the human-terrain program’s leadership. And because Ms. Helbig speaks such an odd array of languages, “there was a running joke about which agency I secretly work for.”

But one person who heard Ms. Helbig’s comment took it seriously….

Even before the military-intelligence investigation was complete, officials in the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, which oversees the human-terrain program, decided to fire Ms. Helbig. In an e-mail message on August 7, which Ms. Helbig obtained through an open-records request, one official wrote that “there are too many indicators that raise serious doubts about her allegiance to the U.S., as well as possible direction from intelligence agencies.”

Ms. Helbig says that that charge is hilariously mistaken. When she was finally directly interviewed by a military-intelligence agent, the day after she was fired, he seemed fixated on the fact that she had traveled to Iran for conferences in 2004 and 2006, and she could not convince him that that might be normal behavior for a graduate student in religious studies.

Although Ms. Helbig’s comment concerned Iran, the official statement that was placed in her security file when she was fired in August says that “her preference toward the Iraqi government is in question.”

“They can’t even get their countries straight,” says Ms. Helbig…

L.L. Wynn

In the wake of Labor’s stunning victory over the weekend there is a lot of speculation about the future of the Northern Territory Intervention. One indigenous commentator on this is Professor Marcia Langton, who has never been one to mince her words. She has written the following article, published in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, which says a lot about the complexities of the intervention and the social problems it is supposed to address. She points out the gender and generational dimensions of “the problem” and draws attention to the role of power within the indigenous population itself. Her approach suggests that the question shouldn’t be “intervention, yes or no?” but “intervention for whom?”

It’s time to stop playing politics with vulnerable lives

Marcia Langton, November 30, 2007

The crisis in Aboriginal society is a public spectacle, played out in a vast reality show through the media, parliaments, civil service and Aboriginal world. This obscene and pornographic spectacle deploys a special mode of dehumanising abuse and parody, and ultimately shifts our attention away from the everyday crises that Aboriginal people endure, or don’t endure, dying as they do at excessive rates.

This spectacle is not a new phenomenon in Australian public life but the debate about indigenous affairs has reached a new crescendo, fuelled by the uncensored exposé of the extent of Aboriginal child abuse.

More than a century of policy experimentation with Aboriginal people climaxed with the Commonwealth Government sending the army and a specialist taskforce into the Northern Territory, the only jurisdiction where it has such broad powers.

It legislated more than 500 pages of emergency intervention measures that subvert self-government powers of the Northern Territory in the most extraordinary federal takeover in Australia’s history. In some critical respects, the outcome is what many have recommended for decades: interventions to prevent the abuse, rape and assault of Aboriginal women and children and decisive action against the perpetrators.

The federal legislation and the emergency taskforce constituted a slap in the face for the Northern Territory Government led by the then chief minister, Clare Martin – a bracing vote of no confidence in her government’s capacity to deal with the Aboriginal crisis.

Even though the Commonwealth provides funds to the Northern Territory Government on the basis of the disadvantages of the population, it was the Commonwealth, rather than the Territory Government, that became the villain of the piece in the public debate about the intervention.

Last Sunday Labor’s Trish Crossin and Warren Snowdon reportedly demanded that the intervention be halted, with a list of demands: the reinstatement of the Aboriginal work-for-the-dole scheme; the removal of measures to limit alcohol sales; and the reinstatement of permit restrictions for Aboriginal communities that had been not just isolated from the outside world but effectively quarantined from the larger society and economy. It remains to be seen whether the Prime Minister-elect, Kevin Rudd, will honour his commitment to the intervention.

Now Martin and her deputy, Sid Stirling, have resigned.

There has also been a spill in the chairman’s position at the powerful Northern Land Council. Wali Wunungmurra, one of Galarrwuy Yunupingu’s cousins, was elected to the position. Just before the federal election, Yunupingu supported the principal intention of the intervention in a public lecture at the University of Melbourne.

The political earth is moving after so much pretentious, vain, and ultimately anti-humanist dancing with symbols while the practical responses to the crisis never came.

There’s a cynical view afoot that the emergency intervention was a political ploy – a Trojan Horse – to sneak through land grabs and some gratuitous black head-kicking disguised as concern for children. These conspiracy theories abound, and they are mostly ridiculous.

Those who did not see the intervention in the Northern Territory coming were deluding themselves. It was the inevitable outcome of the many failures of policy and of the strange federal-state division of responsibilities for Aboriginal Australians. Added to this were the general incompetence of the civil service and the non-governmental sector, including some Aboriginal organisations, lack of political will and the dead hand of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.

The combined effect of the media campaign for action and the emergency intervention has been a metaphorical dagger sunk into the heart of the powerful, wrong-headed Aboriginal male ideology that had prevailed in indigenous affairs, policies and practices.

It’s time for the voices of women and children to be heard. It’s time for both the federal and the Territory government to stop playing politics with the lives of the vulnerable and shut down the alcohol take-away outlets, establish children’s commissions and shelters in each community – as Noel Pearson has suggested – and treat grog runners and drug dealers as the criminals that they are. Otherwise, they will all have the blood of the victims on their hands.

Professor Marcia Langton is the Inaugural Chairwoman of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne.