by Lesley Branagan

 In 2001, a fire occurred at Erwadi dargah in south India, a highly popular Sufi Muslim shrine with reputed miraculous powers to heal people with mental ailments. The fire killed 25 people who had been chained up in the surrounding boarding houses. Sensational media reports portrayed healing shrines as ‘backward’, and revealed that psychiatric services were in a dismal state across most of the country. There were widespread calls for the modernisation of the mental health sector.

The Supreme Court issued suo moto intervention directives to address conditions at healing shrines and to reform mental health services and institutions. The chaining of people at shrines was banned, and the adjoining boarding houses were ordered to meet mental health licensing requirements or close down. State governments were directed to galvanise mental health workers to identify people with mental illness at shrines, and to move them into psychiatric homes. These interventions were justified by the various statutory agencies as a mode of defending the human rights of people with mental illness, and as protecting them from exploitation by the operators of shrines and unlicensed asylums.

Reputed healing shrines in India attract visitors with the common belief that mental ailments are caused by sorcery or bad spirits. This explanation is generally accepted and it avoids the negative stigma associated with mental illness. Attendance at a shrine allows the potent power of the shrine’s resident deity to overcome the evil spirit within the afflicted person. The denomination of the shrine does not matter—cure seekers of different religions will visit well-known Hindu, Sufi Muslim or Catholic healing shrines.

Many health seekers in India will also incorporate biomedicine into their religious healing approach. Even though psychiatric services are weak and very limited in many areas, many people suffering mental ailments will visit doctors and try psychiatric medication if it is accessible and affordable—particularly if they are diagnosed with serious mental illness.

Gunaseelam Temple, photograph by Lesley Branagan

In response to the Supreme Court directives, one Hindu temple in Tamil Nadu state has adapted its practices and now offers a combined ‘medicine and prayer’ model of healing. The Gunaseelam temple has a longstanding reputation for curing devotees who suffer “mind problems”, and it recently established a licensed rehabilitation centre in its grounds, where the healing is overseen by the temple priests and a psychiatrist from nearby Tiruchirapalli (Trichy) city.

Gunaseelam Temple, photograph by Lesley Branagan

At Gunaseelam, the aim has been to create a culturally relevant mental health care system where families can share the responsibilities of care. The rehabilitation centre accepts approximately 12 patients diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia at a time. They stay with their family members for a ritually significant period of 48 days and receive free biomedicine prescribed by the psychiatrist. The patients and families also attend five pujas (prayer rituals) a day in the temple. In two of these pujas, the priests splash holy water onto the faces of the devotees, which they believe drives out their bad spirits. This combination of “medicine and god” is largely believed by patients, families and priests to be a more efficacious method of healing than just undertaking one aspect.

Faith healer at Hanumanthapuram Temple, photograph by Lesley Branagan

While the patients generally worship local ‘small’ gods in their own villages, at Gunaseelam, they are required to worship the ‘big’ or Brahmanic god Venkatachalapatty, which belongs to an upper-caste model of religion.  Concerns have been raised by activists that freedom of religious expression would be impinged upon by government intervention at religious sites, yet my research at Gunaseelam found no evidence to support this. The majority of people in India readily adapt to worshipping other deities for specific purposes, and the patients and carers at Gunaseelam did not believe their usual practices and beliefs were constrained. They expressed a willingness to worship Venkatachalapathy while at the temple, and deemed him to be a ‘powerful’ god, and firmly believed that he had more power to cure them than medicine.

As an ethnographer, it is not possible to assess the progress of patients in terms of biomedically acceptable parameters. However, the majority of the patients’ carers believed that their ailing family member got better at Gunaseelam. World Health Organisation (WHO) studies acknowledge that there are better recovery rates for serious mental illnesses in ‘developing’ countries than in ‘developed’ countries.¹ They all acknowledge wide use of non-Western therapies at developing country research sites. Yet the studies fail to investigate medical pluralism as a factor in differential outcome. This issue needs further research.

However, it is questionable whether the perceived improvements in patients at Gunaseelam are long-lasting. Patients’ narratives indicate that their illnesses often recur when they return home and can no longer access free medication. This supports other studies demonstrating that a significant proportion of patients in India abandon orthodox psychiatric treatment or stop medication. It must also be acknowledged that Gunaseelam offers a level of care and proximity to a powerful deity that is considered healing, and when patients leave the place of care, the cure diminishes. This acknowledgement in patients and carers is often what drives repeat visits to religious healing sites.

The relative ‘success’ story of Gunaseelam, from a governmental intervention point of view, lies in the fact that its new model continues to survive at all. Throughout India, there has been a variety of reactions from shrines to the intervention, but few have reconfigured in any substantial way. Attempts to introduce psychiatry services at healing shrines have often not been sustained, and many shrines continue to allow the practice of chaining people. This may not be emphatic resistance to laws on the part of shrines, but rather suggests that the state itself is not particularly uniformly effective in a large and diverse country like India. In practice, a number of intervention initiatives into temple practices quite simply dissolve over time, due to lack of will, lack of coordination, geographical issues and the difficulties of implementation, rather than because of any explicit resistance.

The notion of ‘lack of will’ and associated concepts of apathy and corruption are commonly used in India to explain the non-delivery of services and the failure of certain initiatives. But the lack of follow-through of the Supreme Court directives could possibly be better explained as a fundamental mismatch between the worldviews of the paradigms of psychiatry and religion in India. There has long been an uneasy dialogue between culture and psychiatry, where the relative credibility and ‘truth claims’ of scientific models such as psychiatry are pitted against the ‘folk models’ held by patients, and their rather different notions of cure. It is also important to acknowledge the difficulty of incorporating notions of spirit possession and exorcism into the same paradigm of illness that antipsychotic drugs claim to treat.

Although the notion of integrating the two paradigms is plausible only in a rudimentary fashion, Gunaseelam appears to be a practical and relatively successful marriage. The head priest and psychiatrist do not overwhelmingly endorse each other’s methods, but can see the benefits of co-treating patients. From a psychiatric point of view, patients can be treated within a framework that is cheaper and more community-based than a hospital. From a priestly point of view, the benefits of the rituals are assisted by medication that helps control symptoms, and the consistent patient recovery rates reinforce the temple’s long-standing reputation as a healing site.

Gunaseelam has also been a favourable site for intervention for other reasons. Unlike many temples, it does not have large commercial interests to protect, such as those gained from healing services or shops. There was also an already-established relationship between the temple and the psychiatrist before the intervention – and therefore a degree of recognition of each other’s paradigm. Additionally, the local culture supports such pluralistic measures, and the model of healing on offer is acceptable to a wide range of people. Gunaseelam is therefore one of the few examples of the intervention in India that sustains an interface between the paradigms of medicine and religion.

The fact that very little has changed in the way that most healing shrines operate indicates that the new technologies of rule do not always achieve their stated effects. Ironically, it is the very looseness of the Supreme Court directives, and their lack of benchmarks, models or clear objectives that not only allows shrines to sidestep governmental intervention, but also enables them to respond with new models of mental health healing that are sensitive to the local context and capacities.

Gunaseelam seems to be a rare case of a collaborative effort where the paradigms of psychiatry and religion have combined harmoniously to meet local needs with a culturally relevant model of healing. Such projects are generally driven by committed people who have utilised the uncertain space offered by the mismatch and the lack of detailed directives, to develop appropriate initiatives that are responsive to the needs of people with mental illness. The scope for NGOs to utilise the fluid terrain to further develop innovative new collaborative models of mental healing is large, yet very few NGOs in India work in this area.

Reference

1. WHO. Report of the International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia, Volume I. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization; 1973. WHO. Schizophrenia: An International Follow-up Study. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons; 1979.

Lesley Branagan received a Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Award to undertake fieldwork in India. This fieldwork was utilised in a thesis for her Master degree in Applied Anthropology at Macquarie University (in affiliation with Delhi University).

But why not have a proper mountain in the Netherlands? Well there is actually a plan for a real Dutch Mountain in the Dutch campagne. Alpe d’Almere will be the Dutch’s own and first real mountain. With an altitude of 2000 meter it will be, if realized, a prominent feature in a very flat countryside. And the designers have produced a funky presentation.

My good friend and Holland’s best radio reporter Jan Maarten Deurvorst has produced a radio documentary (in Dutch) on Alpe d’Almere. It will be available here after the broadcast on Sunday 30 October. For those who do not read Dutch I have translated the text on the website:

The Netherlands is world famous for large infrastructure projects such as the Delta Works and the dam that closes the Zuiderzee. The Dutch Mountain will however put all previous ones in its shadow, a mountain of 2000 meters in the Flevoland polder. 77 billion cubic meters of sand will be needed for the highest and largest structure ever made. In comparison, the tallest building in the world is in Dubai and is 828 meters high. Yet engineers, architects and sports people are sure: “The mountain will come.”

The idea of the Dutch Mountain comes from ex-cyclist-cum-columnist Thijs Zonneveld who is keen to eliminate Holland’s geographical disadvantage in sport. At least for three months a year, the Dutch will have a mountain covered in thick snow suitable for skiing and snowboarding. Zonneveld also wants to build a high-altitude skate track to ensure that world records skating can again be set on Dutch soil.

But resistance is fierce. Earth Sciences professor Klaas van Egmond is furious that engineers, politicians and media take this “hedonistic preoccupation with stimulating the senses” seriously. He calls the project extremely decadent, especially in the current crisis which does not even allow money for the purchase of a small parcel in Flevoland for the benefit of the National Ecological Network. “The Dutch Mountain indicates the end of civilization.” Also most of the people in Almere are not very pleased with a two thousand meters high mountain in their backyard.

Dutch anthropologist and philosopher Ton Lemaire wrote a book entitled Filosofie van het Landschap (The Philosophy of the Landscape) in 1970 (the ninth edition appeared in 2009). One of the theses in that book is that every nation gets the landscape it deserves. The Dutch landscape is a reflection of an affluent society and dense population. In particular over the last few decades people struggle with the tensions between prosperity and well being, between work and leisure, between economy and ecology, and between comfort and beauty.

Over the last couple of hundred years man has left no single inch of the landscape untouched. All of Holland’s landscape is manmade, mostly because of some utilitarian need but also sometimes following aesthetic considerations and the need for recreation. The Dutch landscape reflects the tensions above.

On top of that all the previous big infrastructure projects were all built during times of social and economic crisis. They stimulated economic growth and they have generated expertise on dike building and land reclamation that has gained worldwide acclaim. This has greatly helped Dutch companies to obtain contracts for such projects as Hong Kong’s airport and The Palm Islands in Dubai. Likely the investors now interested in the Alpe d’Almere envision mountain-building adventures in Arabia after they have finished the job in Flevoland in 2018.

In many respects, the Dutch Mountain fits into an established approach to landscaping and I hardly see any decadency. I think that the mountain should be build so that it becomes a memorable example of Dutch people’s eccentric relationship with the landscape. And I can’t wait to climb it one day with my Dutch cycle friends.

The 2004 Crisis Group Report on the situation of Palestinian citizens of Israel states that

social attitudes mirror the invisible geographic lines that separate the two communities [Jew/Arab]. Intermarriage is highly unusual and frowned upon by vast majorities in both

The debate in Israeli civil society is if “institutionaliz[ing] a religion is going to disempower the members of the other faiths” (Bisharat 2010). As there are no official statistics or academic research about Arab/Jewish intermarriage in Israel, my fieldwork for my Master of Applied Anthropology study was a unique opportunity to collect information and relate with people who experienced this type of relationship.

One of the few studies citing the phenomenon of mixed marriages between Arabs and Jews was conducted by the Tel Aviv Geocartography Institute. The results found that over half the Jewish population in Israel believes that the marriage of a Jewish woman to an Arab man is equal to “national treason” (Nahmias 2007). As the Palestinian – Israeli journalist Sayed Kashua expressed in one of his editorials: “Simply by being an Arab who carries an Israeli citizenship, one is accused of being a traitor. The accusation comes from both Jews and Arabs” (Kashua in Hochberg 2010).

Such descriptions were also expressed by my informants, showing the extent to which the apparently personal act of marriage is widely regarded by both Israelis and Palestinians as being highly politically charged.

The perceived danger posed by intermarriage constitutes the framework within which the main research question of my thesis was formulated. The main problem being debated in Israeli civil society is whether civil marriages, by increasing inter-faith marriages and inter-ethnic marriages, would divide the character of the Jewish State, as stated in the Declaration of Establishment of the State of Israel.

My thesis aimed to demonstrate that the maintenance of the state’s Jewishness, which is defined in the constitution, provides a strong basis for the control of social boundaries within Israeli society. The maintenance of these boundaries provides the framework into which intermarriages are regulated and openly discouraged. Therefore an ideal endogamy is regulated and maintained by the state itself.

Describing the situation of the “Arab minority” in Israel, Abu-Saad (2006) correctly underlines that Palestinians in Israel are considered as “outsiders” and an illegitimate presence in the Jewish-Israeli state. Palestinian citizens of Israel hold an Israeli passport that states their ethnic group as “Arab” (older passports also stated the holder’s religion). Since the Oslo Agreement the status of Israeli-Palestinians, who comprise 20% of the overall population (Central Bureau of Statistics, Israel, CBS, 2010), has been addressed as an “internal issue”. They are referred to as the “Arab minority in Israel” (Khalil 2007:36). The division between ethnic identity (Palestinian) and citizenship (Israeli) is clearly expressed through anti-assimilation policies, discriminatory practices in every-day life and urban segregation. For this reason, the “issue” of the Israeli “Arab minority” is pivotal for constructive and practical improvements in the development and long-term stability of the country.

Although all citizens are allowed the freedom of practicing their own religion, the government maintains control over the authorities who can provide certain religious services (i.e. marriage, divorce) and imposes certain limitations (i.e. a prohibition against inter-faith marriages) (Abu-Saab 2006:1087). Nevertheless, it should be clarified that intermarriage is not “prohibited”, as it is not illegal under Israeli law. The state of Israel only officially recognizes “religious unions” and makes no provision for the registration of civil marriages – and therefore secular marriages – within Israel.  However, civil marriages entered into abroad are recognized. In short, limitations on inter-faith marriage do exist, but legislative provisions do not forbid inter-faith marriage or consider it illegal in Israeli law. Rather, a “cultural ban” on Arab/Jew intermarriage is enforced and perpetuated throughout Israeli society via anti-assimilation organizations that coercively discourage relationships with “the Arab minority”. Furthermore, this cultural ban is highly gendered, focusing almost exclusively on averting relationships and marriages between Israeli-Jewish women and Palestinian-Israeli men.

Religious orthodox organizations, such as Yad l’Achim, are actively involved in discouraging Israeli-Jewish girls from dating and marrying Arab men. In 2008, Ha’aretz, one of the main Israeli newspapers, published an article about Yad l’Achim, a Jewish-orthodox organisation working to prevent intermarriages, particularly between Bedouin men and Israeli-Jewish women in the city of Kiryat Gat, Southern Israel (Ha’aretz 2008). Supported by the police and the municipality, this program teaches Israeli Jewish women that Bedouin-Arab men do not suit “Jewish values” (ibid.). Young girls are shown a video called “Sleeping with the enemy”, featuring a police officer and a woman from the Anti-Assimilation Department of Yad l’Achim warning:

the affair begins as superficial love which appears to be authentic. Many times the girl doesn’t even know she’s going with someone who is a minority. […] The [Jewish] girls, in their innocence, hook up with Bedouin Arabs who exploit them. She sleeps with the enemy without realizing it (Silverstein 2008).

 The organization’s PR campaign advocates similar concepts, as shown in this advertisement:

Translation:   (Top) One day he will break your heart.

(Bottom) Your life will be ruined.

 The organization has an “Anti-Assimilation Department” which actively focuses on “protecting” Israeli-Jewish girls from inter-ethnic relationships (Yad l’Achim, 2010); as their website explains:

this [anti-assimilation] department deals with women and teenage girls who have become involved with Arab men. In most cases, these relationships lead to marriage, which then deteriorate into violence. Among the many serious problems that result from such relationships is the identity of the children. They are Jews, but are raised as Arabs. Thus, entire generations are being lost to the Jewish people (Yad l’Achim, 2010).

 The presence and social activities at a community level are important strengths of the organisation, translating into projects and educational programs. One of the education videos, cited at the beginning of the chapter, warned young girls in these terms:

like they warn you to be careful while driving or when they warn you to be careful when swimming in the sea and there’s a black flag and a red flag–when it’s allowed and when it’s forbidden–the same thing we’re doing to warn girls of this unnatural phenomenon (Silverstein 2008).

 The politically charged importance of mixed relationships was clearly expressed by a chief rabbi from the area: “seducing” Jewish girls was “another form of war in the larger Israeli-Arab conflict” (Cook 2009).

According to Yad l’Achim’s website, the organization receives more than 100 calls a month about Jewish women living with Arab men, both in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) (Cook 2009). Yad l’Achim carries out “rescue operations” in cooperation with the Israeli army, the internal security forces and the police (i.e. see the documented rescue operation: “Mother, Eight Children rescued from Muslim quarter”, Yad l’Achim 2008). Recently, more invasive practices have been created: vigilante patrol groups roam Pisgat Ze’ev, a Jewish settlement outside of East Jerusalem, every night. The group, linked to Yad l’Achim, patrols the streets looking for mixed Arab-Jewish couples (Cook 2009; Frenkel 2009). Other groups are also active in bigger cities, such as Beersheva and Haifa (Frenkel 2009).

Similar “educational” programs are actively supported by other municipalities. For instance, at the beginning of 2010 in the South of Tel Aviv the municipality sanctioned a project between the municipality of Tel Aviv – Jaffa, the Ministry of Social Affairs and Ministry of Immigrant Absorption (which pays 75% of it). The purpose of the program, which involves 120 girls up to 22 years of age, is to “prevent relationships between Jewish girls and minorities” (Reider 2010). Clearly the government publicly supports its anti-assimilation policies and the efforts of the organization for “preserving Jewish values” and intermarriages are actively discouraged because they are portrayed as a strong symbol of assimilation and consequently an incorporation of / adaptation to the “other” group.

Gender analysis

The analysis of Yad l’Achim’s activities acquires particular significance due to cultural and gender characteristics as they seem to address only women. Jewish-Israeli men were portrayed as more responsible in the face of “danger”, while Jewish girls are not able to care for themselves and need to be assisted. He tended to describe the “victims” of intermarriages as “Israeli-Jewish girls” and their “predators” as “Arab men”. The terminology that he used implied a dichotomy between the victims represented as young girls; and the predators indicated as adult men:

they go out hunting for girls … we’re talking about local Arabs and Arabs from villages coming to Tel Aviv for work (Reider 2010, italics added).

The depiction of Jewish women as “victims” (or “survivors” once the organisation rescues them) acquires major political implications. As expressed by Rav Lipschitz, the founder of Yad l’Achim:

These girls are in distress. […] They feel that if they can’t defeat us in war, they can wipe us out this way. We must fight this threat as well; it’s a matter of national security (Yad l’Achim 2010).

Citizenship and gender

Marriage and divorce codes are crucial in the construction of identity boundaries, and regulate who does and who does not belong to the “imagined” community (Anderson, 1991; Yuval-Davis 1997:48-49).

As declared by the Law of Return, citizenship is hereditary and the only conceivable way for an “outsider” to join the national collectivity is by intermarriage – conversion to Judaism does not give the automatic right to become an Israeli citizen – (ibid.: 27). Therefore, social endogamy regulated by religious and cultural codes are “crucial in constructing boundaries” (ibid. p. 49); as a result, some authors prefer to replace the term intermarriage with “out-marriage”, underlining the characteristic of “marriage outside of the group” (Bachi 1976:51 cited in Kanaaneh 2002:44, italics added). In this light, intermarriage has also being described as an act of “ex-patriation” (Tabili 2005:801), shifting from one homeland to another.

Within this framework women bear the responsibility of a Jewish collective identity (Yuval-Davis 1997:45). Women play a key role in the biological and cultural reproduction of collective Jewishness through customary and religious laws of matrilineality (ibid.: 26-27). State-controlled sexuality assures the preservation of ethnic boundaries and quasi-cultural eugenicist control of marriages and, consequently, of births. The fact that miscegenation (unfortunate term from the Latin: “to mix + kind” or “to mingle + race”) and intermarriage are controlled by state legislation and discouraged by religious propaganda demonstrates that women’s sexuality is controlled and young women are being taught the “appropriate behaviour” [staying away from Arab men], while “exerting control” and supervision “over other women who might be constructed as deviants” [social cases], reporting them to specific authorities, or contacting the organization itself (ibid.: 37).

In the case of the Jewish Israeli state, women’s major role in the “making of the nation” is amplified by the biological and cultural reproduction of its Jewish citizens. Israeli women carry the “burden of representation” because they are constructed as “bearers of the [Jewish-Israeli] collectivity’s identity” and citizenship (ibid.: 45).

CONCLUSION

 In an interview issued for Hadarim, Mahmud Darwish, the leading Palestinian poet, stated that: “it is impossible to ignore the place of the Israeli in my identity […] Israelis have changed the Palestinians and vice versa. The Israelis are not the same as they were when they came, and the Palestinians are not the same people either. Each dwells inside the other […] The other is a responsibility and a test […] Will a third emerge out of the two? This is the test” (Darwish, cited in Brenner 2001:91, italics added).

As my MA thesis aimed to show, intermarriage is one of the “tests” Israeli society is facing and will continue to face in view of cultural/social pluralistic attainments. The cultural opposition and segregation that intermarried couples are facing demonstrates the resistance to a new formulation of Palestinian/Israeli identity. Arabs/Jews intermarried couples have a very important role to play in the formulation of a “third identity”, and in the development of a sustainable cultural change, creating an increasingly pluralistic society. In light of such difficulties, the formulation of a “third” mixed identity may be a first step towards a more pluralistic Israeli society (ibid.). This solution will involve the abandonment of nationalistic agendas (Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli) and the reformulation of social norms within Israeli society.

REFERENCES

Abu Saad I., 2006, “State-Controlled Education and Identity Formation Among the Palestinian Arab Minority in Israel”, American Behavioural Scientist, 49:1085-1100

Anderson B., 1991, Imagined Communities. Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London

Brenner R.F., 2001, “The Search for Identity in Israeli Arab Fiction: Atallah Mansour, Emile Habiby, & Anton Shammas”, Israel Studies, 6(3):91-112

Hochberg G., 2010, “To Be or Not to Be an Israeli Arab: Sayed Kashua and the Prospect of Minority Speech-Acts”, Comparative Literature, 62(1):68-88

Kanaaneh R.A., 2002, Birthing the Nation. Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel, University of California Press, Berkely

Khalil A., 2007, “Palestinian Nationality and Citizenship Current Challenges and Future Perspectives”, Research Report, CARIM Euro-Mediterranean Consortium For Applied Research On International Migration, CARIM-RR 2007/07, European University Institute, Florence, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies

Tabili L., 2005, “Outsiders in the Land of their Birth: Exogamy, Citizenship, and Identity in War an Peace”, Journal of British Studies, 44:796-815

Yuval-Davis N., 1997, Gender & Nation, SAGE Publications, London

The festival, called Magyar Sziget (Hungarian Island), was created ten years ago (by a man later charged for his role in the 2006 Budapest riots and for conspiring to attack a gay pride march) as Hungarian nationalists’ answer to the popular festival Island (Sziget). Although Hungarian Island’s goal is a “nation-awakening crusade,” and as such it appeals to what the organisers call “national brethren” (i.e. ethnic Hungarians), it has, they claim, come to be Europe’s largest “national festival,” an annual jamboree of white supremacists, racists, anti-Semites and xenophobes of all stripes. This year, it hosted a concert by Saga, the Swedish white supremacist singer who is Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik’s pop idol.

What attracts them to Hungary is that they are able to engage in speech and practices that they would not in their home environments, even within the BNP, which expelled the tourist after images of his salute were revealed. As with other forms of tourism, hate tourism — or perhaps more precisely, intolerance tourism — offers a liminal space in which the taboos of everyday life dissolve. Moreover, in the crowd of Hungarian “nation-builders,” nationalist extremists who — despite the broadening appeal of some of their ideas — are still stigmatised as freaks in Western Europe, are seen as normal, even, perhaps, admired. The BNP politician has previously lectured to members of the Hungarian party closely linked to the festival.

But even outside the festival, Hungary is a good place for racists and all those who are simply uncomfortable with a society that is in any way diverse. The traumatic experience of brown and black skin that Anders Breivik faced at the summer camp where he carried out his massacre could never happen in Hungary, which is reassuringly white: even the minuscule immigration that exists consists mostly of Hungarian “national brethren.” No one makes a fuss if Africans or Gypsies are denied entry to a club, a frequent occurrence. Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Auschwitz T-shirts and other Nazi paraphernalia are not only sold at Hungarian Island but circulate freely among the public. As for Greater Hungary bumper stickers and World War II memorabilia, which show half of the neighbouring states as part of Hungarian territory, those are veritably ubiquitous. As a response to the BNP affair, a member of the Hungarian parliament and organiser of Hungarian Island, who bears the fitting surname Zagyva (Muddled), announced that the organisers would sue the British journalists who filmed the BNP official’s salute for intrusion and accused them of violating media ethics. It did not occur to him to offer any apology for the salute or symbols displayed: this would be unthinkable in today’s Hungary. The government avoids taking a stand on such occurrences, and media or politicians close to the government routinely dismiss those who condemn them as exaggerating, unpatriotic, or worse, agents of a foreign conspiracy.

Despite growing anti-immigration sentiments, it is very unlikely that Western Europe will ever be all-white again. Moreover, in many countries, these sentiments against certain ethnic or religious groups are justified in terms of protecting other minorities — such as homosexuals. In Hungary, and to varying degrees in other Eastern European countries, the public acceptance of racist and homophobic discourse and discriminatory practice must feel like a breath of fresh air for some, perhaps many, Western Europeans. Add cheap beer and good food, and Hungary’s future as a destination of hate tourism, perhaps also hate migration, is promising.

From a pedagogical point of view I think this is fantastic. Not only is this going to be an experience that those anthro students carry with them through the rest of their lives, it’s a great way to bring home all sorts of points about anthropology: e.g. that it doesn’t only deal with theoretical knowledge but involves embodied practices, that participation is a necessary part of learning and so on. Also, the strangeness the students must have experienced when the dancers first stood up, the sense of surprise and perhaps uncertainty about what was going on, would have provided the perfect entry point to discussing the assumptions we make about space and its meanings, and to point out the value of moments of uncertainty, when we don’t know what is going on, for developing ethnographic insights.

Thanks to Paul Mason for sharing this link!

The project is called “Ethnosense” and seems to be a group of students who have experienced working in cross-cultural settings. They don’t all necessarily seem to be anthropology students, but they share an enthusiasm for the power of ethnography, and fieldwork-like experiences more generally, to a new appreciation of difference. With a sort of evangelical enthusiasm their blog sets out to convey to the uninitiated the possibilities of doing ethnography, the insights it provides as well as some of the pitfalls. As the title of the blog suggests, the key is not learning a methodology by rote, but developing a particular sensibility to cultural difference.

An ethno-sense is something that you cannot develop in a quick trip to a developing country or in a short course of intercultural communication. It’s an integral understanding of why people do what they do in a certain way and not in other – especially when it’s not done in our way – an understanding that is most of the times either unspoken, hidden or encoded across multiple layers of cultural meaning and social life. Languages, customs, rituals and manners all belong to a cultural code that is hard to penetrate and that takes time to learn.

So, you must be thinking, “ethnographic sounds complicated”, and to a certain degree it is. Not everyone has an ethno-sense.  An ethno-sense is more than understanding another culture, it’s also understanding that one’s common sense is part of a culture, as strange and particular as any other. But it is still possible for anyone to develop such a sensibility. Currently, many people are in fact doing that through different cross-cultural programs of international aid, development tourism, volunteering abroad, educational tours, etc. And even if you have not gone through any of this sort of programs, but you have been able to reflect critically about what is considered to be “normal” among your peers, if you have thought at some point that your own customs, routines, beliefs and even values are somewhat peculiar or even exotic, in other words, if you have been able to defamiliarize your own culture, then, you have for sure started to develop an ethno-sense.

Most of the posts seem to be written from the perspective of personal experience, reflections on the process of cultural immersion and disengagement and so on. As a method of both working through their own experiences and giving readers a “sense” of what it is to do anthropology, I think it’s a really great project.

One small gripe that I have with the project is that the posters generally make use of their online tags or pseudonyms rather than being up front about who they are. Maybe they’re taking a leaf out of Third Tone Devil or Ali Adolf Wu’s book, but I would really like to see them using their real IDs. They’re writing good, interesting stuff there and should be proud to put their real names to it. Just saying.

“I come from South Africa and lived under this, and am every way attuned to seeing racial discrimination,” Ms Pillay, a former anti-apartheid campaigner and international criminal court judge, said at the end of a six-day visit.

“There is a racial discriminatory element here which I see as rather inhumane treatment of people, judged by their differences: racial, colour or religions,” she said.

The Herald has framed this story as an attack on Australia itself as racist with the headline: “UN rights chief slams ‘racist’ Australia”. This slippage between particular policies and the country as a whole means that debate is probably going to dwell on the question of whether Australia is a racist society or not. This is, I think, not all that helpful if we want to have a more nuanced understanding of the particular political and economic factors that have produced the NT intervention and successive governments’ asylum seeker policies.

But the more I think about this the more I wonder if this kind of slippage is going to be inevitable given the nature of the criticism. After all, what precisely connects these two policy areas with each other? Why are they both evidence of the same thing? Are we not forced to conclude that what links them is some racist essence in Australian society itself? Or are there other more specific and tangible ways that these policies can be connected without resorting to abstract notions like “Australian racism”? Do they both, for example, reflect a particular mode or logic of governance? Do both these policies represent instances of governments using marginal populations to score political points? But then doesn’t this align them with rhetoric about being tough on crime, on “welfare cheats” and so on? Don’t they then participate into much wider economies of resentment than just racism? Why then privilege race as the base issue?

In fact, I wonder how useful it is to frame criticisms of these policies in terms of racism at all. Unlike Apartheid-era South Africa, racial discrimination is not explicitly encoded into the law — quite the reverse. So what factual basis is there to say that inhuman treatment of people is on the basis of differences in race, colour or religion? Sure, discrimination occurs and many Australians hold racist views — I’m certainly not trying to deny that — but what’s the evidence to say that the policies themselves are founded in racism? Wouldn’t it be more productive simply to focus on the inhumane results of the implementation of the policies,which at least can be objectively demonstrated?

These questions may be naive. Maybe people who know more about these two policy areas could offer better interpretations. But my main question here is this: is it justified to use racism to connect the treatment of asylum seekers and Aborigines with each other?

Source: http://www.smh.com.au/world/un-rights-chief-slams-racist-australia-20110526-1f4yy.html#ixzz1NPMlt9i7

Note by Jaap: This is the first in a series of blogs by MAA students on their research conducted within the framework of the course. With these blogs we want to showcase to a wider audience the often wonderful results and relevant insights gained during MAA research projects. 

Thailand has just announced plans to close all nine refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border, sending over 150,000 refugees back across a border littered with land mines and army factions to a country that is unstable and unsafe. Many of them no longer have a home due to the fact that their villages have been destroyed. How can this be right? This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ill treatment of Burmese refugees in Thailand, for a country known to have sent boat refugees back out to sea to die with no food or water and transport refugees in the back of a truck packed so tightly that many suffocated.

The Thai authorities have not yet set a date, and aid organizations and the UNHCR are stating that repatriation must be strictly voluntary, that no one should be forced back across the border into Burma. The Thai and Burmese governments are in talks over the potential closing of the camps.

I was alerted to this announcement while doing fieldwork with Burmese refugees here in Sydney. My research is looking at the treatment of Burmese refugees in Thailand, both in the country and in the refugee camps. I am doing research for the Master of Applied Anthropology course at Macquarie University. This news alarmed me, and certainly the entire Burmese community here in Sydney, many of whom are still trying to have their loved ones brought out of the camps and over to Australia. If this happens, most of them will be affected as loved ones are pushed back into the warzone.

Photograph from Jack Dunford (2004),

Twenty Years on the Border.

Bangkok, Thailand: Burma Border Consortium.

One Burmese friend of mine, who has been in Australia for quite a long time now, had quite a bit to say about this. “My friends on the border, they have headache and cry. They worry they will be sent back”. He, on the other hand, does not believe that this will happen. The refugees are too vital to the Thai economy, he said. He went on to explain how the border area houses factories owned by Thai businessmen and staffed almost 100% by Burmese refugees who work for almost nothing. Foreigners are not allowed to own businesses, and as such, Burmese pay Thais to put their names on the businesses. Should the refugees be sent home, the factories would lose their staff and potentially close down. Very few Thais would be willing to work there for such low pay. The Thai economy, then, would lose millions of dollars. Politically, he explained, the government would never get the support of the factory owners, and while they turn a blind eye to the exploitation of the Burmese workers, they know how important they are to the Thai economy.

So why would the Thai government even consider sending so many refugees back to Burma considering the circumstances and the detrimental affect it would have on the Thai economy? The relationship between the two countries has always been rocky ever since the first Burmese attack on what was then called the Kingdom of Siam in the 1500s. The modern governments have been trying to maintain good ties through trade and mutual support, and Thailand even supported the entrance of Burma into ASEAN, despite international outcry. Burma, at times, has accused Thailand of supporting rebel troops who take refuge in the camps and periodically attack the Burmese military. Could this be an attempt for Thailand to show its cooperation with the Burmese government by returning its people, and more importantly, delivering the ‘rebels’ into the hands of the military?

US Puts Pressure on Burma’s brutal military

to stop the slaughter as sanctions loom.

Mail Online 05 October 2007.

The country of Thailand has a very unique culture, one that they have always wanted to preserve. The Thai government has very stringent rules about naturalization and becoming “Thai”. Being Thai has always been important, following Thai culture, mastery of Thai language; none of “being Thai” is observed in the refugee camps, with few refugees even being able to learn Thai language. The fact that none of them would pass the naturalization laws means that they are outside of Thai norm, and thus are not subject to the same rights and freedoms of Thai people.

The Thai government is there to protect its own people, yet has been under the burden of housing millions of refugees on all borders in the past century, with refugees coming from Laos, Cambodia, and Burma as a result of many Indochinese conflicts. At this point, it is possible that while still wanting to respect human rights, Thailand has become weary of its humanitarian burden and is ready to protect the “Thainess” of its culture from refugees, and at the same time protecting its own relations with the Burmese government from the necessarily politicized environment of the camps, where there are many refugees who have or are still involved in militant activities against the Burmese government. Thailand would be looking out for its own security and protecting itself from the invasion of Burmese, just as they had to in the past. Thailand and Burma’s unsteady history creates a basis for this fear of invasion.

Thailand’s military culture has always allowed for the use of force when opposition calls out, and has been seen multiple times over the past three or four decades with violent crackdowns against its own people during mass demonstrations, whether peaceful or not. If strength and force can be used against their own people, it is not a far cry to pushing out those who may not culturally belong in Thailand; those who create a heavy burden on the country and who originally were meant only to be temporary residents but have now been forced to create permanent settlements. (For more about Thai military crackdowns through an anthropological lens, an excellent book is Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand by Alan Klima).

Will Thailand actually go through with this, or is it just for show, an empty threat? It would be foolish for the Thai economy if the government goes through with this, and it would be a death sentence for many of the refugees.

The video is interesting on a number of levels and could be related to anything from the question of cultural boundedness to the essay writing habits of students. (Could essays be productively thought of as mashups? And does this help to explain lackadaisical attitudes towards attribution?)  It also has a section devoted to movies such as Avatar which Ferguson describes as being part of a “sorry for colonialism” movie subgenre. This relates back to discussions on Savage Minds and elsewhere on that subject, and while not providing much in the way of analysis the video does help to show how pervasive the “white-man-who-goes-native-becomes-the-chief-warrior-and-defender-of-the-indigenous-tribe-against-the-colonising-power-and-in-the-process-finds-his-authentic-self” genre is in Hollywood.

Or then you might just be interested in how amazingly derivative Star Wars was. In a galaxy far, far away … not!

Via Kottke via @kbandersen via …

According to its own blurb:

The journal is motivated by the need to reinstate ethnographic theorization in contemporary anthropology as a potent alternative to its ‘explanation’ or ‘contextualization’ by philosophical arguments, moves which have resulted in a loss of the discipline’s distinctive theoretical nerve. By drawing out its potential to critically engage and challenge Western cosmological assumptions and conceptual determinations, HAU aims to provide an exciting new arena for evaluating ethnography as a daring enterprise for ‘worlding’ alien terms and forms of life, by exploiting their potential for rethinking humanity and alterity.

As I see it Hau is also an attempt to reinvigorate what is important and unique about anthropology that means that it isn’t simply derivative of other fields of enquiry. It doesn’t do this by locating anthropology’s uniqueness in its ethnographic methodology alone, or in a core concept such as “culture”, but in the particular relationship between theory and methodology that anthropology enables. The heart of anthropology, it seems to say, is its ability to generate theoretical insights through ethnography which cannot be reduced to pre-existing philosophical categories. The goal is to return theory to a more intimate relationship with ethnography, as something that emerges as much out of ethnography as much as being applied to it.

The title of the journal is also worth noting. It references of course Mauss’s foundational essay on The Gift, a text that has been extremely fertile within, and beyond, anthropological theorising. In it Mauss famously argued that that something intangible of the giver remains a part of the gift and demands to be returned — and he used the Maori term hau to indicate this “spirit of the gift” to capture the way gift-giving produces the need for reciprocity and therefore forms the basis of various kinds of social bonds. What was particularly daring about the way Mauss employed hau was that he didn’t limit its application to the Maori context but used it to say something about gift giving in general. Instead of remaining confined to ethnographic specificity, hau became part of an attempt to say something about being human in general.

This has been controversial. Is is appropriate, for example, to apply this term in contexts where the concept of a “spirit of the gift” doesn’t exist? But this difficulty is precisely the point that the journal is trying to address, at least as I see it: is it any more appropriate to take Western philosophical categories and assume that they can say something about being human in general? Can we assume that we can just treat different cultural contexts as variations on a universal theme which can all be explained with the same theoretical language? Or do we need to take culture, difference, more seriously than that and acknowledge that there is always going to be a certain impossibility in bringing the particular and the general together? Is cultural translation always going to be a fraught process because there isn’t a universal framework in which we can map all human variation?

These are the sorts of issues the journal’s blurb references when it describes its debt to Mauss and his use of hau as a theoretical construct. Unfortunately it is expressed in a near impenetrable piece of text:

HAU takes its name from Mauss’ Spirit of the Gift, an anthropological concept that derives its theoretical potential precisely from the translational inadequations and equivocations involved in comparing the incomparable. Through their reversibility, such inferential misunderstandings invite us to explore how encounters with alterity occasion the resurgence and revisitation of indigenous knowledge practices.

The paragraph has been the subject of some discussion (and mockery) on the Australian Anthropological Society’s mailing list. And indeed, what are we supposed to make of this passage? If this kind of writing alienates many professional anthropologists how are the wider publics that the journal is trying to reach through its open access policies supposed to react?

Alex Golub of  Savage Minds provided his own improvement of the above passage to the AAS mailing list which I hope he doesn’t mind me repeating here. I think it does a much better job of conveying why it’s interesting to use hau as a sort of guiding motif for the journal:

HAU takes its name from Mauss’s Spirit of the Gift, an anthropological concept that is powerful because it cannot be adequately translated. By standing with a foot in two worlds, concepts like the Hau invite us to explore how encounters with difference can be occasions to revisit and empower indigenous knowledge practices.

This is an important issue for a journal that seeks to promote open access anthropology. Open access, if it’s taken seriously, shouldn’t just be about making it possible for a general public to gain access to anthropological texts;  these texts also need to be accessible. In other words, there are more barriers than just paywalls to getting anthropological thought out into the world as knowledge that connects with and inspires people outside the discipline. My feeling then is that a journal that professes both to want to affect philosophical debates outside the discipline and to be openly accessible should take a broad view of that project. A commitment to clarity of language as a foundational principle would help the journal to more effectively achieve its stated goals. However I’m not arguing that the writing should be dumbed down. Obviously a journal dedicated to cutting edge anthropological theory should encourage sophisticated thought and challenging ideas. But I agree with the adage attributed (correctly?) to Einstein: “Say things as simply as possible, but no simpler.”

In a way both of the above areas of focus — of revitalising the relationship between ethnography and theory, and of open access anthropology — revolve around similar core concerns. In both cases the central question has to do with the tensions inherent in translation, of communicating across difference, and of bringing the specific in relationship to the general. How do we communicate the specificity and uniqueness of an indigenous worldview, or that of a tribe of anthropologists, to the wider world without at the same time destroying what makes it specific and unique?  The project of reinvigorating and “worlding”  indigenous knowledge therefore parallels that of reinvigorating  and “worlding” anthropological theory. And indeed it would appear that these projects are not only analogous but interdependent.